Church of the Leaping Ape Skeleton.

Holy Smoke provides an … innovative … means of remembering your loved ones:

The process of having cremated ash placed in live ammunition begins when you contact us. You tell us what type of hunting or shooting that the decedent practiced and we can help you decide what will best suit your needs. [...]

Once the caliber, gauge and other ammunition parameters have been selected, we will ask you (by way of your funeral service provider) to send approximately one pound of the decedents ash to us. Upon receiving the ashes our professional and reverent staff will place a measured portion of ash into each shotshell or cartridge.

Example: 1 Pound of ash is enough to produce 250 shotshells (one case).

I can't say it'd be for me or mine, but¹ then I can't think of a single reason why those for whom hunting and shooting was a way of life shouldn't have the option of being remembered in the same vein.

[Via MetaFilter]

1. Assuming that the whole site isn't an elaborate joke. ↩

Bill DeRouchey's presentation from last year's South By Southwest Festival on the History of the Button¹ illustrates how the notion of what a button is, and what it does, has shifted over the last century or so. Which is a lot more interesting that I'm making it sound, I promise you!

[Via BERG Blog]

1. That's pushbuttons, not buttons on clothing. ↩

Text Editors in The Lord of the Rings:

vi: Moria

Like Fangorn, ancient and deep, with hints of the long labor of a great people. There is, supposedly, a monumental city of stone down here somewhere but it's so dark I can't see a damn thing. No, wait! A shaft of light illuminates some runes! They read as follows:

^C^C^X^X^X^Xquit
qQ!qdammit[esc]qwertyuiopasdfghjkl;
:xwhat

The Wizard translates: "We cannot get out! We cannot get out! They are coming!"

Every time I use vi,¹ I come to the conclusion that (like Unix) "vi is user friendly: it's just choosy about who its friends are."

[Via Electrolite (Sidelights)]

1. In the interests of complete accuracy, it's vim rather than vi that came with my Mac. Same difference. ↩

Before and After Shots of Joggers:

Last summer, Sacha Goldberger decided he would take on a very interesting project. He assembled a team who helped him create an outdoor studio at Bois de Boulogne, a park located near Paris that's 2 1/2 times the size of New York's Central Park. He stopped joggers, asking them for a favor – would they sprint for him and then pose right after for his camera? Many obliged. Out of breath, these joggers showed an overwhelming amount of fatigue on their faces.

Goldberger then asked these same people to come into his professional studio exactly one week later. Using the same light, he asked them to pose the same way they had before.

"I wanted to show the difference between our natural and brute side versus how we represent ourselves to society," Goldberger tells us. "The difference was very surprising."

[Via MetaFilter]

I did not know that:¹

French law requires that a purebred dog or cat – that is, an animal belonging to one of the breeds listed in the Livre des origines français or the Livre officiel des origins felines – be given a name beginning with a prescribed letter of the alphabet, determined by the year of its birth, rather like the way British car registration plates used to be organised. The alphabetised system began in 1926, with Z omitted. In 1972 the Commission Nationale d'Amélioration Génétique further regularised the system, and K, Q, W, X and Y were also taken out of contention. [...]

1. #376 in an ongoing series. ↩

In the wake of a tech pundit's suggestion that Microsoft sell off Bing to a suitable buyer – like, say, Apple – John Gruber came up with a truly brilliant idea that would put Bing back in the black PDQ:

They charge pay-per-view admission to listen live to the phone call as Steve Ballmer calls Steve Jobs and pitches him on Apple buying Bing.

Please, please, someone make this happen.

Nicked from 37signals:

Have you noticed that software feels cheap when UI elements move around on the screen without notice? Web applications are particularly vulnerable to this problem. Browsers give image elements a default size if they do not have explicit width and height attributes. Once these images have loaded, they expand or contract to their full size, causing all other elements on the page to reflow in response.

We try to avoid this in our applications, but it's easy for an image tag to slip through the cracks. That single tag might be repeated many times in a loop, each instance causing the on-screen furniture to shift around in an unseemly way.

Here's a tip for catching unsized images during development. Add this CSS rule somewhere in your stylesheet:

img:not([width]):not([height]) {
border: 2px solid red !important;
}

Then any images without width and height attributes will be drawn with a red border so they're easy to spot.

Neat.

Somewhat overdue:

• Orda Cave
• Showers
• Bethlehem, Sunday, 6:52 a.m.
• Marine Life
• Contrails
• Stripey Wednesday Socks
• Joffery Ballet¹
• The Shuttle Rips Space/Time at the End of an Era
• Hummingbird at Dawn
• it's a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness
• Spire #2
• Jagged
• look girl "on the sunny corner"
• Ediblity²

1. Especially the first image in the set. ↩
2. Which I've linked to before, but I came across it again this week and I think it's well worth another look. ↩

One for those of us still pining for Lost: a clip shown at Comic Con 2011 finally reveals the Man in Black's name.¹

[Via The Medium Is Not Enough]

1. Talking of time travel, here's the BBC America trailer for the return of Doctor Who, also via The Medium Is Not Enough. ↩

Rather brilliantly, when Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out the BBC World Service invited Colonel John Blashford-Snell to review it:

In any way, do you have assignments that are as hairy, in a sense, as some of the scenes that you see in films like the Crystal Skull?

Well, yes, er, I mean, some of the, on the – a few years ago we did an expedition in Bolivia and, ah, Brazil; and that was actually looking for a lost city. It was Paititi in this case, the great city of gold. But Akator came into it, because we found -

- which is in the present film – the current film -

- yes, it's in the present film – and I thought: golly, where did they get this story from? They must have read our book. One of the things about it was that we were faced with a bunch of neo-Nazis. They were real. And we were followed about by chaps with red armbands with swastikas on and that sort of thing. And this was in 2001. And so they created a lot of difficulties for us. And luckily the Bolivians equipped us with a wonderful Bolivian colonel, Hugo Cornejo, who was, um, built like Rambo, and his nickname was Rambo, and he dealt with the opposition … very effectively.

Sadly, the interviewer forgot to ask whether JBS had ever sheltered from a nuclear blast in a fridge.

The story of the murder of John Beckley on Clapham Common in 1953 encompasses knife crime, the coining of the phrase 'Teddy Boy', and a barrister by the name of Christmas Humphreys:

[Senior counsel for the prosecution] Humphreys wasn't your usual common or garden barrister, he was also the author of many works on Mahayana Buddhism. In fact Penguin had published his book Buddhism: An Introduction and Guide just two years previously in 1951 and has, somewhere in the world, remained in print ever since. Indeed Humphreys had founded the Buddhist Society in London in 1924 (it still exists and is now one of the oldest Buddhist organisations outside Asia) and was the most notable Buddhist in the country.

By the time of the Michael John Davies trial in the autumn of 1953 Christmas Humphreys had already had an extraordinary year. If he had been the sort of person who worried about what people thought of him (and he almost certainly wasn't) he would have wished the upcoming Clapham Common murder trial to be as uncontroversial as possible.

The reason why Humphreys might have hoped for a quiet, uncontroversial trial was that had already been involved in a couple of highly controversial cases¹ involving the death penalty, cases that ended up leading to the suspension of the use of the death penalty for murder just a couple of years before Humphreys became a judge himself.

1. A couple of years after the trial of Michael John Davies, Humphreys was the lead prosecutor in the Ruth Ellis trial. All told, Christmas Humphreys was such a central figure in Britain's use of the death penalty in the 1950s that he has been played on-screen five times in films and TV plays about the various high-profile trials he was involved in. Has any other real-life barrister been depicted on film and TV as often? ↩

Adrian Hon reckons that Unbound is a Crowdfunding Cargo Cult:

I genuinely admire the sentiment behind Unbound, but there's been a real lack of understanding of what makes for successful crowdfunding. I hope they can fix it soon.

I think that it's far too soon to dismiss the Unbound model. The relatively slow start has caused them to re-think the deadlines they've set for projects, but better that than to drop all the partially-funded projects and start again.

I'm not too bothered about the fact that the Unbound model is a little different, a bit more corporate and perhaps even impersonal that the Kickstarter approach. Unbound is providing a crowdfunding service for a particular type of client. A year or two from now it'll be clearer whether the public are willing to pay for books in this way.

As I observed when I wrote about Unbound the one big difference between Unbound and Kickstarter is that the authors using Unbound were mostly published authors already, with the real test being whether the service is used again by authors after they've managed to get one book crowdfunded. If authors use Unbound primarily to prove the commercial viability of their work so as to snag a deal from a publishing house next time round then Unbound will probably fail. If authors come back for a second or third book then Unbound and Kickstarter could happily coexist for years to come.

Jim Meskimen performs Clarence's speech from Shakespeare's Richard III as a number of different celebrities, from Woody Allen to Simon Cowell, via William Shatner.

Uncanny work.

[Via MetaFilter]

Excerpts from the index to Samuel Butler's Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino:

Absolute, we would have an absolute standard if we could, 196

Absolutely, nothing is anything, 196

Bullocks, how I lost my, 154

Evolution and illusion, 43
– essence of, consists in not shocking too much, 110

Maoris on white men's fires, 117

Professions should be hereditary, 155

Rhinoceros grunts a fourth, 233

Toeless men, 129

Undertakers' blinds and art, 145

[Via Making Light (Particles)]

NASA shows us a massive solar flare in close-up, at multiple wavelengths. Awe-inspiring stuff, best viewed at 720p.

[Via Bad Astronomy]

In praise of Joanne Rowling's Hermione Granger series:

It's the end of an era. The entertainment which has stretched across books, movies, and countless marketing tie-ins, which has captivated children and adults for well over a decade and which has, for better or worse, managed to become the defining myth for an entire generation, is winding to its close. I speak, of course, of the Hermione Granger series, by Joanne Rowling.

So, before she goes away for good, let us sing the praises of Hermione. A generation could not have asked for a better role model. [...]

Hermione is not Chosen. That's the best thing about her. Hermione is a hero because she decides to be a hero; she's brave, she's principled, she works hard, and she never apologizes for the fact that her goal is to be very, extremely good at this whole "wizard" deal. Just as Hermione's origins are nothing special, we're left with the impression that her much-vaunted intelligence might not be anything special, on its own. But Hermione is never comfortable with relying on her "gifts" to get by. There's no prophecy assuring her importance; the only way for Hermione to have the life she wants is to work for it. So Hermione Granger, generation-defining role model, works her adorable British ass off for seven straight books in a row. Although she deals with the slings and arrows of any coming-of-age tale – being told that she's "bossy," stuck-up, boring, "annoying," etc – she's too strong to let that stop her. In Hermione Granger and the Prisoner of Azkaban, she actually masters the forces of space and time just so that she can have more hours in the day to learn. [...]

[Via kottke.org]

An Oral History of Friday Night Lights describes the genesis of the Best Married Couple on Television:

[Series creator Peter] Berg: [In the original Friday Night Lights movie], Connie Britton's role was sort of Pretty Wife Clapping in the Stands, which is about the shittiest job an actress can have. At least Talia Shire got to own a pet store and go ice-skating with Rocky.

[Actress] Connie Britton: When Pete got in touch with me and said, "We're going to make a Friday Night Lights TV show. Why don't you come play that part?" I was like, "No way!" The only thing worse than playing a nothing part in a movie is [playing it] for years and years on TV.

Berg: She said, "Are you fucking kidding me? You think I'm going to spend 10 years sitting on a hard-wood bleacher getting splinters in my ass and cheering on Kyle Chandler? You're out of your mind." I said, "I promise. We'll create a character. We'll give you a job. We'll give you dimension. We'll give you a real voice."

[Imagine Television executive David] Nevins: I had to convince her that the wife was going to have a much more significant role, and that the marriage would be the heart of the show. But you never know if that's going to be true. I tried to convince myself so I could convince her.

Britton: It really was a leap of faith, initially, because I only had three scenes in the pilot script. So I remember even going into the pilot and saying, "OK, Pete, just so we're clear: What's here on the page in the pilot, that's not what we're talking about, right?"

[Actor Kyle] Chandler: I'd never met Connie. I didn't know her from her work either, and I don't think she knew me from mine. But it didn't take long – probably 25 steps on the way to go get brunch – that I had an idea that she was going to be a lot of fun to work with.

Berg: I was really worried. Connie and Kyle developed a very flirtatious, precocious relationship right off the bat. And Kyle, of course, is married. They announced they were going to drive to Austin together from L.A. to move out, and I threw myself in front of that bus. I said it was a horrible idea for multiple reasons. They ignored me. Connie dismissively told me she knew what she was doing and she didn't need my advice. I was convinced they would be having some torrid affair by the time they reached Santa Fe and Kyle's marriage would be over by the time they got to Austin. I was wrong about that, thank God.

Friday Night Lights¹ has just ended in the States after five seasons; over here ITV4 showed season 2 last year – only three years behind the NBC run of the show – at 1am. Just to make the show's that little bit harder to get into, ITV4 ran episodes five nights a week.² It's just a crime that such a fantastic show got buried in the wee small hours.

I know that at first glance Friday Night Lights looked like a corny, sentimental show about a bunch of pretty high school kids playing American Football, but trust me: it was so much more than that.

1. Previously. ↩
2. I think that 'stripping' a one hour drama across multiple nights a week is a terrible idea; instead of inviting a potential viewer to devote one hour a week to keep up with your new show, you're asking them for five hours of their time. I know that in theory in this age of DVRs viewers can let episodes stack up and watch them at their leisure, but in practice I suspect that pushing out five hours a week of a show – especially a newish show which you're just barely bothering to advertise – simply makes it that much more likely that viewers will look at the backlog of episodes building up over a fairly short time and decide to skip the show completely. ↩

A Doctor Who Tube Map. And why not?

[Via currybetdotnet]

I'm Comic Sans, Asshole.

[Via swissmiss]