Boris is clearly missing a trick with his public information. We need better tube posters. Here are a few etiquette posters that appeared in the Tokyo subways between 1976 and 1982 (more at the original post, via Pink Tentacle). * * * * *

The Seat Monopolizer (July 1976)

Inspired by Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator," this poster tells  passengers not to sit like idiots.

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Don't forget your umbrella (June 1977)

This poster of the high-class courtesan Agemaki (from the kabuki play "Sukeroku"), whose captivating beauty was said to make men forgetful, is meant to remind passengers to take their umbrellas when they leave the train.

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Space Invader (March 1979)

This 1979 poster has a fairly simply play on words. If you can't work it out, I can't help you.

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Don't forget your umbrella (October 1981)

The text at the top of this poster  reads "Kasane-gasane no kami-danomi" (lit. "Wishing to God again and again"). The poster makes a play on the words "kasa" (umbrella) and "kasane-gasane" (again and again). Doubting Thomas looks pretty freaky.

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Coughing on the platform (January 1979)

Modeled after the paintings of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, this poster -- titled "Hōmu de Concon" (coughing on the platform) -- urges people not to smoke on the train platforms during the designated non-smoking hours (7:00-9:30 AM and 5:00-7:00 PM). The poster makes a play on the words "concon" (coughing sound) and "cancan" (French chorus line dance).

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Clearly show your train pass (September 1978)

Napoleon's partially concealed train pass is meant to remind passengers to clearly show their train passes to the station attendant when passing through the gates. The dictionary page in the background is a reference to Napoleon's famous quote: "The word 'impossible' is not in my dictionary."

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Marcel Marceau (October 1978)

Marcel Marceau gestures toward a priority seat reserved for elderly and handicapped passengers, expecting mothers, and passengers accompanying small children. He makes me afraid of clowns.

To see a world in a grain of sand,And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour. (from 'Auguries of Desire')

There's a good biography in Wikipedia, but here's the short story: Born in 1757, William worked in his father's hosiery shop until his talent for drawing became so obvious that he was apprenticed to an engraver at 14.

He worked on his first book, Songs of Innocence, with his wife Catherine. Blake engraved the words and pictures on copper plates (a method he claimed he received in a dream), while she coloured the plates and bound the books. It sold slowly during his lifetime. Songs of Experience (1794) was followed by Milton (1804-1808), and Jerusalem (1804-1820). He poured his whole being into his work. The lack of public recognition sent him into a severe depression which lasted from 1810-1817, and even his best friends thought he'd gone nuts.

Blake worked on a small scale. Most of his engravings are little more than inches in height, yet the detailed rendering is superb and exact. His work received far more public acclaim after his death. He died on August 12, 1827, and is buried in an unmarked grave at Bunhill Fields, London. Utterly unique, incredibly creative, a true original. Possibly the greatest artist our shores have ever produced.

A truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.

Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.

Do what you will, this world's a fiction and is made up of contradiction.

Energy is an eternal delight, and he who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.

Every harlot was a virgin once.

Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than fun, and happiness is better than mirth. What is a wife and what is a harlot? What is a church and what is a theatre? are they two and not one? Can they exist separate? Are not religion and politics the same thing? Brotherhood is religion. O demonstrations of reason dividing families in cruelty and pride!

I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow.

No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.

I still get a hankering for Picture Consequences. You might know it by a different name, but it's the one you play when you draw a head on a piece of paper, fold it over and pass it on to your mate who draws neck down to belt, they pass it on to someone who does waist down to knees, etc. Draw And Fold Over drags this old parlour game into the virtual world, but with a distinctly analogue feel. Pass your drawing on, share it on Facebook, all that jazz.

Procrastination: win.

UPDATE: Charlie Bayliss just put up a link to Postal Consequences, a website that uploads scans of beautiful snail mail versions of the game: http://www.postalconsequences.com/ - checkacheckacheckitouuuuut.

“Versions” is a visual essay by Oliver Laric, investigating the re-appropriation and manipulation of images in our culture. First half more interesting than the second half, where some of the commentary gets a bit obfuscatory.

As a post script to his essay though, I'd say it's important to remember that the "copy and paste" function, writ large like these examples, is not always a product of laziness. With some of it, it's an efficiency thing. Cutting corners in order to get things out to more people - a modern audience already understands the frame of the narrative, they just want to see it in a different framework, a different context, proving a different moral. The same is as true in Disney as it is in Grimm's fairy tales, Greek myth etc.

Watch the video here.

(link found on the indefatigable art blog BOOOOOOOOM!)

XKCD updates every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Jonathan Glancey interviews Norman Foster for the Guardian: Norman Foster at 75: Norman's conquests As the great British architect Norman Foster turns 75, he talks to Jonathan Glancey about flying cars, his new underground city – and how he beat bowel cancer

'The other day," says Norman Foster, "I was counting the number of aircraft I've flown: from sailplanes and a Spitfire to a Cessna Citation. By chance, it comes to 75." So Foster, who turned 75 this month, has decided to make models of all 75, to hang in his own personal museum, which he keeps at his Swiss home, an 18th-century chateau set in vineyards between Lausanne and Geneva.

These model aircraft will hover over his collection of some of the 20th-century's greatest machines, cherished for both their engineering brilliance and streamlined beauty; many of them look like winged or wheeled versions of Foster's most innovative buildings. "At the moment," says the architect, "I'm restoring a Citroën Sahara, designed to tackle north African dunes. I'm also thinking of getting a Bell 47 helicopter as a focal point. And I've had a model made of the Graf Zeppelin airship."

This last item puts me in mind of 30 St Mary Axe, aka the Gherkin, the Zeppelin-like London skyscraper that bears witness to Foster's passion for engineering marvels – a passion that began in childhood. Five years ago, I asked the architect if he had ever been a railway enthusiast. He replied by postcard, with a sketch of a Royal Scot class 4-6-0 thundering along, just as he would have seen it from his bedroom window, in the terraced house in Manchester where he grew up.

Foster has come a long way from those zinc-bath-in-front-of-the-fire days. The boy who left school at 16 to do his national service with the RAF is now – as his astronomical career shows, and as Deyan Sudjic writes in his new biography – "a phenomenon". But the lad from Levenshulme never forgot what he saw and learned as a working-class child brought up in an industrial Britain.

"There's a snobbery at work in architecture," says Foster, speaking at his riverside studio in Battersea, London. "The subject is too often treated as a fine art, delicately wrapped in mumbo-jumbo. In reality, it's an all-embracing discipline taking in science, art, maths, engineering, climate, nature, politics, economics. Every time I've flown an aircraft, or visited a steelworks, or watched a panel-beater at work, I've learned something new that can be applied to buildings. Disciplines connect, from locomotive engineering to the design of a bridge, or from a study of the way raptors and gliders soar. The most amazing lesson in aerodynamics I ever had was the day I climbed a thermal in a glider at the same time as an eagle. I witnessed, close up, effortlessness and lightness combined with strength, precision and determination. "

(read the rest of the interview here)

(Via.)

Sasha Prood has produced some beautiful pieces of illustration that explore typography through nature and watercolour. Really breathtaking. AND she has a website with some rather natty horizontal scrolling, which is something I've been wanting to try for ages.

...harder than you might think. These aren't all my favourites (some are other people's) but they're all good. Bit of  shock, a dash of reversal and you're hooked. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. 1984, George Orwell

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger

Mother died today. L'Etranger, Albert Camus

It was the day my grandmother exploded. The Crow Road, Iain Banks

All this happened, more or less. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C. S. Lewis

It was a pleasure to burn. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad

He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. Scaramouche, Raphael Sabatini

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In a similar vein, spoke with someone yesterday who was saying the trick to blockbusting book titles, at least according to Martin Amis and some of his buddies, is to pick someone else's bestseller and just change one word.

You might recognise Josh Cooley's pen from his time at Pixar. For the last two years, he's spent his spare time working on his Lil' Inappropriate Book line. They've now been compiled into a book, and will be released alongside a rocking set of saucy playing cards. There are a few galleries dotted around. I want to buy one of the prints. There's a link here to some larger images, and a larger range (though smaller) on his blog. Click through and see if you can recognise the films...

One of my favourite websites, Pink Tentacle has THIS fantastic collection of early 20th century posters for Japanese travel companies. Knocks the socks off Lastminute.com!

Osaka Mercantile Steamship Co., Ltd., 1916

Selection from a fantastic set from boooooom.com. Part of a series by Beijing photographers Huang Qingjin and Ma Hongjie called "Family stuff". I can't find out much about them. Click here for the original link.

Sort of puts the mess in my bedroom to shame! Far too much crap. Do be sure to look at the whole selection here.

If Brazil were a building...with Niemeyer it's all about the flexibility of concrete, the man-made organic shapes. I'm not going to upload tonnes of pictures and images or talk about his life. Instead, here is a list of his works, and here are some things he said:

My work is not about "form follows function," but "form follows beauty" or, even better, "form follows feminine."

Architecture was my way of expressing my ideals: to be simple, to create a world equal to everyone, to look at people with optimism, that everyone has a gift. I don’t want anything but general happiness. Why is that bad?

I deliberately disregarded the right angle and rationalist architecture designed with ruler and square to boldly enter the world of curves and straight lines offered by reinforced concrete.… This deliberate protest arose from the environment in which I lived, with its white beaches, its huge mountains, its old baroque churches, and the beautiful suntanned women.

Life is very fleeting. It’s important to be gentle and optimistic. We look behind and think what we’ve done in this life has been good. It was simple; it was modest. Everyone creates their own story and moves on. That’s it. I don’t feel particularly important. What we create is not important. We’re very insignificant.

We hated Bauhaus. It was a bad time in architecture. They just didn’t have any talent. All they had were rules. Even for knives and forks they created rules. Picasso would never have accepted rules. The house is like a machine? No! The mechanical is ugly. The rule is the worst thing. You just want to break it.