Humiliating Moments In Parenting.

For hands-down humiliation, however, I haven't yet been able to top my neighbor's misery, when his three year old daughter interrupted his poker game by running naked into the room and screaming with a joyous voice of discovery, "DADDY! DID YOU KNOW? I COME WITH MY OWN POCKET! AND IT CAN HOLD A PEN! LOOK!"

And while he was knocking his chair over to get across the room to put a stop to her performance, she showed all his friends where the pocket was and how well you could put in and take out all kinds of things.

This is a man who's going to show up at his daughter's high school graduation drunk and shirtless, with her name painted across his chest and gut, randomly shouting "WOOO!!!" during her valedictory speech and making devil horns with his upraised hands. And she will have totally earned it.

Believe it or not, there's at least one story in the comments on that post that does just about top that story. (It's the one about the kid in the supermarket.)

[Via Cruel.com]

The latest trailer for The Bourne Ultimatum is a huge improvement on the teaser – not least because it shows plenty of footage from the new film, rather than lazily recycling clips from the first two films.

The Bourne films have been much better than they had any right to be; with the likes of David Strathairn, Paddy Considine, Scott Glenn and Albert Finney joining series regulars Matt Damon, Julia Stiles and Joan Allen on screen and director Paul Greengrass behind the camera I reckon The Bourne Ultimatum might break the curse of the threequels.

Stu was inspired by this to produce The Complex and Terrifying Reality of Doctor Who Fandom:

I don't have a girlfriend so I don't know what she’d think of me liking Doctor Who. Not too long ago it wasn't actually something you would talk to girls about unless they were fans as well and you wouldn't know that unless they inexplicably mentioned the indomnitability of something. But it’s never something that’s impossible to justify and hardly a handicap.

There is an explicable twist to Doctor Who fandom, that is completely understandable and in the life-blood of all Doctor Who fans. It is this:

Doctor Who fans love Doctor Who.

[...]

Nice work.

Now, if someone would kindly produce further derivatives covering Star Trek, Babylon 5 and Buffy…

The Complex and Terrifying Reality of Star Wars Fandom:

My girlfriend doesn’t understand what I see in Star Wars. We’ve had several soul-crushing arguments about what exactly makes this series so important to me, and every time I have found it more and more difficult to argue my case. As the maddening years have wound on, I think I finally understand the reason for this crippling handicap.

There is a diabolical twist to Star Wars fandom, you see, that defies comprehension, and yet is the life-blood of all Star Wars fans. It is this:

Star Wars fans hate Star Wars. [...]

There's a lot to be said for the notion that shows shouldn't stick around for more than three or maybe four seasons: better to leave 'em wanting more than to outstay your welcome.

(Related: this article, that I posted about last year, positing the notion that creators would do better to plan for a limited run and then move on.)

[Via dsandler]

Bill Kauffman meets the New Secessionists:

Secessionists – most of them, anyway – are all too aware that what they seek (the dissolution of the mightiest empire on the planet Earth) borders the inconceivable. But they have made peace with its implausibility and moved on. Reform they scorn; he who works within the system is swallowed by the system. Taking up arms is madness. "Rebellion and revolution are useless," says Sale. "You would be crushed." If you want out of a bloated empire and dehumanizing system, secession is the path.

"The left-right thing has got to go," declares Ian Baldwin, cofounder of Chelsea Green Publishing and publisher of Vermont Commons. "We're decentralists and we are up against a monster."

What might replace left and right, liberal and conservative, as useful political bipolarities? Globalist and localist, perhaps, or placeless versus placeist. Baldwin argues that "peak oil and climate change are linked and irreversible events that will within a generation change how human beings live. The world economy will relocalize." He dismisses homeland security as "fatherland security" – for "homeland," with its Nazi-Soviet echoes, has never been what Americans call their country. What we need, says Baldwin, is "homestead security": sustainable agriculture, small shops, a revival of craftsmanship, local citizenship, communal spirit. The vision is one of self-government. Independence from the empire but interdependence at the grassroots. Neighborliness. The other American Dream.

[Via 3quarksdaily]

I might as well just pack it in and put up a link pointing you to Chris Applegate's del.icio.us feed today. He's posted three cracking entries that demand to be shared:

• Fun at the Creation Museum! – including a phrase I'd never have expected to see on a sign there that suggests someone working in the museum has a fully functional sense of humour.
• A much-needed dialogue box.
• Pictures illustrating precisely why James May was fired from Autocar magazine.

[Via Chris Applegate (duh!)]

Over the last few days I've been watching this mysterious tale unfold.

I have absolutely no idea where they're going with this, but I'm hooked. Something about the casual way the makers slipped something very odd into the background of a shot in the first video¹ piqued my curiosity.

¹ If you've watched the first instalment, you know what I'm referring to. If you haven't, I don't want to spoil it for you.

Statistic of the day:

More than 60 per cent of business executives think about sex while listening to boring presentations.

[Via The Obvious?]

I've seen photographs of airliners landing at St. Martin in the Caribbean before, but I think this is the first video I've seen of an airliner landing there.

The video isn't of the highest quality, but it really brings home just how low the approach run takes a Boeing 747. (For the record, that's "Really, really low. Scarily low.")

[Via GromBlog]

The Onion's Apple iPhone infographic reveals a key feature Steve Jobs apparently forgot to mention:

Exclusive link to Google Street View so you can watch yourself using your iPhone at all times.

The first service pack will bring an upgrade to this feature that will automatically post a screencap of yourself using your iPhone to the internet.

Seriously, I wonder many videos of iPhones and their proud owners will be posted to YouTube over the month of July 2007. 100? 1,000? More? I hope Google have plugged in plenty of extra servers, ready for the stampede.

[Via bump]

Simon Jenkins reckons that what Britain really needs is a risk commission:

Every employer and every enterprise in Britain should receive an actuarial target for the maximum number of accidents, deaths and injuries that might be considered reasonable given the nature of their activity. The target would be based on the same calculations that are made for the "cost of a life" by, for instance, insurers and road engineers. This might mean telling the railways that they have too few accidents, a sign of spending too much on safety and wildly overcharging passengers as a result. Schools and sports clubs should likewise know what is a roughly acceptable accident level, rather than being left in perpetual terror of a single playground fall or fatality on an adventure trip.

Employers with an exceptionally good safety record should not be considered admirable, since they could just be wasting money and overcharging customers. The test would not be how safe can everything be, but how safe should it be within the bounds of common sense. If a charity fete or construction site or historic castle is regularly way below its accident target, it would suggest that money is being wasted and no one had the courage to take a risk.

I was tempted to quote the opening couple of paragraphs of Jenkins' article, in which he ranted about "Tony Blair's cultural Taliban", "a balaclava militia owing allegiance to Ofcom" and "the ban-crazy Health and Safety Executive", but you really need to read the entire opening to get the full effect. Let it suffice to say that this is a man who thinks that the Health & Safety Executive "enjoys a power similar to that of the military."

Presumably the government's spin doctors are bullying the media into keeping quiet about the pre-emptive strikes by HSE bombers on factories that are failing to document the quarterly inspections of their fire extinguishers.

Another trailer for The Simpsons Movie is out.

(Please, just for a change, could the film live up to the trailer.)

[Via Ghost in the Machine]

Microsoft Surface:

Instead of using one of today's more popular compact devices to get directions to where you're going, why not use a device the size of a small car to do the same job?

Not all fair criticisms, perhaps, but all pretty funny.

[Via The Furrygoat Experience]

The funniest picture of all time?

[Via four panels, posting at MetaFilter]

Kitten or Puffer Fish?

Even worse than a deep-fried Mars bar: Deep-Fried Coca-Cola.

[Vendor] Abel Gonzales Jr. has come up with a new artery-clogging concoction for the State Fair of Texas. It's fried Coke.

Gonzales deep-fries Coca-Cola-flavored batter. He then drizzles Coke fountain syrup on it. The fried Coke is topped with whipped cream, cinnamon sugar and a cherry. Gonzales said the fried Coke came about just from thinking aloud.

There's such a thing as thinking too much…

[Via Away With Words]

Ars Technica has some fascinating statistics about current internet traffic patterns:

Ellacoya Networks, makers of deep packet inspection gear for carriers, has pulled together some statistics on one million broadband users in North America, and its findings show that HTTP traffic accounts for 46 percent of all broadband traffic. P2P applications now account for only 37 percent.

Chalk it up to YouTube and other Internet video sharing sites. The surge in HTTP traffic is largely a surge in the use of streaming media, mostly video.

Breaking down the HTTP traffic, Ellacoya says that only 45 percent is used to pull down traditional web pages with text and images. The rest is mostly made up of streaming video (36 percent) and streaming audio (five percent). YouTube alone has grown so big that it now accounts for 20 percent of all HTTP traffic, or more than half of all HTTP streaming video.

Looking over all the numbers, one of the most surprising result is the continued success of NNTP (newsgroups) traffic, which still accounts for nine percent of the total. Clearly, newsgroup discussions (and, ahem, binaries) are still big business.

Given that the average text- and image-based web page is tiny compared with any halfway decent piece of video or audio data, I'm impressed that collectively such 'traditional' web pages still account for a whole 45% of traffic.

I wonder how much of that 45% is actually RSS and Atom feeds being polled at regular intervals. This probably doesn't account for much of the volume, since a well-behaved feed client will look to see whether it gets a 304 response code before trying to grab the whole feed, but it'd be nice to see some numbers to show how far RSS and Atom have taken over some of the load of keeping us up to date with what's happening on the web.

These scans from Jack Kirby's comic book adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey make me wish it was still in print.

Kirby's take on the visual side of the story was very different to Kubrick's: compare all the Kirby dots to Kubrick's stark, black and white vision of life on the Moon and beyond. I loved the film, but I reckon the classic Kirby look works well too. I'd pay good money to see all of Kirby's take on the Big Trip Dave Bowman takes in the last half hour of the film. (Marvel, are you listening? I want a Marvel Masterworks edition of Kirby's 2001, and I want it now!)

The Triumph Rocket III is not your ordinary motorcycle.

[Via GromBlog]

Courtesy of an emailed comment on PostSecret's Father's Day Secrets, a classic piece of fatherly advice:

When I was little my Dad told me that the tune played by the ice-cream van was the ice-cream man letting everyone know that he'd run out of ice-cream.

Well played, sir…