Wednesday coffee break: Fun with Google Analytics

Some of the keyword searches people were using over the past year when they stumbled upon our little ol' URMAblog. Feel free to use any of these as a jumpoff point for your next poem, short story, folk song, or flashback:

don't step in that
short words are words of might
break a kindle
cap'n franks nc
found that ducks may be even more comfortable standing under a sprinkler
hot housewives 2008 pictures
urma pics
redsex
was darwin wrong
bluesex
coffee makes you happy
oh evolve
best way to win a debate
chuck berry is on top
pretend restaurant
cold down
nyuk nyuk
break nut
endowment effect cartoon
good screenplay
new zealand citizenship requirements
perks for employees
the snobbishness of the learned
a&m rubber ducks
agoraphobia parrots
parrots for psychosis
black hole black coffee
coffee makes you break out
egg corns
easy ways to win a debate
evolution for dummies
feel dizzy
i hate my copy editor
jason smith breaks neck
nutjobs r us
pictures of 100 year old men
rich kids want pity
rubber ducky you're the one

Duck and cover: The Pelican Project

The Pelican project: a collection of Pelican paperback covers from the 1930s to the 1980s

A question of balance: redesigning the Atlantic

Look behind the scenes at last fall's redesign of an icon of American journalism.

1. A general discussion: "For a graphic designer, few jobs are as challenging as designing a magazine. Unlike a logo or a poster, the design of which can rely on blunt simplicity, a magazine is a complex organism, the result of an intricate interplay of words and pictures. Any single issue represents thousands of minute decisions about typography, layout, photography, and illustration. And these decisions are made within an accepted system of conventions -- preconceptions we all share about how a magazine is read -- and more practical and mundane limitations like budgets and schedules...." A Question of Balance, the atlantic.com

2. A slightly more detailed take from the design studio: "When Pentagram undertook a redesign of the Atlantic -- the eighth in its history -- the goal was to establish an intelligent and striking framework for the magazine’s wide-ranging editorial voice."

3. Bonus gallery: 151 Years of Atlantic covers

The Boy Who Loved Transit

How the system failed an obsession: "An uncommonly seamless blend of fluid writing and fastidious reporting, "The Boy Who Loved Transit" tells the story of Darius McCollum, a thirty-seven-year-old New Yorker who has spent much of his life in jail for impersonating a transit officer. Writer Jeff Tietz outlines the numerous ways in which the court system has failed McCollum, the the piece is much more than a sermon against injustice; it's a complex portrait of an inscrutable character who, in Tietz's hands, comes alive."

Finalist, profile writing, American Society of Magazine Editors' Best American Magazine Writing 2003. (Jeff Tietz, Harper's, May 2002.)

Also: a Wikipedia entry on McCollum; "The Ballad of Darius McCollum" by a band called the Dare Dukes.

Terminal Ice

"...at the heart of the mystery, like broken shards of a colder climate, float the icebergs, ghost-white messengers trying to tell us something we can't quite fathom."

Finalist, feature writing, American Society of Magazine Editors' Best American Magazine Writing 2003. (Ian Frazier, Outside)

Lying in wait

"Thanks to profoundly deep reporting and riveting prose, the reader spirals downward right along with George O'Leary in his fall from grace as Notre Dame's head coach. In "Lying in Wait," Gary Smith renders his subject as the King Lear of the sports world with such pathos that even a reader with no interest in sports can feel his anguish. This is Smith, a master profiler, at the top of his game."

Winner, profile writing, American Society of Magazine Editors' Best American Magazine Writing 2003. (Gary Smith, Sports Illustrated)

Wednesday coffee break: Tyson and Dawkins on teaching about science

Wired's Art Director on the basics of magazine design

Glory, Grief, and Secretariat's race for the Triple Crown

"Horseman, Pass By" was the winner in the feature writing category of the American Society of Magazine Editors' Best American Magazine Writing 2003. It was written by John Jeremiah Sullivan, and appeared in Harper's.

"Sham led the field going into the first turn. He was flying. Everyone watching the race knew that he was going too fast. The strategy for Secretariat, for any horse, would have been to hang back and let Sham destroy himself, but [Secretariat's jockey] Ronnie Turcotte decided to contest the pace. It was, to all appearances, an insane strategy. William Nack writes that up in the press box, turfwriters were hollering, "They're going too fast!"

"Secretariat caught him just after the first turn, and for the first half of the race it was a duel between the two rivals. Then, around the sixth furlong, Sham began to fall apart. [Jockey] Laffit Pincay pulled him off in distress, and Secretariat was alone. Turcotte had done nothing but cluck to his horse.

"This is when it happened, the thing, the unbelievable thing. Secretariat started going faster. At the first mile, he had shattered the record for the Belmont Stakes, and at a mile and an eighth he had tied the world record (remember that he was only three years old; horses get faster as they age, up to a point). Everyone -- in the crowd, in the press box, in the box where the colt's owner and trainer were sitting -- was waiting for something to go wrong, because this was madness..."

Thursday coffee break: Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (2009 Results)

An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for "The Last Days of Pompeii" (1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression "the pen is mightier than the sword," and phrases like "the great unwashed" and "the almighty dollar," Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the "Peanuts" beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, "It was a dark and stormy night."

Thursday coffee break: Evolution for Dummies

Writing quote of the day

"Short words . . . come from down deep in us -- from our hearts or guts, not from the brain. For they deal for the most part with things that move and sway us, that make us act." Frank Gelett Burgess, "Short Words Are Words of Might" (1939), in Weigh the Word 104, 107 (Charles B. Jennings et al. eds., 1957).

Friday coffee break: reinterpreting Little Red Riding Hood

Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

Monday coffee break: Gold diggers

In all of history, the total amount of gold humans have mined would fill:
A. two Olympic-size swimming pools
B. the Colusseum in Rome
C. the Grand Canyon

At Batu Hijau, a large-scale open-pit gold mine in eastern Indonesia, how long does it take to accumulate more tons of mining waste than than all of the tons of gold mined in human history?
A. sixteen hours
B. sixteen days
C. sixteen months

How much rock and ore must be extracted at Batu Hijau to produce the amount of gold (one ounce) in a typical wedding ring?
A. 250 tons
B. 250 pounds
C. 25 pounds

The answer to all three questions is: A.

Source: The Real Price of Gold, National Geographic, January 2009

Professional driver on closed course. Do not attempt.

'Ring Tossed: "A Visit to the Nurburgring -- once the world's most treacherous racetrack, now a pedal-to-the-metal public playground -- provides a crash course in German automania."

Finalist, leisure interests, American Society of Magazine Editors' Best American Magazine Writing 2002 (Steve Rushin, Sports Illustrated)

After you read the story, have a gander at this:

For all of them to live, one of them had to die

Gone: "What's it like to be kidnapped and held for ransom, not as a political prisoner but as an economic one? What's it like to live in the Ecuadoran jungle for 141 days? What's it like not to sleep, to be bound in chains, to have your body invaded by living things, to waste away to the point of death? What's it like to have one of your fellow hostages killed when the negotiators fail at negotiation? What's it like? This is what it's like."

Finalist, feature writing, American Society of Magazine Editors' Best American Magazine Writing 2002 (Tom Junod, Esquire magazine)

One of the great musical mysteries of all time

In the Jungle: how American music legends made millions off the work of a Zulu tribesman who died a pauper.

Finalist, reporting, American Society of Magazine Editors' Best American Magazine Writing, 2001. (Rian Malan, Rolling Stone)

An eradicated killer

The Demon in the Freezer: How smallpox, a disease of officially eradicated twenty years ago, became the biggest bioterrorist threat we now face.

Winner, American Society of Magazine Editors' Best American Magazine Writing, 2000. (Richard Preston, The New Yorker)

Daily Routines

A site all about how writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days.

dailyroutines.typepad.com

From Vladimir Nabokov's entry: "Summers I spend in the stumbling pursuit of lepidoptera on flowery slopes and mountain screes; and, of course, after my daily hike of fifteen miles or more, I sleep even worse than in winter. My last resort in this business of relaxation is the composing of chess problems. The recent publication of two of them (in the Sunday Times and The Evening News of London) gave me more pleasure, I think, than the printing of my first poems half a century ago in St. Petersburg."

Now read this

Up Then Down: The lives of elevators. (Nick Paumgarten, New Yorker)