Acme Ideas

I was actually googling 'gin and bingara' when i found this. Thanks, lovely lovely web. 'The only hardboiled-type guy I can think of who regularly drank a mixed drink is Marid Audran, the hero of George Alec Effinger's Budayeen novels (When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun, and The Exile Kiss; they're near-future science fiction, but very much in the hard-boiled detective tradition). Marid always drank something called "gin and bingara" with a splash of Rose's Lime. I've always wanted to try it, but I have no idea what bingara is. Every once in a while, I remember Marid and do a Google search for bingara...but the closest I've come is that Bingara is the name of a town in New South Wales, Australia. Maybe Effinger made it up. We can't ask him, because he died in 2002 at 55 years old. Which is sad. What's infinitely sadder is that he only wrote those three Marid Audran novels. They're fantastic, and when you reach the end of the third and realize there aren't any more...well, it's kinda like an alcoholic realizing the bottle's empty and there's never going to be another one.'

I'm an absolute sucker for tilt-shift and Keith Loutit is probably the best there is...

The City of Samba from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.

Seconds Of Beauty - 1st round compilation from The Beauty Of A Second on Vimeo.

Lovely collection of one second movies compiled from Mont Blanc's One Second Movie competition.