Rigel and the Witch Head Nebula. Lovely.

Tom’s Glossary of Book Publishing Terms:

COPYEDITOR: An independent scholar, usually with a Ph.D. in the humanities.

COPY EDITING: A phase of publishing that requires little or no budget, is considered of slight importance, and may be omitted at the option of the publisher.

[Via MetaFilter]

In Which This Recording Picks The Greatest Popular Songs Of The Year…

The Climb/Party In The U.S.A. – Miley Cyrus

Miley is the Rayanne Graff to Taylor Swift’s Sharon Cherski. Demi Lovato is Angela Chase, and Kevin Jonas is Rickie Vasquez. In case you were wondering.

On Lady GaGa:

Just Dance/Poker Face/Paparazzi/Bad Romance/Telephone – Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga’s Cremenstrual Cycle. Everyone remembers when they broke down about Lady Gaga. It’s like the moonwalk or the Kennedy assassination. Sure you were able to ignore the disco stick, and the flaming tits and the Kermit dress. But then one day you caught yourself going “ra ra ah ah ah” and barely vogueing and you knew the jig was up.

All too true, dammit!

The Yorkshire Ranter suggests that Charlie Stross should next turn his attention to the Conservative Party:

“Sir Peter Viggers…I think I’ve heard the name. Should I look him up in Who’s Who?”

“No. Perhaps you should try Who’s What.”

“Who’s What?”

“It’s a Laundry Intranet project – run out of Section MH. It’s an internal wiki, intended to gather our collective knowledge of the political establishment – something we’ve perhaps neglected since the Healey plan of ‘76. Basically we’re trying to collate key facts – who’s associated with who, who voted for what, what kind of pan-dimensional squidthing ate and replaced whose brain.” [...]

[...] Haven’t you ever wondered what went wrong with Peter Hain? Where they found Tony Blair? How Mandelson got like that? If William Hague is alive? Why did they have to get rid of Charles Kennedy, and why they sent him to the old Benbecula rocket range? What species George Osborne actually is? [...]

Geoff Manaugh proposes an alternative use for the Burj Dubai, just in case that whole hotels/offices/apartments business plan fails to work out.

Charlie Stross has a new short story set in the Laundry¹ up as a free download at Tor.com.

[Via jwz]

1. Previously. ^

Danny DeVito: painting pictures with words on Twitter.

Oh no! Santa’s been hacked…

You’re probably talking about this terrible security disaster already: the largest database leak ever. Arweena, a spokes-elf for Santa Claus, admitted a few hours ago that the database posted at WikiLeaks yesterday is indeed the comprehensive 2009 list of which kids have been naughty, and which were nice. The source of the leak is unclear. It may have come from a renegade reindeer, or it could be the work of a clever programmer in the Ukraine. Either way, it’s a terrible black eye for Santa. [...]

[Via Bruce Schneier]

Elisabeth Mahoney relates a lovely tale, told by retiring First Minister of the Welsh Assembly Rhodri Morgan to Andrew Marr on Start the Week, about playing host to Tony Blair:

Blair had once stayed at Morgan’s house at short notice, sleeping in his son’s bedroom as it happened to be empty. “It was full of Bob Marley posters on the ceiling,” Morgan explained. They arrived back to the house late, and Morgan informed Blair that he wouldn’t be getting up with him at 6am. “I told him where the tea and coffee were,” Morgan said. If you didn’t already admire Morgan, that hosting nonchalance with the then prime minister is a hugely likable trait. The next morning, while Morgan snoozed, his mother-in-law encountered Blair in the kitchen. “They stared at each other for a while,” he reported. Eventually his mother-in-law broke the silence. “Oh I know who you are,” she said, “you’re Lionel Blair.”

Awwwww…

Picture the scene – you’re Russell T Davies, famed showrunner of Doctor Who and famed atheist. You’re at a Q & A just after showing a preview of the Christmas 2009 episode – your penultimate piece of work on Doctor Who – when a little kid grabs the microphone, in front of lots of journalists, and asks: “Did you meet the Doctor or did you make him up?”

Nice Tutulemma.

The Abridged Script for 2012 makes me glad I didn’t rush out to the cinema to catch Roland Emmerich’s latest trash-the-world epic:

Everyone gets into a BIG PLANE and they fly away as the UNIVERSE COLLAPSES two inches behind their vehicle.

There are more VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS! And more EARTHQUAKES! Then a TSUNAMI! And a FLOOD!

JOHN CUSACK
Jesus, did someone write the screenplay after discovering the ‘Disasters’ menu in SimCity?

AMANDA PEET
You got a screenplay?

THOMAS MCCARTHY
I have bad news everyone. We were planning on refueling in Hawaii, but for some crazy reason a giant volcano turned out to be an unsafe place to be during the end of the world.

JOHN CUSACK
If only China would move to our current location! Just kidding, that idea is retarded.

It DOES anyway. They land in THE HIMALAYAS.

Also, when is John Cusack going to fire his agent?¹

1. Alternatively, if Cusack himself thought the likes of Must Love Dogs, Serendipity, Identity and 2012 were good projects, perhaps the pertinent question is when is John Cusack going to start listening to his agent? Or his sister? Or someone… ^

This Swiss Mountain House, half-submerged into a hillside, looks lovely and cosy. A house worthy of a Hobbit.

[Via Swissmiss]

Phil Gyford, inspired by the concept video for Mag+,¹ picked up on what he sees as a big advantage of the Mag+ concept:

Something that emerged in the research that was really interesting was that [magazines] can be completed, that they’re very knowable, that one can read through it, and finish it, and have a sense that they’ve consumed an editorial package, without necessarily the endless, infinitely expanding RSS feed, for example, where there really is no end.

This idea – that you can finish reading a magazine – is such a fundamental and obvious one that I suspect it’s taken entirely for granted. And, because of that, it’s all too easily thrown out when thinking about electronic magazines and newspapers etc.

Maybe it’s spending so long consuming news and current affairs coverage via RSS feeds, but I think I’ve trained myself out of the expectation that news is delivered in a discrete bundle that I need to get to the end of. I no longer feel guilty about marking bunches of old news items as Read instead of ploughing through them.²

1. A digital magazine, destined to show up in the real world just as soon as we get truly lightweight, thin cheap tablet computers with touchscreens that ordinary people will be willing to spend money on. In other words, maybe a decade from now. ^
2. Google Reader’s Mark Items Older Than [A Day|A Week|A Month] As Read command is a huge help here: I can leave some folders for a few days, then decide during a weekend news catch-up session whether to focus on the last 24 hours of news of a particular set of feeds. ^