Sage advice from Robert Brady:

If one is swinging a cat with any sense of urgency, one should ideally have a short stiff cat and a large target.

Yes, there is a story behind that line.

Musical highlight of the weekend: Joan Osborne's performance (with more than a little help from the surviving Funk Brothers) of What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted, from a BBC4 showing of Standing in the Shadows of Motown.

Sadly, at present the programme¹ isn't available on the BBC iPlayer. As it happens, the Standing in the Shadows of Motown soundtrack album isn't available at the UK branch of iTunes, nor at Amazon UK's MP3 store.

Osborne's cover of What Becomes of the Broken Hearted is available on one her own albums, Breakfast in Bed, but as an Album Only track.² Happily, Breakfast in Bed has been sufficiently heavily discounted (£3.49) that I'm willing to pick it up in order to get my hands on the track I really wanted in the first place.

Whether this is a sign that the music industry's strategy of heavily discounting back catalogue is working – they did get a sale out of me, after all – or just a function of my reluctance to hit the P2P networks to get my music is the £12 billion³ question.

1. Which also featured The Funk Brothers backing Osborne's cover of Heatwave, as well as performances by the likes of Chaka Khan, Ben Harper, Bootsy Collins and Meshell Ndegeocello. ↩
2. It's on Spotify, but only to stream and not to buy unless, once again, I'm willing to buy the whole album. I want a copy on my iPod, so that's not ideal. ↩
3. I suspect that figure was arrived at by the sort of rigourous calculations that gave us claims that a few days of heavy snowfall earlier this year cost the UK economy £1.2 billion. Because you absolutely can substitute a potential purchase for every 'unauthorised' listen to a music track. You know, just like nobody in the UK ever cut a few corners to catch up with their workload once the snow cleared. Either that, or to this day the entire UK economy is still three days behind schedule. ↩

I've seen lots of film of rockets exploding after they leave the launchpad. This film of a US Air Force Delta II rocket exploding 13 seconds after launch goes a step further, showing the carnage at ground level after the big bang.

(Note to self: if ever I visit a rocket launch, I should definitely travel to the launch site by public transport.)

Cassetteboy vs The Bloody Apprentice.

Juvenile? No question. Funny? Hell, yes!

(NB: audio is NSFW.)

[Via TV Today]

Possibly the best photograph of the surface of Mercury I've ever seen.

Brian Eno has lit up the exterior of the Sydney Opera House.

You might imagine that the title 30 Awesomely Bad Unicorn Tattoos: A Gallery tells you all you need to know.

You'd be wrong: believe me, you have to see with your own eyes just how bad 'awesomely bad' can be.

[Via Bifurcated Rivets]

The Daily Mail Dictionary:

A-levels: a) Exams passed only by attractive 18 yr old girls. b) When those from the working-class or of a dusky complexion get three A grades in sciences & maths this proves the exams are useless and not worth the paper they're written on… however, when a minor member of the Royal Family gets two D's in Art History and Poetry this shows how incredibly clever the upper-classes are due to their superior genes.

[...]

Zero Tolerance: A tough, no-nonsense approach to law and order that all police forces should follow; except for motoring offences which is a nanny state victimisation of law-abiding people by officers who should be concentrating on catching real criminals.

[Via LinkMachineGo!]

The Anti-Terrorist Fantasy Dream Team is on the case:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

WASHINGTON, DC – Seeking to quell fears of terrorists somehow breaking out of America's top-security prisons and wreaking havoc on the defenseless heartland, President Barack Obama moved quickly to announce an Anti-Terrorist Strike Force headed by veteran counterterrorism agent Jack Bauer and mutant superhero Wolverine. Already dubbed a "dream team," their appointment is seen by experts as a crucial step in reducing the mounting incidents of national conservatives and congressional Democrats crapping their pants.

"I believe a fictional threat is best met with decisive fictional force," explained President Obama. "Jack Bauer and Wolverine are among the very best we have when in comes to combating fantasy foes." Mr. Bauer said, "We're quite certain that our prisons are secure. Osama bin Laden and his agents wouldn't dare attempt a break-out, and would fail miserably if they tried. But I love this country. And should Lex Luthor, Magneto or the Loch Ness Monster attack, we'll be there to stop them." [...]

[Via Bruce Schneier]

Buffy Summers might be about to return to the big screen:

A new incarnation of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" could be coming to the big screen.

"Buffy" creator Joss Whedon isn't involved and it's not set up at a studio, but Roy Lee and Doug Davison of Vertigo Entertainment are working with original movie director Fran Rubel Kuzui and her husband, Kaz Kuzui, on what is being labeled a remake or relaunch, but not a sequel or prequel.

While Whedon is the person most associated with "Buffy," Kuzui and her Kuzui Enterprises have held onto the rights since the beginning, when she discovered the "Buffy" script from then-unknown Whedon. She developed the script while her husband put together the financing to make the 1992 movie, which was released by Fox.

[...]

The new "Buffy" film, however, would have no connection to the TV series, nor would it use popular supporting characters like Angel, Willow, Xander or Spike. Vertigo and Kuzui are looking to restart the story line without trampling on the beloved existing universe created by Whedon, putting the parties in a similar situation faced by Paramount, J.J. Abrams and his crew when relaunching "Star Trek."

So far, so bad. But wait…

One of the underlying ideas of "Buffy" allows Vertigo and Kuzui to do just that: that each generation has its own vampire slayer to protect it. The goal would be to make a darker, event-sized movie that would, of course, have franchise potential.

I rather enjoyed the various Tales of the Slayer(s)¹ stories I read, most of which weren't written by Joss Whedon either.

Admittedly the Tales of the Slayer(s) pieces frequently worked best as vignettes,² but I could see a film working pretty well if it stayed well away from the time period covered in the TV series and told a meaty enough story that simply used some of the lore established by Whedon as a backdrop without trying to ape the setting of the TV series; a new Slayer doesn't need a knockoff of Xander or Willow or Cordelia. Half of the point of the TV series was that Slayers normally worked alone, after all.

Of course, the film would still need to be well-written and attract a decent cast and what have you, but if they can resist the temptation to remake or reboot the TV series it needn't be a terrible idea. Suffice to say, I'm intrigued…

[Via MetaFilter]

1. Tales of the Slayers was a comic; Tales of the Slayer was the title of a series of short story collections. ↩
2. See, for example, Jane Espenson's Presumption: a lovely little story whose central conceit wouldn't survive being stretched over 90 minutes. ↩

In the midst of a lengthy description of the roots of the current financial crisis, John Lanchester just couldn't help but lapse into sarcasm:

All of this [i.e. Lanchester's account of the history of the Royal Bank of Scotland and the series of takeovers and mergers that made them Too Big To Fail.] makes RBS's corporate report for 2007, published just weeks before the bank had to go back to the markets for more capital, a document of unusual interest. Northrop Frye somewhere defines 'irony' as involving a state of affairs in which words have a different meaning from their apparent sense. This can be achieved by the audience's knowing something the speaker doesn't: so the speaker is saying one thing but we are understanding another. The RBS corporate report is like that. (So are their slogans: 'Make it happen.' Make what happen? A £100 billion tab for the taxpayer?) The section on corporate citizenship at the beginning is particularly good value. The firm is involved in plans to increase general levels of financial education. 'When people have been educated about money and how to work with financial services firms they are more likely to make the right decisions and to avoid difficulties.' That's true, but you can also just rob post offices. 'RBS is a responsible company. We carry out rigorous research so that we can be confident we know the issues that are most important to our stakeholders and we take practical steps to respond to what they tell us. Then occasionally, we blow all that shit off, fire up some crystal meth, and throw money around with such crazed abandon that it helps destroy the public finances of the world's fifth biggest economy.' See if you can guess which of those sentences is not in the report.

Creepy and cute.

[Via The Ephemerist, via Blog of a Bookslut]

The Times reports on something that – their headline notwithstanding – is more of a 'Japanese problem' than a 'Google problem': Google Earth maps out discrimination against burakumin caste in Japan…

Despite its ambition to be the cartographer of the internet age, the search engine has lumbered into one of the darkest corners of Japan – the bigotry of mainstream Japanese society towards the burakumin, the "filthy mob", whose ancestors fell outside the caste system of the 17th-century samurai era.

By allowing old maps to be overlaid on satellite images of Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto on its Google Earth service, the search engine shows how the old ghettos relate to the 21st-century streets.

That, critics say, is perfect ammunition to hurt descendants of the people who lived there 400 years ago. [...]

Short of vetting every attempt to create a KML file or removing the ability to add overlays to the maps they provide, what on earth¹ can Google be expected to do about this? Add some keyword filters?

One more thing:

Under pressure to diffuse (sic) criticism, the search engine has asked the owners of the woodblock print maps to remove the legend that identifies the ghetto with an old term that translates loosely as "scum town".

That's "defuse", FFS!

[Via Net Effect]

1. No pun intended! ↩

Stuff You Wouldn't Believe If It Showed Up In A Film Script (part 53 in an ongoing series): the first TV image of Mars ever was made with crayons.

The people at the JPL were so excited to receive the images that they couldn't wait for them to be processed by the lab's imager. As the first picture was beamed down as a stream of 8-bit numbers—each point indicating a brightness point—they thought of a quick way to get an image straight away: Print the numbers indicating brightness in paper strips, put them together, and color them with pastel crayons.

[Via Kevan Davis]

Quote of the day (lifted from Decca Aitkenhead's interview with Clive James in today's Guardian):

"A writer is someone for whom writing is harder than it is for other people."
— Thomas Mann

I Will Always Have Been Back: Toward a Grand Unified Theory of Schwarzenegger…

Arnold Schwarzenegger was one of the first action movie stars of the 80s. Perhaps he was one of the first action movie stars, period. His predecessors to that title – Steve McQueen? Clint Eastwood? – had dramatic credits to their name as well as escapist fare (Papillon, Play Misty For Me, etc). But Arnold Schwarzenegger will never direct Million Dollar Baby. Explosive action movies sit at both the beginning and end of his range.

Consequently, not many critics take Schwarzenegger seriously as an actor. He's a muscle-bound lunk, they claim. He's nothing but a stony face and some catchphrases. He always plays the same role. But what if that's deliberate? [...]

[Fx: applause.]

[Via MetaFilter]

Last.fm stand accused of allowing their parent company, CBS, to pass data about what tracks Last.fm's users have been playing to the RIAA.

Last.fm have flatly denied doing any such thing, but appear to be hamstrung by the fact that their corporate masters have yet to issue a statement backing up their denials.

Three observations:

1. It's quite possible that Last.fm are sincere in their denials, but will be hung out to dry by CBS. That's the drawback of selling your company to a conglomerate with fingers in several pies.
2. If I read one more comment to the effect that "If CBS/Last.fm don't sue Techcrunch for libel then we can only assume that the allegations are correct" I'll scream. Lawsuits are expensive and can take a long time to resolve; it's quite possible that some CBS executive will conclude that the cost/benefit analysis favours letting the story die down for lack of further evidence one way or the other and waiting to see if Last.fm haemorrhages users. The priorities of the management of CBS are not necessary aligned with yours. Or mine. Or those of Last.fm's management. And they're under no obligation to explain themselves to us, unless and until they find themselves in court.
3. My favourite take on all this came courtesy of MeFi user verb:
   

   My theory? A service that deals with streaming music on the Internet today is balancing between two very tricky groups. The RIAA wants them to die in a fire, and has the ability to make life difficult. The general Stuff Wants To Be Free crowd wants the RIAA to die in a fire, and views music sharing services as either 'Friends in the struggle' or 'Collaborators with the RIAA.'

   Most services survive by dancing carefully between these two constituencies and NOT being drawn into a fight that pits them with one and against the other. Deny, deny, deny, and keep your head low whenever you can. That's the way you (hope to) survive long enough to develop a working business model.

I'm not planning to delete my Last.fm profile just yet, but I'll be watching for future developments.

[Via MetaFilter]

Nine years after Godfrey, it's come to this:

Nadine Dorries, the Conservative frontbencher who claimed the Daily Telegraph's revelations on expenses could drive MPs to suicide, has had her blog shut down by lawyers acting for the newspaper.

[...] She had claimed that MPs were being "tortured" by the Telegraph's dripfeed of revelations.

The newspaper is understood to have acted after she made further allegations concerning the motivation of the newspaper's proprietors, Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay. Withers, the lawyers acting for the Barclay brothers, are understood to have instructed the takedown, invoking the acceptable user policy used by internet service providers to protect themselves against libel action provoked by comments on websites they host.

I hope Dorries will repeat her allegations under the protection of parliamentary privilege.

[Via Ben Goldacre]

Apparently bees from hives in Newcastle commute across the River Tyne just like the rest of us:

[Beekeeper Ian Wallace...] said: "Bees don't like crossing bodies of water, it throws their navigation. However Newcastle has lots of bridges, so the bees would fly from the roof, cross the bridge, collect honey and nectar and come back again across the bridge."

Alan Stern discusses the history of NASA's attempts to find evidence of the presence of water ice on the Moon and details the steps NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will be taking over the next year to resolve the issue:

What is clear about lunar polar ice is that it is hard to confirm with any single technique from orbit. And although it would be much easier to confirm with a properly equipped polar rover, such a mission would be far more expensive than LRO and is not yet on the books. NASA planners putting together the payload for LRO recognized both of these facts, and assembled an armada of five separate instruments that could search for the ice from orbit, each using an independent and complimentary technique.