Spliced Krispies is Mark Vidler’s latest collection of mash-ups.
(Beware of track 5, Wouldn’t It Be Nice To Have A Finger Of Fudge?, which features the strangest collision of musical styles I’ve heard in quite a while. There’s even a video, if you’re feeling brave.)
[Via Word Magazine]
SCENE: Tony comes home, gets a cheeseburger and proceeds to send his company’s stocks diving faster than a GBU-500 when he announces he’s getting out of the weapons manufacturing business.
Obadiah Stane: Gee, thanks for killing the company.
Tony: No prob.
Obadiah: I hope you aren’t going hippy on me with that freaky medallion.
Tony: Nah, it’s just a miniature fusion plant.
Obabiah: On your chest?
Tony: Yup.
Obadiah: That you built with spare parts and an equipment shop that the Mythbusters would reject?
Tony: Yup.
Obadiah: I don’t suppose you’d consider doing something wild and crazy like, oh, I don’t know, selling it to power the entire free world!
Tony: Nah.
Obadiah: And people are going to call me the villain of this movie.
Swedish versus British Nightclubs: can you tell the difference?
[Via plexi, posting at MetaFilter]
The teaser for Iron Sky is beautifully rendered, but I have a feeling the plot will leave something to be desired:
Towards the end of World War II the staff of SS officer Hans Kammler made a significant breakthrough in anti-gravity.
From a secret base built in the Antarctic, the first Nazi spaceships were launched in late ‘45 to found the military base Schwarze Sonne (Black Sun) on the dark side of the Moon. This base was to build a powerful invasion fleet and return to take over the Earth once the time was right.
Now it’s 2018, the Nazi invasion is on its way and the world is goose-stepping towards its doom. […]
It all sounds similar in tone, if not in plot, to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Not a good omen.
[Via I Watch Stuff]
From a complaint to the BBC:
TERRY JONES’ MEDIEVAL LIVES
TX Date: 04/05/08“I feel that Terry Jones is using history to criticise the Pope. He is predictable and of poor quality.”
As impressive feats of data recovery go, recovering data from a hard disk from the Space Shuttle Columbia ranks right up there:
It was one of the most iconic and heart-stopping movie images of 2003: the Columbia Space Shuttle ignited, burning and crashing to earth in fragments.
Now, amazingly, data from a hard drive recovered from the fragments has been used to complete a physics experiment - CXV-2 - that took place on the doomed Shuttle mission.
Columbia’s fragments were painstakingly and exhaustively collected. Amongst them was a 400MB Seagate hard drive which was in the sort of shape you think it would be in after being in an explosive fire and then hurled to earth from several miles up with a ferocious impact. […]
Even as you read this, Seagate’s advertising agency is no doubt working up a new campaign…
[Via rc3.org]
Sand: not as dull as you might imagine.
[Via MemeMachineGo!]
This gallery of photos of the Chaitén volcano in Chile is astonishing.
It’s the sort of weather you want to observe from a safe distance, preferably accompanied by a soundtrack of Metallica or Led Zeppelin.
[Via MetaFilter]
Having just watched the penultimate episode of Dexter season 1, I have only two things to say:
If 2007 was the year of Heroes and Friday Night Lights, 2008 is almost certainly going down as the year of Dexter.
As is his habit, Cory Doctorow has made a copy of his latest novel, Little Brother, available for download free of charge under a Creative Commons license.
[Via Whatever]
At Ballardian, an account of a J G Ballard short story I’m going to have to track down:
Ballard’s “The Index” (1977) is a damnably clever short “story”, playing all sorts of games with the reader, with the act of writing, with existence itself. It tells the tale of a mysterious man named Henry Rhodes Hamilton, who, although he has been hitherto completely invisible in the world’s media, seems to have been the confidante of every world leader of note since WWII — and the lover of some of their wives as well. According to the “editor’s note” that begins the piece, HRH is “a man who may well have been one of the most remarkable figures of the 20th century. Yet of his existence nothing is publicly known, although his life and work appear to have exerted a profound influence on the events of the past fifty years.”
[…]
The story’s conceit is that it is typeset like an index, apparently the only surviving fragment of HRH’s “unpublished and perhaps suppressed autobiography”, and all of the plot details above, plus much, much more, can be gleaned from the brief fragments in the index itself.
The Filmspotting podcast recently invited listeners to recast Ghostbusters.
The best response by far was Ghostbusters: London Calling by a poster called frozenhamster:
An Edgar Wright Film
In this highly anticipated sequel/re-imagining of the original Ghostbusters England is about to get slimed! When ghosts get a passport to Europe they take London by storm and it’s up to a special team of British parapsychologists to save the city. Killing ghosts and making jokes, all before tea time.
Steve Coogan - Dr. Peter Venkman
Simon Pegg - Dr. Raymond Stantz
Martin Freeman - Dr. Egon Spengler
Nick Frost - Winston Zeddmore
Cate Blanchett - Dana Barrett
Paddy Considine - Louis Tully
Emma Thompson - Janine Melnitz
Christopher Eccleston - Walter Peck
Bill Nighy - Mayor
Ricky Gervais - Male Test Subject
Anna Friel - Female Test Subject
Thandie Newton - Gozer
Edgar Wright - Zuul/Slimer (voice) (uncredited)
I think Ricky Gervais would be better as Louis Tully,1, but that’s still a pretty solid cast.
Another poster by the name of minerwerks found a cast list from an alternate timeline where the original screenplay somehow ended up in Woody Allen’s hands:
Tony Roberts - Dr. Peter Venkman
Woody Allen - Dr. Raymond Stantz
Jeff Daniels - Dr. Egon Spengler
Christopher Walken - Winston Zeddemore
Diane Keaton - Dana Barrett
Paul Simon - Louis Tully
Mia Farrow - Janine Melnitz
Jeff Goldblum - Walter Peck
Howard Cosell - Mayor
Daniel Stern - Male Student
Mariel Hemmingway - Female Student
Shelley Duvall - Gozer (and the voice)
Woody Allen - Zuul / Slimer (voice) (uncredited)
I’d have paid good money to see that film.
Farah Mendlesohn’s review of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother makes me think I might have to add it to my to-read pile:
As some people know, as part of an ongoing research project I’ve spent the past five years reading every science fiction book written for the Young Adult market I can get my hands on. It’s not been an entirely happy experience. In most of the books I’ve read there is an absence of any political complexity, and in particular, an inattention to the way the world works. Perhaps worse, there has been an utter failure to address what I have always thought of as one of the key factors that make an SF book an SF book, that at the end of it, the reader has learned something. This something can be about genetics, strategy in a military mission, the nature of beetle sexuality - I really and truly don’t care - but I have always regarded SF as a didactic literature and regarded that didacticism as a good thing, yet most YA SF novels lack it (even when they simultaneously promote a political viewpoint such as science is bad, it will destroy the planet, focus on your mystical abilities). Little Brother, however, is fiercely, unashamedly didactic. Doctorow revels in what he has set out to do, which is simply to place in the hands of every school child a manual which could be subtitled “how to bring down your government and enjoy doing it.” The first time I read it I was on a flight to the US, and while I became increasingly concerned that this might have been a Very Bad Idea, I also sort of hoped customs might find the book because it is inflammatory. In UK terms, it most definitely Glorifies Terrorism.
It sounds like a companion piece to my current reading, Ken MacLeod’s The Execution Channel.1
[Via The Sideshow]