I'm pleased to see this piece on how TV serials achieved the status of art give due credit to Hill Street Blues as the inspiration for the rise of the serial drama over the last decade or so:

From the outset, prime time serial dramas were after cultural prestige. In part, they needed to cover up the fact that their innovations had embarrassing origins. Complicated serial narratives had been a feature of daytime television for years, with shows like Search for Tomorrow and Love of Life running continuously for many decades. As Bochco and Kozoll knew, however, soap operas were for bored housewives, people with nothing better to do. Prime time was for the busily employed, people who invested their leisure time with consideration and care because there was so little of it to invest, people for whom leisure choices were potentially embarrassing and therefore loaded with social import. Hill Street Blues hid its narrative ancestry by crafting an aesthetic completely at odds with the romantic fabulism of soap operas. In the show's opening credits, police cruisers move through a bleak, slushy, urban waste; and the pilot episode had drug addicts and prostitutes, as well as the deaths (later reversed due to audience protests) of major characters. This is the hard-nosed, gritty authenticity for which so many police, law, and medical dramas have been praised in the last thirty years: televisual realism. The fact that this realism is often more about style than "reality" has not blunted its effectiveness as an advocate for television's respectability. As the popularity of Hill Street Blues grew, NBC executives were surprised and happy to see that the fan letters they received were, as the scholar Todd Gitlin reported, lengthy, literate – even typed.

I adored Hill Street Blues back in the 1980s, even though ITV treated it like a red-haired stepchild and shunted it all over the schedules.

One more point: I appreciate that as SF and fantasy shows the likes of Babylon 5, Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine don't count as the kind of mainstream "prime time" television the article is concerned with, but I feel an obligation to note that these shows were doing multi-episode story and character arcs years before The Wire, Lost and The Sopranos came on the scene.

[Via Feeling Listless]

Probably too much information for a press conference.

A dream…

The Russian city of Kaliningrad¹ is proposing to erect a statue honouring Woody Allen²:

Allen, 74, has been approached by a young film-maker, Masha Vasyukova, a native of the Russian exclave that borders Poland and Lithuania, with a choice of designs for this new work of public art. Allen's favourite tribute is a pair of his trademark glasses, mounted at the height of his forehead – 157cms.

[...]

Other designs included a reel of film topped by Allen's glasses and a life-size statue of the auteur dwarfed beside an existing statue of the city's most famous son, philosopher Immanuel Kant. Vasyukova was too embarrassed to show Allen a design that styled him as a human sperm, a reference to his 1972 film Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, but was delighted by his enthusiasm.

1. Which used to be called Konigsberg. ↩
2. Whose birth name was Allen Stewart Konigsberg. ↩

Lost as a 1987 computer game.¹

[Via MetaFilter]

1. NB: contains spoilers for anyone who hasn't seen as far as season 3. ↩

The A4 might just be the cleverest design for a mouse mat I've ever seen. I'm not a fan of the colours it comes in, but the design itself is really neat.

[Via Monoscope]

Lindy West's scathing review of Sex and the City 2 is really rather wonderful:

In order to escape their various imaginary problems, our intrepid foursome traipses off to dark, exotic Abu Dhabi [...] Each woman is immediately assigned an extra from Disney's Aladdin to spoon-feed her warm cinnamon milk in their $22,000-per-night hotel suite. Things seem to be going great. But very quickly, the SATC brain trust notices that it's not all swarthy man-slaves and flying carpets in Abu Dhabi! In fact, Abu Dhabi is crawling with Muslim women – and not one of them is dressed like a super-liberated diamond-encrusted fucking clown!!! Oppression! OPPRESSION!!!

This will not stand. Samantha, being the prostitute sexual revolutionary that she is, rages against the machine by publicly grabbing the engorged penis of a man she dubs "Lawrence of My-Labia." When the locals complain (having repeatedly asked Samantha to cover her nipples and mons pubis in the way of local custom), Samantha removes most of her clothes in the middle of the spice bazaar, throws condoms in the faces of the angry and bewildered crowd, and screams, "I AM A WOMAN! I HAVE SEX!" Thus, traditional Middle Eastern sexual mores are upended and sexism is stoned to death in the town square.

I'd assumed this portion of the review was an extended joke, but apparently that subplot really is in the film. I liked the TV show but didn't get round to seeing the first film: somehow, I don't see myself rushing to my local multiplex to catch up with the franchise.

[Via MetaFilter]

It turns out there's a minor glitch in our new government's policy that ministers eschew the use of chauffeur-driven government cars:

Now ministers are being told they must travel to their constituencies by second class public transport, but for security reasons their red boxes must travel to the constituency separately in a private car.

This seems like the sort of thing that happens when someone takes a new policy just a bit too literally. Surely it's eminently fixable: just make other arrangements for ministers to have access to the material in their red boxes.

Given that much of the material the minister is being asked to review will be reports, correspondence, memos and the like that were prepared on a computer,¹ how hard could it really be?²

[Via New Statesman]

1. Or that could have been prepared in the appropriate format if it was known in advance that this was necessary. ↩
2. That said, let's hope that the chosen solution isn't to have all this correspondence prepared in various nice, accessible formats only to be copied to a flash drive that is handed to the minister on their way out of the building on a Friday night. ↩

I had no idea there was a Sauna World Championships:

Okay kids, today's activity is to go down to your local Pizza Hut, have the oven set for 261° and insert your body into it. The tips of your ears start to ignite. The backs of your arms scream. Your throat burns as if somebody had stuck a tiki torch down it. Your lips feel bitten by large, unseen raccoons. And you haven't hit 30 seconds.

Now do it for 10 minutes or more, and that's what it's like to compete in quite possibly the world's dumbest sport: the Sauna World Championships.

I know. I entered.

The eighth annual championships were held in August 2007 in Heinola, Finland, a lake-riddled town 87 kilometers north of Helsinki. As my wife, The Lovely Cynthia (TLC), and I drove up, my mind reeled at what kind of things competitors would say to sportswriters afterward: "I just got hot. What can I say?"

I went over the rules. Competing in six-person heats — written without irony — the 84 contestants battle to see whose skin boils last. You may wear only a bathing suit that goes eight inches down the leg and absolutely nothing else. You can wipe sweat from your face but not your body. You cannot cover your ears with your hands. You may not lean over too far. Ambulances will be standing by. Good luck! [...]

Somewhere, a TV producer is putting together a proposal for Celebrity Sauna Sizzle. If you doubt it, consider that in the 1980s and 90s Clive James made a good living out of presenting clips of wacky foreign TV shows for British audiences to marvel at, secure in the knowledge that British television was The Best In The World and we'd never stoop so low. Over the last decade, a frighteningly large number of those shows have been adapted for British TV, frequently with the addition of 'celebrities' to the mix.

Why wouldn't they usher a crowd of D-listers and wannabes into a walk-in oven to bake at 260°F for ten minutes or so?

[Via The Browser]

The twitterverse according to jwz.

The Big Caption, wherein jokes and statements are made using typography.

[Via kottke.org]

Phil Gyford came across some old press cuttings from the early 1990s. Makes me feel all nostalgic:¹

14 August 1992:

I've a lot of sympathy for Judith Mellor. But her dad's statement "If he'll cheat on my daughter, he'll cheat on our country" is stupid. When I had my own garage business I cheated on my wife on many occasions, but it didn't make any difference to the good service I gave my customers. (Signed letter in the Sun)

1. Or, more straightforwardly: old! ↩

Good question: Is it possible for the back button to escape the browser?

I read a lot on the web and increasingly it's becoming a social activity. Links come from all directions: Email, Twitter, RSS feeds, IM, Facebook and surprise surprise, other webpages. These links are the stuff of many of conversations we share, and a great thing about the web is the friction for the conversation to move across the various internet technologies is minimal. The URL breaks all the boundaries. In theory anyway.

On my Mac when I click a button to pass a link from one application to another, it's up to me to remember where it came from, which conversation it was central to and who and where I should direct my response to regarding it. This mental load heavier on an iPad [or iPod Touch in my case] when you can't leave the window of the first application visibly open as a reminder.

I kinda, sorta address this problem when I write weblog posts with a bit of help from an Applescript that in turn runs some Javascript to grab the page URL and referrer URL for the current tab and insert them into my weblog post template, but that's limited to items I've opened in my browser.¹ It'd be really nice to have a helper application² sitting in the background and acting as a man-in-the-middle, gathering this sort of 'application referrer' information as a matter of course and making it available to other programs.

[Via Inessential.com]

1. I could probably adapt the script to pull the same trick with pages I opened in NetNewsWire, but my workflow generally involves skimming my feeds in NetNewsWire to find stuff I want to read and then opening those pages in Safari, so the need doesn't arise. ↩
2. Perhaps acting as a local HTTP proxy server? ↩

Crescent Venus and Moon. Beautiful.

Caitlin Moran prefaces her account of an epic interview-cum-night on the town in Berlin with Lady Gaga with an explanation of how she became a fan:

Since [seeing Lady Gaga perform at Glastonbury last year], I have followed Gaga's career like boys follow sports teams. As a cultural icon, she does an incredible service for women: after all, it will be hard to oppress a generation who've been brought up on pop stars with fire coming out of their tits.

She's clearly smart and clearly hilarious – she pitched up at the Royal Variety Performance on a 16ft-high piano, modelled on Dalí's spider-legged elephants – but has never ruined the fun by going, "Actually, I'm smart and hilarious," like, say, Bono would.

And, most importantly of all, she clearly couldn't give a f*** what anyone says about her. When she appeared on The X Factor, it was the week after Simon Cowell had said that he was, "Looking for the new Lady Gaga." She performed Bad Romance in an 18ft-long bathtub with six dancers – then played a piano solo on a keyboard hidden in a pretend sink, while sitting on a pretend toilet. Clearly, Simon Cowell would never sign up anything like that in a million, billion years. It was very much in his face.

[Via No Rock and Roll Fun]

Who'd have thought that a baby panda could sneeze that loudly?

[Via James Nicoll]

A 1927 Paramount Studios map of California's geographical facsimiles.¹

[Via A Whole Lotta Nothing]

1. Original context: The Motion Picture Industry as a Basis for Bond Financing. ↩

Bruce Sterling on the implications of the Flash Crash:

* Why should there be a faith in a market of this kind – given its demonstrable behavior? What happens when it becomes blazingly obvious that the world just can't afford itself? And that the mechanisms of "affordance" are fictional, that the bottom-line don't moor to objective reality any more than the Olympic Pantheon does? The Planetary Enron. What happens then?

* If I can trade in a microsecond, what good does it do if someone can trade in a picosecond? If I can trade in an attosecond, in what way does this allow us to make rational investment decisions, pay for retirement, house widows and orphans, support a civil society, educate the children, to live? Sure, it saves us from the agonizing horror of designing stable systems and making regulations – but now we're living in a Gothic High-Tech ghost world where we can lose ten percent of everything in picoseconds, and we can't even describe the thing that has us by the throat. We've created a financial world where utter panic makes sense.

[Via Phil Gyford]

Get ready for the cursor conservation crisis.

[Via swissmiss]

See the cake that inspired what Time magazine described as "probably the harshest words ever spoken of a dessert."

[Via Blood & Treasure]