A collection of classic lines:

Brain: Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
Pinky: Well, I think so, Brain, but what if we stick to the seat covers?

[...]

Brain: Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?
Pinky: Wuh, I think so, Brain, but wouldn't anything lose it's flavor on the bedpost overnight?

[I thought I'd linked to this before, but a quick search doesn't reveal any past links to the site so here it is.]

[Via Exclamation Mark]

Jon Carroll shares some words of wisdom he received by email:

Things I've learned from my Boys (honest and not kidding):

1. A king size waterbed holds enough water to fill a 2000 sq. ft. house 4 inches deep.
2. If you spray hair spray on dust bunnies and run over them with roller blades, they can ignite.
3. A 3-year old boy's voice is louder than 200 adults in a crowded restaurant.
4. If you hook a dog leash over a ceiling fan, the motor is not strong enough to rotate a 42 pound boy wearing Batman underwear and a Superman cape. It is strong enough, however, if tied to a paint can, to spread paint on all four walls of a 20×20 ft. room.
5. You should not throw baseballs up when the ceiling fan is on. When using a ceiling fan as a bat, you have to throw the ball up a few times before you get a hit. A ceiling fan can hit a baseball a long way.
6. The glass in windows (even double-pane) doesn't stop a baseball hit by a ceiling fan.
7. When you hear the toilet flush and the words "uh oh," it's already too late.
8. Brake fluid mixed with Clorox makes smoke, and lots of it.
9. A six-year old boy can start a fire with a flint rock even though a 36-year old man says they can only do it in the movies.
10. Certain Lego's will pass through the digestive tract of a 4-year old boy.
11. Play dough and microwave should not be used in the same sentence.
12. Super glue is forever.
13. No matter how much Jell-O you put in a swimming pool you still can't walk on water.
14. Pool filters do not like Jell-O.
15. VCR's do not eject "PB &J" sandwiches even though TV commercials show they do.
16. Garbage bags do not make good parachutes.
17. Marbles in gas tanks make lots of noise when driving.
18. You probably DO NOT want to know what that odor is.
19. Always look in the oven before you turn it on; plastic toys do not like ovens.
20. The fire department in Austin, TX has a 5-minute response time.
21. The spin cycle on the washing machine does not make earthworms dizzy.
22. It will, however, make cats dizzy.
23. Cats throw up twice their body weight when dizzy.
24. 80% of Men who read this will try mixing the Clorox and brake fluid.
25. Women will pass this on to almost all of their friends, with or without kids.

For some perverse reason, I find #4 particularly impressive.

Neal Adams has posted some pencil sketches of his work on the forthcoming Joss Whedon story in Giant Size X-Men #3. It'll be interesting to compare Adams' take on a Whedon X-Men story with John Cassaday's work on Astonishing X-Men.

[Via WHEDONesque]

The Amazing Adventures of Lethem & Chabon. Class.

[Via MemeMachineGo!]

If you're an iTunes user, you probably thought you'd "customised" your program when you added a couple of non-standard visualisation modules, or maybe when you set up a couple of mildly clever smart playlists.

I'm here to tell you: that's not customisation … this is a customised iTunes setup.

I'm in awe of the effort this guy has gone to in making iTunes work the way he wants. I just hope the update to Tiger doesn't break most of his fancy Applescript work. (If Apple have any sense they're taking notes and will implement most of his ideas in the standard product.)

[Via Sci-Fi Hi-Fi]

Google Maps UK is in beta. No satellite photographs as overlays as yet, but otherwise it's looking good.

[Via grayblog]

A random fact about Vin Diesel (#1 in a very long series):

Vin Diesel once told a joke that was so funny that God laughed.

[Via nik.angrycake.com]

Edward Felten has posted a good, reasonably non-technical explanation of AACS, a proposed system which would uniquely identify individual DVD-playing devices, and thereby allow the film industry to block what they deem to be illegitimate copying of their content one player at a time. (You'll notice that I'm not writing the word "illegal" there. That's a whole different issue.)

In principle, the AACS specification will allow the industry to not only limit who is able to create players (including software-based players for use on whichever operating systems they deem to be "unsafe"), but will let them block the device IDs of a specific player that was used to make an "illegitimate" copy. The theory is that once they've added the offending machine's device ID to their blacklist factory disks created from that day on will no longer play, let alone copy, on that player. As Professor Felten explains, this isn't actually going to do all that much to stop piracy for all sorts of entirely predictable practical reasons, but it certainly will limit competition in the creation of DVD-playing software.

Which is the real aim, after all: ending illegitimate copying would be nice, but the really big win would be for the industry to gain more leverage over the creation of DVD-playing software on operating systems and/or hardware platforms. If your chosen operating system doesn't lock down all copying of potentially copyrighted content to the satisfaction of the film industry, they'll just refuse to issue the keys you need to make your software play their current disks. Microsoft will be fine, pointing to their Secure Audio Path technology. Apple can probably come up with something similar if they really have to. What will Linux do?

Are you thinking what we're thinking?

Tim Bray says it all:

Last week at that internal tech summit, the subject of desktop multicore computers came up. Marc Tremblay said “If it’s Windows, one of the cores could be running Norton Antivirus.” Everybody laughed. But today I was reading PC Magazine’s review of the new Dell XPS which has the first multicore Xeon, and found this:

One of the complaints we’ve heard from readers is that “protection” programs, like Norton Internet Security, are useful for safeguarding their systems. but slow their computers to a crawl. Dual-core Hyper-Threaded processors, such as the Pentium EE 840, can help, improving your computing experience because the processor’s dual cores can process tasks simultaneously. While most of the system is “concentrating” on making sure your Internet or gaming experience is fulfilled in the foreground, the reserve power that the dual cores provide protects you in the background, running Norton or other antivirus or firewall programs.

You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Indeed you couldn't.

Another selection:

• The Kilauea, Hawaii volcano at night – spectacular is the only word that fits.
• This Astronomy Picture of the Day captures the crescent moon quite beautifully.
• I'm always up for a spot of cloud porn.
• Spring time.
• Float is a starkly beautiful portrait shot.
• This picture taken from the Empire State Building reminds me of something out of The Matrix.

Bruce Schneier casts a security analyst's eye over the balloting procedures of the College of Cardinals of the Roman Catholic church. His conclusion: "When an election process is left to develop over the course of a couple thousand years, you end up with something surprisingly good."

It's just a pity that most of the procedures Schneier applauds in this electoral process are so damned tricky to scale up to the degree required to handle general elections.

[Via rc3.org]

Some eagle-eyed users of Google Maps have noticed that some of the images captured aircraft in flight. Google Sightseeing has compiled a post listing some of the nicer examples of the phenomenon.

I managed to avoid all TV and press coverage of the royal wedding last weekend, so I don't know whether the press gave the hat Laura Parker-Bowles was wearing the attention – i.e. ridicule – it deserved. Heather at Go Fug Yourself sums up nicely:

I'm not sure what that is on her head — it's a hat; it's a gold-painted model of an atom; it's a hidden weapon that, when thrown, decapitates your foe; it's the world's most untimely bubble-gum accident and there wasn't a nearby pair of scissors with which to cut out the tangle… The list goes on.

As I linked to a scathing review of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy film the other day, it's only fair that I point out Yoz Grahame's own review, which includes a list of links to other (mostly positive) reviews. Perhaps they haven't screwed up the adaptation after all; we can but hope.

As a postscript to his review, Yoz cites Neil Gaiman, quoting Douglas Adams' views on 2001: A Space Odyssey:

I loved the film of 2001, saw it six times and read the book twice. And then I read a book called The Lost Worlds of 2001 in which Clarke chronicles the disagreements between himself and Kubrick – he goes through all the ideas left by the wayside, "Look at this idea he left out, and this idea!", and at the end of the book one has an intense admiration for Kubrick.

… from Neil Gaiman's Don't Panic, as spoken by Douglas Adams.

Just to nitpick: although there was indeed a novel of Kubrick and Clarke's film, it was written in parallel with the screenplay, rather than existing in its own right before work on the film started. (True, there's a Clarke short story which contained the kernel of the film's plot, and another which foreshadowed a crucial bit of action during the film's middle section. But the film added a huge amount of plot before and after both stories: they were more inspirations for the film's story than the seeds of the screenplay.) What Clarke was doing was akin to the process of co-authoring a story, not going back to a pre-existing work and having to decide what you can bear to leave out. The 2001 parallel would only work if there had been an earlier film adaptation of 2001: say, if Peter Hyams had decided to remake the Kubrick film, as opposed to adapting Clarke's (fair-to-middling at best) sequel.

I concede that sometimes what's left out is as important as what's left in when adapting work for a different medium, but that's not really the issue with Hitchhiker's. The barrier isn't that we're all in love with the novels, it's that we've already seen the story done for a visual medium once and the impression of that take on the story sticks. If (for example) the film-makers say that it's too difficult to fit in much of The Book's material without spoiling the flow of the story, we can call them on it because we saw the BBC do it perfectly well twenty years ago. Not that the TV series was perfect by any means, but it felt pretty faithful to the spirit of Adams' books. I don't care to quibble about exactly how many lines survive unscathed from the earlier versions of the story, I just want to feel that old Adams magic again.

Economist Steven Levitt, whose article at Slate about whether given names serve as predictors of economic success I linked to the other day, has given an interview to Jason Kottke:

jkottke: Your talent for ignoring seemingly applicable but ultimately irrelevant information (not that different from a professional-grade batter taking cues from certain aspects of a pitcher's mechanics and ignoring the extraneous ones in order to hit well), where does that come from? Good genes or was it all the books in your childhood home?

Levitt: If nothing else, I had an unusual home environment. My father is a medical researcher whose claim to fame is that he is the world's expert on intestinal gas (he's known as the King of Farts). My mother is a psychic who channels books. From an early age, my life was different from that of other kids. For instance, when I was in junior high, my father would wake me up at night to drill me with questions in hopes that I would be the star of the local high school quiz show.

Stuart Ian Burns of feeling listless fame has posted a very decent review of The Unquiet Dead, last weekend's episode of Doctor Who, at Off The Telly.

[...] By the third episode of any series the formula is explained, the scenario demonstrated and the characters introduced. Depending on the type of show, it's here we find out if the formula is flexible enough not to become repetitive, the scenario is intriguing enough to for us to want to carry on watching, and if the characters are solid enough to hold our interest.

"The Unquiet Dead" managed to succeed in all three.

It's not unexpected that the TARDIS would land in the past this time out, having already been to the present and far future. But rather than picking something fairly generic instead its very specific. They might have landed the ship, but as usual it's gone off course. Instead of Naples in 1860 as the Time Lord had promised his companion, its 1869 in Cardiff, when Dickens is in town during a theatre tour. What would be the point of following up a major historical event like the end of the world with The Battle of Hastings? It's this contrast which perfectly demonstrates the flexibility of the show, the ability to tell stories large and small. Instead of inadvertently starting The Great Fire of London, The Doctor's at an undertaker's trying to work out how the dead are walking again. [...]

After detailing just why this episode was the best so far – and giving special attention to Billie Piper's contribution, Stu arrives at a conclusion I can but quote approvingly:

A show going from strength to strength. Although the ratings were down last week, it seemed to be because of the nicer weather (every show was lower across the board). With this story I'm sure that a core audience will start developing and its going to be rather large. By episode four you'll be talking about consolidation, and next week is the big invasion story. It's called "Aliens of London" for goodness sake. If it can continue to be exciting but also increase the mystery of what happened and is happening with the Doctor I'm going to be very, very happy.

The Tree of Life project has more pictures of jumping spiders than you can shake a stick at.

I'm so not getting any sleep tonight…

[Via Exclamation Mark]

Rich Kyanka runs Something Awful, so he's no stranger to threats of lawsuits from people who don't appreciate being the butt of his users' humour. But then he attracted the attention of former WWF wrestler The Ultimate Warrior (or rather, of one Chris Lewis, Mr Warrior's Director of Communications):

FROM: Chris Lewis cl9904@msn.com
TO: webmaster@somethingawful.com
CC: mrwarrior@earthlink.net

As Director of Communications for Ultimate Creations, Inc. – which owns all rights associated with the wrestling character Ultimate Warrior – part of my job is to address any violations of Ultimate Creations' intellectual property rights associated with the character. Consider this email as your fair notice that we consider your site to be in violation of those rights.

A current posting on your site refers to the Ultimate Warrior as a "racist" – a statement that is not true, and is clearly libelous.

Furthermore, Ultimate Creations, Inc. has never authorized you or anyone affiliated with your website to use the image or likeness of Ultimate Warrior.

If the offending portion of your post is not removed by 9 AM on Monday, April 11, 2005, we will be forced to take appropriate legal action to address the libel and unauthorized use of the Ultimate Warrior likeness. We also expect an apology for your outrageous accusations against Warrior.

Sincerely,
Chris Lewis
Director of Communications
Ultimate Creations, Inc.

Well how do ya likes that! It would appear that voicing your opinion on the Internet is now highly illegal, especially if it is negative and involves rambling neo-conservatives who used to tie bicycle streamers around their arms. That's strange, I always thought the conservatives were the guys who loved free speech and the Founding Fathers and the 10 Commandments and all that other crap which grants me the liberty to call people "fags" on the Internet without having to worry about the government breaking down my door and lobbing wheelbarrows full of tear gas into my extensive DDR dance pad stockpile. I obviously have no idea how the Internet, and most of America for that matter, operates! And yes, the Ultimate Warrior really has an Earthlink email address… an ULTIMATE Earthlink address.

From here on in, the story gets funnier and funnier.

[Via Bifurcated Rivets]

My urban legend alarm has just exploded:

[Names] are seen to carry great aesthetic and even predictive powers.

This might explain why, in 1958, a New York City father named Robert Lane decided to call his baby son Winner. The Lanes, who lived in a housing project in Harlem, already had several children, each with a fairly typical name. But this boy—well, Robert Lane apparently had a special feeling about him. Winner Lane: How could he fail with a name like that?

Three years later, the Lanes had another baby boy, their seventh and last child. For reasons that no one can quite pin down today, Robert decided to name this boy Loser. Robert wasn't unhappy about the new baby; he just seemed to get a kick out of the name's bookend effect. First a Winner, now a Loser. But if Winner Lane could hardly be expected to fail, could Loser Lane possibly succeed?

Loser Lane did in fact succeed. He went to prep school on a scholarship, graduated from Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, and joined the New York Police Department, where he made detective and, eventually, sergeant. Although he never hid his name, many people were uncomfortable using it. To his police colleagues today, he is known as Lou.

And what of his brother? The most noteworthy achievement of Winner Lane, now in his late 40s, is the sheer length of his criminal record: more than 30 arrests for burglary, domestic violence, trespassing, resisting arrest, and other mayhem.

These days, Loser and Winner barely speak. The father who named them is no longer alive. Though he got his boys mixed up, did he have the right idea—is naming destiny? What kind of signal does a child's name send to the world? [...]

Bizarre introduction notwithstanding, the article is quite interesting.