It’s old news that the entire run of Spy magazine is available on Google Books. A poke through the archive will give you an excellent sense of why the magazine was so riveting and influential in the late ’80s and early ’90s, when founders Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen were running the show. If you’re unfamiliar with Spy, read this piece from Metropolis or get your hands on the definitive anthology, Spy: The Funny Years.

Scrolling through the pages of Spy in Google Books using a desktop or laptop web browser isn’t a great reading experience. Luckily, there’s a much better option: Using a Mac desktop app called Google Book Downloader, you can scrape Google Books to create PDFs of many of the publications and books in Google’s archive. (I’m sure there must be Windows apps that do the same thing.)

On a recent weekend afternoon, I used Google Book Downloader to generate a PDF of every issue from Spy’s heyday, then pulled everything into my Dropbox account to allow me to access the archive from anywhere and any device — primarily my iPad. The whole process took me less than two hours. The filesize of the PDFs ranges from about 25 megabytes to about 50 megabytes, and the quality is quite high; the issues look fantastic on my new iPad’s retina screen. An iPad gives a much better approximation of an actual print-magazine experience than a web browser does, and if you save an issue into a PDF-friendly interface like Amazon’s Kindle app, you can use page thumbnails to navigate. It’s pretty sweet:

It’s a real treat to have the entire Spy archive at my fingertips, in a way that allows me to curl up with an issue on the couch.

You can use Google Book Downloader with other magazines, too. Try Popular Science, August 1927, or Baseball Digest, September 1966, to name just two at random…

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is dense with grids, mazes, mirror images, and other rigid visual and conceptual geometries. A prominent example is the intensely colored hallway carpet that Danny zooms over in his Big Wheel in several key scenes, including the one in which he first encounters the scary goings-on in Room 237. The carpet pattern is fundamentally a grid. If you look closely in some scenes, you can even see the edges where the long rolls of carpet meet.

Other people have been fascinated by the carpet’s grid-based design. As I discovered with a little googling, for example, the Belgian web designer Veerle Pieters used the Shining carpet pattern as the basis for an Illustrator tutorial a few years ago.

Those of you who frequent interior design stores will know there’s a company called Flor that makes modular carpet tiles. The tiles are 19.7" square and generally cost $10–$20 each. They’re sold at places like CB2 and are popular as a floor covering in homes and offices:

So here’s my concept: I want Flor, or some other company, to manufacture a special edition of modular carpet tiles based on the Shining carpet.

A single tile would look like this:

Two would look like this:

Four would look like this:

And sixteen would look like this:

I would totally spend enough money to cover the floor of my home office with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining Carpet Tiles™.

To match the scale and proportions of the carpet in the film, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining Carpet Tiles™ would have to be roughly three feet wide by four feet tall, assuming that Danny Lloyd, the young actor who played Danny Torrance, was about four feet tall at the time. If the individual tiles were too small, it would ruin the effect. Verisimilitude is key here. It would also be important to use a low pile for the tiles; this artist used a messy pile for a Shining carpet installation, and it ruined the effect.

On the other hand, these Shining carpet socks are pretty rad. But they don’t seem to be available anymore.

My maternal grandfather, Frank “Tex” Glanville, was a renowned vaudeville performer in Australia from the 1930s through the 1950s. He was primarily famous as a rope-spinner, but he was also a wire-walker, juggler, and hypnotist.

I only met Tex two or three times, long ago, and until last month I’d never seen video of him performing. But my mother just sent me several DVDs filled with silent footage of Tex from the 1940s and 1950s. It’s amazing stuff. Also included on the DVDs was the clip below, a late-’80s local-news report about Tex and his career. (My grandmother is also interviewed in the video.) The hook for the story was a McDonald’s commercial that used old footage of Tex to hawk the franchise’s Double Beef ’n’ Bacon burger. There’s some great old footage here:

Tex died in 1990. His ropes, juggling props, and voluminous scrapbooks are preserved as part of the Performing Arts Collection at Arts Centre Melbourne. I hope to make it to Melbourne in the next few years to take a look at everything. Tex also left behind an unpublished autobiography called At the End of My Rope, which I’m planning to lay out and publish as an on-demand book at Blurb.com.