Shuarian’s Weblog

Found via the Adrift forum:

1 - Go to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to Random quotations: www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 The last four words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

If you want to do this again, you’ll hit to hit refresh to generate new quotes, because clicking the quotes link again will just give you the same quotes over and over again.

3 - Go to flickr’s “explore the last seven days” http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/ Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

Put it all together, that’s your debut album.

That’s as good an excuse as any to get away from learning French (and maths) for a few minutes, so here’s mine:

Mater Health Services
Have Us Forget Summer

Description on the back of the cover
Mater Health Services are the new Belle & Sebastian around the block,
The songs are dark and will change your mood,
We’re the new real thing, not just a mock.
Despised is everything that is crude
Our lyrics are thus written in terza rima
Which, unfortunately, doesn’t make them good.

Needless to say, the group never made it and broke up quietly.

The word is mightier than the sword. Having neither a sword ready nor something insightful to say just yet (I remain optimistic about the future, hem), here are some fine examples of what can be achieved and conveyed through words:

Alan Charles Kors gives a brief, one minute long, history of humanity. Brilliant and to the point.

Lawrence Lessig helds a presentation about free culture and copyright:

Source: http://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/

In my opinion, Martin Luther King’s speech “I have a dream” is about as inspiring and enlightening as a speech can be:

A very good resource for speeches is American Rhetoric, a site with a large collection of speeches. Usually, both a transcript and a recorded speech are available. I especially like Robert F. Kennedy’s Affirmation Address at Cape Town University and William Faulkner’s Speech Accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Of course, not everyone is equally gifted at speech writing and delivery. The results, then, can be rather bizarre; an adjective which seems appropriate to this video clip from the presidential candidate who already brought us such classics as “the old man and the throwing of stones“, Mike Gravel.