Legend has it that Hemingway was once challenged to write a story in only six words. His response? ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn.‘ Last year, Smith Magazine re-ignited the recountre by asking their readers for their own six-word memoirs. Smith also teamed up with Twitter for a Six-Word Memoir contest in 2006 and then decided to make a book out of it which is available now.

People can also still submit Six-Word Memoirs on the Smith site here, too.
I liked ‘I photoshop people in my head‘ by Abigail Pope.

..and how to do it yourself.

Otto this post is especially for you. Please study. Thank you.

Nice work by Jennifer Daniel for The New York Times - more of her work here.

This is an (you guessed it!) quite old ad from Panasonic that ran in Rolling Stone magazine back in the day that I found via Allmusic. Just slightly ahead of their time. Slightly.

The Decapitator is Back With A Vengeance and turns to The London Paper.

Earlier Decapitator sightings here.

I was in London for a few days (part of a Kong Amsterdam delegation) for both business and pleasure. Business meaning visiting some amazing (and I mean amazing) production agencies, freelancers and possible future Kongsters.

Pleasure meaning popping in at Poke Towers for a quick catchup and suprising buddy Nathan by turning up to his enjoyable Blogfest event at the The Blue Posts pub on Berwick Street in SOHO (right opposite Yauatcha).

It was really nice to see everyone again. Thank you London. We’ll be back soon!

Found this article in the Daily Telegraph today which I found in the plane flying back (from London to Amsterdam - more about that in the next post). Thought it would make a nice RSS headline.

Scientists believe they have tracked down the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans on the planet today.

“Originally, we all had brown eyes”, said Prof Hans Eiberg from the University of Copenhagen, who led the team.

Blue eye colour most likely originated from the near east area or northwest part of the Black Sea region, where the great agriculture migration to the northern part of Europe took place in the Neolithic periods about six–10,000 years ago.

“That is my best guess,” he said. “It could be the northern part of Afghanistan.”

The mutation affected a gene called OCA2 and “literally ‘turned off’ the ability to produce brown eyes”, he says.

OCA2 is involved in the production of melanin, the pigment that gives colour to hair, eyes and skin.

The mutation in the adjacent gene does not switch off the OCA gene entirely but limits its action, reducing the production of melanin in the iris of the eye – “diluting” brown eyes to blue.

If the OCA2 gene had been completely turned off, those who inherited this mutation would be without melanin in their hair, eyes or skin colour - albino.

For the study, Prof Eiberg’s team examined DNA in blue-eyed individuals in countries as diverse as Jordan, India, Denmark and Turkey.

His findings are the latest in a decade of genetic research, which began in 1996, when Prof Eiberg first implicated the OCA2 gene as being one of those responsible for eye colour.

“They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA. From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor,” said Prof Eiberg, who reports the work in the journal Human Genetics.

Original article here, picture from here.