I could have sworn that I'd posted about the distinctly eccentric brand of personal ad published in the London Review of Books before now, but I can't find any posts when I search my archives. So, let Sarah Lyall of the New York Times tell you about the British intelligentsia's personal ads:

Many of the ads reflect the writers' diverse intellectual interests.

A woman in the current issue, for instance, specifies that she is looking for a man "who doesn't name his genitals after German chancellors" (not even, the ad says, "Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingfürst, however admirable the independence he gave to secretaries of state may have been.")

In an e-mail exchange also conducted on condition that her name not be used, the woman, a 38-year-old local government arts official with an interest in Bismarck, said she been inspired by a disastrous experience with a date who announced over the tiramisu that he called his private parts "Asquith," after the World War I prime minister.

"I'm fairly easygoing, but I specifically didn't want another dessert-spoiler," she said, explaining that the only thing she could think of worse than a wartime prime minister was a pre-Weimar German chancellor.

Mind, it's not all witty intellectual repartee:

Lots of people talk about their bad divorces. "My favorite Ben & Jerry's is Acid-Boiled Bones of Divorce Lawyer," says one ad.

[Via Blog of a Bookslut]

Not much in the way of links to post tis evening, as I spent much of it at the cinema catching up with Daniel Craig's take on James Bond in Casino Royale.

There's much to like about the new film, which rewinds some forty years of on-screen continuity and gives us a newly-promoted Bond, a thug still finding his feet as holder of a '00' license. The action is more close-up and brutal, with very little gadgetry or gimmickry. Put it this way: last time out Bond was menaced by an orbital death ray; this time round he's strapped down and beaten by a man wielding a knotted rope. (That said, Bond's Aston Martin does have some interesting accessories in the glove compartment. It's just that they're more believable this time round.)

Daniel Craig might have the makings of a fine Bond if he's given a few films to make his mark. He's not as smooth as some of his predecessors – closer to the Connery/Dalton axis than the Moore/Brosnan one – and it'll be interesting to see how far that quality is retained in future outings. Will the producers hold their nerve and keep Bond as something of a loose cannon, learning to live up to the license to kill, or will they give in to the temptation to show him two films from now as the top dog, the complete agent with all the moves. Of the supporting cast, only Dame Judi Dench survives from the last few films. It's a pity no place could be found for Colin Salmon, who always deserved more lines than he got in the earlier films, but I can understand the producers wanting a clear-out. As to the supporting cast brought in for this film, Eva Green did well as Vesper Lynd, being both as sharp as a tack and as sexy as hell. Mads Mikkelsen made a fine, sweaty, shifty villain, and Giancarlo Giannini and an unrecognisable Jeffrey Wright were memorable in their relatively minor roles.

The thing is, for all that this was clearly a more down-to-earth Bond, I can't quite bring myself to proclaim the series revitalised just yet. It's a good start, but it's by no means one of the best Bond films ever. Casino Royale was streets ahead of Moonraker or A View To A Kill, but it didn't reach the heights of a Goldfinger or On Her Majesty's Secret Service or From Russia With Love. Whether a modern, grittier low-tech Bond can reach those heights is an open question: exciting as Casino Royale was, it wasn't significantly better than, say, either of Matt Damon's outings as Jason Bourne. The main thing this Bond had over Jason Bourne's last outing was that Bond hangs out in more glamorous locations, and that's not really enough. If the series is to scale the heights, I don't think it'll be due to scaling up the threat to the operatic levels we saw in the good old pre-Roger Moore days. It's going to have to get there on the basis of Daniel Craig's performances. Happily, he's got the chops to make it happen if he's given the right scripts. I look forward to seeing him try.

This Time article about an increase in the number of American women in their 20s and 30s considering becoming nuns piqued my interest. Not so much in the reasons for the increase, but in the fact that this younger generation are using the same tools to communicate with the world as their secular counterparts. Or, to put it another way: as members of the twenty- and thirty-something generation enter convents we're starting to see nuns with weblogs.

Having checked out a couple of the sites mentioned in the Time article, I've decided to keep an eye on A Nun's Life, written by Sister Julie Vieira. She writes clearly, thoughtfully and accessibly about her life; it's a fascinating window into a world I, for one, would otherwise have no contact with.

[Time article via rebecca's pocket]

Some pictures I've seen online today:

• Three from David J Nightingale: Trick or Treat? (a.k.a. Lil' Hulk), Heavy Water and SG-Blackpool #2.
• Barry's Birthday Cake by Noah Grey.
• Paul Flury's Nothing Lasts For Ever.
• A portrait of George, wise beyond his years, courtesy of Graham Jeffery.

I knew that Tori Amos fronted a band called Y Kant Tori Read before her solo breakthrough with Little Earthquakes, but I'd never heard any of their material. Thanks to the wonders of YouTube I now know what I was missing…

Let's just say that if Y Kant Tori Read's first release had been a hit very few critics would have been drawing parallels between Tori's work and that of Kate Bush.

[Via If Destroyed, Still True]

This video of David Caruso delivering Horatio Caine's pre-credit one-liners in CSI: Miami is hypnotic.

I can only repeat the question I posed last time I posted about CSI: Miami: was he that bad in NYPD Blue and somehow I just didn't notice, or did he just have less cliché-laden scripts to deliver back then?

[Edited to add: another wedge of Caruso cheese here.]

[Via Warren Ellis, via MetaFilter]

A quick mention for a couple of online petitions aimed at UK residents with an interest in music copyright issues:

• The Release The Music campaign is trying to persuade Tessa Jowell to resist the proposal to extend the copyright term for sound recordings to life plus 70 years.
• Suw Charman of the Open Rights Group has used the No10 Petitions system built by mySociety to put up a request an exception to copyright law legalising private copying for the purposes of making backups, archiving and shifting formats. At the moment Suw's petition is the fourth most popular, albeit well behind the one demanding the repeal of the Hunting Act of 2004.

I rarely have any reason to wear a tie, but if I did find myself having to dress more formally at work then I might well invest in a couple of these gorgeous SquidBrain ties.

I'm especially taken with the olive version, for some reason.

[Via Pharyngula]

Polygon is a nice little animation: a Japanese salaryman creeps back home somewhat the worse for wear and finds his wife waiting for him.

Stephen Colbert on Blogs. Marvellous.

[Via Videosift]

I suspect that this story is an urban legend, but I don't care:

Bono is at a U2 concert in Ireland when he asks the audience for some quiet.

Then in the silence, he starts to slowly clap his hands.

Holding the audience in total silence, he says into the microphone… "Every time I clap my hands, a child in Africa dies."

A voice from near the front of the audience pierces the silence … "Fookin stop doing it then!"

[Via Japundit]

The Random Wodehouse Quote page is a fine way to kill some time:

He was a long, stripy policeman, who flowed out of his uniform at odd spots, as if Nature, setting out to make a constable, had had a good deal of material left over which she had not liked to throw away but hardly seemed able to fit into the general scheme.

[Via James Nicoll]

A couple of weeks ago NASA's Mars Global Surveyor fell silent, just short of ten years after it set off for Mars. Emily Lakdawalla explains how NASA hope to get the orbiter working again.

At War With Baraka! takes Ron Fricke's Baraka and replaces the soundtrack with the Flaming Lips' At War With The Mystics. It's two great tastes that taste even better together!

I'd imagine that the site is liable to be nuked from orbit by the respective rights-holders any minute now, so go and see it now if you're interested.

(NB: the At War With Baraka! site offers only a download of the film with the replacement soundtrack that clocks in at just short of 400MB – there's no streaming version or sample clip. Dial-up users will presumably have to either get hold of a CD and DVD and do it themselves, or else get a friend with a broadband connection to burn them a CD-ROM or DVD.)

[Via Memepool]

Mike D'Angelo compares the work of the Scott brothers:

On March 19, 1895, Auguste and Louis Lumière photographed a gaggle of workers trudging out the gates of their family's factory. Anticipating today's blunt literalism by more than a century, the boys dubbed their 46-second effort "Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory" ("I've had it with these motherfucking workers in this motherfucking factory!"); most historians consider it the first motion picture ever screened for a paying audience. So the medium actually kicked off with two brothers working together. Today, that's practically an epidemic. The Coen Brothers. The Farrelly Brothers. The Wachowski Brothers — presumably soon to be the Wachowski, Um, Crap, I Dunno, Siblings I Guess. For "urban" audiences, the Hughes Brothers. For foreign-film buffs, the Dardenne Brothers. In the world of animation, the Brothers Quay.

Which just makes it all the weirder that Ridley Scott and Tony Scott insist on behaving like some kind of gruesome Nazi medical experiment gone awry. Not only do they not work together, ever (though they do share a production company, Scott Free), but their career trajectories have diverged in such a cartoonishly clear-cut, Jekyll-and-Hyde way that you can pretty much define yourself by which one of them you prefer, just as everyone is fundamentally either a John person or a Paul person. Except in this scenario, there's no John — it's more like Paul vs. Ringo, if Ringo were considerably more debauched and used one arm solely for crashing a cymbal every two seconds. Would you rather watch Russell Crowe learn to appreciate the finer things in life after he inherits a French vineyard (A Good Year)? Or do you start chuckling happily at the ludicrous prospect of Denzel Washington as an ATF agent using psychic powers to solve a ferry bombing (Déjà Vu)? In short, do you like your movies reputable or disreputable? [...]

Me, I'm a Ridley Scott man. Not that he hasn't made some terribly disappointing films in his time, but I'd take Alien or Blade Runner or Thelma & Louise over any film Tony Scott's ever made.

Dr Ben Goldacre, author of the Bad Science column in the Guardian, has invited his readers to help him with a little information gathering exercise:

I don't know if you've ever tried using the Freedom of Information Act: it's an excellent trouble making tool, and you do feel quite James Bond, but the act has its flaws. One being that if you ask for too much, as one lone, obsessive, disproportionately pedantic science columnist, they turn you down on grounds of cost. Quite spuriously and unfairly, to my mind. So now I'm offering a kind of skills swap: I'll teach you all how to do an FoI request (it's easy) if you help me get a bunch of data.

Contain your boredom and exhaustion, because it's the Durham fish oil pill people again, but think of this more as an experiment in what happens when you just won't let go. You'll remember that this story bore the cardinal hallmark of quackery: they claimed they had proven that expensive Equazen fish oil pills improved school performance in various trials, and were eager to sing about this in the media, but when I approached to ask about the science, with a loaded postgraduate medical qualification in my back pocket, they shut up shop and fled. Dr Madeleine Portwood, eager to appear on Channel 4 promoting her "trials" and bamboozling non-science journalists, did not return my calls, or my emails, and the press office – bless them – weren't much help. The durhamtrial.org "results" website is a superficially plausible but ultimately uninformative sham.

So I made an FoI request to get the data, and they refused to give me anything. The refusal, I ought to say, took them the full statutory 4 weeks (nice!). And why are they turning me down? "It is estimated that it would take 30 hours to fully respond to this second request, which would cost £750 when calculated using the statutory rate of £25 per hour."

This is a joke: all I asked for, essentially, was the basic information you'd find in any write up of any scientific experiment: the trial methods in sufficient detail to decide if they were a "fair test" of the treatment, and the results in full. Oh, and a few leaflets. You can witness the full, formal anality of my FoI request online: I just used the CONSORT guidelines as a template, since they're the gold standard for writing up any trial. If Durham and Dr Portwood really are in a position to bang on about their positive results, they should have this information at the tips of their fingers.

But no. And not only did they turn me down, they also – rather censoriously to my mind – pointed out that any cleverdick "multiple small applications" shenanigans from me would be totted up and rejected. And this is why, gentle reader, I need your help. [...]

Good luck to them, one and all.

I think this news story speaks for itself:

On Monday, Nov. 27 and Wednesday, Nov. 29, O.J. Simpson, acquitted murderer and NFL Hall-of-Famer, will star in a two-part FOX special sensitively titled "O.J. Simpson: If I Did It, Here's How It Happened."

[...]

Publisher Judith Regan and Simpson will have a no-holds-barred interview in which he, among other things, "tells for the first time how he would have committed the murders if he were the one responsible for the crimes."

[Via Fimoculous.com]

Harry Knowles has been thinking far too hard about Claire, one of the characters from Heroes. As in, way past Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex territory.

[Via BeaucoupKevin(dot)com]

From the Top 100 Quotes at Fundies say the darndest things!:

"Occam's Razor Disagrees" Award

"I am a bit troubled. I believe my son has a girlfriend, because she left a dirty magazine with men in it under his bed. My son is only 16 and I really don't think he's ready to date yet. What's worse is that he's sneaking some girl to his room behind my back. I need help, God! I want my son to stop being so secretive!"

Linda, Good news prayer room

That's priceless.

I do hope Linda has figured out the truth by now. If so, I'd like to think that Linda has been accepting of her son's penchant for reading that particular variety of 'dirty magazine.' After all, that's not a particularly 'fundamentalist' question – more an expression of concern as her kid grows up too fast. I'm not sure Linda deserves to be grouped with some of the barking mad types elsewhere in the list, at least on the basis of that quotation.

[Via plasticbag.org]

You truly can find everything on the internet. Who'd have thought there would be a web site devoted to the phenomenon of the Bus Plunge:

BUS PLUNGES

A handy guide

As bizarre and random as bus plunges might seem, they generally fall into several well-defined types. For instance:

Bridgus Slipperius
Perhaps the most common species of plunge, bridge mishaps surely helped cement the term "bus plunge" because, well, bridges are usually pretty high up in the air, right? Also, many lesser-developed countries – where BPs proliferate – often rely on primitive, ill-designed bridges to navigate mountainous and rain-swollen terrain, meaning there is, unfortunately, many opportunities for the Bridgus Slipperius to prosper.

Curvus Skiddus
You'd think that someone driving a rickety bus holding twice the tonnage designated for it when manufactured thirty years ago in a country that cannot make cars that don't explode when you stop short and that don't leave parts on the highway when you shift gears would slow down when approaching a pot-holed, goat-soiled, dimly light hairpin curve, wouldn't you? [...]

The Slate article where I found this site isn't about bus plunges in far-flung foreign lands per se; it's about the way that such single-paragraph pieces, once a staple of newspapers everywhere, have been squeezed off the page because the flexibility afforded newspapers by of electronic typesetting relieves newspapers of the need to plug gaps in their page layout. Not that all the one-paragraph stories were about buses:

At the Times, the shortest stories – a one-line hed and a single paragraph of copy – were called "K-heds."

"The great challenge was to edit those things as short as they could be and still have them make sense," Siegal says. Great acclaim came to the editor who could artfully reduce wire stories to their absolute essence. One of Siegal's favorite K-heds, which ran in the Times in the 1950s, read in its entirety:

Most snails are both male and female, according to the Associated Press.

The piece's hed is lost to posterity, Siegal says.

[Via Slate]