This week's selection:

• Martine at frangipani has posted a lovely photograph of a train in a snowstorm taken by one of her students, Yuki.
• Sam Javanrouh posted two really impressive shots this week: a shot of an aircraft's contrail contrasting pinkly with the blue sky in the background, and a shot of a damp pavement reflecting a colourful cloudscape.
• Interlaken in Switzerland looks very placid in this photograph by Olya.
• Ice cube meets water – chilly perfection from ssilence.
• A young hippo takes a nap.
• Reinhard Kirsch posted a lovely image of a snow-laden waterfall.

The trailer for the film adaptation of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy which is exclusively available at Amazon is a bit scrawny. Happily, someone has posted a much nicer Quicktime version of the trailer here. (NB: 51MB file.)

The International Centre for Theoretical Physics at Trieste has put up a Digital Divide Simulator which demonstrates very effectively the gulf between those of us sitting on the end of a broadband connection, those using dial-up and those stuck on the end of low-bandwidth wireless links. (I can't help noticing the implication that the debate about the "digital divide" is about connection speeds, whereas it used to be about having connectivity at all. But then, the whole point of the simulator is that a site might as well not be available to you if it assumes that users have a broadband connection.)

The simulator mimics the use of a slow connection by allowing you to choose your connection speed and pick from a selection of target sites, then displaying two attempts to connect to your chosen site. One window opens and downloads the page at the speed of your own connection, and a second page opens up and displays the same site with your connection speed throttled back to your chosen speed.

There are plenty of sites that will quantify a page's size and allow you to calculate download times for different connection speeds, but actually seeing the difference makes it so much clearer. Unsurprisingly, Google does pretty well even at lowish speeds, Yahoo! quite poorly, and CNN very badly indeed. It would be nice if you could pick any site to test, but I quite understand why the ICTP don't fancy giving anonymous users a chance to see just how long a full-screen movie trailer takes to download at 0.3 Kbps.

[Via Rob's notebook, via Bifurcated Rivets]

The rundown of the unwritten rules of Oscar by Jim Emerson at Roger Ebert's site doesn't contain many surprises: amazingly enough, it helps if your lead actor is dying or suffering from some debilitating physical or mental condition, it's even better if he or she missed out on an Oscar for a really good performance a year or two earlier, and subtlety doesn't always get the recognition it deserves. However, one of Ebert's points made me sit up and think:

Having a Period
The showiest way to flaunt your budget (besides spending it on astronomical marquee names) is to set your movie in the past, so you can see all the departments – costumes, production design, cinematography, makeup – working hard all the time. It’s astonishing, but the only Best Picture winners in the last 20 years to be set in contemporary times (real or fantasy) were "Rain Man," "The Silence of the Lambs," and "American Beauty" – which are also among the few that weren’t historical biographies (although "Rain Man" was supposedly based on a real person).

My first thought was that the picture isn't quite so clear-cut if you look beyond Best Picture winners and consider the acting awards as well. Looking at the period from 1990 to 2003, I came up with this breakdown of awards for acting performances in contemporary roles as follows:

• 9 out of 13 Best Actor awards
• 9 out of 13 Best Actress awards
• 9 out of 13 Best Supporting Actor awards
• 5 out of 13 Best Supporting Actress awards

In short, actors seeking an Oscar should avoid period films like the plague.

(For what it's worth, I've put up a copy of my analysis of the data as a tab-separated value text file, so you can argue with me about my classification of particular films as contemporary or otherwise if you're so inclined.)

[Article edited to change the identity of the linked article's author, as per Jim's comment. jr 20 Feb 2004]

[Via web-goddess, whose 2005 Oscar Contest closes in just a few days.]

The headline says it all: Whedon and Cassaday on 'X-Men' for 24 more issues.

[Via WHEDONesque]

The Robert Rodriguez/Frank Miller film of Miller's Sin City has a shiny new official web site.

A few sections are still labelled as "Coming Soon", but there's still enough content there to suggest that this might just be really, really good fun. Not least the latest trailer, which skimps on the cool dialogue compared to the footage that was shown at that San Diego comic-con late last year but is still more than cool enough to get me to the cinema on the opening weekend. Heck, I even like the music from the trailer, though I gather that's something of a minority opinion.

I'll admit that there's still plenty that could go wrong, but with that cast, Robert Rodriguez directing and the author of the source material closely involved in the project it's got to have a better-than-even chance of being at least worthwhile.

Everquest II players can now order a pizza from within their game by typing /pizza. Which sounds moderately clever, until you find out that all that command actually does is launch their web browser and point it at the Pizza Hut online ordering page.

Am I missing something here, or is this one really minor breakthrough in online gaming technology?

[Via collision detection]

Rumour has it that George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon enjoyed stepping into the shoes of the Rat Pack so much that they're set to do it all over again. Apparently Clooney has bought the rights to Robin and the Seven Hoods, a film even less worth watching than the original Ocean's Eleven, and is looking for a director.

I'll grant you that at this early stage it's impossible to know whether Clooney & friends will find a gifted director and a talented screenwriter and come up with something wonderful or will just end up with another smug-fest as uninspired as Ocean's Twelve. It's just a shame that an actor who has shown himself to be pretty good at mixing the commercial with the quirky since he left ER and became a full-time film star is picking such uninspired source material.

Another contender for the title of worst headline of the year.

[Via Blog of a Bookslut]

If the Farscape finale was a fine example of how to wrap up a multi-year storyline, Alison Headley's account of the last X-Files story is a classic illustration of just how badly a show's ending can be botched:

[...] in the last episode, mulder gets arrested for murdering this dude named knowle rohrer.  since knowle rohrer is a supersoldier and can't be killed and therefore isn't actually dead, scully and mulder and skinner and robert patrick know that the allegations are bullshit.  to prove mulder's innocence, they hold a military trial during which they recap the ENTIRE SERIES and invite back every single recurring character from the last nine years.  it's just like the final episode of seinfeld, but without that green day song. [...]

I realise this isn't a remotely timely topic, what with The X-Files having come to this sorry conclusion a few years ago and my having stopped watching on a regular basis a few seasons earlier, but Alison's post is a lot more entertaining than the final X-Files episode probably was and deserves a mention. I'd heard that the show's finale was a disappointment, but I had no idea just how badly they missed the target.

The title says it all, really: McSweeney's brings us a collection of Necrophiliac pickup lines:

I'm pretty sure I'm not going to get you pregnant.

[Via Fimoculous]

Rumour has it that there's a collection of garden gnomes some 50-odd metres under the surface of Wastwater, the deepest lake in the Lake District. What's more, the police say that an earlier "gnome garden" lured several divers to their deaths.

It sounds like something Terry Pratchett would come up with if he decided to turn to horror writing.

[Via the null device]

And tonight's excuse for my failure to post any interesting links is … the Region 2 DVD release of The Peacekeeper Wars, the three-hour story which gives Farscape the send-off it deserves a couple of years after the series was cancelled so abruptly that the producers couldn't even re-shoot the season's end, let alone wrap up a series of storylines that were supposed to have another year to play themselves out.

This really isn't a TV movie you could reasonably show to someone who hadn't seen the parent show, but then that's the point. The writers are out to provide a proper conclusion to the story of a group of characters who we got to know over four years, and they use their three hours wisely by giving us a grand, sweeping chunk of old-fashioned space opera with any number of feats of derring-do. There's plenty of eye candy, some really, really big explosions and some seriously wacky science – hard SF this ain't, and it's all the better for it – but all the shiny stuff is balanced by some really nice lines, some great character moments and the odd heroic sacrifice. And a note-perfect steal of one of the most iconic scenes in my all-time favourite film.

As the UK DVD release only came out today I don't want to get into plot details, but I will say that whilst this wasn't the best Farscape story ever it was certainly a hugely enjoyable and very satisfying way to wrap up the story. Strongly recommended.

This week's batch:

• Sam Javanrouh's 7 cars, parking lot reminds me of a recent car advert involving a game of Connect-4 in a car park. Only with fewer cars and more snow.
• The Visions of Science 2005 competition has just been launched. If the 2004 winners are anything to go by, the competition should produce some really striking images. I think my favourite from last year's winners is Stephen Gschmeissner's shot of eyelash mites. (I can't link to it directly without breaking the site's framed structure: if you go to the page listing the 2004 winners, it's the second-placed entry in the Close-up section.)
• Pixeldiva's Photo Friday entry is, indeed, luscious.
• This Astronomy Picture of the Day shot of the track left in the Martian surface by the discarded heat shield from the Opportunity probe may not be the most spectacular image ever seen on the site, but it's still a favourite of mine. I just like seeing man-made artefacts elsewhere in the solar system, even if they have slightly disturbed the pristine surface of another planet.
• Panoramas.dk has a lovely collection of 3D Quicktime panoramas from the Apollo lunar landing missions.

[Visions of Science site via Apothecary's Drawer Weblog, Apollo panoramas via The Sideshow]

Hanzi Smatter 一知半解 is a weblog devoted to tracking down the misuse of Chinese character in western culture.

Many of the examples – as you might expect – are tattoos, but there's no shortage of signage and commercial art that apparently deploys ridiculous combinations of Hanzi or Kanji characters for effect rather than meaning.

[Via Bump]

BBC News has a gallery of a dozen of the winning images from the World Press Photo Awards for 2004. I think the last three images РJahi Chikwendiu's shot of a sandstorm in Chad, Lars Tunbj̦rk's image from a fashion show, and Bob Martin's overhead shot of a swimming heat at the Paralympic Games Рare my favourites.

[Via Bifurcated Rivets]

X-Men: Death Becomes Them. Or, how to summarise Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men in under 90 seconds. Very nicely done.

[Via The Man from T.R.I.P.L.E.T.S., posting at Barbelith Underground]

Those of you who like to keep an eye on comments on the entries here will be pleased to see the return of the list of recent comments in the sidebar. It's not very pretty at the moment – I don't like the way the text runs right up to the right edge of the page – but until I get round to adapting the style sheet to make the site look more like the old design it'll do.

And of course I'll also be putting all my old sidebar entries – lists of favourite weblogs, links to my Technorati and Audioscrobbler profiles and what have you – before long. Possibly this weekend, if I can find the time.

(But probably not today. I've got a big haul of comics and trade paperbacks to catch up on this weekend: Human Target, Planetes, and a Grant Morrison triple-bill of Vimanarama, Seaguy and Doom Patrol. It's slightly scary to contemplate how much I've spent on Morrison's work over the last couple of years.)

The restaurant at the centre of the storyline in Sideways turns out to be real. Not to mention a lot busier than it used to be:

"Last night, we ran our stock of Highliner down to the last bottle," says Hitching Post owner-chef Frank Ostini. "And we can't run out of this wine — we think people are making the journey to be here, and we want to have what they've come for." He also says demand for his Highliner pinot noir — a wine that wine-snob Miles considers superior to any other — has doubled.

Naturally, the Santa Barbara tourist board is making hay while the sun shines, distributing maps showing the location of the various wineries Miles and Jack visit during the film.

[Via The Independent Film Weblog, via feeling listless]

I've somehow managed to miss all of Alexander Payne's films up until now. Having thoroughly enjoyed Sideways, I'll be rectifying that omission as soon as possible.

Sideways has enormous fun showing us a week in the life of a couple of life's losers, spending a week touring California's wine country before one of them gets married. Paul Giamatti deserves all the plaudits he's been getting for his performance as the film's central character, but Virginia Madsen also does a tremendous job in her role as the woman who is clearly attracted to him despite his reticence. I don't know why Madsen has spent the last decade or so labouring in obscurity, but here's hoping that she gets roles worthy of her on the strength of this performance.

At first the film seems poised to dissolve into a series of jokes about wine snobbery, but before long you're sucked into the relationship between the two very different male leads and their attempts to escape/hide from/deny their respective fates. The film is just over two hours long but it certainly doesn't feel like it. It may or may not be the best film of the year, but it's certainly one of the most memorable and humane. Highly recommended.