The Daily Telegraph's review of Basic Instinct 2 totally killed off any slight interest I might have had in seeing it with this terrifying image:

[...]

It's a tall order for Morrissey to take the place of Michael Douglas as Tramell's reluctant/obsessive lover. Only three years after Stephen Frears's Downing Street-drama The Deal, it's hard not to look at him and think of Gordon Brown. In every clinch or every one-on-one he has with Tramell, we half-expect him to start cooing in her ear about endogenous growth. [...]

For the avoidance of doubt, that's David Morrissey, not the musician.

[Via BBC News Magazine]

Judging by Simon Hoggart's account of John Prescott's latest performance at Prime Minister's Questions, Prescott's face-off with William Hague was both hilarious and a little pathetic. But mostly hilarious:

Tony Blair was still away, so John Prescott took questions. He faced William Hague. It was magnificent. Punch and Judy politics? This was Punch and Punch, Cannon meets Ball, a Roman ballista with a cauldron of boiling oil up on the battlements.

Then it turned nasty. They got out the Stanley knives. And the fact that every jab had been carefully planned in advance made no difference.

Hague rang the bell for round one, asking why pensioners, who had a £200 rebate on their council tax last year, weren't getting it this year. What had changed? (Obviously the election is over, stupid.) Prescott thumped back. "I am delighted to see that the Tories have been going through leaders so fast they have started from the beginning again."

Referring to one of the many scandals that buzz around this administration, Hague pointed out that Prescott had not paid his council tax at all. Meanwhile pensioner couples were paying an average of £250 more. Here is the Prescott reply: "It is the overall policy of this government to actually consider the pensioner payments and the other matters that we give to them and to consider in the round. That I think is what we have done, that is what we continue to do, and as for the argument about the payment of council tax, let me tell him, and he must know again in the comparison between our government and his government, that we gave in the response 39% increase in real terms … "

Hague hit back with this oven-ready zinger: "There was so little English in that last reply that President Chirac would have been happy with it."

[...]

Prescott said Hague was the first Tory leader never to become prime minister. "At least I got through the campaign without hitting anybody," said Hague.

[...]

Ouch!

iGoatse. The new skin for your iPod. Oh my…

[Via The Cult of Mac Blog]

The Typography of Girls' Asses:

It became the thing in the late-1990s from what I remember, or maybe a little later. Those sweatpants and shorts marketed towards teenage girls with things printed across the rear end like “Angel,” “Princess,” “Queen,” and “Hooker.” Okay, I haven’t seen a hooker one yet, but I’m sure it’s available. The retailers even print their names on the asses too-Abercrombie, Hollister, Juicy, American Eagle, encouraging their customers to advertise their brand across their size negative 5 anorexic behind. They aren’t all negative 5 though; unfortunately the oblivious fleshy behinds sport them too. Colleges and sports teams sell booty type too, wanting the women to shake that “go team” ass from the bleachers to the dorm rooms.

[...]

While browsing the summer fashions at my nearest American Eagle (Abercrombie was closed for renovations), I realized that this booty type is in fact similar to public signage that I’ve worked so closely with over the years: it’s meant to be seen, it’s communicating important and relevant information, it can be used to alert people of a problem (“SLUT!”), or it can simply be pointing out a scenic overlook. The major shortfall that plagues the designs first and foremost is that their choices in typography are severely lacking. On a pair of capri shorts I saw while being run down by 15 year old girls who hold month-long packages to the tanning salon (you’re not fooling anyone, by the way), read “Sun Kissed” in a horrendous brush script. The only choice more vile than that would have been Papyrus or Comic Sans—the bête noire of professional designers. Aéropostale carried a similar line of active shorts that read “sweet thing” and “lucious” [sic] in an alterni-pop script that has taken the 2000s by storm. In fact, on a number of them I had trouble making out what exactly they said; when that booty is racing by in the other direction, there’s no way I would be able to figure out that she really is that lucious. A more readable swiss design like Helvetica, Univers or Frutiger, spaced out optically in lower-case letters would have been much more viewer-friendly.

[...]

A must-read, I think you'll agree.

[Via kottke.org remaindered links]

Motörhead's Ace of Spades played by barbie dolls.

Mere words can't convey how much this rocks: go and see for yourself.

[Via web-goddess]

Hallmark Cards reject many more greetings than they publish. Some just aren't up to scratch. Others fall into the category they call "Funny, but No":

[...]

Those that have earned a chuckle but not a nod to become a card are marked "FBN" for "Funny, But No" — a designation that has become a sort of badge of honor among writers.

"It starts with funny," Taylor said. "That's good."

With rejects roughly outnumbering winners 10 to one, there are plenty of FBNs to go around.

Among the losers is a holiday card that announces on its face, "Christmas just wouldn't be the same without peanut brittle." Then, inside: "Or Jesus."

And the drawing of a couple cuddling on a living room couch with a friendly bearded man, wearing a robe, sandals and a turban. The woman blurts: "Honey, this Afghan your mom gave us is really warm!"

Then there's a questionable get-well card with a big happy face on the front. On the inside, it reads, "Hi! Welcome back from your coma!"

Tobaben said rejecting the ideas doesn't mean they're not funny, it just means editors were skeptical of their selling power. "It comes down to, 'Would I send this?" she said.

[...]

I think my favourite comes from the sidebar to the article:

Christmas

Front: "Spread some holiday cheer."
Inside: "Or drink alone. Who am I to judge?"

[Via Blog of a Bookslut]

I had no idea that oil drums of a certain vintage produced by Royal Dutch Shell Plc were so sought after by musicians:

[...]

For many of the world's estimated 35,000 panmen, the sweetest-sounding music comes from the 55-gallon, 20-gauge red steel oil barrels made in Shell's lubricant mixing plant on Barracones Bay in Trinidad.

A few miles up the road in Port of Spain, beneath the shade of the big breadfruit tree at 147 Tragarete Road, a Shell executive in 1946 made history's first steel drum from an empty barrel of tractor lubricant bearing the company's distinctive clamshell insignia.

[...]

According to American jazz musician Andy Narrell, Shell oil-barrel pans made between 1946 and 1967 are as renowned and desirable as the Cremonese violins of Antonio Stradivari, Nicolo Amati and Giuseppe Guarneri. Even the barrels made today are in high demand among pan players.

[...]

One of the early Shell Invaders, Malcolm Weekes, received an annual $2,000 scholarship to attend Howard University in Washington, where he played the double alto (two drums with 16 notes on each pan) for the school's Trinidad Steel Band and graduated with a degree in chemical engineering. Now retired after a career as a chemist at Bechtel Group Inc., Weekes remembers when he and Mannette forged pans out of toxic barrels.

"We built bonfires to burn out all the crap stuck inside the drums," Weekes, 65, says. "It was dangerous work. We all inhaled the fumes. But what the barrel had contained also helped define the sound of the drum."

Mannette now builds about 100 pans annually from the unsoiled barrels that roll off the line at North Coast Container Corp. in Cleveland.

"Weird thing is, nobody's really sure why a 55-gallon oil drum can be crafted into a musical instrument or why my early Shells have a distinctive sound," Mannette says. "I once made a drum out of a Shell barrel that had stored perfume. Now that was really exceptional."

[...]

The full article is marvelous, with much more information about the history of "the only new acoustic instrument to hit the music scene since Adolph Sax came up with the saxophone in 1841."

[Via Buzz Andersen]

This post about Why Lost is genuinely new media looks fascinating:

I've been as impressed with the way that the creators of Lost have enabled interaction around the show as with the show itself. Perhaps 'enabled' could be replaced with 'coordinated' or even 'manipulated', but strategically, the call-and-response relationship between the form of the show and the unfolding interaction across varying platforms would appear to indicate a very sophisticated understanding of contemporary media indeed. To aid communication, I've attempted to illustrate this process with a hastily-produced graphic score (below), but first, some set-up …

A while ago, I wrote about a theory of using the ripples made possible by new media, to enable a trackable 'social life of a broadcast', based on our work at BBC radio. What Lost has done is far beyond that, truly raising the bar for much mainstream media. Again, it's ever clearer – frankly it was at the time – that all those late-90s Flash experiences, grown out of early-90s CD-ROM experiments, were largely facile attempts at 'new media experiences'. Lost is a far more ambitious piece of media, which uses the entire web as its canvas and its entire audience as its creators. I'd suggest this piece of work – Lost, when viewed in its entirety – is truly new.

[...]

Unfortunately I had to stop reading a few paragraphs in because I'm waiting for season 2 to start on Channel 4 and There Be Spoilers part way through the post, but Dan Hon assures us that the article is worthwhile and I'm quite prepared to believe him. I have to wait about six months to find out for myself, but if you're up to speed with the US broadcast schedule and find the introductory remarks above intriguing you should probably have at it…

[Via Words]

I had no idea people wrote to Juliet (as in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet) in the same way children write to Santa Claus. What's more, their letters are answered:

"Dear Juliet," the letters all begin.

"Dear Juliet … You are my last hope. The woman I love more than anything in the world has left me. …"

"Dear Juliet, I live on the third floor. My parents don't allow my boyfriend to come to my house. So I have to sneak him in. …"

"Dear Juliet, my name is Riccardo. I am 10 years old." Riccardo is in love with an older woman, 14. He saw her in Verona the summer before. Does Juliet have news of her?

Every week, hundreds of letters pour into the office of the Club di Giulietta, in Verona, Italy, the city that is the setting for Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet." Some are addressed simply "To Juliet, Verona," but the postman always knows to deliver them to the club's Via Galilei headquarters. Every letter is answered by the club's group of volunteers, no matter what the language, sometimes with the assistance of outside translators. (In the past, the owner of a local Chinese restaurant helped.)

[...]

Do any other fictitious characters receive correspondence from readers, I wonder…

If the forthcoming thriller Don't Look Down is half as entertaining as the story of how the two authors collaborated for the first time, it's going to be well worth a read:

One evening in Maui, Jenny Crusie was watching the sun set over the Pacific when Bob Mayer sat down beside her and said, “What do you write?” Jenny said, “Well, basically, in my books, people have sex and get married.” Bob said, “In my books, people have sex and die.”

Naturally they decided to collaborate.
Nine months later, Don't Look Down was done.

It was pretty simple, really. They decided that the Crusie heroine would, as usual, come from the normal world, and the Mayer hero would, as usual, come from the covert ops world, and that they'd meet because the Crusie heroine would be working for a normal-world boss who was really a Bad Guy that the Mayer hero would have to take out of the picture.

Jenny: “I want to write about a woman who runs a B&B or a woman who’s a film director.”
Bob: “How many people can I kill in a B&B?”
Jenny: “I’ll do the film director.”

[...]

Although the entire story takes place over only four days, Jenny wrote a sex scene at the behest of her editor and agent. It was her first sex scene with a hero wearing body armor, a Glock, a garrote, and a calf knife. Then Bob killed the people having sex.

Jenny: “Bob, sometimes people live after having sex.”
Bob: “They haven’t in the books I’ve written.”

[...]

But in the end they had a great book about a film director and a Green Beret who risk life and limb on a bridge near Savannah to save a little girl named Pepper. There’s also a rapacious starlet, a deluded actor, a hotshot pilot, and a lovestruck make-up girl, plus the CIA, the Russian Mob, and an alligator named Moot. Jenny had the best time she’s ever had writing a book, and Bob has cheered up because Jenny has promised that he can kill more people in the next one.

[Via Lorem Ipsum, via MemeMachineGo]

Martine has posted an adaptation of my Living in 2006 post from the other day: Living in Tokyo in 2006.

You know you are living in Tokyo in 2006 when

1. You accidentally try to scan your ATM card on the train ticketgate suica pad, and then try to insert your Suica or Passnet train cards into the ATM…

2. You haven’t been to a real cinema for years – you just download movies and TV shows and watch them at home on your computer or ipod video because (a) going to the cinema is around $20 a pop and may involve waiting in a really long queue, (b) International films get released about 6 months behind the rest of the world anyway and run for about 2 weeks if they're lucky, and (c) because foreign films are only subtitled in Japanese (of course).

3. You have no idea who at least 30 of the people in your keitai (mobile phone) address book are despite the fact you photographed almost all of them with the phones camera and attached their photos to their profiles.

4. You IM or SMS your family abroad on your G3 phone to tell them that you'll Skype them later tonight.

[...]

Reading Martine's much more hi-tech version of the list makes me feel quite old-fashioned. I don't have a mobile phone, I don't use IM to any significant extent, I've no interest in Skype, my rail/bus pass is an old-fashioned bit of card with a photo attached, my iPod doesn't do video, and although I have a PDA it's three years old. (And the model in question had just been replaced, so the design is about five years old.)

I need to upgrade my kit or turn in my gadget freak credentials…

Billy Bragg talks to The Onion's A.V. Club:

AVC: How did the fall of communism change things for you? The political playing field was suddenly far different from when you first started.

BB: First of all, I was very happy. I was in Knoxville, Tennessee, actually, playing in a supper club. We were late. I think we got lost somewhere. I'm not very good in Tennessee, it's not one of my strongest states, and we got lost somewhere past Chattanooga. When we turned up late, the guy said, "The toilets are over there, you're onstage in an hour, and the Berlin Wall has come down." [Laughs.] It's one of those fuck-the-world moments. I think it was perhaps the greatest thing that was achieved in the second half of the 20th century. The First World War never resolved those issues, it had to be fought again as the Second World War. To all intents and purposes, around 1980, you'd have thought we would have to fight again in Europe over this issue, and drag everybody into it again, because of our failure to resolve issues that really belonged in the 19th century. The fact that we were able to resolve these issues peaceably is a real victory for humanity. And I'm very proud that we were able to do that—that the people in the East felt brave enough to do it, and we felt compassionate enough to respond in a positive rather than a negative way. It couldn't have happened in a better way. [...]

Engadget has a nice picture of the iLiad eBook reader that Philips spinoff iRex is about to launch. It looks to be a pretty capable piece of kit:

This monochrome e-ink touchscreen display will be going up against heavyweight Sony's similar Reader device, although the iLiad sounds like it should be able to hold its own, sporting a 400MHz XScale processor, 64MB RAM, 224MB user-accessible internal flash memory, WiFi, Ethernet, 3.5-millimeter audio jack, and slots for SD and CF cards as well as USB drives. iRex claims over a week of three-hour-a-day reading sessions are possible between charges, and also promises to expand upon the PDF, XHTML, TXT, and MP3 formats that will supported at launch.

No non-standard hardware interfaces or proprietary document formats … sounds very promising. A colour screen would be nice, but it's hardly essential for the sort of uses the iLiad will be put to. (At €650 the iLiad is clearly priced for the business market, but assuming that the hardware proves durable in real world use surely iRex will produce an appropriately-priced consumer version sooner rather than later.)

I wouldn't dump my PDA for an iLiad unless someone produced a decent calendar/address book/task list/memo application suite for it, but I could be tempted to use it as a re-usable piece of electronic paper. Now all we need is to dissuade the major publishers from crippling ebooks with DRM and high prices…

Sometimes managers need to realise that the time has come to speak to one of their techies:

Thu, 23 Mar 2006 00:52:58 +0000 (Wed, 18:52 CST)
Jerry A. Taylor submitted the following Information:
Email xxxxxxx
Company City of Tuttle
Location Oklahoma
Comments

Who gave you permission to invade my website and block me and anyone else from accessing it???

Please remove your software immediately before I report it to government officials!!

I am the City Manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma.

———————————————–

From: Johnny Hughes
To: Jerry A. Taylor
Subject: Re: www.centos.org – Contact Us Form
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 18:59:18 -0600

I feel sorry for your city.

CentOS is an operating system. It is probably installed on the computer that runs your website.

We hope you are happy with it, since we produced it for free and you are able to use it without paying us … and are even threatening to have us arrested for providing to you free of charge.

Please contact someone who does IT for you and show them the page so that they can configure your apache webserver correctly.

Thanks,
Johnny Hughes,
CentOS 4 Lead Developer

[...]

You might say that I'm being a bit harsh; it's not a huge stretch that a manager who was expecting to see his organisation's web site might see the default test page CentOS serves up after a fresh installation and decide to email the folks apparently responsible. What makes this exchange of emails such fun is that it doesn't stop there. You really need to read the full set to grasp just how out of his depth the manager was.

[Via Tailrank]

A Random Jack Bauer Fact:

Jack Bauer's mother once caught him with his hand in the cookie jar when he was a child, he wanted the cookie, so he shot her.

[Via linkmachinego]

Gordon McLean says:

You know you are living in 2006 when

1. You accidentally enter your password on the microwave.

2. You haven’t played solitaire with real cards in years.

3. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of three.

4. You e-mail the person who works at the desk next to you.

5. Your reason for not staying in touch with friends and family is that they don’t have e-mail addresses.

6. You pull up in your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home to help you carry in the groceries.

7. Every commercial on television has a web site at the bottom of the screen.

8. Leaving the house without your cell phone, which you didn’t have the first 20 or 30 (or 60) years of your life, is now a cause for panic and you turn around to go and get it.

10. You get up in the morning and go on line before getting your coffee.

11. You’re reading this and nodding and laughing.

12. Even worse, you know exactly to whom you are going to forward this message.

13. You are too busy to notice there was no #9 on this list.

14. You actually scrolled back up to check that there wasn’t a #9 on this list.

AND NOW U R LAUGHING at yourself.

I don't have a mobile phone, but you could substitute the term "PDA" at #8 and it'd certainly apply to me. I had to go without my Palm for about six weeks late last year and it felt as if I'd been lobotomised, so I'd definitely turn round and get it in the event that I forgot to pick it up on my way out.

#6 can't be saved: I don't have a car so I just carry my groceries home the old-fashioned way.

Surely #12 is a bit 1999? Wouldn't "You're going to post this on your weblog the first chance you get" be a better fit for 2006?

Andy Budd's collection of iTunes Smart Playlists leaves his iTunes setup about one step short of genuine, honest-to-goodness artificial intelligence:

I listen to my iTunes music library almost constantly when I’m working. I currently have 3476 songs in iTunes which works out at around 12.4 days worth of music. This may seem a lot, but considering how much time I spend on the computer, I burn through tracks with surprising ease.

One of the problems with this is keeping your music collection interesting. You’ll want to hear newer songs more often than older ones, yet at the same time you’ll want to make sure that the old music doesn’t get lost. You want to hear your favourite songs slightly more often than everything else, but you don’t want to keep listening to the same old tracks over and over again. As such you need to make sure your playlists have a good degree of variety as well as and a high churn rate.

[...]

I've used a few smart playlists, such as one that brings up 4 or 5 star songs I haven't played in at least a fortnight, but I've not explored the possibilities of smart playlists feeding into other smart playlists. Something to play with this weekend, I think…

[Via GromBlog]

Reading Patrick Nielsen Hayden's post on the just-announced Hugo and Campbell award finalists, I realised that for the first time in years – possibly the first time ever – I've actually read a majority of the Best Novel finalists before I heard the list of finalists. (Mind you, I only made it over the line because I finished Robert Charles Wilson's Spin on the bus home from work today. But it still counts, right?)

Best Novel

• Learning the World, Ken MacLeod
• A Feast for Crows, George R.R. Martin
• Old Man’s War, John Scalzi
• Accelerando, Charles Stross
• Spin, Robert Charles Wilson

Of Spin, Accelerando by Charlie Stross and Ken MacLeod's Learning the World I think I'd probably have to opt for Accelerando as my favourite, but I'd happily see Wilson pick up the award instead. I wasn't all that taken with Learning the World; perfectly competent, but not up there with MacLeod's "Fall Revolution" sequence of novels. Once I've made a dent in my To Read pile I might pick up one of the other nominees, John Scalzi's Old Man's War, but I don't think I'll be trying to get into George R R Martin's multi-volume epic fantasy series at this late stage.

The shorter fiction categories are a complete mystery to me; I'm utterly out of touch with that end of the field nowadays, to the point where I haven't even bothered to pick up the latest Dozois Year's Best Science Fiction collection these days because I still haven't finished the edition from two years ago. I read the occasional short story or novella online or download it to my Palm if I come across something that's highly recommended, but that's about it.

The two Best Dramatic Presentation categories look pretty strong:

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

• Batman Begins
• The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
• Serenity
• Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit

Surely a slam-dunk for Serenity?

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

• Battlestar Galactica, 'Pegasus'
• Doctor Who, 'Dalek'
• Doctor Who, 'The Empty Child' & 'The Doctor Dances'
• Doctor Who, 'Father’s Day'
• Jack-Jack Attack
• Lucas Back in Anger
• Prix Victor Hugo Awards Ceremony (Opening Speech and Framing Sequences)

Presumably the Doctor Who vote will be fatally split, opening the way for a Battlestar Galactica victory. But then, it'd be difficult to deny any of the episodes chosen an award, because they were all really fine episodes in their different ways. (I still haven't seen the new version of Galactica. I don't think it's destined to show up on free-to-air TV over here any time soon, so I'll just have to get hold of the DVDs some day. So many people have testified that the re-imagined show is seriously good that I'm going to have to find out for myself before I get too many seasons behind.)

The Top Ten Most Annoying Alarm Clocks:

#10
The Sfera alarm clock hangs from the ceiling above your bed. When the alarm goes off, you can reach up and touch it to activate the snooze function causing it retract towards the ceiling. When snooze goes off again, you have to reach higher to activate the snooze again. Each time you activate the snooze function the alarm retracts a little higher to the point that you get your butt out of bed.

[...]

Elegant and (I'd imagine) very effective.

[Via meish dot org]

BMW have designed a really nice cabin lighting system for the Airbus A350, complete with a simulation of the night sky on the cabin's ceiling. I wonder if it looks as good in the flesh as it does in the photographs.

[Via Needcoffee.com]