Lockpick Pornography is now being offered in its entirety for free in PDF. Written by Joey Comeau of A Softer World fame, Lockpick Pornography is a ridiculous, fun, interesting, sensational, wild, heartbreaking of staggering genius. And it’s only 121 pages, in big type, so just read the damn thing.

Or if you want a taste, the first seven (of ten) chapters are online in plain text, and you can read some short stories from It’s Too Late to Say I’m Sorry, Comeau’s collection released last summer.

Garfield Minus Garfield: The Book

The third volume of Penguin’s Great Ideas series is set to hit shelves in the coming weeks, and the whole set of cover designs is on Flickr. Volume III was designed largely by David Pearson, who also did Volume I and Volume II, as well as a number of other projects for Penguin (including the beautiful Great Loves series).

McSweeny’s: Lit 101 Class, in three lines or less.

1984

WINSTON: Don’t tell the Party, but sex is way better than totalitarianism.

EVERYONE: Surprise! We’re the Party.

WINSTON: Oh, rats.

Books Received is a periodically updated feature on Design Observer of some books they like. Some design books, as you might have guessed.

Staff picks:

Jutta Schickore, The Microscope and the Eye: A History of Reflections
Tod Lippy, Esopus
Alix Lambert, Crime
Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
Mel Bochner, Solar System & Rest Rooms: Writings and Interviews
Indi Young, Mental Models
Luke Wroblewski, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks
Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do

Bonus!: ESOPUS Magazine has a stream of the mix CDs that came with the first seven issues. Artists range from A to Z, and the themes for each mix are fantastic. (e.g., CD #2 is “Musician-couples wrote a song inspired by the Craig’s List “Missed Connection” personal ad of their choice.”)

Ammon Shea spent one year reading the entire Oxford English Dictionary for his upcoming book Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. The result is a compendium of absurd entries in the OED.

In a rather unconventional bit of lexicography the word scindapse has no definition at all, but there is a nice little etymology which informs the reader that it comes from a Greek word which means ‘a ‘thingumbob’, a what-d’ye-call-it.’

I’ll confess that on several occasions I thought that the editors of the OED were having a joke at the reader’s expense. The entry for unpoetic gives no definition, but there is a note that tells the reader to ‘cf. next.’ The reader dutifully looks ahead to the next entry which is unpoetical, the definition of which reads ‘cf. prev.’

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die is an edited list of, you guessed it, 1001 great books from pre-1700 to the present. Picking up the book will get you a critical essay accompanying each entry, or you can just check out the full list on its own.

The few I have read:

Faced with a list of notable books throughout history, I quickly see that I do not read nearly as much fiction as I would like; 32 out of 1001 is far from impressive. In my defense, most of my reading these past few years has been non-fiction (periodicals or books) or short stories, but it makes me feel no less guilty. At least my obsession with Haruki Murakami finally came in handy.

New life goal: read 500 books from the list not counting ones already read. A book a month for 42 years? Easy.

Television Tropes & Idioms is a “a catalogue of the tricks of the trade for writing fiction” (in wiki format, of course).

Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations. On the whole, tropes are not clichés. The word clichéd means “stereotyped and trite.” In other words, dull and uninteresting. We are not looking for dull and uninteresting entries. We are here to play with tropes, not to make fun of them.

Examples include E equals MC Hammer (see above), better than it sounds (with the related I am not making this up), slap slap kiss, and the untwist.

TV Tropes is definitely worth bookmarking and looking around, but be careful. It will steal all your time and ruin your life.

(via the subversively troperific Ryan North)

“We Didn’t” by Stuart Dybek from I Sailed with Magellan:

How adept we were at fumbling, how perfectly mistimed our timing, how utterly we confused energy with ecstasy.

They did it in honor of man and woman, in honor of beast, in honor of God. They did it because they’d been released, because they were home free, alive, and private, because they couldn’t wait any longer, couldn’t wait for the appointed hour, for the right time or temperature, couldn’t wait for the future, for Messiahs, for peace on earth and justice for all. They did it because of the Bomb, because of pollution, because of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, because extinction might just be a blink away. They did it because it was Friday night. It was Friday night and somewhere delirious music was playing — flutter-tongued flutes, muted trumpets meowing like cats in heat, feverish plucking and twanging, tom-toms, congas, and gongs all pounding the same pulsebeat.

Headlights bounded towards us, spotlights crisscrossing, blue dome lights revolving as squad cars converged. I could see other lovers, caught in the beams, fleeing bare-assed through the litter of garbage that daytime hordes had left behind and that night had deceptively concealed. You were crying, clutching the Navajo blanket to your breasts with one hand and clawing for your bikini with the other, and I was trying to calm your terror with reassuring phrases such as “Holy shit! I don’t fucking believe this!”

We were sitting, no longer talking or touching, and I remember thinking that I didn’t want to argue with you anymore. I didn’t want to sit like this in hurt silence; I wanted to talk excitedly all night as we once had. I wanted to find some way that wasn’t corny sounding to tell you how much fun I’d had in your company, how much knowing you had meant to me, and how I had suddenly realized that I’d been so intent on becoming lovers that I’d overlooked how close we’d been as friends. I wanted you to know that. I wanted you to like me again.

The end of The Wire – SADLY, sadly, sadly, The Wire has come to an end. Jason Kottke wraps it up with a collection of recaps and reviews. Despite the show’s criticisms (and this final season toeing the line between ridiculous and absurd), I would readily argue these 5 seasons have been the best 5 seasons in television history (not counting MacGyver or Wings, of course). And also, *SPOILER ALERT*.

Can Scientists Dance? – A bevy of students, postdocs, and professors perform interpretive dances for their Ph.D. dissertations. Like Simone Recchi performing Dynamical and chemical evolution of blue compact dwarf galaxies a la Daft Punk’s “Around the World”.

Quote, Unquote – There has been a bit of discussion (read: ire) over the widespread use of “dumb quotes” (straight) over “smart quotes” (curved). Straight apostrophes denote inches and degrees and minutes and seconds, while curved apostrophes are used in conjunctions and quoting. There are a number of reasons to purposely use one or the other, but anything else is just laziness. Thankfully, Wordpress has me covered.

10 trends that will define logo design in 2008 – I guess it’s already time for another makeover.

Slide Show – “Are you ready for PowerPoint karaoke?” No.

How do you build a public library in the age of Google? – Slate.com photo essay on the changing architecture and role of public libraries. As digital content becomes more and more pervasive, there’s less need for a stuffy old library filled with nothing but books. Public libraries in major cities around the country are responding to this not only with new offerings (coffee shops, movie rentals, more computers) but with new architecture as well.

The 2008 Tournament of Books

In which we would seed the year’s most celebrated works of fiction in a March Madness-type bracket and pit those novels against each other in a “Battle Royale of Literary Excellence.” In honor of our favorite character in contemporary literature, David Sedaris’s brother, aka “The Rooster,” we decided to present the winning author with a live chicken.

Floating cigarette – The secret behind a good magic trick is making it remain amazing, even if you know how it is done.

Bottom line, all web apps suck – Not to bite the hand that feeds me…Matt Haughey brings up some good points, and strikes up a good conversation (see the comments). And I love Wordpress, but even it falls prey to some of Haughey’s complaints.

How camera lenses are made – A piece from the Discovery Channel’s “How It’s Made”. Not the best bit the show’s ever had, but who knew it took six weeks to make one lens? Shenanigans.

Sitepoint CSS Reference – I am such a dork.

USB 3G modems don’t fit with MacBook Air – One of the smallest USB 3G modems out now won’t fit in the custom MacBook Air USB port. Not much of a surprise, but who cares? Air users shouldn’t have to attach plastic tumors to get cellular broadband.

MacBook Air Craft – That’s one solution…

For Sale: Pink Upholstered Vagina Chair – Man, I love Craigslist sometimes. Who’s up for a trip to California?

Books that make you dumb – Take the top ten most popular books at every college, compare it to the average SAT/ACT scores for those colleges, and bango presto! A descending list of books that make you dumb. The Bible is pretty average, but The Holy Bible could use some Princeton Review courses.

To end: Kate Beaton’s History Project – Twenty comics about different historical figures or cultural themes. Like the Professor Brothers, but static. Educated humor has never been so hilarious.

Google has set that ambitious goal of scanning tens of millions of books. The vast majority of these books are copy written. Google’s answer is simply to ignore copyright, fight to change the precedence and hope things work out. I hope it does work out for them so that we can all scan the true entirety of human knowledge, but in another way, I feel sorry for authors. “Information wants to be free,” according to one of the web’s founding mantras notes this Weekly Standard article. As stands, the goal is to only give user “snippets” of pages around a search term. Google should just go the full distance, settle with the two organizations suing them, and publish, in their entirety, all books that are copy written but not currently in print. That would be the giant leap forward toward information wants to be free that we need.

The commercial promise–and downright coolness–of Google’s undertaking staggers the mind. Which is why many recent accounts of the project, from Toobin’s to Jason Epstein’s in the New York Review of Books to Michael Hirschorn’s in the Atlantic, vibrate with fidgety, egg-headed excitement.

Consider me among the egg-heads.

If you have been somehow living under a hyperrealistic rock, Amazon recently released the Kindle, the company’s foray into the world of e-readers. (Though I say “world”, I really just mean a very boring planet made only of Amazon and Sony.) Most notably, the Kindle can download content from anywhere you get cell phone service, holds 200 books to start, lets you subscribe to newspapers and blogs, and looks like someone took a piece of cardboard and painted it white.

The Kindle’s been available a few days now, and I’m a little late to the game (I blame Thanksgiving), so everyone has already said everything I’d want to say. Thus, today’s post will be as long as ever, but much less work for me. That’s right: quotes!

John Gruber, Daring Fireball:

Why not bundle the Kindle e-books with the good old-fashioned shareable, preservable, paper books? Change the pitch from “buy digital e-books instead of paper books” to “get a digital Kindle e-book with each paper book you buy from Amazon”.

(As I suggested earlier, if Amazon really wanted to get aggressive, they could offer to Kindle owners not just digital versions of each book they buy from Amazon going forward, but also digital versions of each book they’ve already bought from Amazon.)

John Gruber again:

Kindle supports a few other formats than its proprietary .azw, but the only way to use it for its main purpose — as a digital reader for popular mainstream books — is via its own proprietary DRM-protected format.

First, Lev Grossman of TIME magazine’s “Nerd World”:

Has anybody written anything about the fact that digital books could kill off the publishing industry really really easily? I mean, like that? Music and movies have some resistance. With them, the file sizes are big, fidelity is lousy, and those artists have lots of ancillary revenue streams to live off once their stuff starts getting mass-pirated. But books are tiny, they come through at ultra-high fidelity (duh, words don’t get compressed), and authors don’t tour or sell merch or sound any better at the multiplex. Seriously. The Internet is the common cold, and music and movies have some antibodies to it, but book publishing is the boy in the bubble. E-books better have some sick DRM on them, or we’re looking at a mass die-off.

Second, it seems like a big deal-breaker to only “experimentally” support PDF. I am not much of an e-book guy, but any e-book I have downloaded has been in either TXT or PDF format. Not offering good support of PDF, more than other format, could easily stop anyone from buying a Kindle if they are interested in going beyond Amazon’s digital downloads.

(This bit also makes me wonder if companies are neglecting a whole market of potential users: researchers. Imagine a device that lets you subscribe to scientific journals, or even authors or topics, automatically downloading the newest papers. You would then have a portable database of your entire scientific field, searchable by author, subject, journal, year, and so forth. No more looking through, or even having, cabinets filled with papers.)

As far as interface goes, Craig Hunter has a great piece on how to improve the Kindle:

We might not have given it a second thought a year ago, but in a world enlightened by the iPhone, having a fixed keyboard on a device carries some big questions nowadays.

But what about a better Kindle? Say one that ditched the fixed keyboard, the goofy pointing device, and the page turn buttons in exchange for a touchscreen a la iPhone. Wouldn’t that be cool? Imagine having the ability to flick from page to page, point at individual words with a finger tip, or use pinch gestures to change text size. Everybody is talking about how Kindle is the ‘iPod of Books’ or something like that, but the iPod is so yesterday (even Apple knows it). If Amazon really wanted a breakthrough, they should have aimed for the ‘iPhone of Books’. That’s a better way to out-book a book.

Even if Amazon refused to have a touch screen, they should at least have looked to see what Sony was doing with their Sony Reader. Sony has a bit of experience by now, and its Reader recently went through some design changes (for instance, putting the page-turn buttons on the side, like a real book). The Kindle could easily have been the “iPhone of Books”, but at least should have been on par with Sony’s Reader. The whole big, white, fixed-keyboard look is a few dozen steps in the wrong direction.

Lastly, beyond the strengths and weaknesses of Kindle’s design, there has also been an reoccurring image of what any e-reader would have to be like in order to succeed. Basically, everyone wants a literary cross between a Zune and a Toughbook; something social and durable, just like one of those old-timey “book” things everyone’s in a hubbub about.

(And just for the record, are simultaneous Jimi Hendrix/Fahrenheit 451 jokes not cool anymore?)

I have only one question for you: You gonna light that pipe?

Design Observer has a slideshow of Tom Manning’s spam cartoons, short strips inspired by (and consisting of) the text from spam mail. Turning spam subject lines into comic strips is nothing new, but Manning’s art is the only I know that uses the whole shebang. The work is some beautiful stuff.

Joseph Sullivan of The Book Design Review has released his 2007 list of favorite book covers. There is still time in 2007 for new releases, but even if one or two more greatly designed books are released, the list remains a nice bit of eye-candy. For even more book cover design, see Fwis.com’s frequently updated Covers

I will admit that xkcd can sometimes be…a bit much, and the latest strip is definitely one of those times, but may I present to you 1337: Part 3, in which we learn of how super-hacker Elaine “helped start a movement among teen girls, a culture of self-taught female programmers and musicians, coding by day and rocking out by night — Riot Prrl.”

Italian Spiderman – “Shut your mouth, pussycat, and find me a macchiato, pronto.”

Somehow, even with all the publicity surrounding how frequently employers use Facebook to check on employees, some people still post Halloween party pictures after requesting off from work for a family emergency. (Cool wand.)

Oobject.com is like a “Billboard charts for gadgets”, with top whatever (10, 15, 20, 22, etc.) lists of a variety of different gadgets. Sometimes mundane (mobile media devices), sometimes stunning (*cough* ray guns), but always fun (time machines).

If you find yourself alone in the woods with nothing but an onion, some Gatorade, and a dead iPod, don’t worry. Household Hacker has you covered in this week’s episode: How to charge an iPod using electrolytes. Then again, maybe you’re more interested in creating a speaker for under $1 out of a paper plate, aluminum foil, and a penny.

See For Yourself is an online gallery of perceptual illusions provided by Duke University’s Purves Lab. The site is so well done that, honestly, it makes me want to do research there.

Performance artist, musician, writer, actress, and director Miranda July has a new book to be released in May: No one belongs here more than you. Along with the book, she has created a website, using only a marker and her kitchen.