On the prospect that Marvel Entertainment are planning to follow up Spider-Man 3 with a spin-off starring Venom:

He’s just a psychotic monster who greatly enjoys killing everything in his way. I’m not sure how they plan to make him sympathetic.

You drop him in the middle of a Twilight convention.
Posted by: branded at September 29, 2009 10:17 AM

Best. Typo. Ever!

[Via GromBlog]

This seems to be turning into Weird Creatures Week. Yesterday it was the freaky-looking leopard gecko, today it’s the turn of the Spanish ribbed newt:

Like the X-Men’s Wolverine extending his claws, the Spanish ribbed newt slashes through itself with its sharp rib bones to create defensive spines, according to a new study.

Now I’m afraid to look at the internet tomorrow, for fear of what hideous, spiny creature I’m going to read about next…

[Via kottke.org]

I can’t believe Chris Sims has been annotating the Anita Blake comics for three years now. I don’t know how he keeps going in the face of such despair:

8.3: Finally, a scene change with some potential!

[...]

Anita has brought another animator, John Burke, to the city morgue and I’ve got to admit, a morgue in a world of zombies and vampires that has machine-guns mounted on the wall to prevent a mass breakout is actually a pretty good idea. In fact, I’d venture to say that it fills me with hope for the rest of the book, because there’s no possible way that a story about corpses rising from the dead could have a scene where two people whose entire function is to raise people from the dead (including one for whom this is a primary source of income) could go to a place where there are a bunch of dead bodies and not get into some trouble, right? There’s no way this could possibly turn into thirteen more pages of investigation so boring it makes Matlock look intense, right? Right?

9.1: Son of a bitch.

[Via James Nicoll]

I thought this was my favourite photo of the Millau viaduct, until I saw this.

[Via Flickr Blog]

Some of the petitions at the Number 10 Petitions site which have failed to attract more than 1 signature are real doozies. There are petitions to:

• … allow James Bond movies to be created tax free.
• … make it so that, as well as having a legal drink age of 18, one must also seek to attain a license to prove that they can drink responsibly.
• … do freespeak in the chamber.
• … request that those who created democracy have a right to referenda on whether the Welsh deserve citizenship; whether the Scottish deserve citizenship; whether the English language standards recently applied to immigrants should be retrospectively applied to Welsh, Irish and Scottish immigrants.
• … stop to vote according to geographic distribution MP.

[Via Scaryduck]

Is it just me, or does this newly-discovered variety of leopard gecko look like something that should be starring in a low-budget horror movie?

You know the sort of film: in the opening scene, some luckless bastard with very few lines stumbles on their lair and before he can react he finds himself buried under a swarm of carnivorous¹ reptiles.

Next thing you know, they’ve acquired a taste for human blood and a wave of them is sweeping down on the nearest town…

1. According to Wikipedia, although leopard geckos primarily subsist on a diet of insects, they can and will eat mice if they can manage to bring them down. ^

A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard. Impressively geeky, yet perfectly intelligible.¹

[Via The Browser]

1. Until the maths arrives in Act 4, at which point I decided that I’d learned quite enough about encryption for one day. ^

You Are the CSS to My HTML.

Cute.

[Via swissmiss]

Scott Eric Kaufman on looking like a proper expert:

Should you ever be interviewed by The History Channel in your office, it would be best not to have the Wikipedia entry for the topic about which they are interviewing you clearly visible on your monitor. Have a little faith in your expertise or dignity enough to close that damn tab.

Ralf Metzger on the gap between dreams and reality:

Developing the pictograms for the Olympics is a dream for every designer. A dream that most likely will never become reality. Instead you end up doing toilet icons.

[...]

The toilet symbol
Admittedly, it doesn’t sound much of a challenge but there’s more to it on second glance. If you compare Otl Aichers disability pictogram with ordinary ones side by side, it becomes obvious how posture, position of the head, size of the wheel etc. make a difference between a confident and a helpless representation [...]

If you’re thinking that there aren’t that many ways to design a pictogram for a toilet door – I know I was – be sure to scroll down to see the last of the designs Metzger showcases, from London’s Busaba restaurant.

[Via Monoscope]

Tesco’s corporate communications department earned their money this week.

Daniel Jones, also known by his Jedi name Morda Hehol, was asked to leave a Tesco store after he refused to remove his hood. He’s claiming that the tenets of his religion require him to wear a hood in public, as thus Tesco breached his right to religious freedom. The firm’s response:

Tesco said: “He hasn’t been banned. Jedis are very welcome to shop in our stores although we would ask them to remove their hoods.”

“Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda and Luke Skywalker all appeared hoodless without ever going over to the Dark Side and we are only aware of the Emperor as one who never removed his hood.

“If Jedi walk around our stores with their hoods on, they’ll miss lots of special offers.”

Nicely done, though if it were up to me I’d have dropped that last line. Ending on the implication that perhaps Morda Hehol is a Sith would have been much better IMHO. But then, I suppose the firm felt it just had to remind us all that they have lots of special offers. You know, just in case we’d all forgotten that Tesco are a supermarket chain.¹

[Via Feeling Listless Miniblog]

1. But then, perhaps they just knew that nitpickers all over the internet would pick up on this, and in writing about it would inevitably end up repeating the point that Tesco really want to get across, i.e. that Tesco stores have lots of special offers. Strong in the Dark Side, these communications professionals are… ^

Steven Poole takes on the genius of Dan Brown.

But tell us more about the skull, Mr Brown!

He does. Yes, indeedy…

With a single excerpt, Alyssa Rosenberg adds another book to my to-read list:

And then there’s the great tragedy of Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate which succeeded in utterly wrecking one of the best fallen angels to appear in contemporary literature, the young woman who calls herself Irene Adler in The Club Dumas, the Arturo Perez-Reverte novel from which the movie was adapted. Adler is unbelievably sexy, extremely tough, and beautifully-spoken; her dialogue is full of literary illusions that might feel pretentious in another author’s hands, but work the way Perez-Reverte wrote them and his translator brought them over into English. For example:

“I know what I was told a long time ago. The rainbow is the bridge between heaven and earth. It will shatter at the end of the world when the devil has crossed it on horseback.”

“Not bad. Did your grandmother tell you that?”

“I heard it told to a friend, Bileto.” As she said the name, she stopped a moment and frowned tenderly, like a little girl telling a secret. “He liked horses and wine, and he’s the most optimistic person I know. He’s still hoping to get back to heaven.”

Shouldn’t work, that it does. Polanski eviscerated the character, and everything else about the book. I doubt this Irene Adler will ever get her due on the big screen, or from a lot of eager young female readers, which is a shame. She’s fantastic.