Andrew O'Hagan reflects on his first significant article for the London Review of Books, suddenly and terribly topical all over again:

I've been thinking all week about Jon Venables. In some way, I find it too distressing to write down what the case means to me, when so many people believe the young man is simply a lost cause, a person in the grip of evil. The papers have been ringing asking for comment: the messages go to voicemail. Outside, buses pass in quick succession, the passengers reading their newspapers and seeming very sure of something: 'Once Evil, Always Evil,' says the Mirror. I keep thinking of Meursault, who didn't know why he did it, who didn't see the size of the damage, who wasn't able to opt for survival, with the sun beating down and explaining nothing.

When I first wrote about the killing of James Bulger, in the LRB in March 1993, I was in my early twenties and it was the first proper piece I'd written for publication. The nation was in an uproar and something about the boys on the CCTV footage made me uneasy about myself. The editor sent me home to think about it, and over that day and long night I came to see my unease was to do with familiarity. Venables and Thompson were not only like the boys I knew, but like the boy I had been, and their crime was an extreme version, different in degree but not in essence, from things we had done on the housing estate outside Glasgow where I grew up. The amoral meandering of the boys was something I recognised. [...]

Adam Curtis on the changes in the depiction of the Yanomani tribe on BBC TV over the last forty years:

I am fascinated by the way the Yanomamo appear again and again in the BBC film archive. And each time they turn up they play a new role as different Western concerns and ideas about human beings and nature are projected onto them.

Who Would Be Cast in The Coen Brothers' Star Wars? is just plain brilliant.

I'd assumed Clooney would be a shoe-in for Han Solo, but John Goodman makes perfect sense. As do Brad Pitt as Chewbacca and Tilda Swinton as Grand Moff Tarkin.

Finally, of course Jeff 'The Dude' Bridges would play Yoda.

[Via Amygdala]

The Periodic Table of Sci-Fi Film and Television.

I happen to think B5 belongs among the Miscellaneous elements, next to the likes of Firefly, rather than having Space 1999, Lost in Space and Xanadu¹ as neighbours, but perhaps that's just my fond memories of the show talking.

[Via The Morning News]

1. I mean, come on. Xanadu! Really? ↩

A creepy-looking blood-red waterfall in Antarctica.

This American Infographic:

My new years resolution is to make an infographic on every This American Life ever made. The idea is to expand and add context to the stories and information contained in the shows. Basically, anything I am curious about while listening to the pieces.

As a big fan of This American Life, I can't get enough of these.

[Via MetaFilter]

What does David Hepworth not know that he knows about Robert Smith?

[...] A couple of years ago a colleague of mine was talking to Robert Smith of The Cure. My colleague mentioned me. "Ah," said Robert Smith. "David Hepworth knows something about me that nobody else does." Obviously, he didn't say what that thing was or how significant or trivial it might be. I haven't met Robert Smith this century but back in the early 80s I interviewed him a couple of times and therefore it's possible that he did tell me something that I didn't write. He may have told me something that I didn't appreciate the significance of. I've thought about it and nothing comes to mind.

<shot level="cheap">Where he left his comb?</shot>

We should all hope and pray that Lady Gaga never sees this.

[Via GromBlog]

John Lanchester has written another lucid account¹ of the current state of The Great British Economy Disaster:

So why all the posturing about the deficit? 'I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter,' James Carville said in the early years of the Clinton administration. 'But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.' It is the bond market, more than anything else, which is currently forcing the government to pretend to take the deficit seriously. This is one of the reasons for the tensions between Gordon Brown and his chancellor. Brown is allergic to the word 'cuts'. He clearly experiences actual physical difficulty with the term, for good reason, since it does a lot to invalidate most of what he's done in office over the last 13 years. Darling, on the other hand, has to placate the markets, and they demand a higher degree of fiscal rectitude from the UK, which means lower spending and higher taxes. If Darling doesn't look convincing, there will be a 'buyer's strike' and nobody will want to buy the many tens of billions of pounds of debt which the British government is going to have to issue over the next years. If that happens, the government will have a very serious problem. You can lie to the electorate, but you can't lie to the bond market, which is why there will certainly be cuts, severe ones – just not quite as severe as the Texas Chainsaw Massacre scenario implied in the budget. These constraints on action are going to be in place whoever wins the election.

1. Previously. ↩

The internet¹ treats sleeping cats as damage, and routes around them. Just ask Tim Bray, enjoying an evening pottering around writing an application for his phone:

Eventually, Ant built my Android app out of 14 lines of Duby, and I needed the USB cable so I could ship it to the phone. The phone was handy but the USB cable was across the room, and my elderly female cat has earned a few evenings of undisturbed lap time.

Then I remembered that my laptop has a Web server and my phone was on the same home LAN, so I copied the .apk over to /Library/WebServer/Documents/whatever.apk and did an ifconfig -a | grep 192 to find my address and then pointed the phone's browser at http://192.168.1.57/whatever.apk. The phone installed the app, I proved to myself that it worked, and did some further enjoyable tinkering, all while routing round the cat.

Alternatively, as per a comment on that post, this may have been just one more manifestation of the Cat Gravity theory.

1. Pedants will note that Tim Bray was slinging files around on his home network, not on the internet proper. They'd be right, but 'Tim Bray's home intranet treats sleeping cats as damage' didn't fit the original quotation as neatly so I fudged it. Sue me! ↩

David Byrne on collaborations:

I've done a slew of collaborations over the years – more and more as time goes by, and they are always slightly different from one another, though there are more similarities than differences. One could say that some of the songs co-written with other members of Talking Heads were also collaborations, so the give and take nature of collaborative writing skills got developed early. [...]

[...] I did another collaboration recently with Yuka Honda and Petra Hayden that I believe Petra will end up singing; a couple with Dirty Projectors for the Dark Was the Night charity record; and one with Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio is in progress. More are lined up on the runway. A writer at Pitchfork critically said I'd collaborate for a bag of Doritos. I do love it, and the results are sometimes surprising, sometimes creatively successful and sometimes even popular ("Lazy" was a huge hit everywhere except the US).

Striking photographs of windfarms.

Kieran Healy explores Chatroulette: Show me ur books.

Ten great moments with Mr. Nixon:

1. On thinking big (April 25, 1972)

Nixon: I still think we ought to take the North Vietnamese dikes out now. Will that drown people?

Kissinger: About two hundred thousand people.

Nixon: No, no, no, I'd rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry?

Kissinger: That, I think, would just be too much.

Nixon: The nuclear bomb, does that bother you? … I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes.

Has there ever been a more … quotable … president than Richard Milhous Nixon?

Economics of Sainthood (a preliminary investigation):

1. Introduction

Saint-making has been a major activity of the Catholic Church for centuries. The pace of sanctifications has picked up noticeably in the last several decades under the last two popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Our goal is to apply social-science reasoning to understand the Church's choices on numbers and characteristics of saints, gauged by location and socio-economic attributes of the persons designated as blessed. [...]

[Via The Browser]

Apparently, the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart has a ventilation system capable of creating an artificial tornado inside the building.

What could possibly go wrong?

A chart on How to Choose Chart Types.

[Via swissmiss]

Charlie Brooker's latest Screen Burn column about a show called Man V Food has the best closing paragraph I've read in a long time.¹

As a bonus, reading Brooker's column this week introduced me to this bit of folklore, which in turn inspired Wes Craven to come up with this. So at least I've learned something new today.

1. No, I'm not going to quote it here. Trust me, it works best when read in context. ↩

From a thread about the trend for more and more film and TV actresses to resort to plastic surgery and botox:

On the bright side, it's nice to know that folks are doing their best to bridge the Uncanny Valley from both ends at once.
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 3:25 PM on March 12

In a million years or so the solar system is in for a close encounter:

The original Hipparcos data showed that an orange dwarf star called Gliese 710 is heading our way and will arrive sometime within the next 1.5 million years.

[...]

What the new data has allowed Bobylev to do is calculate the probability of Gliese 710 smashing into the Solar System. What he's found is a shock.

He says there is 86 percent chance that Gliese 710 will plough through the Oort Cloud of frozen stuff that extends some 0.5 parsecs into space.

[Via James Nicoll]