A Flat White is an excellent coffee to start the day with – and just as you can identify a typography geek if they can tell the difference between Arial and Helvetica, it’s the real coffee geeks who know the difference between a Flat White and the more common Caffe Latte. Lokesh Dhakar put together a nice, simple graphic that demystifies these and many other coffee drinks.

“In the future, if your children ask you, “Who would win in a fight?  The Mummy or the Wolf-Man?” please refer them to this list, as it will save a lot of time…. Monsters are rated according to how dangerous they are against each other, and then according to how dangerous they are to all the other monsters on the list. Only if all other metrics are equal is the relative danger to the average human considered–because, let’s face it, they’re all dangerous to the average human.  They are monsters.

“Now, here’s the thing about regular vampires:  they’re fucking lame.  They sneak around in the dark and drain blood from people.  They talk a big game, sure, and everyone thinks they’re sexy.  But is sexy going to protect you from the Wolf-Man?  No.  The Wolf-Man is going to tear your god-damn head off.”

Don’t miss the author’s follow up in the comments, addressing why Godzilla isn’t in there.

The only thing I would add to this is:

14. Chuck Norris.

You might not think Twitter is a great place to go for grammar advice, given that every message has a maximum character count of 140, but you say that before laying eyes on FakeAPStylebook:

• “Always capitalize ‘Bible.’ You don’t want to get letters from those people.”
• “‘Arglebargle’ should only be used in the non-hyphenated form. “Argle-Bargle,” of course, refers to the infamous imperialist bloodline.”

Bonus points for spotting the writer uses Birdhouse, the semi-ridiculous iPhone app which allows you to save your draft tweets so that you can re-read, re-read and refine your work. If you did want actual grammar advice, you could always try following ThatWhichMatter, but it’s not quite so much fun.

By definition, dictators can do anything they like, so why wouldn’t the mad, bad and crazy men at the top of tinpot regimes want to write novels?

“Some recent examples have been Saddam Husseins’s last publication, Be Gone Demons!, sales of which suffered due to bomb damage, despite the author’s previous million-selling form; and Radovan Karadžić’s The Miraculous Chronicle of the Night, written while on the run from the UN’s War Crimes trials yet still nominated for Serbia’s highest literary prize, the Golden Sunflower. Neither, unfortunately, are available from Amazon.”

Thomas Keneally (author of Schindler’s List) wrote a novel about the literary ambitions of a dictator, called The Tyrant’s Novel, which I read in 2006. It’s worth a look, but I remember it being a little restrained and dry.

This video comprises “1,500 hours of moving Lego bricks and taking photos of them.” It’s not particularly coherent in terms of theme, unless you call “8-bit games and music rule” a theme. Which maybe we should. Worth it for the chiptune soundtrack, the use of Lego as pixels and the particularly nice Pacman shots, which put you right into the maze.

Been a while since I posted a new t-shirt design, but this Japanese design is clever and certainly deserves a mention. The wires of the utility poles are both printed and stitched onto the shirt. (One thing I found surprising when I first visited Japan – a place you mentally associate with clean, minimal design and neatness – is the fact that there are overhead wires everywhere).

Available at Tokyo Art Beat.

(via Jean Snow)

I’ve moved away from using FireFox as my browser – it’s too slow to start, too fond of updating – and now have Google Chrome on my PCs. It’s not properly available for the Mac yet, so I’ve switched to Safari, which is reasonably quick to start, and gives you more of the web to look at than FireFox. However, it does have an annoying habit of spawning new tabs EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. YOU. CLICK.

Glims is a very useful free add-on that enables you to fix that, plus you can easily add Google UK as a search engine, and there’s a nifty full screen mode too.

The cover of a magazine called Home Farmer, which I spotted while out and about at the weekend. I spend quite a lot of time looking at other magazine’s covers, and this one was quite something – brilliant use of a question even regular readers might not be thinking of asking themselves.

It’s a beautiful sunny morning in London, so this seems like just the right thing to listen to: Pet Sounds, a capella. Despite the fact that it’s a YouTube link, sound quality is terrific. This is probably the first time I’ve really understood just how spine-tingling what music writers refer to as a singer’s ‘phrasing’ can be - check out God Only Knows. Particularly stunning is when the harmonies simply ends, and one of the group says in a very normal voice, ‘how was that?’

Apparently, the original source is a box set called The Pet Sounds Sessions.

Wikipedia’s entry on a capella singing is interesting, relating ”a cappella music originally was, and still often is, used in religious music” and that the use of instruments was a matter of debate in the early Christian church.

FAIL is over – especially if you’re in China. Apparently, these are the Year of the Ox’s most popular linguistic terms on the internet (although we’re only halfway through the year). Wonder how long it will take for ‘yùzháizú’ – the Chinese word for otaku – to appear in Wired or the new William Gibson novel?

Favourite term: FB = 腐败 = fǔbài. Originally the corruption of government officials, now commonly used to refer to going out to have a nice meal. Oddly close to fubar.

(via @monglor)