This infra-red image from NASA’s Earth Observatory reveals a ghostly web of contrails over the south-eastern United States.
Spectacular as the image is, there’s a downside to such a spectacular image: there’s some evidence that an increase in the quantity of contrails contributes to an increase in the level of cirrus cloud cover, which in turn contributes to an increase in ground and atmospheric temperatures.
Not Mayor Richard Wilkins III, but Mayor McCheese. Let Revolution SF take up the story, related by Sarah Michelle Gellar, about her days as a child actress:
[…]
Gellar told World Entertainment News Network that she was in a Burger King commercial when she was 5. It apparently so offended Mickey D’s that everyone involved in the commercial - including the future Slayer/Daphne - was banned from ever entering McDonald’s.
[…]
What on earth did she do in the ad? Do McDonalds have a hit list of former child actors they train staff to look out for? I Think We Should Be Told…
Apple has released iTunes 4.5, which tweaks a few features and adds a couple of handy options. This post at Quarter Life Crisis discusses the details, and includes a very handy tip for turning the new shortcut arrow which appears next to each track name, artist and album in iTunes 4.5 into something useful, especially for those of us living in territories which aren’t presently served by the iTunes Music Store.
[Link to Quarter Life Crisis via plasticbag.org linklog]
I love this news story about a cashpoint in the village of Wooler which was loaded with £20 notes instead of £10 notes and started handing out double the money to everyone making a withdrawal. In particular, it’s the image from the Daily Telegraph’s report of a queue of dressing gown-clad villagers waiting patiently for midnight, when a new banking day would start and they could hit their maximum daily withdrawal limit (x2) all over again.
I can just see the feature film or TV movie now: a sort of low-budget with a Bill Forsyth feel, a Northumbrian Local Hero.
[Daily Telegraph story via qwghlmBlog]
McSweeney’s presents Saddam’s Interrogation Logs by Brian M Sack:
[…]
Interrogation commenced: 0330 hours
Woke SH quite early to catch him off-guard and groggy. I asked, “What’s your first name?” and he said, “Saddam.” Again I asked, “What’s your first name?” and he said, “Saddam.” I kept asking, “What’s your first name?” and he kept saying, “Saddam.” Once I had a rhythm going, I quickly asked, “Where are the WMD?” and he said, “Saddam.”
Interrogation terminated: 0338 hours
[…]
Another night without linky goodness, another feeble excuse about having been out at the cinema…
Having re-watched Kill Bill Volume 1 at the cinema the other week to refresh my memory, it was time to see what sort of a job Quentin Tarantino had made of concluding his story. As just about every review has noted, Kill Bill Volume 2 is stylistically very different to the first volume, drawing on spaghetti westerns more than eastern martial arts flicks. This time round the violence is mostly inflicted with hands, fists and head-butts rather than edged weapons, and the blood is a lot less fake-looking. Uma Thurman does a sterling job of making her bad girl plausible, Michael Madsen’s Budd proves to be a lot nastier than he looks, and Elle Driver, I’m delighted to say, amply demonstrates just what a nasty bitch she really is. And Bill … well, David Carradine comes very close to stealing the film from Uma Thurman. If I squint I can just about imagine Warren Beatty playing the part, as originally planned, but I can’t imagine him pulling off the silky smooth bastard Carradine gives us. There’s a fair bit of humour this time round, in between the bouts of violence and the various set-piece speeches Tarantino hands his characters. (This volume is a lot more like a ‘traditional’ Tarantino film, with no character so rushed that he can’t pause and speak eloquently and at length about why he’s doing what he’s doing and how he feels about what he’s done/is about to do. And obviously when I say “he” and “his” I could equally well say “she” and “her”: everyone’s at it this time round.)
What can I say to sum up? If you saw the first film, don’t go in expecting more of the same. But don’t assume that different means worse. Bringing some closure to the plot threads Tarantino set up in the first film automatically makes the concluding volume more satisfying emotionally, but it’s very difficult (particularly at this time of night, writing shortly after getting back from my trip to the cinema) to say which is better. Let’s just say both are tremendously entertaining if you have the stomach for the level of violence on display, and that I can’t wait to watch both volumes on DVD a few months from now and see how they play in quick succession.
(For what it’s worth, I’d be fascinated to see a Special Edition DVD showing us how Tarantino would have welded the two very different halves together to bring us the single three-hour film which was originally planned. I find it very hard to picture how that would have worked as well as the two stylistically distinct halves we’ve seen have. You have to give some credit to Tarantino and Miramax for doing what was right for the film, instead of creating what would surely have been a less satisfactory story for the sake of running time alone.)
Microsoft developer Chris Pratley has posted a brief history of Microsoft Word, with particular attention paid to Word’s victory over the seemingly-unassailable WordPerfect. Interesting stuff, especially Pratley’s focus on the speed with which Microsoft zoomed in on features ordinary end users found valuable (as opposed to journalists, who had an understandable - but not universally applicable - obsession with whether the word processor they were reviewing had a word count feature).
It’s a worthwhile article, and Pratley is quite right to note that the failure to make a successful transition to Windows 3 killed WordPerfect. What he doesn’t mention once in his article is the main reason WordPerfect corporation thought they could ignore Windows 3, i.e. that Microsoft and IBM were soon telling every business computer user out there that any but the lowest-end business users should be using OS/2. WordPerfect were concentrating on building a (very nice) WordPerfect for OS/2, just as Lotus were putting a lot of effort into Lotus 1-2-3 for OS/2, and both companies were wrong-footed by Microsoft’s decision to shift their efforts away from OS/2 and back towards 16-bit versions of Windows.
Another factor which made a huge difference to Word’s market position but wasn’t (initially) a function of Word’s technical virtues was that Microsoft introduced the first Microsoft Office bundles back when Word for Windows 2 was the current version. Bundling three programs which cost £395 each for £595 (IIRC) did at least as much to build market share for Word (and Excel and PowerPoint) as adding features to Word 6 did.
Now I’m not saying that Microsoft were lying about the virtues of OS/2 during the initial stages of that project, or that Microsoft were somehow cheating by focusing on developing Word for 16-bit Windows systems, or that bundling applications was some sort of underhand tactic. What I am saying is that Microsoft Word’s success is a consequence of rather more than the virtuous user-centered development process which Pratley discusses. (Not that I imagine that he’d disagree with that assessment; I just wanted to point to his insider’s look at the process of beating WordPerfect whilst pointing out that there were other elements to Word’s success story.)
[Via kottke.org remaindered links]
Looking at some of the candidates on offer in the Fandom Escapist Election 2004, I’m not so sure that choosing between Bush and Kerry would be quite such an awful prospect after all. (Assuming I were actually in America in the first place and entitled to vote, that is.)
I mean, how do you choose between Lord Vetinari (”He doesn’t believe in unnecessary cruelty. He’s all for necessary cruelty, of course.”), a Beecher/Keller ticket and the truly scary Luthor/Luthor pairing? Perhaps the safest bets are Pembleton/Bayliss (”They speak for the dead. Let them speak for you.”) and Buffy/Faith (”Don’t send little boys to do a woman’s job.”)
[Via dust from a distant sun]
A day late, but worth the wait:
Yes, really. The Star Wars Kid meets Kill Bill. (NB: 2.2MB WMV file.)
[Mirror 1, Mirror 2, Mirror 3, Mirror 4.]
Really nice work.
[Via Boing Boing]
Over at Open Brackets, Gail relates the story of her first ever date. Or rather, of events leading up to the point where she and her date, Mark, left for the cinema.
I don’t want to spoil her story, but I can’t resist teasing you with this excerpt from towards the end of the tale:
We don’t say a thing all the way to the theatre. Only Mark ducks during the film, each time I reach over for popcorn.
Trust me, you definitely want to read about the events that made young Mark flinch like that.
This week’s edition of Salon’s Ask the Pilot column (NB: non-subscribers will have to watch a short Flash advert before viewing the content) collects some prime examples of airline public address announcements:
Flying to St. Louis, the pilot got on the public address system near Pittsburgh and said: “A special treat for the passengers on the left side. Look straight down and you’ll see a very large white house. Here, let me show you.” [At this point he actually tipped the plane so we could see.] “That’s my ex-wife’s house. I know it’s her house because that’s her lawyer’s BMW in the driveway.” He was very cheerful about the whole thing, but a lot of passengers looked at each other with a mix of laughter and anxiety.
[…]
On one flight I was seated in back and the captain was cracking jokes with terrible puns. The flight attendant charged forward muttering “I’m going to murder him.” I stopped her and said relax, we’re enjoying it. She replied: “But he’s my husband and I told him I would kill him if he told that one!”
I went to the cinema to see Shaun of the Dead last week. I’m not particularly a zombie film aficionado, so I probably missed a lot of homages to its forbears, but what I did see was a fine, funny and - where necessary - quite scary film. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost played an all-too believable pair of twentysomething slackers who find their routine of nights down the pub and first-person shooters before breakfast interrupted by the small matter of a plague of zombies. It’s very similar in spirit to the sitcom Spaced (which supplied both the director and much of the cast), only with added zombies and a bunch of cameos from most of the under-40 generation of British sitcom actors. My only worry is that if lead actor Simon Pegg and his writing partner/director Edgar Wright find success in feature films we’ll never see a full third season of Spaced… (The latest word is that they’ll do a couple of one-off specials, but I want more!)
Talking of zombies, I’ve been catching up with Angel season 4 on DVD and I watched Habeas Corpses last night; it felt a bit odd to see zombies in the Buffyverse so soon after I’d been watching them munching their way through suburbia. I’ve enjoyed season 4 of Angel quite a bit so far. I don’t know whether the particularly nasty beast that’s just popped up in Los Angeles is going to turn out to be connected in some way to that whole First Evil-related unpleasantness that was unfolding in Sunnydale over the course of Buffy season 7, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to be fun (though not necessarily for the staff of Angel Investigations) to find out. Particularly since the last episode I watched, just before posting this entry, ended with Angelus back on the scene…
Following up on the various suggestions offered in response to my post about Spirited Away, I watched Princess Mononoke on DVD last week. The film looked fine and it was refreshing to see that the storyline didn’t simply set up one side as the villains of the piece; Lady Eboshi may have been planning to cut down the forest, but she was much more than your standard rapacious capitalist. When I watch foreign language films I usually watch the subtitled version, but this time I didn’t feel that I was getting as much from the Japanese soundtrack as I wanted so I switched to the dubbed English language soundtrack part-way through. The good news was that Neil Gaiman’s English language adaptation of the screenplay was well up to the mark, assisted by an able cast of reliable American actors: Billy Bob Thornton’s Jigo and Minne Driver’s Lady Eboshi stood out, but Gillian Anderson, Keith David and Jada Pinkett Smith were all fine in supporting roles. The bad news was that I wasn’t much taken by the performances of Billy Crudup and Claire Danes. Which is a bit of a problem when they’re playing such prominent characters, the pair who are supposed to hold our sympathies while the plot unfolds around them. Still and all, the good greatly outweighed the bad, so I’m in no way deterred from seeking out more Miyazaki. Based on what seems to be readily available around here, it’ll probably be Kiki’s Delivery Service next.
Having built an entire village set in Prague for his forthcoming monster movie Van Helsing, director Stephen Sommers thought it was a shame to abandon all that work. He went to the NBC network to propose that they make a spin-off series from the film, which they’d call Transylvania.
All of which wouldn’t be terribly interesting, since Sommers’ films to date have been at best routine B-movies. However, CHUD reports that former Buffy and Angel writer David Fury is on the writing team for Transylvania. Anyone who has paid attention to the credits on prime episodes of those two fine shows will rightly think that this immediately makes the prospect of Transylvania some 500% more interesting.