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]