Pretty!

[Via Widgett]

When I saw the Zaky Infant Pillow I found it disturbing but oddly familiar. I only realised why when I read a comment at Baby Roadies:

I’ve wanted one of those things since I saw the old Adams (sic) Family shows.

That's it! It's Thing (and his brother.)

[Via Progressive Gold]

Pan's Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro gave a fascinating interview to NPR's Fresh Air last month, covering everything from being exorcised (twice!) as a child by his own grandmother to his thoughts on the Mexican film industry to his abiding love for all things Hellboy.

All of which made me want to go out and find the only one of his post-Cronos films I've yet to see (The Devil's Backbone) and watch the rest of them all over again.

I think I might have linked to this unearthly photo of a radio telescope before, but I can't find where; it's such a terrific image that it's worth linking to again.

[Via BLDGBLOG, via Pruned]

Parenting, New York style:

Mom: Don't lean over the tracks like that.

Five-year-old son: I'm just looking for the train.

Mom: It's dangerous, you could fall.

Five-year-old son: Daddy's doing it. You're not saying it to him.

Mom: I'm your mother, and I told you to stop. Daddy can do what he wants. [Boy sulks for a few minutes.] Okay, do you want to call Grandma when we get home so she can yell at Daddy for leaning over the tracks?

Five-year-old son: Yes.

–34th St subway platform

Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Macrovision CEO Fred Amoroso's Response to Steve Jobs's 'Thoughts on Music':

I would like to start by thanking Steve Jobs for offering his provocative perspective on the role of digital rights management (DRM) in the electronic content marketplace and for bringing to the forefront an issue of great importance to both the industry and consumers.

Fuck you, Jobs.

Macrovision has been in the content protection industry for more than 20 years, working closely with content owners of many types, including the major Hollywood studios, to help navigate the transition from physical to digital distribution.

We’ve been helping and encouraging the entertainment industry to annoy its paying customers for more than 20 years. [...]

Apparently Newcastle is the noisiest place in England.

(I can't say I'd noticed, but perhaps that's because I'm sitting here typing a weblog entry at 11.45 on a Saturday night rather than, say, spending my Saturday night hanging around the Bigg Market.)

[Via Bifurcated Rivets]

Jonathan Lethem's The Ecstasy of Influence, an essay on what words are worth, is long but well worth reading right to the very end:

Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator – marked by her forever – remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.

The author of the story I've described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale of Lolita in 1916, forty years before Vladimir Nabokov's novel. Lichberg later became a prominent journalist in the Nazi era, and his youthful works faded from view. Did Nabokov, who remained in Berlin until 1937, adopt Lichberg's tale consciously? Or did the earlier tale exist for Nabokov as a hidden, unacknowledged memory? The history of literature is not without examples of this phenomenon, called cryptomnesia. Another hypothesis is that Nabokov, knowing Lichberg's tale perfectly well, had set himself to that art of quotation that Thomas Mann, himself a master of it, called "higher cribbing." Literature has always been a crucible in which familiar themes are continually recast. Little of what we admire in Nabokov's Lolita is to be found in its predecessor; the former is in no way deducible from the latter. Still: did Nabokov consciously borrow and quote?

"When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty." The line comes from Don Siegel's 1958 film noir, The Lineup, written by Stirling Silliphant. The film still haunts revival houses, likely thanks to Eli Wallach's blazing portrayal of a sociopathic hit man and to Siegel's long, sturdy auteurist career. Yet what were those words worth – to Siegel, or Silliphant, or their audience – in 1958? And again: what was the line worth when Bob Dylan heard it (presumably in some Greenwich Village repertory cinema), cleaned it up a little, and inserted it into "Absolutely Sweet Marie"? What are they worth now, to the culture at large? [...]

[Via Fimoculous]

mr_hopkinson's computer sings some really strange, oddly beautiful cover versions: Radiohead, The Pixies, Gnarls Barkley (on the bonus songs page), the Stone Roses.

The cover of Fake Plastic Trees works especially well, IMHO.

[Via The Sigla Blog]

Lore Sjöberg has a problem:

You know what's getting really tedious? All these time travelers. It seems like two weeks don't go by without some jerk with a time belt and a bad attitude blinking into my living room and trying to zap me into molecules, usually right in the middle of House. Some of them are members of something called "The Chrono-Police," some are plucky adventurers from the 30th century, and one of them was a crazy scientist/inventor from 2035 who tried to brain me with a bust of President Clinton-Bush. [...]

Semi-submersible ships are enormously impressive pieces of technology.

It's the ones carrying an especially wide load that really get my attention: I can't help wondering why they don't roll over at the mere sight of a wave.

[Via MetaFilter]

It's not the sort of thing I'd spend money on, but I can definitely understand the allure of the R2-D2 DVD Projector for well-off geeks of a certain age:

US, January 9, 2007 – Recently, roaming through the halls of CES has felt like touring the TV section of the local Best Buy… there are so many displays it sometimes seems like all there is at the show. But today, we stumbled upon something truly unique at Nikko Home Electronics: the R2-D2 DVD Projector. Sure, it's called a projector, but it's so much more.

The plastic droid, who weighs 17.64 pounds and costs above $2000, not only serves as a projector for your favorite DVDs (think of the scene from Star Wars where R2 is projecting that image of Princess Leia, but with much better resolution), but also as a CD player and iPod hook-up.

His main function is projecting, and he can take a DVD image and display it on the wall at up to 80" wide (R2 also tilts up to project on the ceiling). The little guy can muster a brightness of 1200l ANSI lumens with a contrast ratio of 500:1, and his projection distance is anywhere from 4.9-16.4 feet, depending how large you want the image.

But wait, there's more! Stick a DVD in him and R2 will play it… and you control him with a Millennium Falcon remote. The remote comes with its own stand, and its Afterburner light will glow if you push the Sound button while it is in the base. The remote portion of the apparatus slides out, so if you are not using the Falcon, the keypad is hidden. [...]

[Via #!/usr/bin/girl]

I wish this image of the shadow of NASA's Opportunity robot on Mars was in colour.

[Via Warren Ellis]

Fighter aircraft porn. Lovely.

[Via collision detection]

The American version of The Office has inspired a weblog dedicated to analysing the implications of Michael Scott's management style from the perspective of a Human Resources manager:

Back From Vacation
Thursday, January 4th, 2007

LITIGATION VALUE: $150,000

I empathize with Michael. There is nothing worse than the sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach when you realize that you just accidentally forwarded that witty e-mail (which you worked on all morning) mocking your boss's bad suits and strange habits to your boss, herself, rather than to your clever cohorts in accounting. Not only could such an error get you fired, but careless e-mails often cause even bigger problems. Indeed, e-mail is fast becoming the "smoking gun" of employment litigation and threatens to become even more so with the implementation of new e-discovery rules which require employers to retain and produce volumes of electronic information during the course of litigation. And, just a hint, even if you are able to "recall" the e-mail, most people have already read it. My advice is to think twice before sending any e-mail and, if you would not feel comfortable printing the same message on company letterhead, then don't send it. Well, that and to ALWAYS, ALWAYS double check the recipient.

On a somewhat related note, the relationship between Michael and Jan will also have potential plaintiff's lawyers seeing dollar signs. Sure, everything was great in Jamaica. But what happens after the tans fade (or after Jan learns that Michael sent a picture of her in a partially unfastened bikini to the entire packaging department) and they split up? While office relationships are never a good idea for anyone, they are potentially disastrous for supervisor and her subordinate. A few months from now, Michael could cry "sexual harassment" and claim that he felt pressured to sleep with her in order to advance his career, and Dundler Mifflin is looking at pricey problem. Plus, Jan has lost credibility with the employees who report to her and will lose the respect of her supervisors once they find out. Of course, these comments could also apply to Dwight and Angela, Ryan and Kelly, and to Jim and Karen. I don't know about you, but my office does not have nearly this much juicy gossip. Maybe if it did, yesterday would have gone by a lot faster.

Human Resources humour: now I've seen everything.

[Via MetaFilter]

Ben Goldacre's takedown of 'Dr' Gillian McKeith is essential reading:

Call her the Awful Poo Lady, call her Dr Gillian McKeith PhD: she is an empire, a multi-millionaire, a phenomenon, a prime-time TV celebrity, a bestselling author. She has her own range of foods and mysterious powders, she has pills to give you an erection, and her face is in every health food store in the country. Scottish Conservative politicians want her to advise the government. The Soil Association gave her a prize for educating the public. And yet, to anyone who knows the slightest bit about science, this woman is a bad joke.

One of those angry nerds took her down this week. A regular from my website badscience.net – I can barely contain my pride – took McKeith to the Advertising Standards Authority, complaining about her using the title "doctor" on the basis of a qualification gained by correspondence course from a non-accredited American college. He won. She may have sidestepped the publication of a damning ASA draft adjudication at the last minute by accepting – "voluntarily" – not to call herself "doctor" in her advertising any more. But would you know it, a copy of that draft adjudication has fallen into our laps, and it concludes that "the claim 'Dr' was likely to mislead". The advert allegedly breached two clauses of the Committee of Advertising Practice code: "substantiation" and "truthfulness".

Is it petty to take pleasure in this? No. McKeith is a menace to the public understanding of science. She seems to misunderstand not nuances, but the most basic aspects of biology – things that a 14-year-old could put her straight on. [...]

There's nothing in the article that hasn't already been covered by Goldacre in his Bad Science columns, but today's article serves as an excellent summary of his argument for the general public.

Right Place is a very funny short film about a Japanese shop assistant with a bad case of OCD.

[NB: don't be put off by the tags at YouTube: they're not remotely descriptive of the film's content.]

[Via Table of Malcontents]

The latest trailer for Hot Fuzz is so awesome that it demands a shot-by-shot breakdown.

If you make the mistake of reading the back of the cereal box in the morning this could happen to you:

I've been getting cross a lot recently; it's all part of growing up into a big, strong crotchety old git. It's also rather comforting. Never does one feel so absolutely sure of oneself than when denouncing others in a vitriolic, unsubstantiated tirade of thoughtless kneejerk reaction. Today the victim is Nestle Cheerios. As if their simply being made by Nestle was not sufficient reason to become incensed, I have managed to take issue with the nutrition propaganda on the back. You know the bit, it's put there so you've got something to read while you shovel the refried cardboard (or whatever it is) into your system, shocking your metabolism into remission just in time to exhaust you completely before your inevitable sprint for the bus. Anyway, due to its early-morning audience, one expects such parts of the box to be (a) low-brow and simple and (b) unmemorable, thereby ensuring a stress-free, untaxing experience that can be slipped through in neutral morning after morning without fear of terminal boredom or mental exhaustion. I am therefore tempted to go easy on this little treat. But I won't. [...]

The ensuing rant is really rather wonderful. When I grow up I want to be a crotchety old git like Carl.

[Via Needcoffee.com]

I haven't got any links to post today because I've spent my evening experimenting with different themes for the site. I think I'll stick with this one, called Gray Incite, for a bit, but I've got some more tinkering to do this weekend:

• There's too much wasted space in the page header.
• I want to tinker with the font sizes for some page elements, such as the date displayed for each entry and the Comments and Category block that follows each post.
• I'm not wild about the styling of hyperlinks: the theme defaults to no text-decoration at all, so you can't even tell there's a link there unless you roll your mouse over it. I changed that to an underline, but I don't like the way the underlining of the post title clashes with the line that separates the title from the post content itself. I'm toying with making links show up as bold, or possibly using a change of background colour to highlight them. Or perhaps I'll just create a different CSS class for links in post titles, so that they don't get underlined but other types of hyperlink do.

If anyone comes across any problems with the layout please leave a comment or just email me.