Lost Pix

A picture of two musicians warming up before a gig. (Also, a portrait of one of those men, captured in what can only be described as a bizarre mood.)

Some background.

Clash

Tut tut. NYT chooses to frame the problem of rapes in the New Delhi region as "a clash between old and new India". Sure, that makes the narrative easy to understand (Sarson ke khet! Software! Cow dung! Oh, Timeless India, you!) but what does the story really tell us?

Not much, really.

For example, the writer does not ask why Bombay and Kolkata, two cities that are also home to "new India" (city people) and "old India" (villagers, people from small towns and suburbs) have less (reported) crime than New Delhi? Or how New Delhi compares to Bangalore and Hyderabad, two cities that have also witnessed significant Old India/New India transition in the last two decades. Or what the crime rates are like in "Old India"?

So, yeah, it's still all the news that fits the convenient story arc.

Pictory

Pictory: one user-submitted (and captioned) photograph on a topic. Simple idea, terrific execution.

Some favorites: this photograph in "Infrastructure" is a stunner.
A portrait in a feature titled "Platonic love stories". A really trippy shot of swimmers underwater. Or this picture of a passenger on a train.

Via Metafilter.

Blinded By His Light

"..I felt as if I had stared into the sun's eye" - Max Kaminsky, upon hearing Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues" (The song; just don't stare at the sun too long.)

"Quotes"

"Excellence in dining"

I'm not sure if I saw the above words on a sign outside a restaurant or on the side of a truck, but after spending a day in the Metropolitan museum looking at Medieval art, in which things are exactly what they seem, the carelessly applied quotation marks seemed layered and full of meaning. It was really more MoMA than the Met, "if you ask me". I wish more advertisers would dare to shatter context and expectations with improper punctuation.