The above image comes from this forum thread: 'what are the weird/strange/extreme/incredible engines have you seen meant for 2 wheeler or 4 wheeler closed circuit racing?' Appropriately huge page, many pictures of bizarre racing cars. Also a link to Jay Leno's Garage / a short history of the laugh track / the Wikipedia Reference Desk, something we'd not found before, full of answered (and unanswered) questions / we love Michael Jantzen's architecture, a mixture of the organic and the space age.

We took a trip to Shanghai last week (images to follow). Sadly we didn't get to visit Thames Town. Vaguely related, a resurrected piece on new Chinese architecture at Business Week / hyperkit in Vienna / this is the sort of thing we want to do: tag photos by location / the The 10 Most Puzzling Ancient Artifacts. No answers, unfortunately / Backwards City, a weblog / Radical Cartography.

The megastructure is back: H and de M's behemoth for Portsmouth FC looks set to squash a large chunk of the city's historic dockyards, taking its cue from the frankly rather shabby Spinnaker Tower, a refuge from the Dubai waterfront (and previously discussed here) / Dutchman's Noah's Ark opens doors. Not the only divinely-inspired ark replica in the world; check the Frostburg, Maryland ark/church, just off I-68, or even this scale model.

The Imaginary Foundation, 'a think tank from Switzerland that does experimental research on new ways of thinking and the power of the imagination.' I.e. they seem to sell Magritte-inspired T-Shirts / Wallpaper from the 70s, actual designs you can paste on your wall / a grungy Gimnasio Ecologico, via Edgar Gonzalez / fake is the new real, not a weblog but a collection of links and other things / an aircraft for an oligarch / Cheesedog, a weblog / the ruins of Himley Hall Model Village. More info at the Bekonscot website, the king of all model villages.

Portfolio is a bit like a slightly drier Monocle / Folderol, a weblog / Do You Remember Life Before the Segway?, The Onion helps a grateful nation look back / dedalo, a Portuguese architecture blog / culture evolves!, a weblog / interactive evolutionary design / Gigaswarm, architecture and digital culture / galleries from Wisconsin Historical Images, including Angora, Rabbit Raising in German Concentration Camps; the Wisconsin State Fair; businesses in the City of Madison, from the 20s through to the 60s. Especially show windows.

Something Stinks, Austin Williams on how 'bad design is being blamed for a range of intractable social problems,' a contemporary update of the Victorian discovery of the link between disease and dirt. Only today, poor-quality environments, ambiguously graded by 'design czars' and government commissions, are seen as a prime cause of low self-esteem, anti-social behaviour, lack of respect, etc. etc. Williams is having none of it, but although he has a point, his rebuttal perhaps lurches wildly too far to the opposing view. The site itself, Future Cities, declares itself as a welcome blast against the stifling PC of modern urban debate. But in their rush to denigrate the status quo - their particular bugbear is sustainable development - the FC team becomes almost dogmatic in equating 'green' with gullibility and regressive ideas. 'Having to innovate without causing environmental harm maybe a noble goal in some respects, but when environmental safety is the driver for innovation it ceases to be innovation, almost by definition.' A statement that begs to be engaged with.

Music. A collection of free downloads from the Wu-Tang Clan / The Perfumed Garden offers Peel Sessions / Shortwave Music trawls the spectrum for unusual music transmitted on SW / Who's driving the bus?, music and videos / Desperately I need a sound, an mp3 blog / into the groove, another mp3 blog. posted by things at 22:46

Mansion shatters calm of California oasis, the story of publishing magnate Duane Hagadone and the house he built overlooking Desert City. More at Curbed. The unfortunate architect is one Guy Dreier, who comes from the post-Lautner school of sprawling angularity, with artfully placed 'found' boulders scattered around relentlessly expansive living spaces. The main beef is the Hagadone House's fluctuating; now 64,000 square feet, according to the LA Times, it was originally zoned for around 32,000 (according to The Desert Sun). Unfortunately for the client, 'Hagadone' is a fine-sounding word for a 'Modern-styled' McMansion, unashamed of its own excess. Hagadone also owns the Lady Lola, 62.6m of Superyacht with, absurdly, a concealed putting green. See the house on Google Maps (related, Worker was stealing £1m yacht one piece at a time. Shades of Mash, perhaps).

The airchive, the webmuseum of commercial aviation. See also PlaneBoat, which is just what you'd expect / Vintage Paperbacks, cover galleries / see also Classic Good Girl and Romance Covers / Der Hund Von Baskerville / Michael Moran's images of Philip Johnson's Glass House / Greg Martin's The Fireladders of SoHo, via Built Environment Blog / landscape photography by Thomas Schupping / landscape painting by Oliver Akers Douglas. posted by things at 16:50

My Dad's Architecture Photos, a flickr set posted by Maraid and covering the latter years of modern architecture's heroic period. See also the flickr Brutalist pool / The Tomorrows Project, all walkways and epic urban vistas, via sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy / Big Box Watch, tracks square footage slowly spreading across North America (via kottke) / the Center for Omnitopia Research, defined as 'a structural and perceptual enclave whose apparently distinct locales convey inhabitants to a singular place'. That means considering Vegas as a post-touristic space (pdf) and the recurrent visual imagery of the 'Mom-and-Pop' motel.

London's Kerning, NB Studio's beautiful typographical map / a new website for Shona Kitchen / Kultureflash presents a portfolio by Andri Pol of the New Beijing Stadium. See also Pol's image of Arizona / still in the desert, the Cabazon Dinosaurs, a long-standing Californian roadside attraction, are now part of a Creationist theme park (via me-fi.

Dancing Bears ('writing architects are like dancing bears. they were not meant to do this. somehow it looks odd, un-natural'). The jotted, snapped post entitled 'on the pathological cleanness revolution' looks at the Isokon flats in Lawn Road, restored a couple of years ago by Avanti Architects / Vintage Classic Car Ads.

ZX Spectrum space games. There was even a rather unexpected piece of nostalgia on the BBC News website earlier in the week (obviously a slow news day); the Spectrum is 25 years old this week. See also Crash online / Bluejake, photos / on photography, and other things, what's the jackanory / a collection of chase scenes, collated on YouTube, mostly / Japanese Old Photographs In Bakumatsu-Meiji Period.

ArtsMonitor aggregates feeds, reviews and other arts-related postings. From the current front page we find Not Coming to a Cinema Near You, a film site / The Vinyl Villain, an indie-fixated mp3 blog / we caught a quick glimpse of Ayumi Hamasaki last week, image to follow / Climate Care, an offsetting company endorsed by things.

Polis and Politics, an upcoming conference on Italian Urbanism under Fascism / Secret Dubai, an outsider's insights into the frequently frustrating desert kingdom / Death by Architecture, relaunched and refocused as a space to catalogue and chronicle architectural exhibition entries / architectook, an architecture weblog / Dynamic Architecture, a spinning skyscraper design for, where else, Dubai. posted by things at 23:01

Playing catch-up with links for the next few days. London Then, London Now, a flickr group / playhouses for the offspring of plutocrats. Related, 'each year Bouncing Buildings focuses on one country, inviting the best established and emerging talent from architecture to design a ‘bouncy castle' / 30 days in red pants / we love Rod Hunting's work / the Edward Quinn archive, photography from a classic era / Dumbo Feather, a magazine.

Oh dear, our 'collaborative' nature means we've dropped in Eikongraphia's ratings / beautiful paintings by Phil Ashcroft / beautiful shot of Battersea Power Station / Bopuc, a weblog / I'm learning to share, pop culture artefact weblog, via The Cartoonist / the Payphone Project, charting a doomed technology / the perpetual hunger, mental and physical of extreme dieting: My 6-week journey to the land of thin (via kottke). See also, Celebrity Weighing Scales (via gadgets.fosfor.se).

We were trying to recall this word the other day: nervio, 'a feeling of such intense affection that one trembles or grits his teeth with restraint so as not to harm the object of his affection'. Thanks, ask me-fi / a fabulously detailed breakdown of the costs associated with a Hollywood blockbuster, in this case the straight-to-DVD potboiler Sahara ('massive store of offensive weapons / midriff skin to include below navel skin, repeatedly / room full of skeletons', which incidentally cost $16,744). posted by things at 01:24

Life without Buildings brings an entertaining report on a Blueprint for London, one of the Architecture Foundation's periodic forays into energetic, telegenic and glossy magazine-friendly urban speculation; it's where that Marks Barfield wind-powered London concept - 'Turbine Tomorrow' - originally surfaced. Insightful: 'The AOC seems to be the only firm that understood Blueprint for London as a GQStyle initiative, and they fittingly demonstrated their future London through an enumeration of possible post-plastic PRODUCTS. Consumer culture: 1000; Tupperware: 0.' LWB also dips into Mark Edward Harris's recent images of North Korea, which confirms our theory that North Korea is simply bursting with Western photographers.

More architects in popular culture: Frank Gehry once guested on popular cartoon series Arthur. News and picture here. We never knew Arthur was an aardvark / Real Estalker / little pockets of privilege: Star Island (very un-star shaped), in Miami, and Sandbanks in Poole. See also Private Tropical Islands for Sale, islands for sale and private island sale, all of which are faintly amateurish-looking sites / Prius Versus HUMMER, spin, greenwash and anti-green propaganda in the world of the automobile.

Stereoscopic Images of Lighter Than Air Flight, via Bouphonia. Tropical Islands, an indoor leisure resort set within a hangar built for the now-defunct CargoLifter company, dating from that brief, pre-dotcom bubble period when even the super-heavy airship looked like it was undergoing a revival. There was an excellent post about the whole affair at Strange Harvest, 'Anything to Feel Weightless Again: The Cargo Lifter and the Tropical Island Resort, which drew parallels between our desires for two ultimately unattainable fantasies - practical lighter than air travel and the artificial tropical paradise.

A selection of Strange Maps / very droll / Camberwell Online Blog / Urban 75 takes us on a trip into the Camberwell Submarine, actually ventilation and access for a vast underground boiler room used to heat nearby a nearby housing estate. See also the Pimlico District Heating Undertaking, which originally used waste heat from Battersea Power Station, pumpting hot water under the river to the Churchill Gardens Estate / wallpaper magazine's eco edit, which looked like it involved copious amounts of newspaper.

Owen Jones' The grammar of ornament, digitised (via Malanda) / Le Corbusier's La Tourette (via archidose) / Bird to the North, architecture and public space / the San Francisco Surveillance Camera Players, related to the original New York Surveillance Camera Players. Photographs here / Shift_4ward, illustration and music.

A history of Subbuteo. Notcot links to the Good vs Evil Foosball Table (that's table football to the rest of the world), just one of many offensively over-priced items available at 20 Ltd, which includes oligarchical fountain pens by Omas and a Hellcat motorbike by Confederate. We could go on, but won't. posted by things at 15:58

Creationist Museum challenges evolution, the BBC visits the Answers in Genesis Museum in Kentucky. This is, curiously enough, a quasi-modern structure, reminiscent even of Richard Neutra's threatened Cyclorama or a monumental chunk of Italian Rationalism (construction photos here). Rationalism is, of course, the last quality on display inside, but the decision to build in a modern idiom, and not in a classical one (especially when a strand of theology, espoused in particular by Quinlan Terry, believes in the 'god-given' perfection of the classical orders (quoted here - although to be fair Terry also writes 'Seven Misunderstandings about Classical Architecture' that 'the classical grammar remains neutral'). Then again, who says that Arks have to be traditional structures?

It was a very pleasant surprise to be cited as one of the 'Top 25 Architecture Blogs' by Eikongraphia, apparently rated by some arduous sifting through 'linking blogs (Technorati), subscribers (Bloglines), and hits (Google, and Google Images)'. Thank you very much indeed. The list throws up a host of fascinating places to visit, including white triangle, aggregat 4/5/6, which has a fascinating post on the relationship between the work of Gondry and Hitchcock, ArchiSpass, Kostis Velonis, architecture mnp (which stands for 'my ninja please'), which features the Sliver House designed by Boyarsky Murphy and more. Visit Oscar Niemeyer's Teatro Popular in Niteroi, at marvelous architectures, read the east coast architecture review and doubtless many more which will infiltrate through the referrer logs in weeks to come.

Is mobile phone culture at the heart of an erosion of the division between public and private, politeness and aggression? Certainly the notion of fitting phones with loudspeakers that can act as miniature boomboxes has transformed the city soundscape, especially on public transport. What's fascinating, though, is the way in which the ringtone - a piece of music that's recorded, encoded and broadcast in an identical manner to, say, a current pop hit - has no codification or strata of taste. Wailing babies, ghastly 10-second squelches of happy hardcore techno, familiar yet truncated choruses or worse, all emitted utterly without shame.

Skipping robot, via Justin Blanton. Somehow not so menacing / Battlecat, a weblog / the title says it all, poor taste for rich people / the Treknology Encyclopedia, absurdly detailed descriptions of a fictional world / the work of sci-fi illustrator Don Davis / the Atlanta Time Machine, a collection of then and now shots.

Godlorica, religion and culture / Scraps of Moscow, 'the post-Soviet world as seen from Washington', which links to Steady State, 'Blogging the unresolved conflicts in post-Soviet space' / revisiting King Champ Gillette's vision of Metropolis, an ideal city, which begins 'Under a perfect economical system of production and distribution, and a system combining the greatest elements of progress, there can be only one city on a continent, and possibly only one in the world'.

Bleep Bloop, an excellent weblog. We particularly like the Iranian copy of S,M,X,XL: 'this turned up at the office with a kind note: "dear rem, please don't be angry. we scanned in your book and translated it. we hope you don't mind. and if you do, there's nothing you can do about it because of nonexistent iranian copyright law' / here be Monster Brains, the mythological and the grotesque, in history, fine art and contemporary illustration. Brilliant.

Just recently we were musing on the history of the button; when was the first button? (in a physical, non-computer sense) What devices required push-button operation? Naturally, there wasn't just a website, but a whole URL - History of the Button.com, devoted to the issue of the user interface, real and screen-based. The button might appear an innovative solution, but sometimes it was the answer to a problem that didn't exist, most notably in car design, where the creation of the push-button transmission, like Ford's Teletouch and Chrysler's Torqueflite was systems were explicitly allied to the widespread consumer trend towards ease, automation and convenience. The button site has several posts on Pushbutton driving, an innovation which would apparently 'make driving as easy as flicking a light switch'. See also the equivalent in domestic automation, the Push-Button Manor. Some companies persist with push-button transmission technology, more as a sop to the perception of refinement, not innovation.

Pidgeon Digital, the online archive of architecture and design talks put together by former AD editor Monica Pidgeon (via dezeen). Pidgeon retired last week at the age of 93. AD back in the day / This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. Don't we all / Pigeon Kill / the Pigeon Post into Paris, 1870-1871.

What will happen when the film runs out? / the website of illustrator Danny Gregory, creator of the Sketchcrawl, amongst other things / nothing and all presents a list of 'on this day' type events. Pages are huge / Car Metaphors, 'watching analogies from real life that are wrongly applied to computers' / a cascade of imagery at Randomness, including this 1896 Motorbike / r-echos, worth your clicks / Veritography, a weblog / what's the best song by the worst band? We're travelling a bit next week, so updates will be erratic, perhaps non-existent. posted by things at 06:39

There are plenty of ways of tackling memory in architecture. One is to just let things be and try and record the inevitable slide into decay - like at Endangered Machinery, 'the industrial and industrial heritage photography of Haiko Hebig'. The other is to dress up the new so that it reflects the old. And so we come to 'Airship Park', a masterplan for RAF Cardington. Cardington was once the home of the British airship industry; two of the gigantic hangars used as airship stations are still in existence (only just).

Happily, commerce has come to the rescue. At the heart of the development, the work of PRP Architects, will be a 'tree cathedral', which, according to the press release, is 'planted as an outline of the R101 airship, [and] replicates the airship’s actual size' of 777 feet. 'No. 1 Shed measures 213.4m long, had a clear width of 55.3m and a clear height at its centre of 37.2m. It has full-height sliding doors at both ends.' The two sheds are incredible, dominating the local landscape, looming out of the mist (view the site on Google maps). But the redevelopment plans are kitsch in the extreme.

The Airship Heritage Trust was pushing for airship industry to return to the site, which still maintain their fitness for purpose (although Shed 2 was a key set location for Batman Begins - read a production diary, with pictures, at The American Cinematographer Magazine). The British airship industry imploded with the loss of the R101 in 1930, effectively ending development. The R101 became one of the first modernist ruins. An airship-shaped tracing in a suburban housing estate does not seem like a fitting memorial.

*
Other things. Ten Concepts Detroit Should Have Built, show cars from the archives / what's the formula for an A-Bomb? / a dizzying round-up of the things that have crossed BLDG BLOG's radar in recent weeks; skyscraper farms, American droughts, desertification and hyper-thyroidal log cabins / not sure how interesting this really is, the Electrolux Image Bank / revisiting Penguin's beautiful Great Ideas series / architectural vod pods - short videos and interviews (via No.2 Self) / Jamglue, a flash-based sequencer / fascinating things at Candyland, a weblog.

Visions of a wind-powered London. It should be noted that the Palestra building's much-vaunted wind turbines appear to have vanished / the Museum Plagiarus, a display of the world's greatest knock-offs, near Cologne. Not so much as products inspired by other products, but direct rip-offs that could almost be taken from the same moulds. The Chinese are especially good at this, check out the CMEC Electric City Smart. CMEC make a huge number of electric vehicles: they are the kings of the golf cart. posted by things at 22:22

Koolhaas and His Omnipotent Masters. 'The punch line is that CCTV is the architectural equivalent of a gas-guzzling SUV' / an interview with Walter Murch at BLDG BLOG / 'pencils made from the carbon of human cremains. 240 pencils can be made from an average body of ash - a lifetime supply of pencils for those left behind.' / X, Y and Z in old photographs, sepia-tinged reminders of the ways things used to be and apparently increasingly popular series of books.

Lynn Barber's profile of Will Alsop in last Sunday's Observer saw the designated enfant terrible of British architecture in avuncular mode. 'She likes antiques and I don't dislike them at all. She's very good at making things comfortable - somewhere you can curl up on the sofa in front of the fire and just veg out looking at telly with a glass of wine, and I'm very happy to do that.' And other possibly surprising opinions: 'I can cope with Poundbury! I wouldn't do it myself but I can appreciate that it has certain qualities - an element of surprise, an element of disorder - that people respond to. Whereas they don't respond to the clean lines and rationality of modernism, because we are not rational by and large.'

Names for mr nobody / and far away, a weblog, based in Jordan, which linked this collection of Web 1.0 logos, versus what might loosely be termed Web 2.0 logos / also via DO, 'All my Pelicans, parts one and two / Today's Inspiration, 40s and 50s-era illustration / Chilton Computing Photographs: 1961-1989 / Free Territorry (sic), a project by Igor Tosevski, at Mooon River.

A self-flipping ship / imagineering, a weblog / photography and illustration by Susan Wides and James Holl / Takotron News, architecture and more / Modern Art: Rarities of the Avant-Garde / Indie Labels and the Internet, out come the indie box sets, bands. Pertinent, since we've just bought the Joyce McKinney Experience's Love Songs for Kirk. Pretty obscure, and something that just wouldn't exist without the internet's niche-creating power. posted by things at 23:23

'Back To The Future: The 1970 Los Angeles 'Centers' Concept Plan', published in its entirely at Planetizen. The suggestion is that Los Angeles, despite long being held up as a model of planning without planning, actually had the same ideals as any other metropolitan centre in the late C20 - to 'alleviate traffic congestion', 'enhance the quality of the City's environment', 'make Los Angeles an attractive location for new industries and businesses', etc., etc., etc. By the 1970s, it was probably too late to do anything truly coherent in planning terms, other than sit back and watch the broad ribbons of tarmac spread across its heart and out into the endless suburbs.

Despite the city's many imperfections (see the work of Mike Davis, most notably) there's huge nostalgia for Los Angeles, something that translates well through cinema, naturally, but also in the now firmly established genre of retro-futurism that seems to clog particular sections of the internet - start with Googie and move on from there. The mall, drive-through, snout-house, post-Case Study Housing (Eichler, et al) all add up to create a hazy, elegaic view of modernism that lingers in a romantic fashion. The truth is certainly more prosaic, even pernicious (in the Davis view), a grid of isolated communities, sprawling uncontrolled and unloved. Lewis Baltz's photo-essay The new Industrial Parks near Irvine, California set off a new wave of nostalgia, for the honesty and simplicity of industrial blankness, influencing countless artists and photographers.

Nostalgia is mutable but also adaptable. Los Angeles might inadvertently present a new form of urban nostalgia, but it's certainly not seen as a desirable model for new communities. Instead, architects and planners are seeking to leapfrog decades of organic growth with what's being described as 'instant urbanism', ersatz neighbourhoods that give the impression they have arisen over time. The linked article describes a new development in Denver, Belmar, but it could equally apply to any number of modern developments around the world, from Thames Town in Shanghai to the Dubai Marina, all instant cities with, their creators hope, instant connections.

Instant urbanism is hardly a new planning concept. The City Beautiful movement was founded on the 'idea that beauty could be an effective social control device', and a beautiful city was a safe, prosperous city. Its aims can be seen in Daniel Burnham's 1905 Report on a Plan for San Francisco, which hoped to 'girdle the city with a boulevard' and liberate it from its grid, creating grand drives, vistas, parks and routes - the European classical ideal imposed on the American condition. Designed for the essentially pre-automobile age, Burnham's city was about perambulation and spectacle, not commuting: 'As the boulevards are created the heavy traffic should be restricted and on some of them not allowed at all.'

City Beautiful has been usurped in favour of City Functional, as the raw data is crunched and the lottery of chance encounters is flattened out in favour of carefully structured spaces that strive for a petri dish social mix. Into this one adds technology, the relentless dominance of the visual, and the questions posed by Societies and Cities in the Age of Instant Access. The problem is that technology can either work against nostalgia or with it; either you use your instant access to facilitate nostalgia (flickr, iTunes, weblogs such as this one) or you believe that technology is purely about looking forward, not back. The problem is, as the resurfaced LA plan makes clear, our awareness of the past is shaped by emerging technologies, forevermore impacting upon our relationship with cities.

*
Other things. Mapping Modernism / Postmodernism, simplified, but interesting. In that particular classification, the definition of 'goods and things' as modern, versus 'services and images' as post-modern, bears out the idea that our world is a construct of these images, and that the post-modern object - computer, mobile phone, mp3 player, what have you - simply serves as a portal to access 'services and images' / a house price hot spot map, via DDE. Also via dde is house price crash.co.uk, and a note about the GPS tracking functions of the Nokia N95.

historyworld.net has an abundance of timelines / historic postcards / the Mayoh Postal History site / the Wellcome Trust's Medical Photo Library / reincarnation and memory: 'People who believe they have lived past lives as, say, Indian princesses or battlefield commanders are more likely to make certain types of memory errors, according to a new study.', at further.

Project Gutenberg contains things like this 1920 edition of Punch (or the London Charivari) / luminous paintings by Gordon Seward - new Fauvism / Eating Bark, a weblog / Pulse, a book about 'the coming age of systems and machines inspired by living things' / an interview with architect Albert Frey, touching on his time spent working with Le Corbusier. posted by things at 14:51

City of Sound puts up a host of images from GTA IV, which is shaping up to be an extremely seductive virtual take on New York to explore - the ultimate sandbox. At what point did the amount of virtual space exceed the amount of real space? Ever since the very first MUDs, virtual space has grown exponentially; no human explorer could possibly 'visit' every virtual location.

What we can do instead, is map them. The original computer-generated worlds were strictly two dimensional, meaning they could be easily mapped (well, relatively easily), even as they sprawled ever larger (last map via Solvalou). These new worlds inspired artistry that far exceeded the graphical worlds they were charting, while bedroom coders built complex worlds that appeared increasingly never-ending. The big map continue to form the basis of the contemporary game - see also the maps of Second Life.

*
Other things. Social Practice, 'urban interventions, utopian proposals, guerrilla architecture, “new genre” public art, social sculpture, project-based community practice, web-based interactivity, service dispersals, street performance, and more' / Knuffle Bunneh, a weblog covering what might loosely be termed 'modern objects' / Kottke is right, the McMansion Wikipedia entry is epic / How to build a pyramid. Were a sophisticated system of ramps the answer? / a selection of mysterious devices collated by dark roasted blend.

A new lease of life for Battersea? Vinoly, he of 'walkie-talkie' infamy, gets on board / conspiracy theories abound in Hacker's story / visiting Second Life in 2004, before the goldrush, via 3pointD / all of Waaah!, all for free, via me-fi.

Why I don't like Monocle, via i like. Can a magazine ever be better than its website? More at Mag Culture / i like also links to Mid century ship interiors flickr pool. Israel's Zim Lines had a fine record of modernist interiors (although that site, Simplon, rather skimps on interior shots) / the Hobbit was also the name of a Soviet clone of the Sinclair Spectrum

A Fade Resistance Test for printer paper / images from the Library of Congress sourced by Vivian / Intern Architects in Hell, via Atelier A+D weblog / ChileArq, modern architecture in Chile / eye candy, architectural design / 'The Gift of a Banana, Pre-Sliced from the Inside, Cements a Friendship', borro.ws. posted by things at 20:39

ENZO.DS, a collection of clips of the classic Citroen DS on film. Fabulous stuff. A project by Wolfgang Thaler, who also has a hand in Touristen magazine / Mark Pawson's Disinfotainment website, a vast repository of practically everything counter-cultural, including his own books. See What are you collecting at the moment Mark?, for example / paintings by Alasdair Lindsay / Double-Tongued, 'a growing lexicon of fringe English, focusing on slang, jargon [and] new words...'. Compiled by lexicographer Grant Barrett / the BBC's Voices project.

Ah, McMansions / Jerry and Martha would like to offer you some Daily Art. Martha's vintage cookbook weblog, Grab An Apron, is worth a browse too / a new documentary, Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea, narrated by John Waters. As previously noted, the west shores of the Sea, just off Route 86, host a ghost town, laid out but never finished. We also linked to Richard Heeps' photography of the area before.

A slide gallery of the now-approved Tate Modern Extension. The inclusion of interiors gives the project less of a fantastical appearance than the initial set of renders, but, permission or not, we feel this building is still a bit of a long shot. Anyone remember the V&A's ill-starred Spiral? Ironic that a 'structural analysis model' of the building should now be part of the museum's collection.

'Some buildings worth seeking out in Leicester, UK', among flickr photos by Ned Trifle / the London Underground Tube Diary / Swiss dig world's longest tunnel / Glancey considers James 'Athenian' Stuart to be a forerunner of international design homogenity: 'For it was Stuart who did most, perhaps unintentionally, to trigger a global architectural design, with Greek temples popping up in much the same way as McDonald's do now.' / at least Pearman agrees with us about the Hunchback.

A few pics of our pics at Wallpaper's Geneva Motor Show round-up / 'The first automatic train on the London underground could be hurtling into stations in three weeks, the government has revealed,' in 1963 / save the K8 phonebox, the rather unlovely 1960s version of the Gilbert Scott classic. Apparently only 12 are left. Apparently four of them are in Swindon. Read the original installation instructions, one of many, many documents at The Telephone File, 'A historical web site about UK Customer Telephone Apparatus and Systems'.

Dandyism / a new issue of Magenta Magazine / out-tricking the Trick with this 12-necked guitar, a project by artist Yoshihiko Satoh / Luminous Lint, 'for collectors and connoisseurs of fine photography' / any examples of presentable corporate weblogs? Like Blog Leaves, the Figleaves weblog. Or Innocent's smoothie talk. Or three's X-Series blog. All are admittedly lightly re-worked press releases presented as ongoing dialogues with their customers.

The London Pedestrian Routemap, via diamond geezer and also commented on by Hana (now on Myspace too) / the Railway Poster in Britain, an online exhibition / Rotational on Viktor Antonov's new game, The Crossing. Related, GTA IV has been announced, and the virtual urban playscape of the future just got a little bit more realistic. posted by things at 19:41