The New York Times has an interesting article exploring the dilemma facing the producers of The West Wing as they complete their sixth season and face the retirement of Jed Bartlet. Clearly someone has to move into the White House before the season ends, but the producers claim not to know which party's candidate they'll choose. What complicates matters is that the contract with NBC, the network which broadcasts the show in the US, expires at the end of the season.

I'd have thought that on purely practical grounds the producers would want to have a Democrat win the race for the White House. I know that US administrations appoint the odd cabinet secretary regardless of past political affiliation, and many mid-level appointees running individual departments will initially remain in place, at least until the new administration decides who it wants to move, but the focus of The West Wing has always been on the executive office staff rather than the cabinet or the civil service. In real life, I have the impression that few presidential aides survive the transfer of power between the two parties.

Surely this implies that if the White House goes Republican then pretty much the entire cast will have to be replaced? If the show was safely contracted for another two seasons then the producers could get away with introducing a whole new cast of presidential aides on the assumption that they could spend the next season or two letting the audience get used to them, but would NBC really be willing to sign up for another couple of seasons of a show which had just ditched 95% of the cast from the first six seasons?

[Via feeling listless]

Scientists have made been making new observations of magnetars, the most powerful magnetic objects in the universe. They're big:

Observations of a gas bubble surrounding one magnetar showed astronomers that the star is 30 to 40 times the mass of the Sun. [...] "The surprising thing is how big this bubble is," Gaensler says. "It's huge. The Sun's bubble is a tiny fraction of a light year across. This thing is dozens of light years across."

They're immensely powerful:

[...] magnetars spin much faster, up to 1000 times a second, and emit gamma-ray flashes. This spinning generates their powerful magnetic fields – a million billion times stronger than Earth's.

They're rarer than hens' teeth:

Since the first discovery in 1998, astronomers have confirmed only 11 magnetars, most of them in our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

However, all this is missing the big point. According to The Scotsman, if we're really unlucky, a magnetar could put a kink in our next shopping spree:

The strange objects have magnetic fields so strong that if one was placed half way to the moon it would wipe out every credit card on Earth, said astronomers.

Because if a supermassive object dozens of light years across popped up between the Earth and the Moon, our ability to use our credit cards would be the first thing on our minds.

(In the spirit of Size of Wales, The Scotsman could have pointed out that the magnetar weighed as much as 5.96676×10²⁸ African elephants. Give or take a decimal place or two. Imagine all the mucking-out that herd would require. Or the size of the zoo to hold 'em, come to that.)

[New Scientist article via Amygdala, Scotsman article via The Inquirer]

Observant readers will have noticed that I still haven't tweaked the site's design from the WordPress default. I did spend a little while playing with a couple of alternative templates, and I've made two really minor CSS tweaks, but it's still basically the out-of-the-box design I started with. It's pretty clear that I'm going to want to teach myself some PHP and read the WordPress documentation before I can do a proper site overhaul under my own steam, so in the meantime those of you who like the default design can be happy that it's going to be sticking around for a few days at least, and possibly longer. Those of you who hate the current look will just have to bear with me, I'm afraid. Unfortunately as this switch in software platforms was forced on my at short notice I haven't have the opportunity to plan the migration as I did when I switched to MT, so it may be a little while before everything settles down. The main thing is that (as far as I can tell) everything seems to be working on the WordPress end of the site, which is the main thing.

As I can no longer reliably log into my Movable Type installation, I'm going to have to spend some time fiddling with Perl so that I can strip out all the bits of the existing entries which call Movable Type (i.e. trackbacks, comments, links that use Movable Type's comment redirection feature) so that I'm left with a set of pure HTML pages which I can leave up and link to off the current version of the sidebar, in much the same way that there was a link on the old version of my site's front page to the entries at thebeard.org. Have patience: I'll get there in the end.

I haven't been able to keep up with the various photoblogs I keep tabs on very well lately, but here are a few nice pieces I've spotted as I play catch-up:

• It took me several looks before I figured out what JagedEdge by foureyes was actually depicting.
• Loneliness by ssilence is much nicer to contemplate from the comfort of a warm room than it is to walk through. Still pretty, though.
• Noah Grey's shot of Red Pepper In Birdcage Stand, July 2003 depicts exactly what you'd expect, but doesn't look like what you'd expect at all.
• Martine at frangipani marked her return to Japan from a year-end vacation by posting an exquisite image that just demands to be turned into your computer's desktop wallpaper.
• Beard at Chromagenic is very nice indeed.
• Sam Javanrouh has, as usual, come up with some lovely images in and around Toronto. His shot of the Ontario College of Art and Design building is quite striking – I suspect that the building actually looks better in snowy conditions, where it at least matches the rest of the landscape. Then there's his shot of Toronto's eastern skyline (which, oddly, doesn't look to me as if it includes any of the city's buildings.)
• I can't make my mind up which of these two images at emptyPictures is my favourite – the quite abstract close-up, or the clearer second image of the whole animal.
• A couple of beauties from Graham at Sensitive Light: birds are a speciality, but this shot of an Irish wolfhound and her master is especially nice.
• The Fireworks Galaxy more than lives up to its name. Spectacular.

Jeremy Paxman has posted a delightful account of the process of assembling an edition of Newsnight:

Where to start. Well, firstly, the presenters. The essential skills necessary for the job, are, as Nicholas Tomalin once wrote about journalism, a plausible manner, a little literary ability and rat-like cunning. On many programmes, even the last two requirements can be waived.

Kelvin Mackenzie once invented something called the News Bunny for the fabulously catastrophic L!ve TV news service. Grizzled old Fleet Street veterans were required to struggle into a furry nylon jumpsuit with enormous ears to report upbeat stories.

They disliked it not so much for the affront to their dignity but because of the appalling smell left by dozens of previous inhabitants.

But the News Bunny once even got eight seconds with Tony Blair (in the days before he could hide behind the security apparatus of Downing Street) which I suppose proves the only people with even less dignity than journalists are politicians.

[Via Found]

I somehow contrived to miss Radio 4's broadcast of Stewart Lee's Chain Reaction interview with Alan Moore, so I'm particularly happy to see that Comic Book Resources has posted a transcript. Here's Moore on his disenchantment with film adaptations of his work:

AM:[...] I've decided I don't want anything more to do with films at all. After all the stuff with "The League," there'd been some minor law suit with somebody claiming that I had gotten the idea from an American Hollywood screen writer and you can imagine how I felt about that. So, I felt, if I'm going to react I might as well over react. (audience laughs) So, I said, right, that's it, no more Hollywood films. And if they do make films of my work, then I want my name taken off them and I want all the money given to the artists. I thought, God, that sounds principled (audience laughs) and almost heroic! (audience laughs) Then I got a phone call from Karen Berger the next Monday, she's an editor at DC Comics, and she said, "Yeah, we're going to be sending you a huge amount of money before the end of the year because they're making this film if your Constantine character with Keanu Reeves." I said, "Right, OK. (audience laughs) Well, take my name off of it and distribute my money amongst the other artists." I felt, well, that was difficult, but I did it and I feel pretty good about meself. Then I saw David Gibbons who I had done "Watchmen" with and he was saying, "Oh Alan, guess what, they're making the 'Watchmen' film." And I said, with tears streaming down my face, "Take my name off of it David. (sniffles)" (audience laughs) "You have all the money." Then I got a check for the "V for Vendetta" film. It was just, this was within three days!

SL: You must have believed there was some sort of God punishing you.

AM: Or at least he's got kind of a sense of humor. (audience laughs) I don't know what I was thinking, but I've said it now so I've got to kind of stick with it. But, on the other hand, just for the look on Hollywood producer's faces, "If he doesn't want the money, what does he want?" (audience laughs)

SL: You can't put a price on that.

AM: You can't, not that sort of entertainment. (audience laughs)

The entire interview is worth a read, not least for the revelation as to the nature of the young Alan Moore's very own superpower.

[Via Blog of a Bookslut]

As you've probably noticed, things are looking a bit different around here. Having concluded that I can't easily fix my Movable Type installation, I spent my afternoon playing with Blosxom, then my evening playing with WordPress, which is the system I've decided to go with for the time being.

I've concentrated on configuring the software thus far, so there's no actual content to read yet. I'm not quite done yet: I'm going to have to spend time tomorrow setting up my sidebar, amending the style sheet to something I can live with and what have you. In the meantime, assuming that this article actually shows up when I click on the Post button I do at least have a working weblog again. (What I'll do about the more than three years-worth of content that's locked in my Movable Type installation is a question for another day. For now it's still there in the form of static HTML pages, but any attempt to use Movable Type's features is likely to work intermittently at best, and Movable Type's comments system is completely dead.)

Comments on this new version of my weblog should be working, but they do function somewhat differently now: I'll say more about this tomorrow, but for now just follow the instructions shown on the comments page and everything should be fine. If you should find yourself blocked from posting a comment, email me and I'll see what I can do.

I expect that things will return to normal some time tomorrow, so tune in then for some actual content. Yes, really.

Saturday afternoon's episode of Monk was, once again, enormous fun. As I've only caught on to the show early in season 2, I'm going to have to think hard about whether to fork out for the DVD of the first season. I've got to see what I've been missing, and I doubt that BBC2 will be repeating the first season any time soon.

One show I'll definitely be buying on DVD just as soon as I can scrape the pennies together is Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars, which is due for release in Region 2 in just three weeks' time. I've heard nothing about the prospects of an outing for the two-parter on BBC2, but this post at but she's a girl…. reminded me that the show's proper finale had finally shown up in the UK, so a DVD release was bound to follow before long. Roll on February 14th.

Caution: do not follow either of the following links if you've just eaten. Or are just about to eat.

• The Hasselhoffian Recursion makes me think that maybe animated GIFs weren't such a great invention after all. In fact, perhaps inventing the World Wide Web wasn't such a great idea.
• From the trailers alone, I'm pretty sure that Elektra is a pretty poor film. But it can't possibly be as … unnerving … to watch as this. (Scroll down past the first, quite innocuous, image.)

[Infinite Hoff via cheesedip.com, Chip Zdarsky via Fanboy Rampage]

I needn't have felt so pleased with myself for discovering that it was still possible to download BBEdit Lite the other week: it turns out that although they're not exactly shouting about it, Bare Bones Software have now released version 2 of TextWrangler, the successor to BBEdit Lite, as a free application too.

TextWrangler 2 may not be as powerful and programmable as the full version of BBEdit, but it looks to be as much text editor as I'm going to need for the foreseeable future and then some. It'd be handy if TextWrangler included BBEdit's HTML and CSS editing tools, but they've got to have something to make real software developers pay for the full product, and anyway skEdit is a perfectly decent – and much cheaper – HTML coding package, so I can live without the frills of BBEdit proper.

[Via Forwarding Address: OS X]

Could this be "the supreme headline masterpiece of our time?" I reckon it's a pretty strong contender for the title.

Unless, of course, you know different.

[Via qwghlmBlog]

In a discussion over at Making Light about the mechanics of the hijacking of the panix.com domain, John M Ford came up with a really marvelous quote:

It wasn't that Dortmunder didn't like computers. You could fence them at the same discount as fur coats or DVD recorders, and a considerably better rate than large pieces of jewelry with names. What he found troubling was the unreality of computer money. Once upon a time, you robbed a store, or if you were large-minded, a bank, and you had a bag with paper in it. Everybody liked the paper, and took it happily. (One of Dortmunder's girlfriends called it "fungibility." The relationship didn't last long after that.) But the important thing was, you knew when you had the paper, you could put it in a box and open up the box to make sure it was still there. Somebody might steal the box — it happened all the time — but there were things to do about that, not all of them involving blunt instruments. The computer was a box, but you not only couldn't look inside it to see if the money was there, if the money wasn't there, nobody could tell Dortmunder exactly where it might have gone, or if it even still existed. The U.S. Government had a pretty good set of rules for replacing money that had unfortunately gotten a little burned or had to have unpleasant substances scrubbed off it. They were pretty nice about doing that, for the government. That didn't seem to be true with computer money. It was kind of like knocking over a jewelry store to steal the pretty reflections.

This series of pictures of Tiger Woods practicing his swing gets progressively more impressive as you scroll down the page.

[Via Bifurcated Rivets]

Stefan Collini reviews the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography for the London Review of Books:

Leslie Stephen, founding editor in the 1880s of the original DNB, hoped that it would turn out to be one of the 'most amusing' of books. This remark may have to be interpreted in the light of the fact that Stephen's own preferred form of 'amusement' involved hanging by his fingertips from a ledge on the Matterhorn in the middle of a blizzard, but it is true that an abundance of pleasure, of a certain kind, is to be had from the 60 volumes assembled by his successors. As ways of simultaneously wasting one's time while increasing one's knowledge, they leave skinny tomes such as Wisden or Whitaker's Almanack standing.

After discussing the differences in content and scope between the original Dictionary of National Biography and the current edition, Collini has a little fun with the online edition's search engine:

Since this is still predominantly a compendium of men written by men, the right searches ought to yield some illumination about favoured male self-descriptions. Perhaps surprisingly, only 17 of our national heroes were 'all-round sportsmen', and only two had 'dashing good looks', but 'attractive to women' throws up a fascinating medley of attitudes among its 27 results. Some concentrate on the physical, such as the entry for Edwin Booth (1833-93, 'actor') – 'with dark eyes, long dark hair, romantic good looks, and a warm musical voice, Booth was attractive to women' – and some not, such as that on Marcus Cunliffe (1922-90, 'Americanist'), who is described as 'generous, relaxed, charming, urbane, vivacious, witty, playful and attractive to women'. Others excite more sympathy, such as Thomas Jones (1870-1955, 'civil servant and benefactor') whose agreeable qualities 'made him particularly attractive to women, especially after his wife's death'; one immediately senses a whole squadron of those female 'forceful personalities' steaming over the horizon. A bracing female perspective peeps through in the entry on Fanny Kemble (1809-93, 'actress and author') which refers to her unhappy marriage to Pierce Butler: 'He was clever and handsome – or at least very attractive to women,' which suggests burnt fingers veering towards cynicism on someone's part.

Naturally, with all these alpha males around, things soon get competitive, so within the space of a couple of letters we find not only that Edwin Landseer was 'especially' attractive to women, but that Lloyd George was 'immensely', Krishna Menon 'devastatingly', and a character in a G.A. Lawrence novel 'irresistibly' so. At first I had hoped that a scientific analysis of these posthumous personal ads would enable me to crack one of the mysteries of the universe, but all I learn is that it may help to be either quite short or quite tall or somewhere in between, to have either blue eyes or dark eyes, to be a good talker though also a good listener, to be witty but sensitive, courteous yet forceful, and, possibly, to be 'luxuriantly whiskered'.

A snip at just £7,500.00 for 60 print volumes, or a mere £4,550.00 at Amazon UK. (I wonder if that's the biggest cash discount Amazon UK offers on any print publication?)

Thanks to various work-related commitments I won't be posting again until some time this weekend. Also, some time on Saturday I'll be reinstalling Movable Type, so if you come to the site and find that it looks odd or the comments features have stopped working please come back again on Sunday and everything should be back to normal. Whatever that is…

In the meantime, if you're in search of something to read you could do a lot worse than pay a visit to the various excellent sites listed in the sidebar.

It's hard to describe Team America: World Police in a word. There's no denying that some individual scenes are really, really funny. When Trey Parker and Matt Stone's script piles one action movie cliche upon another, then throws some gross-out humour on top just for fun, the effect can be hilarious: the puppet sex scene which got so much attention prior to the film's release is every bit as daft as it sounds, but the most cringeworthy puking scene since Mr Creosote's is another thoroughly memorable moment.

The trouble is, the gross-out moments are almost all the film has going for it. Some of this is because the script and the soundtrack expend a lot of effort parodying elements of post-9/11 popular culture – godawful ultrapatriotic country songs, left-wing celebrities espousing naive, simplistic anti-war views, ludicrously unbalanced news bulletins – which don't quite work for non-American audiences. Some of it is just because the whole thing comes off as utterly juvenile. If the pop cultural references had resonated more strongly then this might have been as much fun as South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, but as it was the results were too hit-and-miss for this to be worth another look.

No doubt within twelve months Endemol will be putting on a UK version of their latest bright idea.

Celebrity Sperm Race anyone?

[Via Mark Wants a Porsche]

Size of Wales provides a handy online calculator to help us cope with those all-important Television Units of Science. For when you absolutely, positively, need to know how many football fields that iceberg covers.

[Via not you, the other one]

More proof that Wikipedia is one truly valuable resource: an entry listing fictional chemical substances, from Adamantium to Mithril to Scrith to Yor-san.

I'm guessing that the Encyclopedia Britannica is probably not quite up to scratch in that particular subject area.

[Via Boing Boing]

The New York Times has a report by Sharon Waxman about the first attempts by US TV writers and producers to use the Iraq conflict into source material for a TV series.

As you'd expect, everyone involved takes great pains to emphasise that their number one concern is to tell the story of life for the people over there (at any rate, the Americans) rather than engaging with wider political issues, so it doesn't look as if anyone's aiming to produce the Iraq War's version of M*A*S*H any time soon. (Admittedly, one of the current projects is a sitcoms set at a US-funded Arabic language TV station in Baghdad's Green Zone. But I'd think that as long as active hostilities continue there's very little chance that a sitcom set in Iraq will make it to air.) The most promising project discussed looks to be Over There, which is being written and co-produced by Stephen Bochco.

Though the show does not yet have an official green light (and won't until FX sees the pilot), Mr. Landgraf said he was confident that it would make it to the schedule by summer. FX is known for tough, male-oriented shows like "The Shield" and "Nip/Tuck," and Mr. Bochco says he was attracted to the idea of writing for cable at a time when broadcast television seems risk-averse. [...]

He and Mr. Gerolmo did not seek the Army's cooperation because they did not want to submit scripts for approval. Instead they have hired Sean Bunch, a former marine and an Iraq war veteran, as a consultant, and are privately renting tanks, C-130 transport planes and all manner of military props.

I wonder if any British producers are putting together similar shows. Would the markedly less pro-war attitude of the general public in the UK make them more receptive to stories which paint a bleak picture of life in 'free' Iraq, or would the imperative to "support the troops" trump all other considerations? I'd love to be proved wrong, but I suspect the latter.

[Via Fimoculous]