The City of Bozeman, Montana apparently wants to know everything there is to know about job applicants:

[A waiver statement applicants must sign gives...] the City permission to conduct an investigation into the person's "background, references, character, past employment, education, credit history, criminal or police records."

"Please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.," the City form states. There are then three lines where applicants can list the Web sites, their user names and log-in information and their passwords.
[Emphasis added]

Could it be that this is actually a cunning plan to identify potential employees who are too gullible to let within a mile of the city's computer systems?

[Via jwz]

Best. T-Shirt caption. Ever!

Finally, someone puts the Segway to good use.

[Via GromBlog]

Lord Carlile's annual review of anti-terrorism legislation contained good news for harrassed photographers:

[Lord Carlile said...] It should be emphasised that photography of the police by the media or amateurs remains as legitimate as before, unless the photograph is likely to be of use to a terrorist. This is a high bar.

It is inexcusable for police officers ever to use this provision to interfere with the rights of individuals to take photographs.

The police must adjust to the undoubted fact that the scrutiny of them by members of the public is at least proportional to any increase in police powers – given the ubiquity of photograph and video-enabled mobile phones.
[Emphasis added]

That last paragraph is particularly welcome. To put it another way: "With great power there must also come – great responsibility."

[Via Memex 1.1]

News from an (alternate?) future, courtesy – sort of – of the International Herald Tribune, with a little help from Greenpeace.

[Via Long Now Blog]

Can you guess which A-list film stars have never made a sequel? Fewer than you'd think, I'd imagine.

It does rather depend on how you define the A-list, of course. Kate Winslet isn't included, for example. Ditto Sean Penn. Both have bagged Oscars recently and been nominated multiple times over the last decade, so I find it difficult to understand why they wouldn't be deemed to be A-list.¹ I can't think of a sequel featuring either actor.

It's tempting to suggest that this is because those two actors tend not to go for blockbuster scripts, preferring to do relatively small films with juicy parts for them, but it could just be pot luck. For all I know Sean Penn just missed out to Gary Oldman for the part of Jim Gordon in Christopher Nolan's Batman films, and Kate Winslet had a scheduling conflict that prevented her from taking up the lead role in the Underworld movies that went to Kate Beckinsale.²

1. The short answer is, 'Because the Forbes list Movieline based their article on didn't include them.' ↩
2. For the record, I'm not seriously suggesting either actor was up for those roles. The point is that something like those decisions could quite plausibly have landed either actor in a sequel, just as Julia Roberts could have a record unblemished by sequels to this day if the Ocean's Eleven remake had flopped, or even if she'd simply had a scheduling conflict that prevented her returning for the sequel. ↩

Is the Land Grant trophy, awarded since 1993 to the victor in the annual tie between the Penn State Nittany Lions and the Michigan State Spartans, the strangest looking trophy in modern sport?

The Royal British Legion's open letter to Nick Griffin is a doozy:

We couldn't help but notice that there was egg on your face (and on your suit jacket) on the day after you were elected MEP for North West England.

Please don't leave egg on ours.

You wore a Poppy lapel badge during your news conference to celebrate your election victory. This was in direct contravention of our polite request that you refrain from politicising one of the nation's most treasured and beloved symbols.

The Poppy is the symbol of sacrifices made by British Armed Forces in conflicts both past and present and it has been paid for with blood and valour. True valour deserves respect regardless of a person's ethnic origin, and everyone who serves or has served their country deserves nothing less.

[...]

On May 27th, 2009, the National Chairman of The Royal British Legion wrote to you privately requesting that you desist from wearing the Poppy or any other emblem that might be associated with the Legion at any of your public appearances during the European Parliamentary election campaign.

He appealed to your sense of honour. But you have responded by continuing to wear the poppy. So now we're no longer asking you privately. [...]

[Via Prog Gold]

Not something you see every day: a barrage balloon brought down by a nuclear weapon.

[Via Wikipedia, via deputydog]

John Cantwell on Architecture in Ghostbusters 1 and 2:

[...] Outcasts from the start, the Ghostbusters are discredited by their peers and doubted even by their first customer, the lovely Dana Barrett. They can only secure start-up funding for their business by mortgaging Ray's childhood home. The fact that no one believes in the Ghostbusters is treated, by them, as incidental; their confidence as a group rarely flags, and there are few moments of hesitation among the three once they decide to become professional paranormal investigators and eliminators. Rather, the Ghostbusters embrace their outsider status, and gladly appeal to New York's crazies and paranoids. Their slogan is, "We're ready to believe you."

The Ghostbusters' quest is not for recognition, but simply for the right to exist, to be weird, to have different theories and succeed. Standing in their way are several forces of the "establishment" – from Dean Yeager, to Walter Peck of the Environmental Protection Agency, to the Mayor – who repeatedly try to shut the Ghostbusters down. This battle against the establishment, so central to the Ghostbusters' story, is reflected throughout the film by architectural setting. [...]

[Via Subtraction]

The trailer for The Final Destination makes it abundantly clear that the new producers¹ know exactly what the audience expects from the series and have no interest in messing with the formula.

As a rule, I'm sceptical of the rush to make 3D films, but I've got to admit that they couldn't have picked a better franchise to demonstrate how much lowbrow fun a 3D film can be. Just think how much more impact (sorry!) that flying car tyre will have when seen in 3D.

1. This time round neither of the series' creators, X Files alumni James Wong and Glen Morgan, is involved. ↩

Further to the hotlinked images story, the creator of the images describes what happened next.

[Via Qwghlm]

Lucy and Bart. Eerie.

[Via swissmiss]

How can I resist Atlas Obscura? The subtitle tells you all you need to know: "A Compendium of The World's Wonders, Curiosities and Esoterica."

[Via Pruned]

From The Belarusian Army's Tough-Guy Games:

This soldier is marking the 90th anniversary of the creation of the Belarusian army by lying on a bed of nails and having a comrade break a giant cement block on his chest.

I dread to think what sort of 'celebration' the poor bugger will have to endure when their centenary comes round.

I know I keep saying this, but I really must do this more often:

• Snow Ghosts
• DSC00465
• Football at sunset in Lima, Peru
• Smile
• Moravian Single Sisters' House, Side View
• Snow Capped
• Long wave
• Ganchovets station #1
• Dandelion 5
• Dawn
• Knot
• Tiger & Lemon Sharks, Tiger Beach

Note to the boards of directors of W H Smith and Penguin: when you've pissed off Michael Palin, it's almost certainly a sign that you're Doing Something Wrong…

The Office of Fair Trading is due to look into the deal between WH Smith and Penguin following complaints about the bookseller's controversial plans to remove overseas travel guides from any other publisher from its shelves, with Michael Palin and Margaret Drabble adding their voices to the growing opposition. Speaking to the Guardian, Margaret Drabble branded the deal "ludicrous", and said that Penguin "should be ashamed", while Michael Palin called it an "unacceptable restriction of traveller's choice".

"No guide is ever perfect," Palin continued, "and the ideal situation is to pick and choose from all the alternatives available. If this is indeed their policy, I certainly wouldn't go to Smith's before my next journey." [...]

[Via Memex 1.1]

I've never heard the term 'nail house' before, though as it turns out I have seen photographs of a couple of them.

The house in Changsha, China¹ looks especially surreal, not least because in one of the pictures it looks as if there's another remnant of the original street a couple of hundred yards down the road.

1. The fifth house pictured in the linked article. ↩

Who'd have thought that providing technical support for a weighbridge could be so complicated?

More weapons-grade stupidity from astrologer Satya Harvey, commenting on JAXA's plan to crash-land their lunar probe Kaguya in order to observe the composition of the debris thrown up by the impact:

Purposefully crashing something into the moon just to watch what happens is akin to a schoolboy cutting up a live frog to see what makes it jump. It is an example of the domination of the left-brained rational scientific approach over the intuitive.

Did these scientists talk to the moon? Tell her what they were doing? Ask her permission? Show her respect?

[Via Ben Goldacre]