NASA have strung together a series of pictures of Earth taken by the Messenger probe as it swung by on its way towards Mercury into a movie. Even prettier than the Stellarium.

[Via Betsy Devine]

Pets with their heads in bags of food! might just be even better than Cats in Sinks.

[Via scrubbles.net]

Chelyabinsk in Russia might just be the least desirable bit of real estate in the northern hemisphere, according to Sprol:

Over the last five decades Chelyabinsk’s history reads like a contemporary version of the Book of Revelations. Not one, not two, but three nuclear obscenities have brutalized this region in the name of the Cold War. Radiation levels are so high that to compare it with Chernobyl would be like comparing a 361 car pile-up with a fender-bender between two Lexus SUVs in a 5 MPH school zone. Yet so few people, including its citizens, know the true shock of Chelyabinsk’s nuclear recklessness.

It’s a hell of a story.

Kate Bush is releasing a double album, Aerial, on the 7th of November. The first single, King of the Mountain, is out on October 24th.

I’m counting the days…

[Via Do You Feel Loved?]

TV producer Keith Addis has announced plans to put together an anthology show, adapting classic SF short stories that’ll fit into an hour (that is, 42 minutes.) Considering the line-up of stories and screenwriters, this could be very good indeed:

Michael Tolkin (The Player) will adapt Heinlein’s “Jerry Was a Man.” John Milius (Conan the Barbarian) will rework Lem’s “The Hunt.” Bradbury will adapt his story “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed.” Similarly, Ellison will adapt his short story, “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the TicktockMan,” Addis said.

Harlan Ellison scripting ‘Repent, Harlequin!’…

One of my five favourite SF short stories of all time.

Adapted by the author.

A man who, it should be remembered, actually knows how to write for the screen.

Ladies and gentlemen, I do believe the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) for 2007 is taken. Just so long as the screenwriter’s name that appears on the credits isn’t “Cordwainer Bird.”

Seriously, that’s a fine collection of stories and screenwriters Addis has lined up. Obviously a lot will depend on the quality of the scripts, the casting, the budget, the directors, whether a willing customer can be found for the series, whether SF and fantasy are still in vogue by the 2006/7 season and so on and a couple of hundred other imponderables; there’s a long, long way to go yet and we may never hear another word about the show should the stars fail to align at the right time.

(You’ll notice I’m not even mentioning the question of whether the show will be bought by a UK terrestrial channel. That’ll certainly be an issue for me if/when the time comes, but for now let’s just get the show made, then I’ll worry about how I’m ever going to see it.)

The main point at this stage is that at least they’re starting out right: good stories, and screenwriters with genre experience.

[Via Amygdala]

Things you don’t see every day: what happens when a praying mantis encounters a hummingbird.

[Via Making Light Particles]

Opinionista posted a typically amusing piece about her experience of campus recruiting by law firms. However, I think one of her comments on her post, from Dave, was even better:

I went through the same process for I-Banking interviews. My roomate at the time was also interviewing. The whole waiting game outside the hotel room where interviews were being conducted made him totally nervous.

As the interviewer from Goldman shook him firmly by the hand and ushered him into the room, he turned to her, and tried a little quip to break the ice. Gesticulating to the bed in the room, he said “Well, I guess we won’t be needing that.”

They both stood there for a moment, in mutual disbelief at what he had just said. He was not in the least surprised when she turned around and, without a word, showed him straight to the door.

To this day, we both struggle to think of a way to make a worse impression - and laugh like hell.

[NB: Comment quoted in full because I’m not sure how well hotlinking to a Haloscan comment works. In at least one browser I’ve tried - the Mac version of IE - the page of comments loads but doesn’t jump to the right comment.]

Stellarium is a very nice planetarium simulator, released under the GPL for Windows, Linux/Unix and OS X.

As you’d expect of a decent planetarium program, Stellarium allows you to choose to display a minimal set of graphical elements to help you understand what you’re seeing, or to go over the top in very-pretty-but-utterly-unrealistic mode.

Incidentally, if you’re using a Mac with a screen not catered for by any of the preset resolutions it’s possible to edit the configuration file at Stellarium.app/Contents/Resources/config/config.ini and insert the appropriate pixel values for your display. For example, the following values work nicely for my iMac G4’s 17″ display:

[video]
fullscreen                     = true
screen_w                       = 1440
screen_h                       = 900
bbp_mode                       = 32
horizontal_offset              = 0
vertical_offset                = 0

I did experiment with changing the value of fullscreen to false, but although the program did use a standard OS X window it was expanded to fill the desktop and could only be minimised or closed, not resized, and clicks on the controls appeared to be missing the target by some undefined vertical offset. Methinks some reading of the documentation is in order.

[Via The Tao of Mac]

Just a quick mention before I forget that Channel 4 are about to start showing the final season of Oz, aka The Best Damn Prison Drama Ever, starting at 3am on Wednesday morning.

Be aware that it’s not going to be showing weekly, like a normal hour-long drama, but daily. But not every day; going by the entries in DigiGuide they seem to be skipping days here and there, so check your TV guide before programming your VCR.

[While I’m on the subject, if you’re a fan of Oz and have any interest in web design, you might like this old article at A List Apart: Everything I Need To Know About Web Design I Learned Watching Oz.]

After half-watching The Great Escape on TV this afternoon, I spent a happy thirty minutes or so wandering round the IMDB, following cast members from film to film as you do. I ended up looking up Tunes of Glory, a 1960 military drama starring Alec Guinness, John Mills, Gordon Jackson and a young Susannah York. It’s one of my favourite British films, and I’ve seen it numerous times on TV over the years.

Somehow until I read the film’s IMDB entry this afternoon I’d been completely unaware of the film’s tagline. If you’ve ever seen Tunes of Glory, I suspect you’ll agree with me that either the IMDB’s information is wildly inaccurate or else someone in the publicity department at Knightsbridge Films or United Artists was smoking crack in 1960:

Tagline: Here’s a Helluva Swelluva Free-Swinging Movie!

I’m finding it hard to imagine anyone who would be attracted to the cinema by that tagline actually staying in their seat for more than ten minutes before storming out to see the manager, accuse him of false advertising and demand a refund.

Is this the Worst Tagline in History?

Serenity wasn’t the only SF/fantasy film to make its debut at the Edinburgh Film Festival. Dave McKean’s Mirrormask premiered a week or so ago. Paul O’Brien gave it a positive review.

[It’s] McKean’s unique style that makes the film distinctive. Oh, and Stephanie Leonidas, playing Helena, is great - as she’d need to be, given that she’s on screen for pretty much the entire film. Fans will adore it. It’s getting a limited release in America in September, and it seems they’re still deciding what to do with it in the UK. According to McKean, it was commissioned in an attempt to duplicate the success of The Dark Crystal, which is to say that they don’t expect it to take much at the box office, but they’re hoping it’ll do well in the long run.

I think it’s safe to say that it’ll not be seeing anything but a very limited cinema release over here. Here’s hoping that the DVD release arrives sooner rather than later.

Matthew Baldwin has posted an entertaining account of his team’s entry to “the Game,” which appears to be essentially a kind of scavenger hunt for geeks:

As with everything involving the Game, the application process has a few catches. In addition to general information about our team, Galactic Consortium asked us to bring an assortment of miscellaneous items; these requests, however, were hidden on the web site and encoded into riddles. For example, this was the bio for Application Judge “Kered DaVeen”:

[His] pride and joy are his five children. The first loves to go buy things, the second is a homebody, the fourth won’t touch his food, and the fifth keeps repeating the Anchooozian exclamation, “Wee!” His third son is his only confusion. Kered would love nothing more than to have someone present little Snookums’s favorite dish; wouldn’t that spice up an application!

Upon reading this we knew immediately what to do. That is to say, Gordon, our captain, knew what to do. I was stumped until Gordon sent an email to our crew with a To Do list that included “buy roast beef.” Because I recite the “five little piggies” rhyme to my toddler several times a day, I felt like an idiot for not figuring this one out on my own.

Weekly instalments will follow recounting the efforts of his team, The ‘B’ Ark, to win the Game, or at least place as highly as a rookie team can.

[Via Amygdala]

Worth1000’s Mate a Movie contest invited users to combine film posters to comic effect.

My favourite entries: Mr & Mrs Smith, Saving Private Brian and Freaky Friday the 13th.

[Via PosterWire]

If you were ever wowed by one a movie title sequence designed by Saul Bass - and believe me, you probably have been even if you don’t recognise the man’s name - you’ll enjoy this Saul Bass tribute. Very nice work.

[Via scrubbles.net]