I wonder if Sir Geoff Hurst realised when he scored a certain famous hat-trick that nearly forty years later he would be selling his services as a supper guest.
Which wouldn't be so bad, except that one of the other "stars" on the books of Supper With The Stars is Schnorbitz. (Ten Brownie Points to any reader under the age of 30 who can say – without recourse to Google – who Schnorbitz used to work with.)
[Via feeling listless]
It was bad enough that Bryan Singer dropped out of the third X-Men film. Now that I've read an excerpt from an interview with Simon Kinberg, the new writer for the film, I'm really, really worried:
Q: Who – or what – would you say has had the biggest influence on your career?
A: Who: Akiva Goldsman. He took me under his wing, and taught me not only how to write, but how to be a writer, how to survive in a system that doesn't value writing. [...]
So Akiva "Batman & Robin/Lost in Space" Goldsman taught Kinberg how to write? Oh boy…
On checking the IMDB, I see that Kinberg has also written the forthcoming Fantastic Four film, and that Goldsman is producing Constantine. I reckon between them these two men could pretty much kill off the trend for big screen comic book adaptations.
I think Mark Steese, whose Usenet post pointed me in the direction of that interview, pretty much summed it up:
Now it makes sense! Always two there are…
[Via Mark Steese, posting to rec.arts.movies.current-films]
Go Fug Yourself is a wonderfully bitchy web site about the fashion crimes of celebrities.
As you might guess, most of the victims are women – but when a man does show up he's shown no mercy. Ask Daniel Day-Lewis.
[Via downstairs at vixgirl]
It turns out that the U2 iPod wasn't half as groundbreaking as I'd thought. Way back in 1981, Casio brought out the Kraftwerk Pocket Calculator, complete with a songsheet so you could program it to play your favourite Kraftwerk tracks.
[Via MetaFilter]
Bruce Sterling on President Clinton's travails:
"I live in a country which had a failed coup d'etat over a guy getting a blow-job. It's really hard to stop laughing at this."
Not particularly topical, I'll grant you, but it bears repeating.
[Via Peter D Tillman, posting to rec.arts.sf.written]
Yes, you read that right. A film called Darwin Awards is in production.
Next up, the big-screen adaptation of the Bulwer-Lytton Award.
[Via feeling listless]
The Huygens probe has started sending data and images back from Titan. Perhaps not the most spectacular images, granted, but the three floppy disks-worth of data the probe has provided will keep an awful lot of scientists happy for years to come.
Not to mention a few TV science presenters: as I type this, Adam Hart-Davis has just finished asking a couple of scientists what the three pictures show and getting rather vague answers – hardly surprising this early in the day – and now Gavin Essler is talking to Sir Patrick Moore. It's good to see Sir Patrick on a TV programme which started on the right side of midnight.
Never mind this week's big announcements from Apple, I'm waiting for some of the products from The Apple Store Of The Future to show up. I'd buy iSmug and a YogaMac tomorrow if Steve Jobs would just hurry up and announce them.
[Via Brigita, posting a comment at web-goddess]
Dan Blau, currently guestblogging for Pamie, has a problem. His mother lives some 3,000 miles away, is terrified of flying, and is due to visit him next week. Being a helpful son, he's put together some guidance to help her make it through the cross-country flight:
So You Decided To Come Visit Your Children!
A User's Guide.
Congratulations on conquering your fears! Confronting that which frightens us makes for a richer, more meaningful existence, and is often essential for living a properly socialized life on planet Earth. For example, Adam once conquered his fear by playing songs he wrote alone on stage in front of people. And Daniel once conquered his fear by going to the prom…with an actual girl! Still and all, our fears can be alleviated somewhat with the choice weapon of knowledge. Below, a step-by-step process to facing your upcoming air travel head on.
And remember: even though you have to pay for it, there is wine on your plane. Don't be afraid to use it. That's what it's there for. [...]
Bad Book Covers does precisely what you'd expect, holding up some truly dreadful book covers to ridicule. However, once of the featured volumes truly stands out: the cover design is pretty awful, but the title is even worse.
[Via Blog of a Bookslut]
Over at Slate, Jesse Sheidlower posted an entertaining account of the process the Linguistic Society of America's annual conference went through in selecting their Words of the Year:
[...] The American Dialect Society, which meets in association with the Linguistic Society of America, is the main scholarly group devoted to the study of language in America, and most of the time, it devotes itself to serious concerns. This year's sessions included papers on the current status of Texas German, the vowel characteristics of Atlanta speech, and an analysis of prosodic rhythm in African-American English. But once in a while we like to blow off steam, and we do this by voting for the Words of the Year, in various categories—Most Useful, Creative, Unnecessary, Outrageous, and Euphemistic; Most and Least Likely To Succeed; and an overall Word of the Year. Newspapers love this [...]
The Most Outrageous category is tricky; we never agree whether it's the word itself that's outrageous (typically for having some vulgar element, as in 2003's winner, cliterati, for "prominent feminists") or the concept (as with 2002's neuticles, "false testicles for neutered pets"). This year the strongest contender was santorum, defined (and heavily promoted) by sex writer Dan Savage – in a campaign to besmirch the name of right-wing Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum – as "the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex." We dismissed one potential problem – that newspapers wouldn't print the term if it won – on the grounds that we shouldn't censor ourselves. And indeed, in the afternoon's voting, santorum did win, but many newspapers simply skipped this category in their coverage. So much for academic freedom. [...]
The Guide posts an early leader in the race for the Most Misleading Headline of the Year contest.
Courtesy of a recent MetaFilter thread, a cover for a Lost In Space comic that's just wrong beyond the power of mere words to convey.
Japanese students have found a novel way to spread the word about astronomy:
The four students, including graduate students from the University of Tokyo, hope to send printed rolls of toilet paper, which describe the life of a star, to schools and public facilities to help people learn about space.
I can't make my mind up whether this is deeply stupid or utterly brilliant.
[Via Betsy Devine]
A few weeks before Xmas I happened to catch BBC2's Saturday afternoon schedule. Lately they've been filling the afternoon with runs of various detective series. Some, like the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes adaptations, are familiar – classics, even. (Can I just note that I'm horrified, having looked up Brett's series on the IMDB, to discover that it debuted more than 20 years ago. I suddenly feel very old…)
Anyway, this post isn't about the Holmes adaptations, fine as they are. It's about a show which I'd heard of but not seen before, not least because I don't think BBC2 ever tried it in an evening timeslot. Monk is as enjoyable an hour's TV as I've seen in quite a while. Tony Shalhoub's magnificently eccentric detective is clearly the heart of the story, but the supporting cast – especially Ted Levine as Monk's captain and Bitty Schramm as Monk's assistant/nurse – do good work, and the stories are great fun. It looks as if everyone involved is having a ball, which always helps.
As it happens, the detective show which followed Monk in this afternoon's BBC2 schedule was also worth watching. I've never read any of Rex Stout's stories, but by all accounts the A Nero Wolfe Mystery series is a worthy adaptation. As with Monk, you have a sense that the likes of Maury Chaykin and Timothy Hutton are having a ball with the material. I'm definitely going to have to go and hunt down the source material now. And to set my VCR if I'm not around on a Saturday afternoon.
I'd imagine that this UK Freedom of Information Act Requests page, from those nice people at Spy Blog, is going to be essential reading over the next twelve months or so.
Last month Kyle Van Horn handed in a package marked as follows at his local post office:
"ATTENTION POSTAL WORKERS! Please help us with our project. As this camera travels across the country we want photos of all whom it encounters. Please take a photo before you pass it along. Thank you!"
The roll of film came out pretty well, barring the odd image where the flash apparently failed to go off. It'd be fun to see someone try this across different countries: I'd think that sending a camera round the various EU nations would produce some interesting results.
Neal Stephenson's essay In the Beginning was the Command Line is old enough (1999 – positively prehistoric) that it could probably do with an update. Neal Stephenson is too busy to get round to it, but he gave Garrett Birkel permission to post an annotated version of the essay, in which Birkel addresses such matters as the revival in Apple's fortunes since the dark days of 1999, as well as taking issue with some of Stephenson's thoughts on the reasons for Microsoft's success.
I need to sit down and go through the whole thing more carefully, but it looks like a pretty decent, thought-provoking read. Worth a look.
[Via qwghlmBlog]
I was looking forward to House of Flying Daggers quite a bit: after greatly enjoying Hero late last year I was relieved that Zhang Yimou's follow-up had avoided a similarly delayed UK release. For all my anticipation, I have to confess that I was a little disappointed in House of Flying Daggers. It's by no means a bad film, and to be honest I'm having problems putting my finger on the reason I felt it to be a letdown. Somehow House of Flying Daggers just didn't grab me in the way the earlier film did, so it felt over-long in places, to the point where I found myself checking the time once or twice towards the end during a certain ludicrously prolonged death scene; if you thought Trinity's death in The Matrix Revolutions took too long then you'll hate this one.
Which is not to say that there weren't some lovely moments – my favourite being a scene involving a running battle in the bamboo forest which would have looked right at home in Hero – and I have to admit that the performances of the three leads were just fine. It's just that somehow the spectacle and the melodramatic plot didn't quite do it for me this time round. I realise that I'm in a minority on this. Perhaps I just wasn't in the right mood or something.
Alternatively, allow me to completely blow whatever credibility I may have as a cineaste and martial arts connoisseur by noting that I had much more fun this evening watching John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China for the umpteenth time on TV than I did watching House of Flying Daggers last night. There, I've said it. And soon Google and the Internet Archive will pick that comment up and the evidence of my lack of taste will be preserved forever. How's that for an epitaph?
I think this page may be the one I've been looking for ever since I got my first Palm Pilot; I just didn't know it until today. I already have a bubble wrap emulator for my Palm, but I had no idea that I could get so many other weird programs. How would you like a program to scare away pests:
8. Scare The Doggy
Get away, you beast!. Who could imagine that annoying beasts would flee, terrified, from a shiny PDA? Dogs are sensible to certain frequencies, around 16 kHz, virtually inaudible for adult humans. Scare The Dog produces just those noises, very useful when our neighbour's Doberman is chasing us or our sister-in-law's poodle is biting our trousers.
Smaller, but even more annoying, the female (blood-sucker) mosquito feels very bad in the presence of 16 – 20 kHz beeps. Mosquito is a Palm program that generates tones in this range, guaranteed to drive away even the finest-hearing tiny beasts. Both programs are free.
Then there's the … ahem … Palmasutra. Who knew?
[Via linkmachinego]
