Debra Winger – having been absent from our screens for far too long – gave an interview to Rachel Cooke in this Sunday's Observer:

Winger and I meet for lunch in the lobby bar of the Algonquin Hotel – her choice. She used to be famously difficult in interviews, furious and truculent, but today she is neither. Sure, I can see that she is probably still a tricky sort of a human being, but then, aren't all the best people? Physically compact, like a particularly athletic teenager, she ticks with energy and opinion, like a bomb. She also looks a decade younger than her 53 years; an achievement that is mostly down to her genes, I guess, but which is also testament to the grand irony of the plastic surgery culture: unlike virtually all her contemporaries, she has left her face – the most puckish and determined face in movies – alone, and so – ha! – looks more youthful than any of them. She arrives on foot, having travelled into New York from her home in the suburbs on the train and, tidily installed in her seat, orders a gin and tonic, followed by three courses, and fully caffeinated coffee. Jeez. No wonder she was never keen on the whole "movie star thing".

I sit beside her, and once I've calmed down a bit – I was a giant fan of hers when I was a teenager, and the Joe Cocker theme from An Officer and a Gentleman is playing on a loop in my head – all I can think is that Kate Winslet is in for a rude awakening at some point in the not too distant future. If Debra Winger can't get a decent role lined up, what hope is there for anyone?

[Via Nerve Screengrab]

Once upon a time, Stan Lee, Tom DeFalco and John Buscema laboured mightily and gave the world the story of Galactus vs. Mephisto.

The word 'epic' never seemed more fitting.

Galloway Forest Park has announced plans to apply for certification as Europe's first dark sky park:

The patch of ground in the imposing row of mountains is surrounded by 300 square miles of moorland, woods and lochs that form the rugged wilderness of Galloway Forest Park in southern Scotland, and in a few weeks, officers at the forest will take steps towards making it Europe's first official dark sky park.

It is the profound lack of light that makes the area worthy of recognition and such a spectacular place to look at nature. The spot is so remote that on a cloudless night it offers an unrivalled view of the heavens: a rare chance to see shooting stars and the distant Andromeda galaxy, the aurora borealis and stellar nurseries where suns are born to warm alien planets.

This is going to be part of a wider campaign to popularise astronomy as part of the International Year of Astronony. To my mind, anything that raises awareness of just how thoroughly urban light pollution ruins our view of the skies, and how much there is to see up there, is welcome.¹

[Via BLDGBLOG]

1. Having conquered light pollution, we'll then be in a position to turn our attention to learning how to control the weather. Pretty much every time I've tried to make an effort to watch a meteor shower over the last few years I've been foiled by overcast skies, and I've had it up to here, dammit! ↩

I do like this chess stop motion film.

If chess games had looked more like that when I was a kid perhaps I'd have got interested and stuck with it.

[Via Betsy Devine]

David Mitchell looks back on the year to come:

Gary Glitter loses last shred of academic recognition

In July, the Daily Mail captured the public's imagination with a campaign calling for Gary Glitter's O-Levels to be revoked. In an editorial, the paper argued that it was: "… entirely inappropriate for this monster to be walking around with several B and C grades in a nationally treasured defunct certificate of secondary education. It is offensive that such a man is able to proclaim his understanding of ox-bow lakes and his competent conversational French as if they in any way excuse his actions." A spokesman for the Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination Board said he thought it "unlikely that Glitter could use such knowledge for internet grooming as the syllabus has now changed".

Glitter was eventually stripped of his qualifications and the whole question of academic recognition of paedophiles was extensively debated in the House of Lords where a cross-bench peer commentated that he knew of a retired university professor who "had a wife young enough to be his daughter". This was universally agreed to be weird but slightly sexy.

Further to yesterday's post about ministerial plans to reign in the internet, Tom Watson MP has invited us to use his site to comment on the proposals so he can pass on details of our response to Andy Burnham and Lord Carter.

It's not a formal consultation, obviously, and there's every chance that the ministerial response will be that we should all wait to see the formal proposals instead of reacting to an interview in a newspaper. Even so, I think it's worth taking the earliest possible opportunity to let ministers know what internet users make of the ideas that they're floating.

[Via QwghlmBlog]

Culture Secretary Andy Burnham wants us to "think of the children!"

The Cabinet minister describes the internet as "quite a dangerous place" and says he wants internet-service providers (ISPs) to offer parents "child-safe" web services.

Giving film-style ratings to individual websites is one of the options being considered, he confirms. When asked directly whether age ratings could be introduced, Mr Burnham replies:"Yes, that would be an option. This is an area that is really now coming into full focus."

Would these age ratings apply to an entire site, or to individual pages? Would they apply to, say, newspaper sites?¹ How, exactly, will this help with english-language content hosted in the United States?²

Mr Burnham's internet equivalent of the British Board of Film Classification is going to be awfully busy.

ISPs, such as BT, Tiscali, AOL or Sky could also be forced to offer internet services where the only websites accessible are those deemed suitable for children.

So if your house has an internet connection that is shared between the kids and the parents, how will that work, exactly? Short of reintroducing an AOL/Compuserve-style walled garden where they directly control all content displayed, how can an ISP possibly guarantee that an internet connection is child-safe?

He also says that the Government is considering changing libel laws to give people access to cheap low-cost legal recourse if they are defamed online.

Legal recourse that is "cheap" is, pretty much by definition, not going to involve lawyers and magistrates and court hearings and what have you. Presumably this means placing some sort of obligation on ISPs to take down content unless they're absolutely confident it isn't going to be considered defamatory. Alternatively, perhaps police will be given the power to dispense simple, speedy, summary justice (NB: link is to PDF file) by handing out Fixed Penalty Notices to people who own a website someone has complained about.

It's also worth noting that Burnham justifies all this by citing concerns about "content, harmful content, and copyright.". Presumably whatever infrastructure he envisages for producing a 'child-safe' internet also be expected to produce a libel-free internet that contains no unauthorised copies of copyrighted material.

So, it's a walled garden for every hard-working family in the UK…

1. Will we one day see a child-safe version of The Sun online? ↩
2. The article suggests that Burnham will be talking with the Obama administration about this idea. Good luck with that. ↩

Best. Charity. Fundraiser. Ever?

"Bring your teddy bear along and watch how brave they are when jumping from the roof of St James's Church wearing a harness and parachute."

[...]

£5 per jump for one teddy or £10 for three teddies.

Formation teddy jumping – brilliant!

Go to the Royal Opera House registration page and check out the Title drop-down menu.

I don't even know what some of those options mean. Is 'HSH' 'Her Serene Highness'? 'Her Supreme Highness'?

[Via Ben Goldacre]

Over at Crooked Timber, Daniel Davies contemplates questions of mortality:

[We...] have been working out job-related mortality rates for a variety of professions. To date, we have:
[...]

By definition, all Popes die in office and it is very hard to get any data about Popes having died from job-related illnesses, so we had to scale back the project to estimate the rate of violent job related deaths of Popes. The consensus of historians has seven popes definitely having been murdered, which would give a job-related mortality rate of 476/100k Pope years since Gregory the Great in 540 AD. However …

There are a further ten Popes listed by Wikipedia as possibly having been murdered (this number includes John Paul I, so it apparently doesn't take much in the way of real evidence to get on this list). Adding them in would boost the Papal fatality rate to 1158/100kPy. And furthermore …

The first 25 Popes were martyred. This is surely the very definition of a job related death, and I don't really see much case for excluding them as an outlier[6] – in any long run of data, you're bound to get a couple of periods under which Europe was dominated by a vehemently anti-Christian empire[7]. In order to take this additional data into account, we have to extend the window back to St Peter and 33AD[8], but you still get 2126 job related deaths/100kPy. [...]

The entire post is well worth reading, including the copious footnotes and the comments. Fine work all round.

I'm trying to get back to doing this sort of post more-or-less weekly…

• Fox Fur, a Unicorn, and a Christmas Tree
• Surfing
• Hoy la tarde se ha ido volando…
• Moravian Single Sisters' House, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
• The blizzard of 2008 #9
• Complicated
• Bolte Bridge (B&W)
• Twilight in Tokyo & Mount Fuji decided to put in an appearance

From the British Medical Journal's Christmas issue: Rugby (the religion of Wales) and its influence on the Catholic church: should Pope Benedict XVI be worried?

Introduction

In recent times, an intriguing urban legend has arisen in Wales: "every time Wales win the rugby grand slam, a Pope dies, except for 1978 when Wales were really good, and two Popes died". We used historical data to examine whether the Vatican medical team caring for Pope Benedict XVI should be especially vigilant in this, a year in which Wales won the grand slam. [...]

[Via MetaFilter]

NASA TV are celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Apollo 8's Xmas trip around the Moon by running a series of commemorative programmes over the next couple of days.¹

Can I just say that makes me feel positively ancient to be reminded just how long ago it was that the Apollo program was a going concern, with new missions setting new landmarks every few months…

[Via Planetary Society Blog]

1. For those of us outside the US, NASA TV is available via YouTube, or at the NASA web site. ↩

Sometimes potential tenants can be so unreasonable:

I am a born again Christian. Why is this a problem for people????! I have a house that's MINE and I PAID FOR IT. I also have a basement apartment for rent. It's a great space for I'm charing (sic) very little for it, $480 monthly, for the right tenant. I know it's ILLEGAL to require a Christian in the apartment, against the human rights. That's why I NEVER put this in my ad. Why then does it keep getting taken down? [...]

Read on and all will become clear…¹

[Via GromBlog ]

1. Hint: take a good look at the 'Additional Rules/Conditions' section. ↩

Twilight, abridged:

CAM tries to eat KRISTEN, a poorly directed action sequence ensues, and eventually he is defeated.

PETER FACINELLI
Kristen's been bitten! She'll be turned into a vampire within minutes unless you suck the venom out! I can't do it for some reason or another.

ROBERT PATTINSON
Since the whole novel this is based on is just Mormon propaganda for abstinence and bloodsucking is a metaphor for sex, what exactly is this advocating?

PETER FACINELLI
Look, all I know is that even though it's going to be REALLY HARD, you're just going to have to PULL OUT of her before CLIMAX. The climax of the movie, I mean.

He DOES. It's very DISSATISFYING.

Silent Star Wars.

[Via Word Magazine Blog]

Pictures of (and from) the tallest abandoned structure in Russia, which is:

[...] shorter than Empire State Building, but not too much.

A couple of the photographs taken while ascending the structure fooled me: my first thought was that they'd included a Google Maps image to show the location of the site, but then I'd spot an iced up red strut at the edge of the photo and realise it was the view from way up there.

I downloaded Santastic Four: Super Holiday Mashups, Bootlegs and Remixes a couple of weeks ago, but I only got round to listening to it this evening.

I don't know why I waited this long: the album is great fun, with tracks 4-6¹ being the highlight, IMHO.

1. Whoville: Won't Get Yuled Again, Xmasploitation (Santa's Baddass Revenge) and High Tides And Blocked Peace Pipes. ↩

Phil Plait brings us the Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2008.

Number 4 is my clear favourite: a simply gorgeous shot of spiral galaxy NGC 7331. (The high-resolution version of the picture is even better.)

[Via Carnival of Space, via Planetary Society Blog]

The finest slice of airliner pr0n I've seen in quite a while.¹

[Via pjern, posting to MetaFilter]

1. The aircraft is just another Boeing 747, nothing special. The photographer's vantage point is … something else entirely. ↩