Cerebral Interviews - Issue 02

Issue 02 - Vol 01 - Feb 2012
The March edition of my Cerebral Interviews newsletter is out. If you want to read that, then go subscribe and I’ll send it through to you.

I reproduce these here on the site, 1 month after they were originally sent, so here is the February edition.

A Word In Your Ear

Cerebral Interviews attempts to capture the pop culture zeitgeist throughout the month. Published at the end of every month. 12 newsletters in 2012. No more, no less. If you’ve got any comments or want to share, you can contact me via twitter or by replying directly to this email. You can also continue the discussion of any of the points below on the dedicated Facebook page. Finally, if you liked what you saw, why not forward this to others who might like it or send them to the signup page. Thanks for reading,

Khaled Abou Alfa February 2012 www.brokenkode.com

App of the Month

Clear (from Real Mac Software) has quickly become the single best app I use when going grocery shopping. It’s so popular in fact that it has already sold 350,000 copies in 9 days.

Architecture

City Portraits by Victor Enrich. Manipulations of architectural photos with a unique nod to paintings by Escher. Some favourites, here, here and here.

Business

Beaker is a great new online publication, aimed at the ‘ideas generation’.

Comics

Traditional media outlets broke the story behind DC Comics' Watchmen Prequels (here’s Entertainment Weekly, New York Times and USA Today). As you can imagine there has been some entertaining reactions. Notably by Alan Moore, who originally had this to say about the idea, and now has this to say about the reality. Here’s a nice editorial by Don MacPherson about the subject. Here’s an interview with JMS (one of the 4 writers on this project)

Culture

Google celebrates the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens with an awesome doodle, by Mike Dutton. Here’s an interview with the artist about the doodle.

Formula One

Mclaren unveiled their 2012 challenger - you’ll need flash to see the 3D model they’ve created of the car (or you could look at these hi-res pictures of the car and event).

Ferrari unveiled their latest challenger, and it is definitely one of the ugliest looking cars that the team has ever created.

Lotus F1 showed off their latest creation, the E20, with a nice video walkaround the factory with interviews.

Sauber released some photos online.

Red Bull released some computer images - they really shouldn’t have even bothered.

The rest of the teams that have completed their cars (Williams F1, Mercedes, Toro Rosso, Force India ) chose to showcase their cars in the garage before the first test which was held in Valencia, Spain.

Geek Culture

For all you Lego and Back to the Future fans, these sets are nirvana. And while we’re on the subject of lego, these Star Wars sets are also pretty amazing.

Kevin Smith debuted his new show ‘Comic Book Men’ on AMC (from the people that give us Mad Men, Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead). Here’s a Q&A with Smith about the show.

Gadgets

Sometimes the simplest ideas are also the most intriguing. The Sonastand fits that bill in my mind perfectly. Part acoustic aid, part stand, this thing looks great.

While we’re on the subject of iPhone accessories, this review should help you make up your mind if you’re in the market for enhancing your iPhone photography with lens clips.

Life

Many things we do in life now don’t follow what was considered normal and acceptable several 100 years ago. Including your sleep of 8 hours at once. It wasn’t always like this you know. There was a first and second sleep…

Movies

As a precursor to that major award ceremony in the States, ‘The Artist’ cleared house and won 6 BAFTA awards.

At the Oscars, the major awards went to ‘The Artist’, which won in the categories for Music (Original Score), Costume Design, Best Picture, Actor in Leading Role and Directing. Hugo (which is a great movie that focuses on the beginnings of cinema in Paris) walked off with 5 oscars in the more technical categories.

The surprise for me was Rango which won at both awards for Best Animated feature. Maybe because I was tired, maybe because it was late but I slept through this movie at the cinema.

Also, Angelina’s leg got a lot of column space and some spoofs.

Music

Another music icon, Whitney Houston has died, hours before the Grammy Awards.

This latest music video from OK Go brought back memories of actually being excited and enjoying music videos.

Software

Apple releases the developer preview to their next iteration of their computer operating system, OS X Mountain Lion - notice they’ve dropped the Mac from there.

Technology

Raspberry PI is an awesome initiative from the UK. Buy a rudimental computer for either $25 or $35. The bad news is that they sold out on their first day. The good news is that they’re ramping up production.

Websites

After over 2 years, I finally redesigned my site. You can read about it here, and you can see previous versions of the site here. As with most of these things, it’s still a work in progress that I get into in bursts of productivity, fix a bunch of bugs and clean things up a bit.

Writing

Fountain is a plain text markup language for screenwriting. If you’re a Markdown user (this newsletter was written in Markdown) and you happen to also write Screenplays or even comics, this has got your name all over it and I’m surprised it took this long to create.