This gallery of photos of the Chaitén volcano in Chile is astonishing.
It’s the sort of weather you want to observe from a safe distance, preferably accompanied by a soundtrack of Metallica or Led Zeppelin.
[Via MetaFilter]
Having just watched the penultimate episode of Dexter season 1, I have only two things to say:
If 2007 was the year of Heroes and Friday Night Lights, 2008 is almost certainly going down as the year of Dexter.
As is his habit, Cory Doctorow has made a copy of his latest novel, Little Brother, available for download free of charge under a Creative Commons license.
[Via Whatever]
At Ballardian, an account of a J G Ballard short story I’m going to have to track down:
Ballard’s “The Index” (1977) is a damnably clever short “story”, playing all sorts of games with the reader, with the act of writing, with existence itself. It tells the tale of a mysterious man named Henry Rhodes Hamilton, who, although he has been hitherto completely invisible in the world’s media, seems to have been the confidante of every world leader of note since WWII — and the lover of some of their wives as well. According to the “editor’s note” that begins the piece, HRH is “a man who may well have been one of the most remarkable figures of the 20th century. Yet of his existence nothing is publicly known, although his life and work appear to have exerted a profound influence on the events of the past fifty years.”
[…]
The story’s conceit is that it is typeset like an index, apparently the only surviving fragment of HRH’s “unpublished and perhaps suppressed autobiography”, and all of the plot details above, plus much, much more, can be gleaned from the brief fragments in the index itself.
The Filmspotting podcast recently invited listeners to recast Ghostbusters.
The best response by far was Ghostbusters: London Calling by a poster called frozenhamster:
An Edgar Wright Film
In this highly anticipated sequel/re-imagining of the original Ghostbusters England is about to get slimed! When ghosts get a passport to Europe they take London by storm and it’s up to a special team of British parapsychologists to save the city. Killing ghosts and making jokes, all before tea time.
Steve Coogan - Dr. Peter Venkman
Simon Pegg - Dr. Raymond Stantz
Martin Freeman - Dr. Egon Spengler
Nick Frost - Winston Zeddmore
Cate Blanchett - Dana Barrett
Paddy Considine - Louis Tully
Emma Thompson - Janine Melnitz
Christopher Eccleston - Walter Peck
Bill Nighy - Mayor
Ricky Gervais - Male Test Subject
Anna Friel - Female Test Subject
Thandie Newton - Gozer
Edgar Wright - Zuul/Slimer (voice) (uncredited)
I think Ricky Gervais would be better as Louis Tully,1, but that’s still a pretty solid cast.
Another poster by the name of minerwerks found a cast list from an alternate timeline where the original screenplay somehow ended up in Woody Allen’s hands:
Tony Roberts - Dr. Peter Venkman
Woody Allen - Dr. Raymond Stantz
Jeff Daniels - Dr. Egon Spengler
Christopher Walken - Winston Zeddemore
Diane Keaton - Dana Barrett
Paul Simon - Louis Tully
Mia Farrow - Janine Melnitz
Jeff Goldblum - Walter Peck
Howard Cosell - Mayor
Daniel Stern - Male Student
Mariel Hemmingway - Female Student
Shelley Duvall - Gozer (and the voice)
Woody Allen - Zuul / Slimer (voice) (uncredited)
I’d have paid good money to see that film.
Farah Mendlesohn’s review of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother makes me think I might have to add it to my to-read pile:
As some people know, as part of an ongoing research project I’ve spent the past five years reading every science fiction book written for the Young Adult market I can get my hands on. It’s not been an entirely happy experience. In most of the books I’ve read there is an absence of any political complexity, and in particular, an inattention to the way the world works. Perhaps worse, there has been an utter failure to address what I have always thought of as one of the key factors that make an SF book an SF book, that at the end of it, the reader has learned something. This something can be about genetics, strategy in a military mission, the nature of beetle sexuality - I really and truly don’t care - but I have always regarded SF as a didactic literature and regarded that didacticism as a good thing, yet most YA SF novels lack it (even when they simultaneously promote a political viewpoint such as science is bad, it will destroy the planet, focus on your mystical abilities). Little Brother, however, is fiercely, unashamedly didactic. Doctorow revels in what he has set out to do, which is simply to place in the hands of every school child a manual which could be subtitled “how to bring down your government and enjoy doing it.” The first time I read it I was on a flight to the US, and while I became increasingly concerned that this might have been a Very Bad Idea, I also sort of hoped customs might find the book because it is inflammatory. In UK terms, it most definitely Glorifies Terrorism.
It sounds like a companion piece to my current reading, Ken MacLeod’s The Execution Channel.1
[Via The Sideshow]
The outgoing Italian government’s parting shot was to publish details of every Italian’s tax declaration on the web. Obviously I’m horrified that such a huge quantity of confidential information was released by a government in such a cavalier fashion,1 but I can’t help but think that there must be more to the story than we’re seeing in the BBC’s report.
I’m quite prepared to believe that the outgoing government might want to make a point by rolling out the site before it left office, but the government surely couldn’t have put together a site on that scale from scratch in the fortnight since it lost the election. Was the surprise at the notion of putting the information out there, or at the fact that the site had been rolled out early? Or was the real surprise how interested the Italian public apparently was in this information?
[Via Qwghlm]
Nuru Rimington-Mkali’s award-winning short film And I Refuse to Forget is a lovely piece of work: evocative, intriguing and to the point.
[Via MetaFilter]
Is it just me, or does Matthew Gibeault look remarkably unconcerned at having been arrested?
[Via GromBlog]
I now know what a Schwerbelastungskörper is:
It’s a massive cylindrical block of concrete, standing 18 meters high and weighing in at 12,560 metric tons. It is located in the Berlin neighborhood of Tempelhof, where the eponymous airport is found.
The name is translated as “heavy load-bearing body,” although someone in the discussion page has suggested that “heavy load-exerting body” might be more accurate. It was constructed in 1941 to test how well the marshy ground upon which Berlin sits could handle the massive projects planned for Germania. More specifically, it was built to see how the landscape would react to Hitler’s gigantic Triumphal Arch, whose opening would have accommodated Paris’ Arc de Triomphe.
The results were not encouraging:
The Schwerbelastungskörper sank 7 inches in the three years it was to be used for testing, a maximum depth of 2.5 inches was allowed. Using the evidence gathered by these gargantuan devices, it is unlikely the soil could have supported such structures without further preparation.
Hitler dismissed these findings, perhaps confident that the landscape can be subjugated with fine Teutonic engineering. But Hitler’s capital had to wait. There was a war to be waged.
Jeffrey Zeldman, musing on the vanishing personal site:
Our personal sites, once our primary points of online presence, are becoming sock drawers for displaced first-person content. We are witnessing the disappearance of the all-in-one, carefully designed personal site containing professional information, links, and brief bursts of frequently updated content to which others respond via comments. Did I say we are witnessing the traditional personal site’s disappearance? That is inaccurate. We are the ones making our own sites disappear.
Obliterating our own readership and page views may not be a bad thing, but let’s be sure we are making conscious choices. […]
I’ve been mulling over these issues lately, thinking about what to do with my sites. Food for thought…
The Guardian’s report on the travails of the Palm Jumeirah as residents move in and discover that the reality doesn’t quite match the brochure’s promises conjures up a picture of a thoroughly … cosmopolitan … neighbourhood:
The lab rats in this experiment are a strange mix. They include England footballers, a battalion of middle-class Britons from places such as Salisbury and Weybridge, and even, it is said, Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, who is thought to have a house opposite Kieron Dyer, the West Ham midfielder.
Truly, Dubai is a strange place.
[Via Pruned]
Meet Johnny Crash.
A crash test dummy is tired of his job and secretly wants to be a great magician. So he quits his job and decides to realise his dream.
A very stylish animation.
[Via VideoSift]