(Beware of track 5, Wouldn’t It Be Nice To Have A Finger Of Fudge?, which features the strangest collision of musical styles I’ve heard in quite a while. There’s even a video, if you’re feeling brave.)

[Via Word Magazine]

SCENE: Tony comes home, gets a cheeseburger and proceeds to send his company’s stocks diving faster than a GBU-500 when he announces he’s getting out of the weapons manufacturing business.

Obadiah Stane: Gee, thanks for killing the company.

Tony: No prob.

Obadiah: I hope you aren’t going hippy on me with that freaky medallion.

Tony: Nah, it’s just a miniature fusion plant.

Obabiah: On your chest?

Tony: Yup.

Obadiah: That you built with spare parts and an equipment shop that the Mythbusters would reject?

Tony: Yup.

Obadiah: I don’t suppose you’d consider doing something wild and crazy like, oh, I don’t know, selling it to power the entire free world!

Tony: Nah.

Obadiah: And people are going to call me the villain of this movie.

[Via James Nicoll’s LiveJournal]

[Via plexi, posting at MetaFilter]

Towards the end of World War II the staff of SS officer Hans Kammler made a significant breakthrough in anti-gravity.

From a secret base built in the Antarctic, the first Nazi spaceships were launched in late ‘45 to found the military base Schwarze Sonne (Black Sun) on the dark side of the Moon. This base was to build a powerful invasion fleet and return to take over the Earth once the time was right.

Now it’s 2018, the Nazi invasion is on its way and the world is goose-stepping towards its doom. […]

It all sounds similar in tone, if not in plot, to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Not a good omen.

[Via I Watch Stuff]

TERRY JONES’ MEDIEVAL LIVES
TX Date: 04/05/08

“I feel that Terry Jones is using history to criticise the Pope. He is predictable and of poor quality.”

It was one of the most iconic and heart-stopping movie images of 2003: the Columbia Space Shuttle ignited, burning and crashing to earth in fragments.

Now, amazingly, data from a hard drive recovered from the fragments has been used to complete a physics experiment - CXV-2 - that took place on the doomed Shuttle mission.

Columbia’s fragments were painstakingly and exhaustively collected. Amongst them was a 400MB Seagate hard drive which was in the sort of shape you think it would be in after being in an explosive fire and then hurled to earth from several miles up with a ferocious impact. […]

Even as you read this, Seagate’s advertising agency is no doubt working up a new campaign…

[Via rc3.org]

[Via MemeMachineGo!]

It’s the sort of weather you want to observe from a safe distance, preferably accompanied by a soundtrack of Metallica or Led Zeppelin.

[Via MetaFilter]

1. Is season 2 out on DVD yet? I can’t possibly wait the several months it’ll take ITV to get round to showing it.¹
2. There will be blood. Oh yes.

If 2007 was the year of Heroes and Friday Night Lights, 2008 is almost certainly going down as the year of Dexter.

1. While I’m on the subject, when are ITV going to get round to broadcasting Friday Night Lights season 2? I know there’s one honking great miscalculation of a melodramatic subplot that would have been better suited to a daytime soap, but I’d like the chance to form my own judgement.

[Via Whatever]

Ballard’s “The Index” (1977) is a damnably clever short “story”, playing all sorts of games with the reader, with the act of writing, with existence itself. It tells the tale of a mysterious man named Henry Rhodes Hamilton, who, although he has been hitherto completely invisible in the world’s media, seems to have been the confidante of every world leader of note since WWII — and the lover of some of their wives as well. According to the “editor’s note” that begins the piece, HRH is “a man who may well have been one of the most remarkable figures of the 20th century. Yet of his existence nothing is publicly known, although his life and work appear to have exerted a profound influence on the events of the past fifty years.”

[…]

The story’s conceit is that it is typeset like an index, apparently the only surviving fragment of HRH’s “unpublished and perhaps suppressed autobiography”, and all of the plot details above, plus much, much more, can be gleaned from the brief fragments in the index itself.

The best response by far was Ghostbusters: London Calling by a poster called frozenhamster:

An Edgar Wright Film 

In this highly anticipated sequel/re-imagining  of the original Ghostbusters England is about to get slimed! When ghosts get a passport to Europe they take London by storm and it’s up to a special team of British parapsychologists to save the city. Killing ghosts and making jokes, all before tea time.

Steve Coogan - Dr. Peter Venkman
Simon Pegg - Dr. Raymond Stantz
Martin Freeman - Dr. Egon Spengler
Nick Frost - Winston Zeddmore
Cate Blanchett - Dana Barrett
Paddy Considine - Louis Tully
Emma Thompson - Janine Melnitz
Christopher Eccleston - Walter Peck
Bill Nighy - Mayor
Ricky Gervais - Male Test Subject
Anna Friel - Female Test Subject
Thandie Newton - Gozer
Edgar Wright - Zuul/Slimer (voice) (uncredited)

I think Ricky Gervais would be better as Louis Tully,¹, but that’s still a pretty solid cast.

Another poster by the name of minerwerks found a cast list from an alternate timeline where the original screenplay somehow ended up in Woody Allen’s hands:

Tony Roberts - Dr. Peter Venkman
Woody Allen - Dr. Raymond Stantz
Jeff Daniels - Dr. Egon Spengler
Christopher Walken - Winston Zeddemore
Diane Keaton - Dana Barrett
Paul Simon - Louis Tully
Mia Farrow - Janine Melnitz
Jeff Goldblum - Walter Peck
Howard Cosell - Mayor
Daniel Stern - Male Student
Mariel Hemmingway - Female Student
Shelley Duvall - Gozer (and the voice)
Woody Allen - Zuul / Slimer (voice) (uncredited)

I’d have paid good money to see that film.

1. For those of us who haven’t seen the film for a while, that’s the character played by Rick Moranis who ends up being possessed and becomes The Keymaster.

[Via MetaFilter]

As some people know, as part of an ongoing research project I’ve spent the past five years reading every science fiction book written for the Young Adult market I can get my hands on. It’s not been an entirely happy experience. In most of the books I’ve read there is an absence of any political complexity, and in particular, an inattention to the way the world works. Perhaps worse, there has been an utter failure to address what I have always thought of as one of the key factors that make an SF book an SF book, that at the end of it, the reader has learned something. This something can be about genetics, strategy in a military mission, the nature of beetle sexuality - I really and truly don’t care - but I have always regarded SF as a didactic literature and regarded that didacticism as a good thing, yet most YA SF novels lack it (even when they simultaneously promote a political viewpoint such as science is bad, it will destroy the planet, focus on your mystical abilities). Little Brother, however, is fiercely, unashamedly didactic. Doctorow revels in what he has set out to do, which is simply to place in the hands of every school child a manual which could be subtitled “how to bring down your government and enjoy doing it.” The first time I read it I was on a flight to the US, and while I became increasingly concerned that this might have been a Very Bad Idea, I also sort of hoped customs might find the book because it is inflammatory. In UK terms, it most definitely Glorifies Terrorism.

It sounds like a companion piece to my current reading, Ken MacLeod’s The Execution Channel.¹

[Via The Sideshow]

1. I’m just over 100 pages into MacLeod’s novel, but thus far it certainly looks to be a story set five minutes into the future, in a worryingly competent surveillance state.

I’m quite prepared to believe that the outgoing government might want to make a point by rolling out the site before it left office, but the government surely couldn’t have put together a site on that scale from scratch in the fortnight since it lost the election. Was the surprise at the notion of putting the information out there, or at the fact that the site had been rolled out early? Or was the real surprise how interested the Italian public apparently was in this information?

[Via Qwghlm]

1. That said, there’s a small part of me that is amazed that people get so up in arms about the possibility that other people will find out how much they earn. I’ve never understood why this is seen as such a sensitive issue. For the record, my gross salary last month was £1,359.25.

[Via MetaFilter]

[Via GromBlog]

It’s a massive cylindrical block of concrete, standing 18 meters high and weighing in at 12,560 metric tons. It is located in the Berlin neighborhood of Tempelhof, where the eponymous airport is found.

The name is translated as “heavy load-bearing body,” although someone in the discussion page has suggested that “heavy load-exerting body” might be more accurate. It was constructed in 1941 to test how well the marshy ground upon which Berlin sits could handle the massive projects planned for Germania. More specifically, it was built to see how the landscape would react to Hitler’s gigantic Triumphal Arch, whose opening would have accommodated Paris’ Arc de Triomphe.

The results were not encouraging:

The Schwerbelastungskörper sank 7 inches in the three years it was to be used for testing, a maximum depth of 2.5 inches was allowed. Using the evidence gathered by these gargantuan devices, it is unlikely the soil could have supported such structures without further preparation.

Hitler dismissed these findings, perhaps confident that the landscape can be subjugated with fine Teutonic engineering. But Hitler’s capital had to wait. There was a war to be waged.

Our personal sites, once our primary points of online presence, are becoming sock drawers for displaced first-person content. We are witnessing the disappearance of the all-in-one, carefully designed personal site containing professional information, links, and brief bursts of frequently updated content to which others respond via comments. Did I say we are witnessing the traditional personal site’s disappearance? That is inaccurate. We are the ones making our own sites disappear.

Obliterating our own readership and page views may not be a bad thing, but let’s be sure we are making conscious choices. […]

I’ve been mulling over these issues lately, thinking about what to do with my sites. Food for thought…

The lab rats in this experiment are a strange mix. They include England footballers, a battalion of middle-class Britons from places such as Salisbury and Weybridge, and even, it is said, Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, who is thought to have a house opposite Kieron Dyer, the West Ham midfielder.

Truly, Dubai is a strange place.

[Via Pruned]

A crash test dummy is tired of his job and secretly wants to be a great magician. So he quits his job and decides to realise his dream.

A very stylish animation.

[Via VideoSift]

As I understand it, one day a few billion years from now it’ll be our turn.

[Via Seed]

A spokesman for OGC said: “It is true that it caused a few titters among some staff when viewed on its side, but on consideration we concluded that the effect was generic to the particular combination of the letters OGC - and it is not inappropriate to an organisation that’s looking to have a firm grip on Government spend.”

Heh…

[Via MetaFilter]

Using a semicolon is like barbecuing:
I’m never quite sure I’m doing it correctly.

[Via Fritinancy]