DSD

From telegraph.co.uk, here’s a bit of pos­si­bly the world’s best cus­tomer com­plaint let­ter, sent to indus­tri­al­ist Sir Richard Bran­son regard­ing a flight on Vir­gin Airlines:

Now I know what you’re think­ing. You’re think­ing it’s more of that Baaji cus­tard. I admit I thought the same too, but no. It’s mus­tard Richard. MUSTARD. More mus­tard than any man could con­sume in a month. On the left we have a piece of broc­coli and some pep­pers in a brown glue-like oil and on the right the chef had pre­pared some mashed potato. The potato masher had obvi­ously bro­ken and so it was decided the next best thing would be to pass the pota­toes through the diges­tive tract of a bird.

(Thanks to Nathan for the link.)

An inter­est­ing pro­peller pic­ture via Global Nerdy:

The cheap CMOS sen­sor of an iPhone does not expose the whole thing at once, it scans from left to right. If you take a pic­ture of some­thing that moves very fast (like an air­plane prop) you can get some crazy pic­tures out of it since each col­umn rep­re­sents a slightly dif­fer­ent time. 

Hear­ing this story recently on This Amer­i­can Life reminded me about the ter­rif­i­cally ridicu­lous World’s Most Unwanted Song. It was care­fully com­posed accord­ing to poll data on people’s least favorite musi­cal ele­ments, and is vir­tu­ally guar­an­teed to offend your sen­si­bil­i­ties. From the com­posers’ notes:

The most unwanted music is over 25 min­utes long, veers wildly between loud and quiet sec­tions, between fast and slow tem­pos, and fea­tures tim­bres of extremely high and low pitch, with each dichotomy pre­sented in abrupt tran­si­tion. The most unwanted orches­tra was deter­mined to be large, and fea­tures the accor­dion and bag­pipe, […] banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, syn­the­sizer […]. An oper­atic soprano raps and sings atonal music, adver­tis­ing jin­gles, polit­i­cal slo­gans, and “ele­va­tor” music, and a children’s choir sings jin­gles and hol­i­day songs. […] 

Here’s some more back­ground. Also, please, have a listen:

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It may be against my best judge­ment to post this, but it’s just too hilar­i­ous. (via Fail Blog)

Boing­Bo­ing points out the pretty amaz­ing new cover for the 20th anniver­sary edi­tion of the Princess Bride. The title is itself upside-down. Flip over the DVD, and it reads just as beau­ti­fully. Escher would be proud.

“The Super­est is a con­tin­u­ally run­ning game of My Team, Your Team. The rules are sim­ple:
Player 1 draws a char­ac­ter with a power. Player 2 then draws a char­ac­ter whose power can­cels the power of that pre­vi­ous char­ac­ter. Repeat.“
Now that’s pretty awesome.

My sister’s first radio piece, which she did for a project at the Salt Insti­tute for doc­u­men­tary radio, was just fea­tured on the Salt­cast blog. It’s pretty awe­some — have a listen.