I think this story introduces itself quite nicely:

DR. Lytle S. Adams, a dental surgeon from Irwin, Pa., was vacationing in the southwestern US on December 7, 1941. Like millions of Americans, he was shocked at the news from Pearl Harbor and couldn't believe Japan had been able to mount such an attack. In those days, "Made in Japan" meant cheap, shabby, and inferior. Americans' image of Japan was of crowded cities filled with paper-and-wood houses and factories.

Dr. Adams pondered how the US could fight back. In a 1948 interview with the Bulletin of the National Speleological Society, Dr. Adams recalled: "I had just been to Carlsbad Caverns, N. M., and had been tremendously impressed by the bat flight. . . . Couldn't those millions of bats be fitted with incendiary bombs and dropped from planes? What could be more devastating than such a firebomb attack?"

Dr. Adams went back to Carlsbad and captured some bats. [...]

[Via Japundit]

Xyle scope looks to be a very nice tool for fiddling round with CSS on a Mac.

I'm going to play with it this weekend before deciding whether to pay the (very reasonable) registration fee: it's unquestionably much prettier than the Web Developer extension to Firefox, but whether it's more useful only a serious CSS-wrangling session will show.

[Via The Tao of Mac]

Another nice image from capturenewcastle: Police over Monument.

Imagine the fun a mischievous studio executive could have had trying to sell Stanley Kubrick's The Shining as a feelgood family movie. (NB: 9.5MB Quicktime movie.)

[Via 13 days from monday]

Kate Bush's new single King of the Mountain is available at the iTunes Music Store.

Her return feels real now…

Liquid Sculpture is a fabulous site, chock full of fascinating images. Particularly the section called … ahem … Pournography. (Completely Safe For Work. Honest!)

[Via GromBlog]

I've seen some strange sights on the internet over the years, but this monstrosity is truly in a class of its own.

Is she wearing it for a bet, or what?

The Planetary Society's Cassini, Day by Day page holds pointers to a wealth of amazing images. A couple of favourites:

• From Rev 6: Pointing at Saturn F-Ring.
• From Rev 15: Pointing at Epimetheus.

Patrick Pittman makes a strong argument for Homicide: Life on the Streets as the best TV drama ever made.

If you consider the show's peak – roughly speaking, the first four seasons – then it's unquestionably a strong contender for the title of best police drama. I wouldn't go any further than that, because I don't think it's very useful to compare dramas in wildly different genres. You can make a case for shows as different as St Elsewhere, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Cracker, This Life, My So-Called Life, ER, Six Feet Under or Farscape as the best shows of their respective genres, but it seems to me that to rank shows across genres is usually more revealing of the writer's view of the respective merits of their genres than it is of the merits of the individual shows.

Homicide may have been outlasted by NYPD Blue and the various branches of the Law & Order franchise, but for my money Homicide was streets ahead of the two of them. I'd say that the other contenders for the title of best police drama in my time would be Hill Street Blues, Cracker (which was much less plausible in that it pushed people other than detectives into the leading role in the investigation, but which could be forgiven as it provided us with a fascinating and charismatic leading character) and The Cops. (For the record, that's a BBC drama from the late 1990s, not the similarly-named US show.)

[Via kottke.org remaindered links]

What Should I Read Next aims to do exactly what it says: you tell it a book you've enjoyed, it'll suggest some more based on reader recommendations.

It's a lovely idea, but I think perhaps that either their algorithm needs some work or else they need more subscribers to improve the pool of recommendations they're working with. When I said that I liked Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, the suggestions given were:

• Final Assault – Dean Wesley Smith, Kathryn Kristine Rusch, Steve Saffel
• The Tenth Planet: Oblivion: Book 2 – Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch
• The Gumshoe, the Witch, and the Virtual Corpse – Keith Hartman
• The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge – Vernor Vinge
• Standard Candles: The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt – Jack McDevitt
• Paradise Screwed: Selected Columns of Carl Hiaasen – Carl Hiaasen, Diane Stevenson
• Callahan's Crosstime Saloon – Spider Robinson
• Mr.X – Peter Straub
• Bug Jack Barron – Norman Spinrad
• The Ersatz Elevator #6 – Lemony Snicket

I can see where they're coming from with the Vinge, the Hiaasen and the Spinrad. Perhaps even the Spider Robinson. But Lemony Snicket? Peter Straub? I suppose Straub has on occasion written realistically chaotic combat scenes from the grunt's-eye point of view, something of a Haldeman speciality, but I don't think of them as terribly similar authors.

Another try: on being told that I liked Frederik Pohl's Gateway, What Should I Read Next suggested that I try:

• Homeland – R.A. Salvatore
• Rayuela – Julio Cortazar
• Diggers – Terry Pratchett, Lyn Pratchett
• And Then There Were None – Agatha Christie
• Leave It to Psmith – P.G. Wodehouse
• The First Discworld Novels: "Colour of Magic", "Light Fantastic" – Terry Pratchett
• Timequake – Kurt Vonnegut
• Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh
• Choke – Chuck Palahniuk
• 1984 – George Orwell

Just to be clear, I'm not rubbishing the idea of the site. It's a terrific idea, and some of those recommendations would certainly point me in useful directions. I'm just thinking that they might do better to initially present fewer but better choices.

[Via meish dot org]

The Joy of Tech on: greed.

Neil Gaiman on working with the Henson Company and Dave McKean on Mirrormask:

[...] Jim Henson himself made fantasy movies in addition to making puppety movies, like Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal.  It was in that tradition that they came to Dave McKean and me.  They said "Hey we made these films in the 1980s. They cost $40 million each. We want to make a new one and we have $4 million. If we give you guys the $4 million, will you make us a movie?" and that was the deal. It was more out of the Henson culture—a very Anglo-American culture. The Henson Company in L.A. is one of the few places in L.A. that I can get a decent cup of tea.

[...]

With the movie it's very different because you're writing a script and we were writing the script very carefully, Dave McKean and I, because we only had four million dollars and only one person knew how to make a $40 million fantasy movie for only $4 million and it wasn't me.  Normally the way I work with Dave, and I've worked with Dave for 20 years now, and the way that we work is very, very simple in that I go off and write something during at which time I have complete control and power and then I give it to Dave and he draws it with complete control in power, and I get back something that's wonderful, strange, and cool. 

With Mirrormask, Dave knew how he could achieve a bunch of cool effects and do it cheaply—and some of those things were obvious and some of them weren't obvious but the only person who knew how it would work was Dave which meant that we were there together coming up with the story and when I was writing he was looking over my shoulder at every step of the way and saying "Nope you can't do that, you can't go there." [...] Did I expect what I had written to look like the finished film? No.  Am I fairly used to after 20 years of working with Dave McKean to giving him things and having them come back and not to be like what I expect? Absolutely.  To the point of where now if I gave Dave a script or a story and he gave me back something that was exactly like what I had in my head, I would get really weirded out. [...]

Gaiman also ruminates on the difference in 'geek culture' in British and American high schools:

I was a faintly booky kind of kid who probably didn't fit in terribly well and was much too likely to miss his train stop because he was reading and be late for school because I went on one stop too long and had to go back. But nobody sort of went "Ah yes, geek! Nerd! Cool kids over here!" because that wasn't how it was. Coming out to America and people going "So were you a geek in school or a nerd?" and you go "Well I don't know. It's suddenly like you're being asked if you're a Democrat or a Republican, and you're going  "Well I thought there were lots of other alternatives." and you're coming out here and people say, "Are you an ice cream or a frozen yogurt person?" And you say, "Well I like crème brulee." And they say "No, no, no. That doesn't count!"

[Via Fanboy Rampage]

I'd heard that in the early 1990s Marvel produced a couple of crossover comics featuring an encounter between everyone's favourite mutants and the Enterprise crew from the Original Series, but this post at Dave's Long Box is the first time I've seen any of the artwork or read much of a plot synopsis.

By all accounts the crossover was every bit as awful as you'd expect, but it did at least produce one good (not to say irresistible) joke: the moment when Dr McCoy encountered Dr McCoy.

Ned's ideas for Gay & Lesbian Channel.

Hilarious, but almost certainly Not Safe For Work.

[Via GromBlog]

Powell and Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp was shown on BBC2 this afternoon. Though it's one of my favourite films I hadn't seen it in ages; it was as good as I remembered, with Roger Livesey, Anton Walbrook and Deborah Kerr all giving wonderful performances and a script that painted an affectionate picture of Clive Candy and of the English way of life, and of war.

Searching Amazon, I see that there's a reasonably cheap DVD release of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death and I Know Where I'm Going. If they'd just swapped the latter film for The Red Shoes it'd be my ideal Powell-Pressburger set.

I was googling around afterwards trying to find a particular line from the film and came across a number of interesting sites, one of which included the text of a pamphlet published at the time of the film's initial release entitled The Shame and Disgrace of Colonel Blimp:

[...] "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp", is one of the most wicked productions that has eve disgraced the British film industry and inflicted upon the long-suffering British people. We shall later have occasion to mention a few others from the same "Blimp" stable, but this one in particular offers a vivid example of how the living, crawling germs of World War Three are being carefully hatched. In this long three-hour mess-up of a film you will gain a good idea of how World War One led to World War Two. This picture will give you the answer that has puzzled so many people. How is it that when we had victory utter and complete in 1918, with the Germans at our mercy, how is it that though we had determined there would be no more war, we allowed victory to elude us, the Germans to fool and hypnotise us, so that we have to fight them all over again? When you have looked at, and pondered well, the phenomenon of "Blimp" appearing during the Second War against the Germans, the answer to that will be easy.

Today the attempt to hypnotise us has been made not as last time, after the war, but right in the middle of the war, in the middle of 1943. Last time the hypnotising process was directed against us from a distance, from Germany, by Germans, which is understandable. This time it has been effected within our own camp, at the very climax of a life and death struggle with a ruthless enemy.

The final effect of this film is to present us to the world as mild, foolish softies and the Germans as the hard done by victims of superior caste. This film might well be a first step towards a national mental preparation for this country to become an aggressed upon nation for the third time. [...]

Well, that's one view…

Rex was out for a ride on his motorbike one day, just cruising and singing his favourite song. Trouble is, some people just wouldn't leave him alone. (NB: 24MB Quicktime movie.)

As demonstrations of computer animation skills go, Rex is pretty damned impressive.

[Via MetaFilter]

The press release for Rabbit speaks for itself:

The things one finds wandering in a landscape: familiar things and utterly unknown, like a flower one has never seen before, or, as Columbus discovered, an inexplicable continent;

and then, behind a hill, as if knitted by giant grandmothers, lies this vast rabbit, to make you feel as small as a daisy.

The toilet-paper-pink creature lies on its back: a rabbit-mountain like Gulliver in Lilliput. Happy you feel as you climb up along its ears, almost falling into its cavernous mouth, to the belly-summit and look out over the pink woolen landscape of the rabbitís body, a country dropped from the sky;

ears and limbs sneaking into the distance; from its side flowing heart, liver and intestines.

Happily in love you step down the decaying corpse, through the wound, now small like a maggot, over woolen kidney and bowel.

Happy you leave like the larva that gets its wings from an innocent carcass at the roadside.

Such is the happiness which made this rabbit.

i love the rabbit the rabbit loves me.

Yes, the site has pictures; pictures of a large, pink rabbit on an Italian hill.

If you're going to visit, I'd suggest you do it soon. The artist may intend that it'll remain in place for 20 years, but I'm betting it'll be mouldy and rotting (and rather smelly) within 12 months.

[Via web-goddess]

Reading David Mery's article in today's Guardian about his experience of being arrested not so much for something he did as for "acting suspiciously" is deeply disturbing. This is Mery's account of his arrest:

7.21 pm: I enter Southwark tube station, passing uniformed police by the entrance, and more police beyond the gate. I walk down to the platform, peering down at the steps as, thanks to a small eye infection, I'm wearing specs instead of my usual contact lenses. The next train is scheduled to arrive in a few minutes. As other people drift on to the platform, I sit down against the wall with my rucksack still on my back. I check for messages on my phone, then take out a printout of an article about Wikipedia from inside my jacket and begin to read.

The train enters the station. Uniformed police officers appear on the platform and surround me. They must immediately notice my French accent, still strong after living more than 12 years in London.

They handcuff me, hands behind my back, and take my rucksack out of my sight. They explain that this is for my safety, and that they are acting under the authority of the Terrorism Act. I am told that I am being stopped and searched because:

• they found my behaviour suspicious from direct observation and then from watching me on the CCTV system;
• I went into the station without looking at the police officers at the entrance or by the gates;
• two other men entered the station at about the same time as me;
• I am wearing a jacket "too warm for the season";
• I am carrying a bulky rucksack, and kept my rucksack with me at all times;
• I looked at people coming on the platform;
• I played with my phone and then took a paper from inside my jacket.

After this, Mery was about to be released until another officer appeared and ordered him handcuffed again. After he was taken to the police station for questioning his flat was searched and various bits of computer kit taken away, and his DNA was sampled to keep on file regardless of the outcome of the investigation. While he was at the station, an officer gave Mery the following explanation of the decision to take him into custody after all:

The officer explains what made them change their mind and arrest me. Apparently, on August 4, 2004, there was a firearms incident at the company where I work. The next day I find out that there had been a hoax call the previous year, apparently from a temp claiming there was an armed intruder. Some staff had also been seen photographing tube stations with a camera phone. On June 2, as part of a team-building exercise, new colleagues were supposed to photograph landmarks and try to get a picture of themselves with a policeman.

How's that for an illustration of the dangers of the Database State? So much information, so little idea of what the hell it all means, so many ways to join the dots, so many of them utterly wrong and downright harmful.

Just imagine how much more damage the Database State will be able to do if EU proposals to require retention of years-worth of data on our internet and mobile phone usage go through. If you find the idea deeply scary, you might want to visit www.openrightsgroup.org, the fledgeling web presence of the Open Rights Group and consider signing the European Digital Rights petition.

John Gruber has enormous fun contemplating Dell's DJ Ditty, their attempt to take on the iPod Shuffle.

Random Acts of Reality has a very nice post about how to tell whether someone is really unconscious.

Of course, the real fun is the tip on how to encourage someone who's faking it to "wake up."