There should be more books in this world with a fore-edge painting:
A FORE-EDGE PAINTING is where the page block is fanned and an image applied to the stepped surface. If the page edges are themselves gilded or marbled, this results in the image disappearing when the book is relaxed. When refanned, the painting magically re-appears.
[Via Rebecca's Pocket]
William Castleman's time-lapse, long exposure film of the core of the centre of our galaxy rising in the Texas sky is quite astonishingly pretty. And awe-inspiring. And a reminder of just how much we urban types are missing out.1
[Via The Long Now Blog]
Judging by the trailer, Guy Ritchie's take on Sherlock Holmes is going to be truly awful. As in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen levels of badness.
I doubt even Robert Downey Jr. can save this one…
[Via kottke.org]
As seen at Making Light's Star Trek comment thread: Star Trek: The Bad Transcript
EXT. IOWA, EIGHT YEARS LATER
GREG GRUNBERG
YOUNG CHRIS PINE, why do you have to be so REBELLIOUS?
NOKIA PRODUCT PLACEMENT
I'm obnoxious!
JIMMY BENNETT
Because I'm a REBEL, man. Speaking of fucking the system, I'm going to drive your car into a canyon.
GREG GUNBERG
A canyon in the middle of Iowa? Has J.J. ABRAMS ever actually been there?
DIRECTOR J.J. ABRAMS
Iowa's near Arizona, right?
JIMMY BENNETT
I hope the audience is enjoying watching me dangle from a cliff by my fingertips, because they're going to be seeing a lot of it.
That isn't the funniest part of the script by a long chalk; it's just that most of the rest involves spoilers of one sort or another. If you've seen the film, you should definitely read the whole thing.
From elsewhere in the same comment thread, a rather wonderful comment from Lee:
[...] The re-imagining that grated on me a bit was Chekov, who wasn't even ON the Enterprise until Season 2 of TOS. I just keep repeating to myself, "It's an alternate universe. It's an alternate universe, dammit!"
And while we're on the subject of retconning and AUs, I'll toss in this gem from a review of the movie by ironychan on LJ:
Today I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if a million Trekkies cried out as one, lamenting, "they erased everything and started over from the beginning! All the stories I loved never happened!"
This was followed by a second disturbance, as if a million fans of Marvel and DC comics rolled their eyes as one, replying, "CRY MOAR, N00B."
*sigh* Too true!
The influx of 'forty-niners' who descended upon the port of San Francisco in the wake of the gold rush left their mark on the city:
In 1847, the small settlement of Yerba Buena, which had just recently been claimed as United States territory, changed its name to San Francisco. At that time, the town consisted of just 79 buildings and a population of less than 800. But the following year, in 1848, gold was discovered nearby, and as the area's major port, San Francisco rapidly ballooned in size. By the end of 1849, the population had skyrocketed to 100,000, making it the largest city in California. [...] San Francisco soon averaged 30 new houses built – and two murders committed – each day. And a plot of San Francisco real estate that cost $16 in 1847 sold for $45,000 just 18 months later.
Meanwhile, many of the new arrivals in the port of San Francisco headed directly to the hills to search for gold. In fact, more than 200 ships were completely abandoned and left to rot in the Bay as their crews and passengers went off to seek their fortunes. This both caused and solved a problem. The empty ships were clogging up the harbor, while the rapidly growing downtown business area needed room to expand. So the townsfolk took matters into their own hands and decided to put the ships to good use. Some of the ships were salvaged for their wood, which came in handy as the city had to rebuild itself from no fewer than six major fires that nearly wiped it out between 1849 and 1851. Other ships were towed onto the beach and turned into buildings – a hotel, a jail, a store, or a warehouse. But quite a few of them were sunk intentionally in order to fill in the cove.
[Via MetaFilter]
Popular words in The Times 1985 – 2009.
Given the current kerfuffle over MPs' expenses claims, I'd imagine that the line charting the steady rise in the use of the word "sorry" is going to take a sudden uptick over the remainder of 2009.
It's dispiriting to see the same old lousy ideas come round again with every new online medium/forum someone develops. This week, it's keyword filtering in Second Life:
Meaning, in essence, if [Linden Labs, the operators of Second Life] won't change their plans/implementation of their adult content restrictions, I will not be allowed to call a tit a tit anymore.
[Cue jokes about people living in Scunthorpe having to keep it to themselves and so on, ad infinitum...]
[Via The Sideshow]
The process of making 10cc's I'm Not In Love was every bit as colmplicated as you'd imagine if you're familiar with the track:
"[Singer/guitarist Eric Stewart said...] 'Well, we're gonna need something instrumental in there to sing the whole backing track to,' and he said 'Yeah, we'll keep a rhythm going with something simple; a bass drum, whatever. We can have a guitar just giving us chords, but otherwise it could be all voices.' I said 'Right, there's just four of us to do the whole thing with voices. How are we going to do it?' And it was Lol who then said 'What about loops? Tape loops. Endless voice loops. We can make endless loops of a chromatic scale.' I said 'Right. OK, Jesus, this is really off the wall.'
"I think they'd been at the wacky baccy at this time, and it took me a couple of hours to get my head around the idea. But then I figured how we could physically make the loops and set up the studio to do that. I rigged up a rotary capstan on a mic stand, and the tape loop had to be quite long because the splice edit point on the loop would go through the heads and there'd be a little blip each time it did. So, I had to make the loop as long as I could for it to take a long, long time to get around to the splice again. That way you wouldn't really hear the splice/blip. We're talking about a loop of about 12 feet in length going around the tape heads, around the tape-machine capstans, coming out away from the Studer stereo recorder to a little capstan on a mic stand that had to be dead in line vertically with the heads of the Studer. It was like one of those continuous belts that you see in old factories, running loads of machines, and we had to keep it rigid by putting some blocks on the mic stand legs to keep it dead, dead steady.
"It worked, but the loop itself – and this is where it gets interesting – had to be made up from multiple voices we'd done on the 16-track machine. Each note of a chromatic scale was sung 16 times, so we got 16 tracks of three people singing for each note. That was Kevin, Lol and GiGi standing around a valve Neumann U67 in the studio, singing 'Aahhh' for around three weeks. I'm telling you; three bloody weeks. We eventually had 48 voices for each note of the chromatic scale, and since there are 13 notes in the chromatic scale, this made a total of 624 voices. My next problem was how to get all that into the track.
[Via MetaFilter]
STS-125 Atlantis and the Hubble Space Telescope captured as they pass in front of the Sun.
Wolfram|Alpha turns out to be worryingly good at identifying connections between apparently unrelated sets of facts.
[Via Qwghlm]
Matthew Baldwin's reaction upon seeing the new Star Trek was delightfully idiosyncratic:
As I watched this film last Saturday, and Mr. Spock walked onto the bridge with his stiff demeanor and his formal language, my initial reaction was: "Oh man, that guy is so Asperger's."
I promise you, the full essay is well worth a read.
Random thoughts after viewing JJ Abrams' take on Star Trek:
9/10: would buy from this seller again.
The playground pile-on from The Matrix Reloaded, reenacted by puppies!
[Via Making Light: Particles]
Nick Hornby on being less famous than you'd imagine:
[The...] films of 'High Fidelity', 'Fever Pitch' and 'About A Boy' haven't helped slake my unquenchable thirst for global recognition. Indeed, I once found myself involved in a mortifyingly undignified argument with the person sitting next to me on a plane, who disputed my claim that I'd written 'High Fidelity'. 'I've watched that movie loads of times,' she said. 'If it was a book, I'd have noticed on the credits.' I am used to anonymity; being called a fantasist was a new low.
Apparently, purchasers of Tuscan Whole Milk at Amazon are really, really into Howard Waldrop.
Who knew?
No doubt this bizarre plea bargain will inspire a scriptwriter or two over the next few months:
A Maryland woman involved with a group described as a religious cult pleaded guilty in the starvation death of her son, but insisted that the charges be dropped when he is resurrected.
[...]
The condition was made a part of Ria Ramkissoon's plea agreement, officials said. She entered the plea Monday in Baltimore, Maryland, to a first-degree felony count of child abuse resulting in death, her attorney, Steven Silverman, said Tuesday.
Ramkissoon, a member of a group called One Mind Ministries, believes Javon Thompson, her year-old son, will rise again, and as part of her plea agreement, authorities agreed to the clause.
[...]
In court Monday, it was clarified that the "resurrection clause" would apply only in the case of Javon's actual resurrection — not a perceived reincarnation, Silverman said.
[Via Ben Goldacre]
After a night of catching up with the most recent episode of Lost, my wife and I were drifting off to sleep in our bed, that raft of marriage from which couples weather the storms and calm waters of life together.
"G'night, Kate," I said.
"What?" Dawn asked.
"I called you Kate. I just wanted to see if I'm Jack or Sawyer."
"Oh." A moment spun out in silence. "G'night, Hurley."
Cross-cultural relationships: not as easy as you'd think…
After two years of dating a clean-shaven, nonsmoking Frenchman, I can attest there is some truth in the movies. Yes, there is romance and sex appeal. We also consume a great deal of bread; however, the movies don't reveal the more important truths about dating a foreigner. For example, they don't mention the shock you will experience when your boyfriend – who, like you was born in the '70s – looks up from a magazine and asks, "What the hell is the Brady Bunch?" – pronouncing "Brady" with a short "a." Or that he will be entirely unamused by any jokes that feature Gary Coleman. Or that he will be unable to share your disdain of the Grateful Dead and all its patchouli-scented associations, because shockingly, albeit delightfully, he has never heard of the Grateful Dead.
