From rec.humor.funny:

Did you hear about the school teacher who was helping One of her kindergarten students put on his snow boots?

He asked for help and she could see why.

Even with her pulling and him pushing, the little boots still didn’t want to go on. By the time they got the second boot on, she had worked up a sweat. She almost cried when the little boy said, “Teacher, They’re on the wrong feet.”

She looked, and sure enough, they were. It wasn’t any easier pulling the boots off than it was putting them on.

She managed to keep her cool as together they worked to get the boots back on, this time on the right feet.

He then announced, “These aren’t my boots.” She bit her tongue, rather than get right in his face and scream, “Why didn’t you say so?” like she wanted to.

Once again, she struggled to help him pull the ill-fitting boots off his little feet. No sooner had they gotten the boots off when he said, “They’re my brother’s boots. My Mom made me wear ‘em.”

Now she didn’t know if she should laugh or cry. But, she mustered up what grace and courage she had left to wrestle the boots on his feet again.

Helping him into his coat, she asked, “Now, where are your Mittens?” He said, “I stuffed ‘em in the toes of my boots.”

She will be eligible for parole in three years.

Under Torch Wood:

FIRST VOICE Come close now. Zoom in, chopper-shot to crane-shot, down over Roald Dahl-As-We-Expected Plass and its mobile phone mast fountain and, deep, deep below, in his secret underground headquarters,

SECOND VOICE Captain Jack,

CAPTAIN JACK Hi. I’m Captain Jack Harkness.

SECOND VOICE the insomniac bicon; snug as a hobbit, pretty as a choirboy, immortal as carbon dioxide, wooden as a horse. He is passing the small hours sweeping up pterodactyl droppings,

CAPTAIN JACK They get everywhere.

SECOND VOICE and cataloguing his prize collection of alien artefacts,

CAPTAIN JACK One off gadget for choosing the quickest queue at Tesco, check. And one off purple wig for a girlie going to the moon, check. And one off bottle of stuff for getting pterodactyl pturds off greatcoats, check. [...]

Very cleverly done, and with a better plot and more coherent character work than most episodes of the show.

For the record, I will be watching the two-part season finale tomorrow; I’ve stuck with the show this long and it would be silly not to see how the story plays out. But I’m much less optimistic than Stu is that the show can be fixed by anything short of a complete reboot.

[Via Stuart Ian Burns, posting at Behind the Sofa]

Just before Xmas Michael Bérubé posted an edited version of an essay he wrote in 1993 about 2001: A Space Odyssey (aka my favourite film ever):

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is not a political film. A quarter century after its release in April 1968 (its public debut took place on the day before the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.), 2001 is usually remembered for its images, for the music, or for its groundbreaking special effects–all of which are widely and routinely cited in the general culture. The mysterious monolith turns up in New Yorker cartoons (“it’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand”), “Thus Spake Zarathustra” becomes a staple of Sesame Street phonetics lessons, the balletic representations of space flight provide material for a Lenny Kravitz video and an episode of The Simpsons. Much of the movie’s audience might hesitate to ascribe a “plot” to 2001 at all, much less a “plot” in the “political” sense; the movie’s initial reviews tended to center on the monolith and on HAL, and rereading those reviews today chiefly affords one the spectacle of watching dozens of puzzled film critics circle curiously around this large, black slab in their midst.

[...] My sense is that most people would think it takes a strange critical mind to see the movie as a commentary on the Cold War and the rise of the national security state. But all I’ll be doing here is uncovering one of the film’s premises, a subtext it doesn’t need to elaborate insofar as it takes that subtext for granted (as does its audience). To date, there hasn’t been any discussion of what 2001 might have meant to the politics of national security and manned space exploration in 1968. I think that critical silence is itself readable, and that it testifies not only to cultural work the film has done, but also to the possibility that some forms of textual politics may be most powerful when least explicit. [...]

It’s an interesting essay, particularly for the view Bérubé takes about HAL’s motivation. Well worth a read.

Do not mess with the Shaolin Rabbit.

[Via Needcoffee.com]

Buggy Saints Row: The Musical:

Saints Row (plot: shoot stuff) was a pretty average game by any measure — for starters, it was literally, down to almost every detail, an exact clone of Grand Theft Auto. [...]

Saints Row does, to its credit, have better graphics, a pretty good script, an amusing character creator, and better targeting (for better shooting people in the face).

It also has some bugs. The world’s most awesome bugs.

So many bugs that I would keep my digital camera on hand while I played the game. And every time I came across a bug — and I came across a whole lot of them — I’d take a short video.

For a long time now, I’ve wanted to share these bug videos with you, but I wasn’t convinced they were quite funny enough. They needed a hot comedy injection, a little something to tie it all together. And then it hit me: musical theatre. [...]

The mix of bizarre buggy behaviour and ballads works surprisingly well.

[Via Daring Fireball]

This list of The Top Ten Astronomy Images of 2006 puts the right picture at number 1, but I’d have placed this shot a lot higher than number 9.

[Via Seed]

Astonishing photographs of The Most Dangerous Roads in the World:

2. Bolivia’s “Road of Death”

North Yungas Road is hands-down the most dangerous in the world for motorists. If the previous road is just impassable, this one clearly endangers your life. It runs in the Bolivian Andes, 70 km from La Paz to Coroico, and plunges down almost 3,600 meters in an orgy of extremely narrow hairpin curves and 800-meter abyss near-misses. A fatal accident happens there every couple of weeks, 100-200 people perish there every year. In 1995 the Inter-American Development Bank named the La Paz-to-Coroico route “the world’s most dangerous road.”

[...]

Apparently some companies make business on the road’s dubious fame by selling the extreme bike tours down that road. [...] If you are nuts enough to consider it, please be advised that you will be only adding to the road hazards, as it’s hard to spot a cyclist on the road’s hairpin curves, and your shrieks (as you fall down the abyss) will disturb the peace and quiet of the villagers nearby.

[Via 3quarksdaily]

A Wisconsin company is producing robotic deer to assist game wardens in shutting down out-of-season hunting:

After a while, a truck drives by, stops, then backs up. The deer turns its head towards the vehicle, and a rifle barrel emerges from the driver’s window. A shot breaks the silence. As the ricochet dies away, two game wardens leap from the brush, surprising the poacher. “Game warden!” they yell, “Put the gun on the ground, put the gun on the ground!”

Amidst the commotion, the deer stands unfazed. You can’t rattle a robo-deer, but you can be arrested for shooting one.

Colonel Jeff Gray of the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department reports his officers have made nearly 50 arrests this year using decoys. “It’s an effective tool.” So effective, he’s become a regular customer of Custom Robotic Wildlife. Besides the deer, he’s also ordered six robo-turkeys from the company.

I was a little disappointed that RoboDeer just stands there and gets shot at: I was hoping it would at least shoot back.

In the light of today’s news stories about the ongoing battle between pro- and anti-foxhunting campaigners, I wonder if Custom Robotic Wildlife have considered developing a RoboFox for the export market?

[Via Slashdot]

Clay Shirky despairs at the way the business press cover the growth of Second Life:

“Here at KingsRUs.com, we call our website our Kingdom, and any time our webservers serve up a copy of the home page, we record that as a Loyal Subject. We’re very pleased to announce that in the last two months, we have added over 1 million Loyal Subjects to our Kingdom.”

Put that baldly, you wouldn’t fall for this bit of re-direction, and yet that is exactly what Linden Labs has pulled off with its Residents™ label. By adopting a term that seems like a simple re-branding of “users”, but which is actually unconnected to head count or adoption, they’ve managed to report what the press wants to hear, while providing no actual information. [...]

In fairness, all sorts of online services do their best to obfuscate the distinction between the number of regular users and the number of registered users and the number of visitors per day. While they’re undoubtedly going the extra mile to muddy the waters by throwing around a meaningless term like “Residents”, Linden Labs are really just the latest beneficiaries of a lack of rigour in reporting on the use of online services. Where there’s no practical way to confirm how many users/visitors a service has beyond taking the company’s figures on trust, shouldn’t the press mention this when reporting on said company’s growth?

Edward Felten’s post on whether social networking sites are a high-tech version of sharecropping prompted a thought-provoking comment thread.

Part of Felten’s argument is that users of MySpace and Facebook aren’t all that worried about the possibility that their individual contribution to the site might be worth a few dozen cents out of the millions of dollars that the founders of the service get when they sell their baby on to a big corporation. He reckons – correctly, I think – that the average user is happy to trade that distinctly notional cash value of their content for the ease with which they can create a small corner of the internet that’s all theirs and the allure of being part of a larger social network.

That being the case, the really interesting question (IMHO) is how those users who so value ease of use and being part of a larger social network will feel when some future social networking site takes off and they find that it’s not so straightforward to transfer their content and their network of friends to a different networking site. Will users tend to stick with the site where they first put down roots, or will they abandon their MySpace site in favour of the next big thing, leaving a trail of abandoned personal sites across the internet as they go?

Apple has a trailer up for The Last Mimzy, an adaptation of Henry Kuttner and Catherine L Moore’s Mimsy Were the Borogoves.

I’d have thought that it would be better suited to a more concise TV adaptation, but here’s hoping that the writers have managed to come up with an script worthy of the source material. It’d be nice if, just once every decade or two, a classic of written SF could provide the source material for a classic SF film.

Further to this post, more details of the writers who will be working with Joss Whedon on the comic version of Buffy’s eighth season:

Whedon says he’ll write several of the book’s arcs, including the first, “The Long Way Home” with art by Georges Jeanty. For the rest, Whedon has assembled a veritable who’s who of comic book writing talent that includes Brian K. Vaughan (Ex Machina), Brad Meltzer (Justice League of America) and Jeph Loeb (Onslaught Reborn), along with former “Buffy” TV writers Jane Espenson, Drew Goddard, Drew Greenberg and Steven DeKnight.

Not a bad line-up. I’m not wild about Meltzer or Loeb, but the remainder of that list – especially when working to a story arc sketched out by Joss Whedon – are likely to do good work.

[Via Table of Malcontents]

Comedian/musician Rob Paravonian really hates Pachelbel’s Canon in D major.

[Via Viral Video Chart]

With one exception, I can wholeheartedly recommend the films on Noto’s Corrupt Christmas Films list.

For the record, the film I don’t think belongs in that list is Santa Claus: The Movie, which never struck me as anything other than a lacklustre family film. By contrast, Bad Santa, Scrooged and Gremlins all set out to be wilder, more cynical looks at the holiday season. Those last three would make for one hell of a triple-bill on a Xmas day TV schedule.