Digital Digest: 26/07/2010

The Best Of The Web

Music

TheHighDefinite.com

Mash-ups used to feature just two bands; this latest effort from Brighton-based mash-up artist The Kleptones features no less than six bands’ music spliced together: The Beatles, The Beastie Boys, Boston, Cypress Hill, Rare Earth and Daft Punk. The associated video features clips taken from the less hip recesses of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Annie.

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Design

PinkTentacle.com

Japanese town logos, official symbols to communicate the identity of each municipality, are beautifully designed, with many incorporating typographical elements (particularly kanji, hiragana, katakana, and Roman lettering). Here is a site of town logos that make clever use of hiragana and katakana characters.

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Television

NyMag.com

The fourth series of Mad Men hit US television screens last night and to celebrate, New York Magazine has put together some clips of matriarch Betty Draper exerting her fine parenting skills. Including the gems “Go bang your head against a wall”, “Sally looks fat” and “Oh, go watch TV”; mother of the year, she is not.

Ind.pn/9YMQyS

Literature

TheMorningNews.org

Samuel Beckett may have described Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer as “a momentous event in the history of modern writing” but one Amazon user review reduced it to, “One of the worst books I have ever read. I got to about page 3-4.” See Amazon’s one-star reviews of the twentieth century’s finest works.

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Politics

TonyBlairFaithFoundation.org

Tony Blair-haters look away now. Blair’s charity, the faith foundation, has announced the winner of a film competition seeking the best short movies reflecting a student’s faith. This week, the three winners were announced, students from Singapore, New York and Jordan. See their entries here:

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Comedy

Blog.TheParisReview.org

Which practice started in one form with Shakespeare’s plays in the 16th century, evolved into another mould on television in the 1970s in the US, and was invented by a man called Charles Rolland Douglass? Here’s a clue: it’s possibly one of the most irritating things that can accompany a sit-com.

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Gaming

TomChatfield.Blogspot.com

Tom Chatfield is an author, editor, essayist and game theorist. As if that wasn’t enough, he is the books editor at Prospect and writes across the national press; speaks at games conferences around the world, and still consults for the world's leading games companies. Read his up-to-the-minute blog here:

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