Alexa Chung helps President Obama explain his health insurance reform proposals with a little help from Auto-Tune.

[Via James Fallows]

The biter bit.

It's the surprised expression on the dog's face that does for me every time…

[Via GromBlog]

A pair of memorable responses from a politician to a heckler, lifted from the comments on this post:

• Adlai Stevenson: "You are, sir, what the Reverend Spooner would call, 'a remarkable example of a shining wit'."

• Gough Whitlam: denouncing one of his opponents and wrongly referring to him as a Liberal.
  "He's a Country member" someone heckled.
  "Yes I do remember!" replied Whitlam.

[Via The Browser]

At last, the Microsoft Hit Wizard has a rival: DreamOn Pro.

After World War II, St Nazaire on France's Atlantic coast was left with a huge concrete eyesore: a U-boat base big enough to house 19 subs and built to survive Allied bombs. The question is, what can you do with 480,000m³ of concrete?:

In the former U-boat pens you can find the Base Bar, the tourist information center for St. Nazaire, a theatre, exhibition space, a museum of Trans-Atlantic ship travel, a night club/performance space, and just some kick-ass concrete caverns. It makes under-the-freeway spaces look pretty tame.

The photos at the linked article are impressive, not least the shot taken directly in front of the U-boat pens that turned out to be so big it had to be posted sideways.

Klingon To The Hope Of A Ticket.

In the middle of a MetaFilter discussion on the appeal of Amish romance novels, MeFi user Iridic was inspired to post an excerpt from an Amish werewolf novel:

The hayfork tumbled from Matthias's suddenly alien fingers.

The sense of suffocation which had so oppressed him in the English city returned now, redoubled, to destroy the comfort of his familiar surroundings. The barn, the house he had built himself, they were outrages; and his clothes, too, were intolerable, they choked him. He tore his hat from his head and pulled apart the straw with hands made strong by wrath.

Serene above his convulsing shoulders, an early moon silvered the sky above the barn.

Fool! Sinful fool!

If only he had remained with his family instead of treating with those electric fireplace manufacturers in the English city. He would never have come across that "dog" (ha!), would never have sustained that wound which his uncle's poultices had no power to treat, which even now pumped palpable corruption through his blood.

And the moon, that once friendly angel, which for as long as he could remember had ordered the nights and blessed all natural increase, would not have become what it now was: a cold medallion, struck to commemorate both transgression and punishment.

Matthias screamed, and all the penned beasts for three miles screamed back at him…

I'd be happy to read that novel (or even a novelette or novella, if what's what it took) if Iridic would just care to write it.

Anil Dash reckons between today's releases by The Beatles and Steve Jobs, today marks a turning point for the music business:

But today marks a clear and unmistakeable milestone, dramatically demonstrating that the only entities with the power to make news about music today are artists themselves (as in the case of the Beatles) or technology companies (like Apple). You could arguably include a few TV shows, as well, insofar as reality competition game shows help introduce new artists. Despite this reality, though, most record labels today still absurdly believe that the media covers something like a new Jay-Z album because of the label's promotional efforts, instead of that coverage having arisen from genuine demand from fans, as demonstrated by dialogue on blogs, Twitter, Facebook or just in face-to-face "hey, you gotta hear this song!" conversations. The reality is that the people who can get excitement going about music these days aren't in the record industry at all, but rather all around it.

I have five words for the notion that media coverage these days is prompted by a groundswell of interest from fans: Lady GaGa. Pixie Lott. From what I can gather they've both been propelled onto the pages of our newspapers and magazines over the last twelve months as a consequence of strenuous efforts on the part of their record companies, not because there was, say, a huge groundswell of interest from people clamouring to know every little thing about Ms Lott.

You can argue that pop artists like these are by default a short-term phenomenon, propelled by hype and returning to obscurity a couple of years down the line when fashions change. But then, you could also argue that six months from now the release of the remastered Beatles albums will be old news, and the attention of Rock Band fans will have turned to the question of which 'classic' artists will show up for the Xmas 2010 release.

'News' is ephemeral, especially 'news' about pop cultural phenomena. Record companies certainly have less power than they used to to make stars, and the internet has made fannish enthusiasm more visible than it used to be, but Anil Dash is overstating the extent of the swing in power. It's still perfectly possible for record companies to use their considerable resources to generate a lot of noise about artists in the media, in the hope that enough of them will find an audience to cover the cost of the flops.

Richard Barnes: Murmur.

I don't think his images of starlings in flight would be half as sinister in colour. Nice work.

[Via Pruned]

Wednesday night brings the start of a repeat run for Gavin Millar's four-part adaptation of Iain Banks' The Crow Road. I haven't seen it since 1996, but I remember liking it quite a bit; I hope it stands up a decade on.

As I was setting my DVR to record the day Prentice's grandmother exploded¹, I noticed the preceding programme on BBC4 that night: Jonathan Meades: Off Kilter:

Jonathan Meades takes a quixotic tour of Scotland, a country which has intrigued him since he first encountered lists of towns only known from football coupons.

They had me at the words "Jonathan Meades"…

[The Crow Road via The Stage/TV Today Blog]

1. That's not much of a spoiler: it's revealed in the opening line of the novel. ↩

Some of the new statues outside the University Library at Cambridge have a delightful hidden feature.

[Via Memex 1.1]

As a followup to yesterday's post about what happens when clueless social science researchers encountered LiveJournal, I've just been reading the ensuing MetaFilter discussion. A discussion that included this gem:

my girlfriend (who is enamored of harry potter fanfic) informs me that, apparently as a challenge, someone has written a slash fanfic featuring the pairing of dobby the house elf and the sorting hat.

[...]

posted by rmd1023 at 3:38 PM on September 6

Can I just say, for the record, that I so Did Not Need To Know That.

Alison Macleod on The curious case of the game show neuroscientists, or how NOT to research an online community.

(Executive summary: the FanFic community researches the researchers.)

[Via Ben Goldacre]

It turns out that the H1N1 virus really is tiny but deadly:

So it takes about 25 kilobits – 3.2 kbytes – of data to code for [the H1N1 virus, which] has a non-trivial chance of killing a human. This is more efficient than a computer virus, such as MyDoom, which rings in at around 22 kbytes.

[Via Bruce Schneier]

Which is prettier: SARS, Swine Flu, Smallpox or HIV?

[Via MetaFilter]

Marina Hyde's take on the burning question of whether Madonna can fulfil her promise and become the Oprah of the Middle East is a delicious, deeply sarcastic treat:

The last time Madonna visited Israel in a self-styled envoy capacity, she and her ex-husband Guy Ritchie spent Rosh Hashanah with that arch star-strucker Shimon Peres. On that occasion, Madonna and the Israeli president exchanged presents. He gave her a copy of the Hebrew Bible, and she gave him a copy of her cult's sacred text the Zohar, inscribed with the words "To Shimon Peres, the man I admire and love." She also informed him: "I am an ambassador for Judaism." I do hope that when Shimon stared at himself in his bathroom mirror later, the words "I am such a coward for not calling her out on that" crossed his mind.

Downfall parodies get meta.

[Via Why, That's Delightful!]

PowerPoint Karaoke:

Imagine this: You have to deliver a PowerPoint presentation about an unfamiliar topic, with slides you've never seen, to an audience eager to heckle and laugh at you. If you're in your underwear, you're having a nightmare. If you're clothed, it's called PowerPoint Karaoke.

All right thinking people already know that PowerPoint Is Evil; this takes it to a whole new level.

[Via swissmiss]

Blasphemy! A prequel to John Carpenter's terrifying The Thing is in the works:

Early in 2009, 27 years after that initial blast of opprobrium, The Thing's reputation has recovered sufficiently for its producing studio, Universal, to deem it worthwhile to announce the monster's return in a prequel. Matthijs van Heijningen, whose CV consists largely of drinks commercials, is set to direct a screenplay by Ronald D Moore, erstwhile executive producer and writer of Star Trek, Roswell High and Battlestar Galactica. The prequel will be set in the Norwegian camp, which, as we already know from Carpenter's film, is doomed.

Granted, you can argue that since Carpenter's film was itself a remake it's hypocritical to criticise another set of filmmakers for taking a swing at the idea. Here's the thing, though: in the five years leading up to his taking on The Thing, John Carpenter made the following feature films…

• Halloween
• The Fog
• Escape from New York

Three very decent genre films, two of which are minor classics. The man had a pedigree when it came to fantastic fiction.¹ I'm afraid Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. doesn't have that sort of CV, so he doesn't merit that sort of trust.

In fairness I can't deny that it's possible that Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. is a gifted director with a talent for genre film-making and the prequel will reveal his genius to the English-speaking world. It could be that Ron Moore will come up with a script so good that even a relative novice of a director could bring us a truly memorable film.

I'm disinclined to hold my breath…

[Via MeFi user Infinite Jest, posting to this thread.]

1. Come to that, in the five years after The Thing, Carpenter went on to make Christine, Starman, Big Trouble in Little China, Prince of Darkness and They Live. Not a bad film among them, and at least two of them that I'll happily sit and watch any time they show up on TV. Admittedly Carpenter's work has been much patchier since, but he could have retired in 1987 and would still be remembered as a guy who knew how to make hugely satisfying genre films. ↩

As usual, John Siracusa has provided a detailed review of the latest upgrade to Mac OS X: version 10.6, a.k.a. 'Snow Leopard.' The section on the reason a new install takes up so much less space is especially interesting, in that it illustrates how changes over time in the relative performance of different system components can cause system architects to make counterintuitive trade-offs in how and where they store and retrieve data.¹

This review dives into the under-the-skin changes more heavily than most, what with Snow Leopard being mostly a tidying up/polishing of 10.5 that puts in place various technologies that will really come into their own over the next couple of years as developers start to use them to take advantage of the more powerful hardware that's available in modern Macs.

It's just a pity that this is all of academic interest to me; 10.6 is the first release of OS X since I Switched back in 2003 that I won't be using, what with Apple having decided not to support PowerPC-based systems in Snow Leopard.² I do understand why Apple have decided to prod users firmly in the direction of 64-bit systems, and why it's not worth their while producing a PowerPC port of most of the new features in 10.6 given that they haven't released a PowerPC-based system in some four years now. I just can't afford to go down that path any time soon.

1. I know that's a tad uninformative as descriptions go: all I can say is, if you have any sort of head for the details of how computers work you should read that section of Siracusa's review in full for yourself. It makes a complicated subject crystal clear. ↩
2. I don't doubt that they'll continue to produce security updates for PPC-based systems for a while yet, but I suspect that within a year – 18 months at the most – I'll have come across the first application or upgrade I can't install because it's Intel Only or Snow Leopard Only. ↩