It’s what you might call a cornucopia of illustrative talent, if you were inclined towards using words like cornucopia. Patchbox is a very simple, image based links page where artists post a thumnail pic linking to their site/blog. It’s a great idea dreamt up by the supremely talented Roberto Goring. Ta to Drawn, once again.

We’ve all, I assume, gone blank at some stage when confronted with someone who apparently knows us or said hello to a complete stranger who we thought we knew. My experience of not recognising my own sister is probably a little to the extreme but not quite as far as some of those recounted in this fascinating article about Prosopagnosia.

Prosopagnosia, or face-blindness, is the condition whereby sufferers can’t distinguish between faces. Facial features just become so generalised that they can have difficulty recognising their own loved ones. Recent studies suggest that one in 50 of us could be a sufferer. If you’d like to test your face recognition, go here.

In March of this year political journalist Michael Crowley criticised novelist Michael Crichton’s views on global warming(sub. required). So the Jurassic park author writes him into his next book as a child rapist. As a neat Bifsniff tie-in, the journalist wondered at first whether Crichton was having a potshot at Cork’s Worker’s Party representative Mick Crowley. Ta to Kottke for the link.

I was half tempted to write a long post about the nature of the media and how we all react to tragic events such as the recent five murders in Ipswich, Suffolk. But it seems a bit trite at this stage. However there is still something really off about the palpable sense of excitement in the voices of the Sky News reporters when they talk about their murder scene maps and the like. I, by and large, like 24 hour news and I can usually stand the scrolling text, breaking news music and dumb hyperbole but somethings demand a more sombre tone.

There may be things worth setting yourself alight in protest at but this wasn’t one of them. To be fair, though, every football fan has probably wanted to storm Merrion square at some stage or other. In this instance the fan was furious at Dundalk’s exclusion from next years 12 team premiership and wasn’t going to take it lying down. His actions seem to have prompted the FAI to publish a statement outlining why Dundalk have nothing to complain about - though at no point do they explain why a club with no ground as yet, Shamrock Rovers, meet the criteria set out over Dundalk. Now if the Irish Government had to deal with passion like this, there’d have been a people’s revolution long time ago.