1 March 2007
[censorship] The Great Firewall of China — test any website to see if it is censored by the China’s firewall. [via Metafilter]
[comics] The Reversible Man — another classic Alan Moore Time Twister on scans_daily.
2 March 2007
[movies] Long Flicks: to Cut or Not to Cut? … ‘Some critics thought Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York” or Robert De Niro’s “The Good Shepherd” – both clocking in at about two hours, 40 minutes – would have been greatly improved at closer to two hours. But who’s going to tell Scorsese or De Niro to chop 30 minutes?’
3 March 2007
[comics] This Vicious Cabaret — Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s This Vicious Cabaret set to David J’s music … ‘They say that there’s a broken light for every heart on Broadway. They say that life’s a game, then they take the board away. They give you masks and costumes and an outline of the story.Then leave you all to improvise their vicious cabaret…’
[comics] Ask Metafilter: What’s the appeal of Catch-22 by Joseph Heller? … ‘The disillusionment portrayed in Catch 22 is symbolic of the disillusionment that was forming in the American conscious throughout the 20th century. Just look at Vietnam, a war that began just a few years after Catch 22’s publication. And I would say that the same ideas are still with us, maybe growing. Our Presidential and congressional leaders seem just as incapable of hearing the truth as any authorities in Catch 22. All one can do is navigate through the bureaucracy, using its illogical rules to our own advantage whenever possible.’
4 March 2007
[comics] The Image-Soaked Future — Bryan Appleyard on comics recent successes in bookstores. ‘…one rather banal reason for such success must be mentioned — Chinese printers. A few years ago, it became radically cheaper to print in China. For graphic novels, this was a turning point, as they are expensive to produce. The Jonathan Cape boss Dan Franklin, the form’s leading British publisher, estimates that Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, with its fabulously complex and beautiful images, would have had to be sold at between £30 and £40 if printed in the West. Thanks to China, it sells for £18 – a lot, but not vastly out of line with a conventional hardback.’
5 March 2007
[comics] Matt Murdock is a Dick … the infamous moment when Matt Murdock drops a kid down a lift shaft in Daredevil #209 …
6 March 2007
[apple] Create your own Apple Rumor … ‘An Anonymous tipster has advised us to expect a Flash based iMac or Wifi Enabled iPod Nano in the NAB 2007’ [via Blah Blah Flowers]
7 March 2007
[iraq] Pat Dollard, Hollywood Guy Gone Gonzo … ‘After his fourth wife left him because she got upset about his hobbies, which included cocaine and hookers, Hollywood agent/producer Pat Dollard decided to get his head together by flying to Iraq to hang out with Marines and fight insurgents and film a pro-war documentary that would make him “the Michael Moore of the right.” A few weeks later, he sent his Hollywood pals a photo of himself with a Mohawk haircut, a machine gun and the word DIE shaved into his chest hair. After that, things started to get weird.’ [thanks Phil]
[funny] 100% of SCIENCE!: How Pikey is The Dorchester? … ‘The experiment comprises the depositing of a small denomination coin in the gentlemen’s urinal of said carefully chosen establishment, and measuring how much time passes before the coin is removed.’
8 March 2007
[comics] How D’Israeli Drew Leviathan (Or, Drawing Comics from Scratch on Computer) — nice guide to how a page of D’Israeli and Ian Eddington’s 2000AD serial was created.
9 March 2007
[wikipedia] Top 100 most-viewed pages on Wikipedia [via Waxy]
[comics] Interview with Grant Morrison — this one from 1999 … ‘As writers, we have to know what’s going on, because our lives depend on it. Y’know, I get paid by the script. If I don’t do any scripts, my whole life falls apart, we have to keep writing. And we have to keep being aware of what the pop culture is saying. It’s not even a conscious thing, but you’re in there, you know what’s going on, you know what’s going to sell, you know what kids are interested in. And editors don’t, because they’re getting a salary, they don’t have to care. They’re set up, they’ve got their pension funds, so we actually know how the stuff is done. We know what people want.’
10 March 2007
[movies] Tom Cruise’s Starring Role in Watchmen Narrowly Averted … ‘I asked him point blank about Cruise, and he confirmed that he and Tom had been talking about it. A lot. But that now it looked like Cruise would not be appearing in the film. “He was interested,” Snyder confirmed to me. “I did talk to him about it for a while.” And would the role he wanted be Ozymandias? “That would be the role,” Snyder said.’
11 March 2007
[tv] Charlie Brooker on Adam Curtis’s The Trap – What Happened To Our Dream Of Freedom? (on BBC2, tonight, 9 PM) … ‘Curtis has an uncanny knack for hovering coolly above recent world history and spotting huge, sweeping, disturbing trends, then recounting them in a way that feels subversive and playful, thoughtful and entertaining, all at once. He has an incredible eye for archive footage, assembling one haunting montage after another, apparently from thin air. His programmes unfold like a series of revelations; watching one is like having all your slumbering suspicions about the world – suspicions so dormant you didn’t even realise they were suspicions – confirmed and explained for the very first time.’
[tv] Cry freedom — Preview of Adam Curtis’s The Trap … ‘”I realise what I said at some times may have over-emphasised rationality,” an elderly John Nash tells Curtis in an extraordinary interview, after emerging from years of battling schizophrenia. “Human beings are much more complicated than the human being as a businessman.” In fact, the documentary notes sardonically, experiments show that only two kinds of people behave like perfect little economists in every arena of life: economists themselves, and psychopaths.’
12 March 2007
[comics] Captain America Killed — amusing Onion Vox Pop… ‘Yet another intelligence failure by S.H.I.E.L.D.. How many more screwups must we endure before Bush fires Executive Director Nicholas Fury?’
[blogs] Shaggy Blog Stories: a collaborative blog-stunt for Comic Relief — Mike at Troubled Diva is producing a self-published book of funny blog-entries from UK Bloggers for charity. (Submission deadline is 6pm tomorrow night – so don’t procrastinate about entering!) … ‘Occasionally, in my more delirious moments, I feel like the Anneka Rice of British blogging. At the Nottingham blogmeet on Saturday afternoon, I was tempted to run into the bar in a canary yellow jumpsuit, squawking “OK gang, we’ve got SEVEN DAYS to WRITE A BOOK!”‘ [quote from Mike’s Progress Report]
13 March 2007
[history] Mrs Darwin’s Diaries Go Online … ‘The 6,000-plus pages contain brief comments about the weather, family life and Darwin’s health. The couple regularly held dinner parties for the great and the good of Victorian science. But alongside this Emma recorded his blackouts, retching and flatulence that were features of his mystery illness. Her matter-of-fact style is perhaps most movingly evident in her entry on April 18 1882, the day of his death. She wrote simply: “Fatal attack at 12.”‘
[comic] Everything I needed to Learn About Comics I Learned from Arnold Drake … ’14. Monocles Always Work’
14 March 2007
[tv] Metafilter discuss Adam Curtis’s The Trap … My feeling was that the ‘secret history’ aspect of the docos has deliberately given the nod to the idea that in some sense there are an infinite number of secret histories, but perhaps that’s my preconceptions interfering.”
15 March 2007
[lists] 30 Strangest Deaths in History. … ‘Jerome Irving Rodale was a proponent of healthy eating. He was an early advocate for organic farming and sustainable agriculture, founder of Organic Farming and Gardening magazine and Rodale Press. After bragging that he would “live to 100, unless I’m run down by a a sugar-crazy taxi driver”, Rodale died of a heart attack while being interviewed on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971. Appearing fast asleep, Dick Cavett joked “Are we boring you, Mr. Rodale?” before discovering that his 72-year-old guest had indeed died.’ [via linkbunnies.org]
[blogs] Belle de Jour on Billie Piper and ITV2: ‘Finally – it’s official – Billie’s on board, and you can expect to see Belle the series on ITV2 this autumn.’
16 March 2007
[blogs] Shaggy Blog Stories — Mike at Troubled Diva has succeeded in publishing a collection of funny blog stories for Comic Relief in a week. Buy a copy Here … ‘Make no mistake: this is one absolute BELTER of a book: a showcase of British Blogging at its finest. Most of the entries, and indeed many of the submissions which didn’t make it to press, have made me laugh out loud. Sometimes, I have been in stitches. Yes, that might have been simple hysteria. But never has hysteria felt so sweet.’
17 March 2007
[books] Douglas Coupland on bloggers, YouTube and Bubble 2.0 … ‘In the future, all these kids now with MySpace pages who put absolutely everything out there, like number of tampons they used, everything, in 40 years there’ll be a political culture where stuff like that, minor details, don’t shock anymore. Now in the States if you hire a maid who doesn’t have her papers you have to withdraw from politics. I hope I live to see the day when stuff like that doesn’t matter, but at the moment I think after a certain age – I tag it arbitrarily at 22 – everyone’s more withdrawn in fear.’
18 March 2007
[mac] Unboxing a Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh — watch as a Mac collector unboxes a never opened Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh he bought on eBay for a large sum of money … ‘When the auction ended, I was the proud owner of a brand new TAM for my exact maximum bid. I had outbid another boxed TAM pursuer by £0.01.I went out that night and got drunk, partly out of elation but mainly because I was so dazed at sending so much on an eight year old computer, no matter how gorgeous. With the aid of alcohol, I convinced myself that it was a bargain because I hadn’t paid the $7500 asking price from 1997.’
19 March 2007
[tv] Jack Bauer’s Twitter … ‘Can anyone recommend a good hand lotion? Conditions when I was in China were just torture on my skin.’
[film] Color Me Kubrick Trailer — John Malkovitch and Jim Davidson… together at last! ‘For months Alan Conway, a perfect stranger, passed himself off as one of the greatest film directors of all time, Stanley Kubrick. Conway knew nothing of the filmmaker or his films, but this didn’t prevent him from using and abusing the credulity of those who thought they had come in contact with the mythical and equally discreet director.’
20 March 2007
[comics] The Black Diamond Detective Agency Preview — pages from Eddie Campbell’s latest work.
21 March 2007
[comics] Five Artists who should draw Dredd — interesting list from comics artist Chris Weston’s Blog. ‘…while we are at it could we please have a ROGUE TROOPER one-off by Joe Kubert?’ [via Blackbeltjones]
22 March 2007
[net] Glanced At: ‘sfearthquakes’ on Twitter …
“One of my favorite business model suggestions for entrepreneurs is, find an old UNIX command that hasn’t yet been implemented on the web, and fix that. talk and finger became ICQ, LISTSERV became Yahoo! Groups, ls became (the original) Yahoo!, find and grep became Google, rn became Bloglines, pine became Gmail, mount is becoming S3, and bash is becoming Yahoo! Pipes. I didn’t get until tonight that Twitter is wall for the web. I love that.”
[news] Evening Standard: War Has Started … (more…)
23 March 2007
[comics] 2000 AD Prog Slog — a blog covering a rereading of the first 1000 or so issues of 2000AD … On Judge Dredd in Prog 56: ‘You would have thought that if there were such a thing as a robot car with an ethics circuit that there would be a back up to it in case of failure or access to it would be limited to an administrator account that only the manufacturer would have the password to. In the Judge Dredd story that finishes this issue, all Dave Paton has to do to cause this critical function to fail resulting in his car, Elvis, to go on a four prog long killing spree is to pop under the bonnet and accidentally drop a spanner onto the circuit.’ [via Forbidden Planet’s Blog]
24 March 2007
[lifehacks] Make Microsoft Word less annoying — useful tips from Lifehacker … ‘Microsoft Word can drive you nuts. It piles on features few people need, plagues you with annoying auto-corrections and just generally acts like a pain in the ass. No more. It’s time to take back the word processor…’
25 March 2007
[religion] The Atheist’s Greatest Nightmare… the Banana. [thanks Phil]
[music] Elton John @ 60 — Diamond Geezer visits Elton John’s childhood home … ‘See how the current owners hide their car beneath an all-enveloping tarpaulin, in much the same way that middle-aged Elton used to cover himself with a series of unconvincing wigs. The local council, in their infinite wisdom, appear to have marked this most auspicious musical heritage site not with a blue plaque but with a bright green litter bin. And there’s also a bus stop immediately outside the front door…’
26 March 2007
27 March 2007
[walking] Two useful walking maps of London: Students Guide to the Tube and London Pedestrian Routemap.
28 March 2007
[tv] Farewell Tony, a modern Everyman — Preview of the Last Series of the Sopranos … ‘Unlike most crime boss anti-heroes, Tony Soprano has vulnerabilities. The first episode of the pilot for the series, made two years before the show was picked up by HBO, opens with Tony staring at a statue of a naked woman. He is sitting in the psychiatrist’s waiting room, where he has come for his first session following his collapse from a panic attack. The tone for the 77 episodes that have followed was set: Tony was a modern wise guy, shackled by the responsibilities of both families, and caught at home between the demands of mother, wife, mistress and shrink.’
[comics] For Sale on eBay: Ultimate X-Men, Collected 1-3 and 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 by Mark Millar and Andy Kubert.
29 March 2007
[tv] Quotes from the Batman TV Series … Batman: ‘A reporter’s lot is not easy, making exciting stories out of plain, average, ordinary people like Robin and me.’ [via linkbunnies.org]
30 March 2007
[apple] Top 10 Apple Products which Flopped … ‘One of the main reasons of Lisa’s failure was its astonishing price of $9,995 dollars ($21,500 in Feb 2007 dollars).’