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1 June 2014
[space] Technoarchaeology: How to revive a satellite … the amazing story of how communication has been re-established with a satellite last communicated with in 1998 … ‘This initial contact indicates that the satellite’s computer and radios are functioning. The next steps are to determine more fully whether its control systems work as expected and test its instrumentation and propulsion. The team must fire its rockets by mid-June to reposition ISEE-3. The next big challenge will come when the satellite swings around the moon onto its shadowed side and is cut off from the sun. The craft will power down for the first time in many years, and the team hopes when it sees it again, it will wake up and resume communications. It has lasted this long, and the group hopes for many more years to come.’
2 June 2014
[ukip] Ukip founder Alan Sked: ‘The party has become a Frankenstein’s monster’ … a fascinating interview with UKIP’s founder… ‘Sked recalls, too, the letters of complaint he received from Salisbury, when Farage stood for Ukip in 1997’s general election. “I remember one that said, ‘I’m very glad your candidate believes in education, but until he learns to spell it, I’m not voting for him.’ That’s the kind of person people are voting for when they vote Ukip. Why does anyone have time for this creature? He’s a dimwitted racist.”‘
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4 June 2014
[shops] Britain’s Soulless And Generic High Streets Under Threat … ‘Chef Carolyn Ryan said: “It’s terrifying to think that unless we act fast, our children will never know a world of mobile phone shops, Greggs and Clinton Cards.”
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5 June 2014
[books] The Mr Men Inhabit A Godless Universe. It’s A Brutal Existence … Charlie Brooker on the Mr Men … ‘The Mr Men inhabit a godless universe. They chiefly fall into two camps – those with character defects (eg Mr Greedy) and those with afflictions (eg Mr Skinny). They all suffer in some way, except those too mad (Mr Silly) or too stupid (Mr Dizzy) to comprehend what suffering is. There is justice in their realm, but it’s applied inconsistently at best. Mr Nosey, for instance, has all his inquisitiveness literally beaten out of him when the townsfolk conspire against him. He hears an interesting noise behind a fence and pokes his nose round it, only to be smashed in the face by a man with hammer – who laughs about it afterwards. But Mr Nosey’s only crime was excessive curiosity, whereas Mr Tickle – a 1970s children’s entertainer with wandering hands who runs around town touching strangers inappropriately from dawn till dusk – goes unpunished.’
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6 June 2014
[comics] The Weirdo “NO HOPE” Diagram … by R. Crumb … ‘Proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that there’s No Hope!’ 
7 June 2014
[life] Tweet … Channelling Allen Ginsberg in 2014 … ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brevity, over-connectedness, emotionally starving for attention, dragging themselves through virtual communities at 3 am, surrounded by stale pizza and neglected dreams, looking for angry meaning, any meaning…’
8 June 2014
[art] Michelangelo’s David Correctly Oriented … a different way of viewing Michelangelo’s masterpiece … ‘Everyone has seen photos of Michelangelo’s David, but unfortunately the sculpture is invariably shown from the side view, rather than from the front. The image on the the right is an actual frontal view of David, as he coolly yet menacingly awaits Goliath, his sling at the ready over his shoulder and his face full of disdain. With this lighting, he actually appears to be sneering at the giant. The message of the sculpture is clearly, “You [Goliath, and by extension, Caesar Borgia and any other potential enemy of the Florentine Republic] are dead meat!” No living person has ever seen or photographed this primary view of the world’s most famous sculpture.’ [via As Above]
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9 June 2014
[books] When nature attacks! Pulp horror covers from the 1970s & ‘80s … A gallery of covers and commentary on the “When animals go bad” horror genre … ‘Guy N. Smith produced the insect horror of all horrors with Abomination in 1987, where pesticide causes every insect, worm, slug etc attack man. Smith more than any other author produced several “Nature Gone Bad” books with Snakes, Alligators, Locusts, the rather enjoyable Slime Beast, which may have come from another world, or may have been an evolutionary mutation created by man-made poisons, and The Throwback, where evolution goes wild. The structure of these books is usually the same. The opening has some poor unfortunate, often a down-and-out or a lonely alcoholic, sometimes a misguided scientist, as first victim. Their body goes undiscovered allowing the rats, slugs, crabs, spiders, etc. to go unnoticed. There usually follows a series of tableaux where couples making out, small children and mothers, sad loners, and ambitious yuppies are killed with ever increasing violence. This leads to our hero, often a teacher (Herbert), a pipe smoking expert (Smith), or a disgruntled government employee (Hutson), who notes the pattern of deaths, the tell-tale markings or slime trails, and commences the creatures’ downfall.’
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10 June 2014
[comics] “A Funny Kind Of Relationship” … Alan Moore On Iain Sinclair … ‘So Iain had a profound effect upon my writing style, it’s probably more evident to me than to other people. It was more the fact that after reading Iain’s work I felt that I had to man up, I had to shift things up a gear, because knowing that prose of that quality was possible, unless you tried to address that, any other response is like, cowardice, or defeat, surrender… It was like when I read Burroughs as a teenager. It made me realise that prose was capable of doing certain other things than things that I had previously attributed to it. Later on I found that Iain’s kind of literary genealogy is not a million miles away from my own, its just that his has got a much finer eye attached to it and a much greater body of knowledge, but I think we were both inspired by the energy of the Beat writers and the culture that spread out from them.’
11 June 2014
[people] 27 People Who Have Better Job Titles Than You … ‘Lonnie Johnson – Professional Snuggler’
12 June 2014
[comics] Neil Tennant’s FURY… a fascinating look at a 1977 Marvel comic edited by Neil Tennant from the Pet Shop Boys … ‘The covers of Fury were also similar to the ones Battle had been running. Powerful images with a punchy message. None punchier than the brilliant one shown at the top of this post by Carlos Ezquerra. The artist had produced many similarly strong images for Battle’s covers so it was quite a coup for Marvel UK to commission him for Fury. Unfortunately, the company were not given a budget by their American owners to produce British strips so although Fury looked like a traditional UK war comic on the outside, the interiors were a different matter…’
13 June 2014
[politics] Five myths about UKIP … that should make the Conservatives happy … debunking some widely held ideas about the UKIP… ‘Myth two: More Britons wish to leave the EU than in 2009 – The opposite is true. Five years ago we divided narrowly in favour of a complete withdrawal from the EU; today, by a modest margin, we prefer to remain a member…’
14 June 2014
[scifi] Wikipedia’s List Of Fictional Living Planets … ‘This is a list of fictional living planets, planets in fiction which are said to be alive, and in some cases, intelligent. This includes worlds covered by a single immense organism (such as Solaris) or whose biosphere is composed of organisms which are linked into a hive mind.’
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15 June 2014
[comics] Five Great Comic Book Adaptations Of Movies … some great comics to watch out for on this list. On Kirby’s 2001: ‘It’s hard to imagine two sensibilities more opposite in tone than those of Jack Kirby and Stanley Kubrick. Kirby’s grandiosity acts as a stark contrast to the calculated distance of Kubrick and for this alone, his eight-years-after-the-fact adaptation of 2001 really shouldn’t work. Against everything, though, the adaptation succeeds by choosing to take a new path, mashing up three different versions of the material — novel, screenplay and final product — and adding Kirby’s off-kilter dynamism to create a final product that’s as wonderful as it is “wrong.”The original film is (obviously) full of space, figuratively and literally. Kubrick allows the camera to rest, giving the audience an opportunity to breathe in the recycled air and vastness of the universe. An absence of dialogue and narration helps further the film’s atmosphere, providing a base from which the stunning visuals stand out even more. This draws the audience in, forcing them to pay attention to what’s not being said just as much as what is. This sort of subtlety is exactly the sort of thing that Kirby has no interest in; he’s going to tell you the story. With words and pictures. Deal with it.’
16 June 2014
[comics] The Joker’s Utility Belt … I wonder what the Joker does with the small cork? … 
17 June 2014
[tv] Hannibal, slasher TV for the chattering classes … The Guardian On Hannibal … ‘When Hannibal – or CSI: Whitby Goth Weekend as I like to call it – aired in America earlier this year the cascade of acclaim spewing over its beauty and poetic themes was pretty spectacular. As an intellectual myself, I can only agree. Clearly, us highbrow types can’t get enough of juddery flashback scenes set to sinister circus music, or martinis made from children’s tears, or frosty psychopaths muttering weird jokes as his guests tuck into lung sushi. A body turns up, scooped out like a kiwi and filled with poisonous flowers. A thousand clever viewers politely applaud the artistry of it all.’
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18 June 2014
[comics] Alan Moore’s Lost Comic Miracleman Has Returned … ‘A Dream of Flying is lovely, but the truly jaw-dropping stuff is just a few months away. You’ll get to see “Scenes From the Nativity,” in which Moran’s wife gives birth to a superpowered infant in an infamously (and, in its way, beautifully) graphic manner. You’ll experience the astounding conclusion of Moore’s run: a city-demolishing fight between Miracleman and Johnny Bates that will turn your stomach and expand your mind, followed by an issue in which Miracleman assumes his rightful role as a god and creates a worldwide quasi-socialist utopia. You’ll delight in Gaiman’s series of short stories about life in that utopia – one of which is a gorgeous little tale narrated by an undead Andy Warhol. You’ll read about modern myths and see better worlds. And soon, God (Miracleman?) willing, you’ll find out how it was all supposed to conclude. ‘
19 June 2014
[life] Has David Birnbaum solved the mystery of existence?… engrossing profile of “outsider thinker” David Birnbaum … ‘There is no shortage of people who would say no, at least in Birnbaum’s case. His work, said a commenter on the Chronicle’s website, “reads like L Ron Hubbard had drunken sex one night with Ayn Rand and produced this bastard thought-child”. One scholar who became professionally involved with Birnbaum described the experience as “unsettling, unfortunate and, to my knowledge, unprecedented in academic circles”. Another just called him “toxic”. But then again – as Birnbaum pointed out to me, more than once, during the weeks I spent trying to figure out exactly what he was up to – just suppose that a scrappy, philosophically unqualified Jewish guy from Queens really had cracked the cosmic code, embarrassing the ivory-tower elites: well, isn’t this exactly the kind of defensive response you’d expect?’
20 June 2014
[tv] Cooking with Hannibal: The Supercut … … all the scenes of Hannibal cooking from the TV Series edited together.
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21 June 2014
[movies] Mike Judge answers the question: “What Is a TPS Report?” … ‘According to Rolling Stone, Judge was asked this at a 10th Anniversary screening of Office Space. He replied, “When I was an engineer, it stood for Test Program Set. Isn’t that exciting?” A Test Program Set a document describing the step-by-step process in which an engineer tests and re-tests software or an electronics system. Before getting his start with Beavis and Butthead, Mike Judge earned a degree in physics and was an engineer and programmer for a subcontractor working on military jets.’
22 June 2014
[war] America’s Nuclear Arsenal Still Runs Off Floppy Disks … ‘The control room was not what Stahl-or I-expected: There’s no “big button,” but there are floppy disks. Like the old, big 8-inch floppy disks. Like the kind, […] that are often featured in a computer history museum or found in your attic, beneath old DOS manuals. Like, not even the newer, 3.5-inch model of floppy disk. That’s how they control our nuclear missiles. At 23 years old, the deputy missileer said she had never even seen a floppy disk before finding one that can help wreak untold carnage on planet Earth.’
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23 June 2014
[crime] Sleazy, bloody and surprisingly smart: In defense of true crime … an appreciation of true crime books … The very thing that makes true crime compelling – this really happened – also makes it distasteful: the use of human agony for the purposes of entertainment. Of course, what is the novel if not a voyeuristic enterprise, an attempt to glimpse inside the minds and hearts of other people? But with fiction, no actual people are exploited in the making.
I love crime fiction, too, but lately I’ve come to appreciate true crime more, specifically for its lack of certain features that crime fiction nearly always supplies: solutions, explanations, answers. Even if the culprit isn’t always caught and brought to justice in a detective novel, we expect to find out whodunit, and that expectation had better be satisfied.
24 June 2014
21 Screengrabs That Will Make You Quit Facebook Immediately … ‘U have a brain us it!!! Don’t make me ur brain that thinks for u.’
26 June 2014
[comics] Alan Moore Early Career Timeline … … ‘Swamp Thing 24 – Roots (February 1984) … Monster (Scream #1 – March 1984) Boy buries his father, then goes to investigate the mysterious locked door upstairs which his father was killed going up to. Story ends with a to-be-continued, and was picked up by John Wagner – was about a deformed man living in the attic who was gentle but usually homicidal, apparently.’
27 June 2014
[people] The 17 Most Furious People In Local Newspapers … Buzzfeed condenses down Angry People in Local Newspapers … ‘These people are angry because someone keeps leaving bags of poo in Hoo.’
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28 June 2014
[movies] Mandy Patinkin on playing Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride … ‘And in my mind, I feel that… when I killed the six fingered man, I killed the cancer that killed my father. And for a moment he was alive…’
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29 June 2014
[comics] Chris W’s Cerebus Character Index … a comprehensive index of all the characters who appeared more than two times … ‘Missy (52): #114, #118, #124, #136, #141-2, #144-57, #162-70, #173, #191 (flashback), #218 (dream), #230-4, #237-8, #242, #246, #254, #261, #265, #300 (flashback)’
30 June 2014
[lego] A Common Nomenclature for Lego Families … how to name all the different types of Lego … ‘Every family, it seems, has its own set of words for describing particular Lego pieces. No one uses the official names. “Dad, please could you pass me that Brick 2×2?” No. In our house, it’ll always be: “Dad, please could you pass me that four-er?” And I’ll pass it, because I know exactly which piece he means. Lego nomenclature is essential for family Lego building. “Dad, I’m building a roof for the medical pod, but I need a hinge-y bit to make it open up. You know, one of those four-er flat hinge-y bits.” Yes I do know. I’ll keep my eye out for one…’
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