StatAttack, Austin Kleon

News of the day: I just now sprinted in the rain to the corner across the street to mail my deposit for graduate school in the fall. I still have to sort out all the financial details, but now I really feel like I am going.

Yesterday I found two stops on the internet highway that I'm pretty fond of at the moment.

Numero Uno: StatAttack

This is a lot like Rosa Loves, which I know I posted about at some point. It's the marriage of my love for t-shirts and my love for altruism. All the shirts have stats on African countries like life expectancy and poverty levels. Proceeds go towards helping those countries.

Numero Dos: Newspaper Blackout Poems

It's well worth going to this link and reading several of Austin Kleon's blackout poems. I don't even really like poetry, but I love these. He's working on getting a store up so that you can buy prints of these poems. I just may be one of his first customers.

NPR on Austin Kleon:

"Instead of starting with a blank page, poet Austin Kleon grabs the New York Times and a permanent marker — and eliminates the words he doesn’t need. He recently transformed an article about a piano concert into a poem that begins: “Forget about trying to speak … the image is the travelogue.” The newspaper ends up more black than white, and shows another way to read between the lines."