Lex Ferenda

Ireland’s ongoing response to the dot-com crash, a few years on.

Video

(and yes, apparently the maker is actually from Co. Wicklow, where I grew up; it’s a long way from there to BoingBoing).

Today, after a very early start and a smooth journey from Dublin to central London, I’m at the seminar on ‘Law 2.0: New Speech, New Property, New Identity‘ organised by the Society for Computers and Law and chaired by Lilian Edwards of Southampton’s new ILAWS institute.

Have a peek at the programme here. We’re coming to the end of the third of four sessions (having discussed privacy, Web Thingey (replacing 2.0 - Chris Reed’s amusing on-the-spot edit), and even the semantic Web); for practical reasons I’m going to wait to put a round-up of today’s discussions on this blog, probably tomorrow morning.

Truly random post ahead.

Passing through Newcastle (England) last week, I noticed a very distinctive font in use on the Metro (urban rail, mostly overground) - it was hard to miss when painted in huge letters on the walls of stations! A little bit of investigation turns up the information that it is called Calvert, named after its creator, the well-known designer Margaret Calvert.

Calvert was one half of the pair of designers, working for a committee, that created the British road sign system (the pictures, the colour schemes, the font (”Transport“), and more. Jock Kinneir was Calvert’s boss: there’s a good summary of their work here. Calvert and Kinneir also designed Rail Alphabet for British Rail, which replaced Gill Sans (itself popping back into view this month through the Penguin Celebrations series).

All this leads into Dublin Bus having a new identity (old and new below) that I find quite striking - it is very sans serif (like Rail Alphabet and Transport) and quite different to the existing CIE 2000 (used by buses and trains, designed as a millennium celebration of some sort, it seems).

(For non-Dubs: the odd logo is based on the initials DB and the ‘castle’ motif of the city’s crest)

I think we can now agree that Web 2.0 is here to stay.

(sorry!)

I have a few things I’ve been waiting to post, so why not roll them all in together. There’s a theme in that none of them are about law…and there’s some sort of cultural thread.

The Festival of World Cultures takes place in Dún Laoghaire (pron: dune leer-ah or dun leer-ee) this weekend. Photos if I get around to taking them. This was a great event last year.
 

Kew has started to beat the drum for a special Henry Moore exhibition (here’s a tantalising map (PDF); a version of Reclining Connected Forms (right) is about 30 seconds walk from where I’m typing from right now). Really hope to get to this at some stage.
 
 

Closer to home, the National Gallery has an exhibition of Jack Yeats works, Masquerade and Spectacle : The Circus and the Travelling Fair in the work of Jack B. Yeats, running until November. The Gallery houses the Yeats Archive and a whole heap of paintings. The first painting I can remember seeing in the National Gallery (pre-renovation edition) was Yeats’ The Liffey Swim (left).

The Quill and Quire blog (Q&Q is a Canadian periodical about books, books and more books), to my pleasant surprise, posted this photograph (right) of a sculpture outside Trinity’s library this afternoon. I’m a fan of the sculpture, by Arnaldo Pomodoro (and have managed to visit three others in the same series!); I posted a nice ramble as a comment to their post but I think they’ve all gone to the pub, as it’s in a moderation queue. Either that or I scared them (they came back).

Penguin has a series of retro cover books. Nice. Looking forward to spending too much money on them. (Soon, I’m buying this).

And finally. A collection of (mostly) fielding moments (the bulk of them are magic 6-3 plays) by John McDonald of the Blue Jays (that’s baseball, by the way). Some devoted fan put this together and it has just gone up on GooTube. A 6-3 play is where the shortstop (fielder who positions himself back and to the left of second base) gets the ball and throws it to first base, thus achieving an out. It’s a fairly standard play. McDonald has a particular way of doing this which you’ll see from the video…this, too, is art

The Examear website has been replaced with a simple text notice. Perhaps something to do with the range of stories mentioned in this summary. Hard to believe this is for real.

Thankfully, the Internet Archive has preserved the original site (snapshot at 12 May 2007).

Just a sample:

Our spy wireless earphones are great for:
Students. Both high school and post secondary students. (Tests, Exams, presentations, group projects, speeches)
No more breaking your head over a difficult tests or exam
No more memorizing long and boring speeches
No more screwing your friends or group members
No more thinking about getting caught by using old notes - paper techniques
Listen to music whenever you want, at any time - in class.

Great use of a mixture of forms - poster advertising, viral marketing (through comments on websites, blogs, like-minded networks etc), word-of-mouth, word-of-email and a classy website to go with it.

Come to Camp Okutta.

This week sees the release of some new episodes in the infinite Trapped In The Closet musical/dramatic work (don’t make me call it a hip-hopera). Some would say that it’s by R. Kelly, but personally I think it’s all a big trick, steered by the Global Association of Satirists and Parodists (GASP).

TITC has, so far, given us an infamous South Park episode (which used the title as a link into some fun Tom Cruise bashing and managed to get a Scientology theme in there somehow; here’s a link to the R Kelly parody), an 11-minute Weird Al Yankovic song, now with a video (Trapped In The Drive-Thru), a fanatically detailed Sims recreation, not to mention a host of fun, amateur takes like Trapped in the sock drawer and an odd sketch involving Barbie, Batman and friends. A detailed (too detailed) Wiki entry contains information on some broadcast TV ‘tributes’ (such as Mad TV’s Trapped In The Cupboard, all about cereal and other important things).

All hail the interweb.

Stanley Fish (no, seriously) discusses the problems of complicated cappuccino-speak and different types of sugar-substitute. In the New York Times. Read it here (ahem).

Yes, you heard what I said! A good day to ask: what’s wrong with my computer? Find out.