Artist Luke Stephenson was given the opportunity to photograph a representative selection from the famous Egg Gallery (properly known as The Clown Egg Register), including the eggs belonging to such well-known names as Joseph Grimaldi, the Fratellinis, and Pimpo The Clown.

Okay, so ‘Pimpo’ might not be so well-known, but neither am I making it up. Would I yolk about something as serious as clowning?

The canonical format of a book should be HTML. Authors should write in HTML, making a manuscript immediately transformable to an E-book [sic]. A manuscript could then be imported into that fossil the publishing industry refuses to leave behind, Microsoft Word.

Yes yes yes, a thousand times yes. This should have started happening about five years ago. (The section from which this quote is taken is about halfway through the article.)

HTML is a pretty good language for describing the contents of a book (it would be even better if it had a decent way of captioning images) — and in my opinion it’s easy enough to learn that authors (or the editor, or production manager) could render the first draft as a machine-readable document at the beginning of the production process, rather than at the end.

I also learned something new reading this piece: namely, that Unicode has a specification for different width spaces. Colour me the colour of a person who has just found out something they didn’t previously know.

“It helped me see more clearly what was on the page … Instead of being confronted with a page of 350 words, it might have 50 words, or 100, and I could focus more clearly on words and sentences.”

Apparently DeLillo continues to use the technique. Entire forests tremble with fear every time he begins a new book. (Luckily the new one is a novella.)

Music by Local Natives, Joanna Newsom, Ortolan, Tape Deck Mountain, Gonjasufi, Javelin, Tobacco, Pantha du Prince, Portugal. The Man and Mackaper, among others.

Music by Citay, Fruit Bats, Man/Miracle, Adam Lore, The Art Museums, Mum Smokes, Michael Yonkers Band, Quasi, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy & The Cairo Gang, Black Moth Super Rainbow, Denim Owl and Aphex Twin, among others.

Here’s an 8tracks mix of some of the music I've been listening to in February 2010. I haven’t included Joanna Newsom’s ‘Good Intentions Paving Co.’, which (for the record) is easily my favourite song of the month, because I figure most people have already heard it.

Music by Home, The Paradise Motel, Local Natives, Citay, Frog Eyes, Wolf People, Love Connection, Yeasayer, Mum Smokes, Goldfrapp and The Art Museums, among others.

The city and the city by China Miéville

Written in blood by Chris Lawson (‘Chinese rooms’)

The Monthly February 2010 (‘The whirling dervish: Tony Abbott’ by Louis Nowra)

Music by Pikelet, Joanna Newsom, Home, Basia Bulat, Spoon, Lemonade, Wolf People, Maus Haus, Michael Yonkers, Monster Movie, James Husband and Four Tet, among others.

Fantastic use of the Eurostile typeface — but so much pink.

(Retrospace)

Music by Ghosts of Television, The Besnard Lakes, Spoon, Starless & Bible Black, Maus Haus, Beach House, Slow Six, James Husband, Home, Roj, Wolf People and White Rainbow, among others.

Music by James Husband, The Advisory Circle, Slow Six, Belbury Poly, Ben + Vesper, Nurses, White Hinterland, Roj, Steve Claydon, Paper Airplanes and Plants and Animals, among others.

Here’s an 8tracks mix of some of the music I've been listening to in January 2010.

Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld

Seizures of youth: the sixties and Australia by Robin Gerster & Jan Bassett

Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey

Look who’s morphing by Tom Cho

Having a slight crisis of identity.