Six Things, Volume 89

Lighthouses | Dance | 52 Things | Duolingo | Brands | Travle

Thing 1 – Lighthouses

Storm Darragh is thrashing around as I write, the attention-seeking old so-and-so. His noisy and unsettling neediness is making me ever more grateful for a day indoors – a day of pottering, reading and frankly obscene quantities of toast and hot chocolate.

Thoughts of heavy storms battering the coast lead to thoughts – especially if you’re in a reflective frame of mind, as I am today – of lighthouses. Wild, lonely and romantic places, they are – and, on days such as this, positively terrifying (especially for craven height-averse landlubbers such as your correspondent).

I don’t have anything profound to say about them, but have just spent an enjoyable hour or so looking around for lighthouse-related nonsense for your entertainment and education. Here’s some of it:

• The Lighthouse – a charming short animated film

• Lighthouse Story, a 1958 Pathé film about the workings of a modern lighthouse. Incidentally, if anyone knows who wrote the music this film, I’d be very grateful. I’ve found a couple of sites which include composers for Pathé newsreels, but it doesn’t feature on them. The music for Pathé films is always something to behold, and this is a particularly fine example of the genre.

• Ben Langworthy is drawing his way round the British Isles’ lighthouses and it’s lovely. (It’s a project not unlike Jack Hines’ project of drawing all of London, featured in Volume 85 – but I suspect it’s more achievable)

• Want to live in a lighthouse?

• A nice page devoted to the extreme architecture of lighthouses

• True lighthouse addicts will have a nice time on lightphotos.net, which has this world map of lighthouses

• Some hair-raising lighthouse stories

• I’ve featured the maps of researchremora (aka Terence) before. He has a knack for clarity and beauty and I always find his maps interesting (here are some of his population density maps). His maps showing the lighthouses of various countries are particularly good.

For the briefest second, scrolling through these, I found myself wondering why there were no lighthouses down the west coast of Spa— ok yup that’s Portugal, nothing to see here but an idiot.

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Thing 2 – Dance

I am not a dancer. I do, though, enjoy watching other people dance, especially if they’re good at it. Not everyone in this compilation of movie dance clips fits that description, but it’s a thing of joy nevertheless.

If, like me, you watched that thinking “Ooh what was that one, I remember seeing that, oh isn’t that wotsername, oh hang on wasn’t that the one that won the Oscar, wasn’t he in the West Wing?, ooh! Jeff Thingy!”, then this list of all the featured movies is the thing you need.

And as it’s very much a hunker-down-under-the-duvet-and-watch-fun-stuff kind of weekend, here’s a similar compilation focussing solely on THE work – OF! … ChristOPHer – walkEN!

Can I leave it at that? I cannot. Because I have to include this glorious thing (noting as I do so that it’s nearly ten years old – TEN YEARS good god). Subtitles on if you want the titles of the films.

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Thing 3 – 52 Things

Tom Whitwell’s annual ‘52 Things I Learned This Year’ is always keenly anticipated round here. Among my favourites this year are the role of trees in urban cooling, haunted domain names, and Mongolian horseback raving.

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Thing 4 – Duolingo

A while ago I had a silly thought and threw it at the world just to get it out of my head.

The progression of a viral tweet goes something like this:

– oh good, 10 people have liked it. That’s nice.

– ok this is doing better than I thought

– please don’t go viral

– oh no

– strangers on the internet are shouting at me

– “mute thread”

The reaction to this one was mostly pretty benevolent, and sparked an interesting discussion about the nature of language learning. People shared their experiences, along with tips and tricks for enhancing the process and making the most of what is, after all, a limited tool. Nobody shouted at anyone. It was lovely.

Anyway, the catalyst for mentioning it was this fine piece about the same subject.

“All those hours on Duolingo had given me a huge vocabulary but left me more or less mute.”

Thing 5 – Brands

What do Wayne Enterprises, Zig-Zag and Sterling Cooper have in common?

What about Buy N Large, Buzz Cola and Pizza Planet?

Or perhaps Nakatomi Corporation, AFC Richmond and Omni Consumer Products ring a faint bell?

If you got ‘they’re all fictional brands’, award yourself a gold star.

You can find details of all those, and many more, on the eminently browsable Fictional Brands Archive.

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Thing 6 – Travle

Maxime Tortelier sent me this map-based game a few months ago, and it’s become part of my increasingly time-consuming daily routine. (I play the UK and World versions, but there are loads of options so you can choose the country you’re most familiar with.)