The Weekender — illustration, filth and hip-hop horses

Date
10 August 2012

How awesome are NASA? They seem to have been quite quiet over the past few years and then all of a sudden they pop up and tell us that they’ve landed a little camera-explorer thing (technical term) on Mars. The photos they beamed back were pretty cool but it strikes me that someone in Team Curiosity missed an absolute belter of a prank opportunity (prankortunity) by not superimposing a tiny Welsh flag or a box of Pringles in one corner. Hang on, what if Mars sees this as an invasion? What if this is seen as Earth’s hubristic highpoint after which we are all enslaved by Martian overlords? The Weekender is taking no chances. So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Best of the site

This week we were well impressed by Spencer Murphy’s surfing campaign photos, we delighted in the colourful compositions of Mike Lemanski and we couldn’t ruddy wait for the weekend so we could go out and play with the Hackney Brewery’s unbelievably cool Olympic-themed beermats.

Best of Best of the Web

The Daily Mail (no, really) stepped up with a good interview with Deyan Sudjic about the design legacy of London 2012, The Guardian paid a nice tribute to Robert Hughes the man whose mission was to make art criticism accessible and Dezeen brought us this multi-coloured paint sprinkler

Best of the rest

Elsewhere easily the most interesting thing I read this week was this piece about researchers trying to codify what makes cities look like they do, this amazing Star Wars-opening scene escalator did the rounds again (and rightly so) and The New York Times brought us the perfect tonic to deal with smug parental photos on Facebook – replace them all with bacon.

Tweet of the week

“My wife asked me for Fifty Shades of Grey, so I bought her a tin of HB pencils.”
Sports jounralist @MatKendrick made us chortle with an artistic gag about the book which this week became Britain’s best ever seller. Talking of which…

DEFINITELY NSFW SITE OF THE WEEK

Now it’s often said that qiute apart from all the naughty bits, the main talking point about Fifty Shades of Grey is how excruciatingly badly written it is. So of course it didn’t take long for a wag with a generator to create the ultimate in random filth creation Very funny, but again your boss may not massively appreciate it!

Time savers of the week

The Weekender is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it-gender-neutral-being-around-town kind of phenomenon and doesn’t have enough hours in the day for all the pressing calls on my time. And seeing as nobody seemed interested in my 27.5 hour day proposal, it’s up to us to find shortcuts. So not only did the fine folk at Vice read R Kelly’s autobiography so we didn’t have to , The New York Times 6th Floor blog condensed all the life lessons from Cosmo into a handy, digestible (not literally) list Sweet.

We’ve all been there right of the week

You know when you order a book from Amazon? Yeah? And they deliver it and it’s not the book you ordered. What’s that about? Am I right? Well what about when you order a TV from Amazon? And it’s delivered….And it turns out to be a massive machine gun? Just me? Is this thing on?

Olympic sport re-think of the week

Dressage is soooooo weird. Dancing horses and a bizarre…oh what’s that? Team GB got a gold?! Yay dressage! I’ve always loved dressage and all its intricacies. If I had a pound for every time I predicted this dressage triump…oh who am I kidding. Want to see it set to hip hop instead? Ok…

(Although talking of dancing animals you have to go some distance to outdo Salsa dog!)

Why? Why? of the week

The face of Nigel Thornberry superimposed onto Disney princesses and turned into GIFS. If that sounds like your kind of thing prepare to be wowed!

See you all in the Martian prison camps, last one in the laser lake is a rotten egg!

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About the Author

Rob Alderson

Rob joined It’s Nice That as Online Editor in July 2011 before becoming Editor-in-Chief and working across all editorial projects including itsnicethat.com, Printed Pages, Here and Nicer Tuesdays. Rob left It’s Nice That in June 2015.

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