The Daily Express can shut up shop now, having published what amounts to the platonic ideal of a Daily Express front page.

[Via Prog Gold]

X-Muppets. Lovely work.¹

[Via clusterflock]

1. Just one minor nitpick. Animalverine has just two claws, which suggests that he isn't Wolverine at all: he's X-23. Which is Just Not Right on so many levels. ↩

Roseanne Barr on the TV Industry.

When the show went to No. 1 in December 1988, ABC sent a chocolate "1" to congratulate me. Guess they figured that would keep the fat lady happy – or maybe they thought I hadn't heard (along with the world) that male stars with No. 1 shows were given Bentleys and Porsches. So me and George Clooney [who played Roseanne Conner's boss for the first season] took my chocolate prize outside, where I snapped a picture of him hitting it with a baseball bat. I sent that to ABC.

… and …

I finally found the right lawyer to tell me what scares TV producers worse than anything – too late for me. What scares these guys – who think that the perks of success include humiliating and destroying the star they work for (read Lorre's personal attacks on Charlie Sheen in his vanity cards at the end of Two and a Half Men) – isn't getting caught stealing or being made to pay for that; it's being charged with fostering a "hostile work environment." If I could do it all over, I'd sue ABC and Carsey-Werner under those provisions. Hollywood hates labor, and hates shows about labor worse than any other thing. And that's why you won't be seeing another Roseanne anytime soon. Instead, all over the tube, you will find enterprising, overmedicated, painted-up, capitalist whores claiming to be housewives. But I'm not bitter.

[Via MetaFilter]

Hobbes And Bacon, parts 1 and 2.¹

[Via James Nicoll]

1. See here for a different take on the subject. ↩

Anatomy of a Mashup.

[Via Girl Walk // All Day]

@kjhealy:

No-one told Dominique Strauss-Kahn that being Director of the IMF doesn't mean you get to do to people what the IMF does to countries.

[Via Crooked Timber]

Clive James reviews the latest edition of David Thomson's The New Biographical Dictionary of Film:

[...] Most people of [Thomson's] generation who have spent their lives seeing every properly released movie even if it stars Steven Seagal are incapable of judging them. The reason is simple: those people are monomaniacs. Thompson has found time to do other things: read books, breathe clean air, cook and eat real food. It takes someone with greater resources than a mere buff to ask whether his chosen field might not have reached a point in its history where the best movies, being aimed successfully at an audience that wants art, are no longer for everyone. On the other hand, such a moviegoer can see that he might just be getting old.

Whatever the subject, a real critic is a cultural critic, always: if your judgment doesn't bring in more of the world than it shuts out, you shouldn't start. Writing at his best, Thomson is well qualified. You have to know about more than just the movies to see the "nobility" in Denzel Washington's best acting; to isolate Al Pacino's characteristic of "outrageous inner size," you have to be up to speed with short-legged Napoleonic warlords since Alexander the Great; evoking Warren Beatty's "puzzled look" is a nice way of describing catatonia, but it proves that the critic's eye for aesthetic value can penetrate a surface; and it takes a knowledge of the American class structure to make the correct observation about Katharine Hepburn that she "loved movies while disapproving of them." Thomson just loves them, but he knows there is a world elsewhere.

[Via The Morning News]

APOD: Enceladus Looms.

Thankfully, I got my midlife crisis out of the way early, years ago. Otherwise, this would be a really depressing thought:

"Wanna feel old? Just think, if they remade Back to the Future now, they would be travelling back to 1981."

Nice metaphor:

CharleyCarp 05.13.11 at 1:34 pm

Some people like to use battle metaphors for trials, but that's just because they like to think of themselves as macho he-men. I prefer to compare going to trial to putting on a musical. Where you want the spectators humming your overture during intermission, and joining in the singalong section at the end.

2001: A Space Odyssey on VHS.

[Via LinkMachineGo!]

John Naughton relates a lovely line from a recent lecture by Peter Hennessy in which he touched upon the issue of how a Prime Minister deals with his or her responsibilities as regards the potential deployment of the UK's nuclear deterrent:

Hennessy was very interesting on this function of the Prime Minister, which he calls "end of the world stuff". The big issue is the instructions that Trident captains are given before embarking on the 90-day patrol during which time they are are largely incommunicado. Each incoming PM is now required to write, on four handwritten sheets of paper, the four options that the commander of the submarine is given. These sheets are then sealed and the envelope lodged in the submarine's safe. Hennessy raised a grim laugh when he claimed that Tony Blair "went white" when this was explained to him, and speculated that one of his concerns was that the trident patrols are not synchronised with the electoral cycle: when Blair arrived in Downing Street, one of the subs was on patrol – with John Major's handwritten instructions in the vessel's safe!

One for parents of small children everywhere: Go the Fuck to Sleep by Adam Mansbach, illustrated by Ricardo Cortés.

The cubs and the lions are snoring,
Wrapped in a big snuggly heap.
How is it you can do all this other great shit
But you can't lie the fuck down and sleep?

[Via Matt Haughey's Delicious feed]

Dave Winer on the prospect of Twitter blocking automated access to tweet texts for outsiders:

[...] I don't see why we should care. The good stuff is already outside of Twitter and flows into it.

[Via Inessential]

Courtesy of the Slacktivist, 7 biblical women's names that deserve wider usage:

2. Jael. You meet plenty of people named after Mary, the other biblical character praised as "most blessed of women," but I've never met anyone named after Jael. Maybe it's because the name translates, literally, as "mountain goat." Or maybe it's because "bad-ass" isn't what most parents are looking for in a name for their baby girl. Jael was bad-ass. She took out Sisera, the general in charge of the invading army:

Barak came by in pursuit of Sisera, and Jael went out to meet him. "Come," she said, "I will show you the man you're looking for." So he went in with her, and there lay Sisera with the tent peg through his temple – dead.

Don't mess with Jael.

Obi-Wan Kenobi Is Dead, Vader Says – Galactic Empire Times:

Obi-Wan Kenobi's demise is a defining moment in the stormtrooper-led fight against terrorism, a symbolic stroke affirming the relentlessness of the pursuit of those who turned against the Empire at the end of the Clone Wars. What remains to be seen, however, is whether it galvanizes Kenobi's followers by turning him into a martyr or serves as a turning of the page in the war against the Rebel Alliance and gives further impetus to Emperor Palpatine to step up Stormtrooper recruitment.

In an earlier statement issued to the press, Kenobi boasted that striking him down could make him "more powerful than you could possibly imagine."

[Via Ghost in the Machine]

Movie budgets, over time. That's one hell of a jump.

It'd be interesting to see how the share of the median budget figure devoted to salaries, production costs, marketing and so on has changed over time. Even more so if we could see how median profitability had changed over the same period; that one's tricky for all sorts of reasons, but without it you can't tell whether the cost inflation has been 'worthwhile.'¹

Whether the quality of films has increased that steeply is … difficult to quantify, but not hard to guess.

1. You also have to factor in the way that some of the extra costs can be recouped by the DVD/BluRay/online release in a way that wasn't possible back in the 1960s and 1970s. ↩

Probably the greatest newspaper correction ever published:

Correction: May 8, 2011

An item in the Extra Bases baseball notebook last Sunday misidentified, in some editions, the origin of the name Orcrist the Goblin Cleaver, which Mets pitcher R. A. Dickey gave one of his bats. Orcrist was not, as Dickey had said, the name of the sword used by Bilbo Baggins in the Misty Mountains in "The Hobbit"; Orcrist was the sword used by the dwarf Thorin Oakenshield in the book. (Bilbo Baggins's sword was called Sting.)

Not that I follow baseball, or had read the original report, but reading this I can't help but ask myself "Would I have noticed their mistake?" I have a horrible feeling that I would have.¹

[Via The Awl]

1. I don't think I'd have remembered whose sort Orcrist was, but I'm pretty confident that I'd have known that Bilbo's sword was Sting, and – for bonus points – that Sting was handed down to Frodo and was used by Sam to would Shelob. ↩

INCEPTION_FOLDER: Inception explained using only the Mac OS X Finder.

[Via kottke.org]

• The Underwater Project
• Church in the fog
• Wood pigeon
• n i g h t
• Beautiful Photos by Mikko Lagerstedt
• Friday I'm in love

[Beautiful Photos by Mikko Lagerstedt via The Sideshow; Friday I'm in love via FFFFOUND!]