Or, Big Hairy Post no. 3. From the sublime to the ridiculous.

← From my arm-chair—that classic that most of my colleagues seem to have, too—to yours.

Moral of the story: don’t spend too much time with a post. Be safe, gentle readers: use chairs. →

Ten gent du jour: ah, how I love those testosterone-driven, baseball-card-swapping, Top Gear-ish lists:

• Times Higher Education – Most cited authors of books in the humanities, 2007
• QS World University Rankings – Top 500
• QS World University Rankings 2010 – Arts and Humanities | Top Universities
• Top 200 – The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2010-2011
• Top Universities for Arts & Humanities 2010-2011
• Assessing Europe’s University-Based Research
• The Chronicle of Higher Education: 30 Ways to Rate a College

And, because I happened to be Googling around (to do with this other business that has been keeping me busy of late, and keeping me away from MMM), some more Top Tens, the first of which includes some interesting critique of the whole idea; “interesting” as in “away from the more familiar academic-theoretical arguments”:

• World’s Top 10 Greatest Ceilings – SkyscraperCity
• the lovely Knots in traditional art – Wikimedia Commons

On fashion and style and theory:

• The Sartorialist
• Cool Hunting
• Citibank HR Tells Ladies How To Succeed At Work
• Dress Code: Back (Grad) School
• academichic
• New Dress A Day | 365 Days. 365 New Outfits. 365 Dollars.
• Girls Are Pretty Princesses For Christ, Boys Are Warrior Princes
• NSFW: Was Britney Spears Bamboozled Into Virtual Child Porn Protest Art?
• An Interview With Lady Gaga’s Male Alter Ego
• Gender Is Not Just A Performance
• Joaquin Phoenix’s fascinating performance art – I’m Still Here – Salon.com
• The Postmodernism Generator » Communications From Elsewhere

Maps and mapping:

• BBC News – Ancient map with China at centre goes on show in US (from back last year–hit the news right as my class On Adventures was starting, thanks be to Fortune)
• Qantara: Mediterranean Culture
• Treemaps for space-constrained visualization of hierarchies
• Metaverse Roadmap
• Critical Wayfinding: Ben Millen
• Critical design – Wikipedia
• and the very luscious Information Is Beautiful

A bunch of assorted things that caught my attention, for one reason or another. Alphabetised to protect myself from having to try to order these thematically, or in order of importance, or seriousness, or otherwise impose any sublime-to-ridiculous progressive order on things. Meta-meta-medieval is free-thinking, pre-Hegelian, anti-patriarchal and anti-phallogocentric, anarcho-feminist, and sort of deconstructionist after all. “And/and” rather than “either/or” any day. In any sensible AND subtle world, something can be sublime AND ridiculous :

• 24h executive chair (heh, says it all)
• Avalon5
• Bad Science
• The Best Condom Commercial We’ve Ever Seen. Really. – Sagami 0.02 condom ad – Jezebel
• Bluntcard.com
• Bored At Work
• Chairs at Work
• Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
• Dcscience
• DIY Life – Projects and Tips
• Explain This Image
• Failbook
• FAIL Blog
• Fill ‘er up: self-serve tanks bring wine to French supermarkets | Dr Vino’s wine blog — see also La cuve
• Barry Flanagan Dublin hares (1)
• Barry Flanagan Dublin hares (2)
• Friends of Irony
• Go Away
• HAPPY FURRY PUPPY STORY TIME WITH NORBIZNESS, version 2.0
• Historic Tale Construction Kit
• Hot Slut Of The Day! | Dlisted
• Hyperbole and a Half
• iPad and co: the “banned promo” (see with others from same, for the iPhone) – MadTV – OEEx3.jpg 500×361 pixels – Student Work – Kyle Tolley & Sarah Graves – and why does the Diva cup come accompanied by a wee badge/lapel-pin bearing a cute daisy and the word “Diva”???
• Junsui Keiken – Pure Expreience
• The Lair of the Crab of Ineffable Wisdom – a load of stuff by Joel Veitch that will probably crush your will to live – rathergood.com
• LiveScience | Science, Technology, Health & Environmental News
• Medialens
• National Geographic
• The Other Newman (who might not be a contended for beatification for a while yet): Francis William Newman – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• NewScientist The Last Word
• Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials — Smith and Pell 327 (7429): 1459 — BMJ
• PassiveAggressiveNotes.com — funny (if not necessarily “passive-aggressive”) notes from pissed-off people
• Facebook | PassiveAggressiveNotes.com — funny (if not necessarily “passive-aggressive”) notes from pissed-off people
• PHD Comics: Raiders of the lost dissertation
• Photobomb
• Photos: A Century of Outrageous Beauty Ads – Newsweek
• Rate Your Students
• ScienceBlogs
• Slik festet Iron Maiden i Bergen – Nyheter – Innenriks – Aftenposten.no
• So Much Pun – Funny Jokes in Photos
• This is Photobomb
• What Caffeine Actually Does to Your Brain
• xkcd – A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language – By Randall Munroe
• Zeitgeist in a Petiole
• ZUG: Real-Life Pranks, Stunts, and Experiments

(Sparing you my complete summer reading, online and otherwise–the rest was more techy, on teaching, and Proper Work Itself. And of course a daily diet of spec fi. Though there is another Big Hairy Post coming up with a rough digest of summer reading in language, textuality, and literary matters. Call it the post-digestion Literary Hairy-Ball)

Last but not least, a new favourite chair for the purpose of sitting at a desk and computer and writing. The subject of much gathering and hunting–aka research, field-work, monitoring, tracking, stalking, pondering, finally pouncing–this NOOD occupied me and then I occupied it for a large part of the summer:

UTOPIA NOW: What every library should invest in, in an ideal world–I love the way this chair can move from private/interior-focussed to public/interactive, and from heavy/serious to light/frivolous; and that it can always remain fun and enjoyable throughout. The physical incarnation of “sentence and solas” and “never lose touch with ‘silly’.”