This is wonderful: Antony Gormley, the sculptor responsible for the Angel of the North and the bronzes that were placed on London rooftops the other year, has created a new artwork for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. For 100 days ordinary people will stand on the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square and do whatever they like. One person an hour, 24 hours a day.Here is a good explanation.

There are 2,400 places, with, as of this morning, 19,538 applicants – up by about 14,000 from yesterday. This is a live feed where you can watch them do... whatever it is they're doing..

The Guardian does this better than The Times, which seems a bit sniffy about the whole thing, by using Twitter feeds and flickr to record who has been on the plinth.

One of my favourite things was reading the explanations of people who wanted to stand on the plinth, which, alas I cannot find a link to now. However, this is a list of some of the people coming up today. My favourites yesterday were the man who threw chocolate off the plinth, the man who took up a tea service and danced in the rain to demonstrate that the BNP are [Plural Of Very Bad Word] who do not understand Britishness and the art student who dressed up as a panda and put his mobile phone number on a placard then took phone calls from all over the world. (One person told him to jump. The git.) I even quite liked the woman who just danced like a space cadet.

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musesfool had a lovely section of a post the other day where she talked about mix tapes; how they worked, what makes a good one and why they meant more than mix CDs do now. I requote the bit from Nick Hornby that she quoted:

To me, making a tape is like writing a letter — there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. [...] A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with "Got to Get You Off My Mind," but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you've got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can't have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can't have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you've done the whole thing in pairs and...oh, there are loads of rules.
~High Fidelity, Nick Hornby, p. 88

While I don't necessarily agree with the rules in the above paragraph, I agree that everyone who makes a good mix tape (or mix CD) has rules.

Would anyone be interested in a mix tape challenge or exchange in which you post a playlist of music split into two sides of 30 minutes each?

You could illustrate a theme, subject or make it for a particular person. You could make an intro mix tape which illustrates the best of one band or one scene, or make a mix tape that evokes a city (I could do one for London in no time flat. )

If we posted links to the music, pretty soon we could have a whole masterlist of coherent one-hour playlists, which works really well when you've got tasks to perform and need stuff to listen to.

What do you think?