Here's One I Made Earlier

Ever fancied making your own Damien Hirst from a plastic skull and 8,601 crystal beads or using a Banksy stencil and spray paint kit to give your walls a million dollar makeover?

Well you can with a DIY contemporary art set from iArtist.

You could even go for a blood bag (and plasters) with which to make your own sensational Marc Quinn-esque frozen head or get all the materials to recreate Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept with 1963-1995.

All available by e-mail order from shop@iartistlondon.com. To see styles, go to iartistlondon.com.

Pretty Loaded

Pretty Cool is an archive of preloaders that preload other preloaders:

www.prettyloaded.com

Twitterature

Is there no end to Twittermania? Last week we saw the social networking tool Twitter deployed on the streets of Tehran. This week, moving seamlessly from the sublime to the ridiculous, it is being used to aid the digestion of the world's greatest literature.

Fans of the classics will either be delighted or appalled to learn that the New York-branch of Penguin books has commissioned a new volume that will put great works through the Twitter mangle. The volume has a working title that will make the nerve ends of purists jangle: Twitterature.

In it, the authors will squish the jewels of world literature - they mention Dante, Shakespeare, Stendhal, Joyce and JK Rowling - into 20 tweets or less - that is 20 sentences each with fewer than 140 characters.

The book is the brainchild of two 19-year-old first-year students at the University of Chicago who claim to be starting a cultural revolution from their college dormitory. Bashing their heads together one evening in their university digs, Emmett Rensin and Alex Aciman asked themselves what defined the grandest ventures of their generation, and best expressed the souls of 21st century Americans?

Pretentious, maybe. Precocious, certainly. The answer they came up with was double-headed. They identified high literature as a crucial pillar for any generation.

But they also latched on to Twitter, the website where users compress all of human experience into 140 characters. Twitter, they thought to themselves, epitomised the short attention span and info-deluge that defined the contemporary age.

So what if you put the two together? If great literature and Twitter were combined into one new form - Twitterature. "We have embarked on an attempt to bring the two pillars of our generation together, once and for all," the students said.

In the blurb for the new book the authors give a clue to their incentives for writing it, which are not entirely ethereal. Aciman and Rensin, from New York and Los Angeles respectively, both harbour ambitions to become writers and both clearly also hanker after cash.

They say they are aiming for a book that has the literary merit to wow the blogosphere, as well as the "pure-money genius to take the market by storm".

Whether they are right and fulfil their dreams depends on the appetite for reading Dante's Divine Comedy reduced from its 512 pages in Penguin's own Classics edition to 20 short sentences. Or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last in the JK Rowling series, rendered in 2,800 characters down from 784 pages.

All should become clear in the autumn, when Twitterature is scheduled for publication.

From Media Guardian

iPhone 3G S launch day

Post-It stop motion

What a fabulous animation from Savannah College of Art student Bang-yao Liu

American family's web photo ends up as Czech advertisement

When the Smiths of Missouri – an all-American family with the regulation two blond children – posed for their Christmas photo, little did they know they would end up on a billboard thousands of miles away in the Czech Republic.

Just under a fortnight ago, a family friend of Jeff and Danielle Smith was travelling in Prague when he spotted some familiar faces beaming out of a poster advertising a grocery store's home delivery service.

He took a photograph and emailed it to his friends in St Louis – kindly translating the caption that promises "we will prepare and deliver your requests in two business days".

The picture was indeed of the admirably white-toothed Smiths and their two smiling children. Danielle had been so proud of the image taken by a photographer friend, Gina Kelly, that she had not only sent it out as a Christmas card to family and friends, but also posted it on her blog and other social networking sites, including Momlogic where she identifies her children as "sweet and sassy Delaney" and "loveable and crazy Cooper".

Danielle has expressed her surprise at the news of their international fame: "Interesting. Bizarre. Flattering, I suppose. But quite creepy."

The shop owner was equally shocked. Mario Bertuccio, who runs the Grazie store in Prague, said he found the image on the internet and thought it was computer-generated. He has promised to remove it and email an apology to the Smiths – and said if they lived nearer he would send them "a bottle of good wine".

In her blog on the Extraordinary Mommy site, Smith reflects: "So this is the price we pay for indulging in social media, I guess."

She had no idea the image could be used, she said, and would not have given her permission, but admits she was naive in putting up a high-resolution version on the website. She won't be doing that again – but said she would continue to post images of her family.

The smiley Smiths have now gone global. The site has registered 180,000 hits but Danielle writes that she is blocking the small percentage "who are commenting only to say that a member of my family (or all of us) are ugly".

From MediaGuardian

Harvey Nichols 'gordon brownie'

This cute campaign, by Mr H has been engineered to boost awareness of Harvey Nichol's food markets at stores nationwide using witty and relevant images.

The full line-up is below.

Cards of Change - a novel idea

Here's a great idea: www.cardsofchange.com .

This website's mission is to collect as many business cards and stories of positive change of people who have recently been made redundant and connect them with new opportunities from potential employers, business partners and people who make the effort to look on the bright side of life.

Recycle and rethink those old cards!