I had no idea that the profession of chimney sweep was still thriving … in Germany:

Listening to [Master chimney sweep Dirk Straube] describe his training, it becomes clear that German chimney sweeps view their craft about as modestly as German auto engineers. After earning a license, which took 4 years, Mr. Straube worked as an apprentice for 15 years before taking over his own district.

Germany is divided into 7,888 districts — each served by a master chimney sweep and one or two assistants — and they come to know their bailiwicks like the back of their ash-stained hands.

In Neu-Isenburg, Mr. Straube handles a mix of single-family houses and small apartment buildings. Most have brick chimneys, which vent exhaust from oil and gas heaters. With the high price of fuel, he said, people are installing wood-burning stoves, which require more cleaning.

As technology advances, so does the sophistication of the heating systems. In addition to his ladder and brush, Mr. Straube carries a bag filled with equipment that measures carbon dioxide emissions, for environmental reasons, and carbon monoxide emissions, for safety reasons.

“The job is more and more technical,” he said, noting that cleaning now occupies less than half his time.

David Cronenberg’s Alien, as novelized by J.G. Ballard:

It’s only the cat, Ripley.
Squatting in the brine strained from the ore above, Kane pressed the activation panel of the locker. Startled by the noise of the lock tumblers, the skittish cat bounded over him, causing him to slip on a thin mesentery, a sloughed skin like that of an amphibian dissected by a careless junior doctor. “Catch it, you fool,” Ripley shouted. “It’ll show up on our scanners again.” Ignoring her, Kane shone his torch on the masklike membrane, recognising it as the discarded integument of the final nymph of the Alien. He was unaware of the caudal barb creeping behind him until he was pulled up into the air-duct. He heard Lambert’s irritating hysteria below him as he gazed onto the Alien instar. The moist, immaculate skin of the erect head reminded him of the perineum of a young boy; he felt an almost ceremonial arousal but experienced only the ghost of his orgasm as the buccal ram of the creature shattered his spinal column between the fourth and fifth thoracic verterbrae. As consciousness diminished he relished lying in the warm saline flow of the duct, a simulacrum of his origin unexpectedly recreated in the gulf of space.

Very nice.

[Via Dan Sandler]

The HBO Six Feet Under web site has a section devoted to Claire’s Artwork:

Even before Claire Fisher’s career arc was written, Six Feet Under’s producers were planning her life as an artist - planting clues on the set, weaving plots around her pieces and even building storylines based on art techniques.

Interestingly, whilst some of the pieces of art were carefully designed and placed to tie in with some element of the plot or the characters’ development, others were done at the last minute by an artist on-set who was asked to create a suitable sketch or take a photograph that would show up in that episode.

Although I’ve yet to see the final season, I do remember seeing quite a bit of the art displayed on the site. Admittedly in some cases, such as the nude photos Claire took of Billy, it was the reaction of Claire to the photos (and, shortly thereafter, the reaction of Nate) rather than the quality of the pictures themselves that made a mark, but it’s a nice touch that the producers acknowledge the behind-the-scenes work that helped sell the concept.

[Via Do You Feel Loved?]

The facts just keep following them around…

Funny Kittens! Four minutes of cute feline frolics. (Don’t let the annoying-yet-catchy soundtrack put you off.)

[Via Cute Overload]

If YouTube is going to be forced to remove much of the copyrighted content that makes the site so entertaining, they’ll presumably have to find something else to keep us visiting. How about audition tapes? You just know there are plenty of such tapes lying around, just begging to be viewed by a wider audience.

I thought it was a particularly nice touch to add the clip from the film at the end, just to point up the contrast with what had gone before. However, it’s not really fair to Brian Atene to put his rendition up against the film of the novel from which he’d chosen his audition piece, since Ralph Macchio and C Thomas Howell had the benefit of sets and costumes and direction and … how can I put this politely? … being in possession of a modicum of acting ability.

I wonder if Stanley Kubrick ever laid eyes on that tape? I’d imagine that he had assistants to trawl through the tapes that were submitted to weed out the clearly unsuitable, the way that editorial assistants in publishing houses are assigned the delightful task of wading through the slush pile.

[Via Nerve Screengrab]

Some of the entries in last year’s Royal Air Force Photographic Competition were very nice. Such as this, this, this, and, best of all, this.

(It appears that the 2006 competition has taken place, but there’s no sign of a similar gallery on the site as yet.)

[Via Bifurcated Rivets]

According to the iTunes Music Store Alanis Morissette has been cloned.

[Whether this signifies three times the enjoyment or three times the irritation is left as an exercise for the reader.]

According to this report YouTube has taken down clips from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, presumably at the request of Comedy Central’s lawyers.

(I take it that they’re still working their way through the huge number of clips: this segment I linked to the other day is still around at the time of writing.)

[Via Fimoculous]

Charlie Stross likes a challenge:

May 2007 is the hundredth anniversary of Robert A. Heinlein’s birth. I am therefore going to celebrate the year by writing a Heinlein hommage. Not a Heinlein juvenile, but a late-period Heinlein novel (I like a challenge). And I’m going to try drag it kicking and screaming into the BoingBoing era.

I’d pay good money to read Charlie Stross taking on Time Enough For Love. I enjoyed that novel quite a bit some 25 or so years ago, but then I had a much higher tolerance for late-Heinlein’s little quirks back in the day. I’m not sure a re-read would be a good idea; sometimes it’s better to preserve the fond memories…

Gay Animals ‘Come Out’ in Exhibition:

OSLO (AFP)—Giraffes mounting, aroused whales mating and dragonflies copulating–perfectly normal, tender scenes–although perhaps not for all, as in this case these animals are of the same sex.

Breaking what is taboo for some, the Oslo Natural History Museum is currently showing an exhibition on homosexuality in the animal kingdom which organisers say is the first of its kind in the world.

“As homosexual people are often confronted with the argument that their way of living is against the principles of nature, we thought that … as a scientific institution, we could at least show that this is not true,” exhibition organiser Geir Soeli tells AFP.
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“You can think whatever you want about homosexuals but you cannot use that argument because it is very natural, it’s very common in animal kingdom,” Soeli adds.

[…]

The exhibition, entitled “Against Nature?”, displays examples of this behavior in pictures and models.

In one image two female adult bonobo chimpanzees are having sex, oblivious to a young male who is attempting to join in.

These peaceful primates–with whom man shares 99 percent of his genetic makeup–use sex as a stress reliever regardless of age and gender barriers.

[…]

David Runciman on Liars, Hypocrites and Crybabies:

During Liars’ Week at the Labour Party Conference last month – when Gordon pretended that he still had a lot of time for Tony, on hearing which Cherie said that’s a lie, but being overheard herself had to deny she’d said any such thing, though the next day Tony more or less admitted that her denial wasn’t to be trusted either, before going on to pretend that he still admired Gordon too, and then pledging himself to the cause of peace in the Middle East – it was no surprise that the boldest liar of all came out on top. Fortune favours the brave. In politics, it is tempting to think that a lie is a lie is a lie, and since everyone is at it, all that matters is what you can get away with. But that is to do Tony Blair a disservice. He is not simply the boldest liar, he is also the best, in that he understands better than anyone the new rules of political fabrication. He comprehensively outmanoeuvred Gordon Brown in Manchester by being truer both to himself and to the spirit of contemporary politics in the way he stretched the truth. Blair was sincere in the lies he told. Brown, by contrast, came across as a straightforward hypocrite.

The Spirit Mars rover mission has been a huge success, with the rover lasting 1,000 sols (and counting), compared to a planned life of 90 sols.

Which is good, but did pose an all too familiar problem for NASA’s science and engineering teams:

Although it’s neat for us observers to see the rover calendar tick over to four digits, it’s been a big headache for the rover’s science and engineering teams. Remember that the rovers were designed for a nominal mission lasting 90 sols. I think that everyone involved in the mission hoped that the rovers would survive into three-digit dates, maybe double the original mission; but they actually didn’t plan for four-digit dates. In other words, the rovers have a Sol 1K problem. It’s the same kind of problem that people anticipated with Y2K on Earth. There were myriad places in the digital environment surrounding the rovers where only three-digit dates were used — who could possibly have predicted that the rovers would live more than 11 times longer than required?

Being a new mother and a planetary scientist, Emily Lakdawalla found herself in a quandary when it came to making a blanket depicting Saturn for baby Anahita:

Putting this project together resulted in quite a battle between my left and right brains, which was fun. It was my left brain that insisted that all the moons had to be to scale with each other, and the rings to scale with each other and Saturn. Saturn’s also properly oblate, and I tried to show the scale of Titan’s atmosphere correctly. But my right brain got to have fun with the colors and the patterns I worked into the quilting. It’s hard to see in this picture, but I even worked the fountains coming out of Enceladus’ south pole to create a faint E ring into the quilting. I did cop out and show Saturn near equinox; the present-day ring shadows would have been too hard!

If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right…