Today's APOD: The Milky Way Over the Badlands. Nice.

A welcome moment of plain speaking in the increasingly surreal debate in the United States about health care:

Wingnut: Why do you continue to support a Nazi policy, as Obama has expressly supported this policy, why are you supporting it?

The Honorable Barney Frank: When you ask me that question, I am gonna revert to my ethnic heritage, and answer your question with a question. On what planet do you spend most of your time?…

[...]

You want me to answer the question? As you stand there with a picture of the president defaced to look like Hitler, and compare the effort to increase health care to the Nazis, my answer to you is as I said before, it is a tribute to the 1st Amendment that this kind of vile, contemptible nonsense is so freely propagated. Ma'am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table – I have no interest in doing it.

[Via Slacktivist]

A few weeks ago I wondered how Scott Rosenberg would tackle the question of what the term 'weblog' means in his new book about the history of blogging. As it turns out, he's just provided an insight into his thinking on that point in a post about whether the term 'blogger' still has any meaning:

"Blogger" confuses us today because we've conflated two different meanings of "blogging." There is the formal definition: personal website, reverse chronological order, lots of links. Then there is what I would call the ideological definition: a bundle of associations many observers made with blogs in their formative years, having to do with DIY authenticity, amateur self-expression, defiant "disintermediation" (cutting out the media middleman), and so on.

To my mind, that 'ideological' definition covers just about any type of personal web site: the 'formal' definition, by comparison, is actually a useful way to decide whether a given web site is a weblog or an online journal or just a home to a collection of essays about the author's chosen interest. I'm not saying any of those forms of online expression is superior to the others; it's more that having a meaningful label to apply to a site helps shape the reader's perceptions and expectations. If I come across a weblog, I can probably expect at least moderately frequent updates and lots of links offsite, sometimes with some commentary and occasionally with no context for the link beyond the fact that the author thinks that whatever is at the other end of the link is worth pointing out. If it's an online journal it'll possibly be updated at infrequent intervals, but the subject matter will probably focus on a small range of the author's enthusiasms and preoccupations so it'll quickly become clear to me whether I share enough of them to make it worth my while. If it's a personal site there are likely to be bursts of activity rather than a steady stream of posts, and my interest in that site will be determined by whether I find either the subject matter, the style or the clarity of thought on display to be to my liking.

To take a concrete example: I've occasionally thought about repurposing the old thebeard.org domain where this weblog used to live¹ as a home for material that I don't think fits this site – comments on what I'm watching and reading, notes about OS X and the software I use, the occasional post about whatever else is on my mind, that sort of thing – but if I did build up a collection of posts on the site I wouldn't dream of calling that a 'weblog', nor would what I was doing be considered 'blogging'. It'd be the quintessential personal site.

1. The older content is still there, but I imported the entries generated using Movable Type to this site years ago. I keep meaning to find a way to import all the manually created entries too, so I can redirect all Sore Eyes-related traffic here and dedicate thebeard.org to being something completely different. ↩

Smoke rings can be such fun.

[Via GromBlog]

xkcd on Branding.

I'm sure I remember seeing at least one episode of Roommates (episodes 1, 2, 3) back when it was first posted, but I don't seem to have linked to it here at the time.

A 2009 remake/sequel would presumably feature the addition of a next door neighbour called Bing with a flashy car, a plush apartment and an urge to make new friends. Whether this would make 'Google' seem a more or less sympathetic character is left as an exercise for the reader…

[Via swissmiss]

Headline of the week: Rabbis fly over Israel in hopes of eliminating swine flu.

On Monday morning an Arkia airlines plane took off from Ben Gurion Airport carrying rabbis and kabbalists and flew over the country in a flight aimed at preventing the swine flu virus from spreading in Israel through prayers.

"The purpose of the flight was to stop the epidemic, thus preventing further deaths," explained Rabbi Yitzhak Batzri whose father, Rabbi David Batzri had initiated the flight. "We are certain that because of our prayers danger is already behind us," he added. [...]

[Via FP Passport]

The World's 50 Freakiest Animals naturally fall into three groups:

1. Cute ones: the Proboscis Monkey, Pygmy Marmoset, and Angora Rabbit.
2. Ugly yet neat-looking ones: the Giant Soft-Shelled Turtle, Dumbo Octopus, Pangolin, and Elephant Shrew.
3. Utter horrors, the mere sight of which will prevent me from sleeping tonight: the Wrinkle Faced Bat, Star-Nosed Mole, and the Hagfish.

[Via Making Light]

There's caring about the Eurovision Song Contest, and then there's this:

Rovshan Nasirli, a young Eurovision fan living in the Azerbaijani capital Baku, says he was summoned this week to the country's National Security Ministry — to explain why he had voted for Armenia during this year's competition in May.

"They wanted an explanation for why I voted for Armenia. They said it was a matter of national security," Nasirli said. "They were trying to put psychological pressure on me, saying things like, 'You have no sense of ethnic pride. How come you voted for Armenia?' They made me write out an explanation, and then they let me go."

Don't anyone go giving Andrew Lloyd Webber ideas…

[Via A Fistful Of Euros, via No Rock and Roll Fun]

A timeline of global media scare stories. Judging by that chart, we're living in the Decade of Diseases.

I wonder why the chart doesn't show the numbers for stories about 'terrorism'.¹ Isn't that truly the 'scare story' of the last decade by a country mile?

[Via Waxy.org]

1. Be that articles about actual terrorist acts, or stories using the prospect of terrorist acts as a justification for whatever course of action the author advocates. ↩

Twittering Woodstock:

@slystone Sorry, I'm gonna miss you. I don't know if you can take me any higher than I am right now.
2:49 AM Aug 17th from TwitterFon

[Via Idolator]

The 21st century is a very strange place:

It seems the two London Bridges, the current and the later are on Twitter and have been having a bit of a childish spat! [...]

There's something strangely irresistible about the trailer for Legion.

The look of the film isn't anything special: a cross between Constantine and Max Payne.

The creepy special effects are nothing more than par for the course nowadays.

The cast is OK.¹

The plot sounds horribly cliched…

An out-of-the-way diner becomes the unlikely battleground for the survival of the human race. When God loses faith in Mankind, he sends his legion of angels to bring on the Apocalypse. Humanity's only hope lies in a group of strangers trapped in a desert diner and the Archangel Michael (Paul Bettany).

All in all, it sounds as if Christopher Walken, Viggo Mortensen and Eric Stoltz did all this so much better back in 1995.

And yet … and yet … somehow this trailer has made me really want to see this film.

1. I've always liked Dennis Quaid, and Adrianne Palicki's turn in Friday Night Lights is one of the highlights of on my favourite current TV shows, so I'm happy to see her getting more work. Paul Bettany does nothing for me, though. ↩

The Michael Jackson Monument Design Competition:

What is the appropriate scale to remember a man who operated on everything possible – from the studied renovation of his own human form to the creation of an architectural-scale wunderkamer at Neverland Ranch? What design proposal can top his own unrealized plans to construct a 50-foot robotic replica of himself that roams the Las Vegas desert shooting laser beams out of its eyes?

An excellent question, that…

[Via cityofsound]

Drew Olbrich puts things in perspective:

Usually when you see wacky space pictures, the Moon is unrealistically close to the Earth. What's up with that?

I wanted to get a better sense of exactly how the Earth and Moon would appear from an observer in space. [...]

The image he's produced makes a rather nice desktop wallpaper.

[Via MetaFilter]

David Byrne's latest post, describing the logistics of touring by bus, ended with an surprising (to me) detail:

Our US busses ran on biodiesel. Not sure if the European ones did. That meant we'd book refueling appointments based on estimated fuel consumption. Local fuel tankers would meet us at pre-arranged places and times, as most gas stations don't stock the stuff… yet.

I've heard of air forces having plan long-range missions around the availability of in-flight refuelling; it never occurred to me that eco-conscious musicians might have to do the same.¹

1. OK, so it's not quite the same thing. As far as I can gather, David Byrne and his band didn't end up refuelling their tour bus whilst travelling along the motorway. ↩

This story at Pajiba gave me a very nasty turn:

"And the best part: HAL, the evil computer – voice of Will Smith. Him and space, man, worked for ID4, worked for MIB, I could even see a teaser with nothing but him, looking like an iPod or something until his red eye pops up and he goes, 'Aw, HAL nah.' We could spin the entire campaign around that line! Better yet, he could remix that tired-ass theme song, make it like 'Thus Grooved Zarathustra' or whatever. And if he's not willing to do it, I'm sure that Moby's not busy until Bourne 4 comes around."

Thankfully, they're just kidding around…

Having found much to like now that True Blood has shown up on FX, Andrew Collins mentions in passing that Channel 4 are about to repeat the Angel mistake of 2000:

Interested? If you don't have FX, [True Blood is] being shown on C4 later this year, except with certain cuts made to the sex and violence so that it can be shown at 9pm. Drained of a certain amount of blood, then.

Why they can't just put True Blood on at 10pm or 11pm and let it go out uncut is beyond me. Let those who don't want to wait up that late record it.

All high street bookstores should look as good as the Libraria da Vila in Sao Paulo.

It's like a TARDIS for books.

[Via Subtraction]

Wow! Just … wow…

[Via James Nicoll]