Diagram prize

Each year the Bookseller run the Diagram prize, one of the more unusual literary awards; while many mainstream literary prizes can, if we're honest, be a bit up their own arse, the Diagram accepts nominations from booksellers and librarians for the daftest genuine title. This year's shortlist is out and comprises of (and bear in mind this is not me off on a mad make-up-something-silly jag, these are real books):

How Green were the Nazis? by Franz-Josef Bruggemeier, Mark Cioc and Thomas Zeller

D. Di Mascio's Delicious Ice Cream: D. Di Mascio of Coventry: An Ice Cream Company of Repute, with an Interesting and Varied Fleet of Ice Cream Vans by Roger De Boer, Harvey Francis Pitcher, and Alan Wilkinson

The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification by Julian Montague

Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan by Robert Chenciner by Gabib Ismailov, Magomedkhan Magomedkhanov and Alex Binnie

Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium edited by Robert J Anderson, Juliet A Brodie, Edvar Onsoyen and Alan T Critchley

Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence by David Benatar

Channel Frederator

Posting on the Black Horse animation reminded me that I had forgotten to mention the recent Channel Frederator awards here. Frederator was set up to encourage animators and video makers; there's been a ton of interesting material on there and the recent awards page has links to the winners so not only can you read about them you can see them (too many to link to here, so just follow this main link). I wish the Academy would do something like this for the short animated movie nominees in the running for Oscars this year, since otherwise most of us will never get to see them. Some SF awards like the Hugos have done this with some tales in the short story awards nominations, making them available online so more people can get to read them and I think short animations could benefit from this in the same way, especially now it is so easy to upload short videos for mass viewing online.