A BBC World Service radio adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys will be available to listen to online for seven days, i.e. until next Saturday.

Anansi, the traditional West African spider god, is a storyteller and a joker. What if Anansi were alive today? And what if he were your father – the most embarrassing father a boy could possibly have? Fat Charlie’s about to find out, when he’s dragged into the world of myth, magic and stories.

[Via Neil Gaiman]

This collection of 1960s and 70s Syd Mead concept art contains some pretty eye-catching material. Among other concepts, he came up with what appears to be an early take on the Segway concept, which he christened the Unipod Gyroscopically Balanced Personal Vehicle.

A carapace with with a pair of mercury gyros on the back that would serve as a personal mobility device in future megastructure environments and multi-level commercial areas.

I've got to say that the "Unipod Gyroscopically Balanced Personal Vehicle" looks even goofier than the real-life Segway Personal Transporter does, but the rest of Mead's work here looks pretty cool.

[Via Scrubbles.net]

88 Lines About 44 Fangirls:

[...]

Jessie hitchhiked down from space
I told her, "Thanks for all the fish"
Hannah cosplayed Princess Bride
All I could say was, "As you wish"

Cheryl donned a schoolgirl skirt
And begged me for my tentacle
Kim was like Excalibur
Forever swinging, never dull

[...]

[Via MemeMachineGo!]

An interview with one of my favourite supporting actors, Bob Balaban:

[You've...] directed a number of films, a few of which are built around the theme of cannibalism.
That's true. I directed My Boyfriend's Back, in which a teenage boy becomes a zombie and eats some of his classmates, and Parents, in which Randy Quaid and Mary Beth Hurt cannibalize people for meat. I don't know as I'd really call it a theme, though.

Balaban's diary of his time working on Close Encounters of the Third Kind is worth a look, if you see a copy.

The Times they aren't a changing has a simple mission statement:

It is the conceit of newspapers that each morning there are new stories to tell. Using the New York Times's own archives, unchangingtimes.com sets out to prove that everything news is old.

The approach is straightforward enough: take a story from the current edition of the paper, then find a story on the same topic from the archives to provide some perspective on current events.

I'd love to see someone try this approach with the archives of the Guardian. Sadly, the paper's freely available online archive only goes back to 1999, so there wouldn't be much of a contrast to be had between then and now.

[Via Fimoculous]

Thirst kills.

1337: the start of a five-part xkcd epic featuring Messrs Lessig, Doctorow, Jobs and Knuth, plus a special (rather hirsute) surprise guest.

[Via Making Light]

Last night's Newsnight story on the flimsy physical security used to prevent unauthorised firings of Britain's nuclear weapons quoted a gem of a comment from a senior Royal Navy source:

[In response to the suggestion that it might be wise to add more secure activation systems that would prevent a single officer from launching a Polaris missile without the requisite proper authorisation codes.]

"It would be invidious to suggest… that Senior Service officers may, in difficult circumstances, act in defiance of their clear orders".

Because clearly it was far more important to reassure our naval officers that we trusted them than it was to ensure that a lone maniac couldn't incinerate a few thousand Russians and usher in the Third World War.

[Via Qwghlm]

Richard Kelly's Southland Tales is getting somewhat mixed reviews.

I'm not discouraged; at worst it sounds like an ambitious failure. I think the man who brought us Donnie Darko has stacked up enough credit to be given the benefit of the doubt next time out.

[Via Fimoculous]

Greg Knauss is invited to get a new attitude:

It was inevitable that someone, at some point, would hand me a badly Xeroxed sheet of paper with a quote about “attitude” on it and suggest that I “really think about it.” I’m sort of surprised that it doesn’t happen more often.

Here’s what it said:

ATTITUDE

Charles Swindoll

“The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company… a church… a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice very day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past… we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude… I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you… we are in charge of our Attitudes.”

To which the only possible response — made more interesting by the fact that it was my boss who gave me the Xerox — is: What a steaming load of horseshit. [...]

Testify, brother!

Stormy Weather.

Another one for the 'to read' pile: Under A Flaming Sky by Daniel James Brown is the story of the Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894. Jim Macdonald's review tells you all you need to know:

On Saturday, September 1st, 1894,the nineteen-man fire department of Hinckley, Minnesota, faced a wall of flame five miles wide by two hundred feet high, backed by hundred-knot winds, advancing toward them at fifteen miles per hour. Bubbles and sheets of hot gas floated up and ahead of the fire front to explode on touching oxygen, thousands of feet in the air.

[...]

The fire department had one steam-fired pump with 2,000 feet of hose, and a well for the water supply. They were, the entire town was, in a word, screwed.

Brown has done a lovely job of pulling together contemporary accounts, building a coherent narrative, and setting it in the social conditions of the time. (Scandinavian immigrants, the Pullman strike just ended, the lumber and railroad barons, company towns.) As the disaster develops he goes farther afield to other great fires, forest and otherwise (Peshtigo, Sundance, The Coconut Grove), fire science, forest management, burn physiology, and crowd behavior.

Heroic engineers stand by their throttles, waiting until Almost Too Late in order to load as many people as possible into their cars, as the paint blisters from their engines. Plucky telegraph operators stand by their keys. It’s all good stuff.

Sold.

David Byrne says his local IKEA store reminds him of a video game:

IKEA is huge. We went up to the second floor where the shelves, sofas, tables and lamps are all arrayed into tasteful little room settings — rooms, but with mysterious tags hanging everywhere. Immediately I thought it was like entering a videogame world. Who lives here? What do they do? Why is that book on the table? Is that significant? Could it be some kind of clue to the occupant’s identity?

I hate to say it, but the trailer for the first Futurama direct-to-DVD release is a tad underwhelming.

I'll still be buying it when it's released, you understand, but it'll be more because of the amount of credit the show built up over the course of the broadcast series than because of anything the trailer showed me. I think Messrs Groening and Cohen can be trusted to do right by us.

[Via GromBlog]

A cunning plan is hatched…

Andy Paiko makes some really nice sculptural glassware. I have no use whatsoever for a glass seismograph, but this is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Until the time comes to dust it, anyway.

(I have a feeling I couldn't afford a glass seismograph; the lack of prices on the site suggests that Paiko's work is priced according to the "if you have to ask the price…" principle.)

[Via Making Light]

Nintendo Wii Rejected Game Concepts.

(How exactly would you win at Hari-Kiri? Would you accumulate style points for the neatness of your work? Would you risk losing points the longer it took for your character bleed out after the killing stroke?)

[Via VideoSift]

The Nerd Handbook pretty much says everything that needs to be said:

Your nerd has built an annoyingly efficient relevancy engine in his head. It’s the end of the day and you and your nerd are hanging out on the couch. The TV is off. There isn’t a computer anywhere nearby and you’re giving your nerd the daily debrief. “Spent an hour at the post office trying to ship that package to your mom, and then I went down to that bistro — you know — the one next the flower shop, and it’s closed. Can you believe that?”

And your nerd says, “Cool”.

Cool? What’s cool? The business closing? The package? How is any of it cool? None of it’s cool. Actually, all of it might be cool, but your nerd doesn’t believe any of what you’re saying is relevant. This is what he heard, “Spent an hour at the post office blah blah blah…”

You can be rightfully pissed off by this behavior — it’s simply rude — but seriously, I’m trying to help here. Your nerd’s insatiable quest for information and The High has tweaked his brain in an interesting way. For any given piece of incoming information, your nerd is making a lightning fast assessment: relevant or not relevant? Relevance means that the incoming information fits into the system of things your nerd currently cares about. Expect active involvement from your nerd when you trip the relevance flag. If you trip the irrelevance flag, look for verbal punctuation announcing his judgment of irrelevance. It’s the word your nerd says when he’s not listening and it’s always the same. My word is “Cool”, and when you hear “Cool”, I’m not listening.

Information that your nerd is exposed to when the irrelevance flag is waving is forgotten almost immediately. I mean it. Next time you hear “Cool”, I want you to ask, “What’d I just say?” That awkward grin on your nerd’s face is the first step in getting him to acknowledge that he’s the problem in this particular conversation.

What a toothsome little chap.

Another re-cut trailer: When Harry Met Sally – The Horror Remix.

[Via VideoSift]