[mars] Abstract And Affecting, The New Mars Pictures Are A Confrontation With The Sublime … Sam Leith On Photographs Of Mars… ‘These photographs inspire not only awe and wonder, but also a sort of longing. None of us alive at this moment – possibly no human ever – will see these landscapes with our own eyes. And yet here are the pictures. For me, they have the same effect as great paintings or photographs – a feeling that something impossible has been made present, while remaining just out of reach.’

[crime] Andrew O’Hagen on Jon Venables and the murder of Jamie Bulger [via Sore Eyes] …

Now, at this distance, I realise Venables is nearly 30. I find the confluence, if that’s the word, of his ruination and my visibility disturbing. At some level, I will always feel I could have been Venables and the more opportunity I get to make myself understood, the more it becomes obvious that he will never escape condemnation, the thing John Major called for more of in his statement at the time of the trial. I have dreams about the boys, and sometimes dream I am the person in the CCTV footage who walks past them with a shopping bag at the exact moment they abducted James. I can see the butcher’s shop where James’s mother is waiting for her change; I see the floor tiles reflecting shadows and hear the mall’s muzak bending sinister as the shoppers go about their business. I hear the echoing swimming-pool clamour of the ordinary day about to go wrong…

[funny] Worth a look: Batman vs. The Gerbils … Fantasy League … Nothing Happened.

[woz] Steve Wozniak is on Twitter: ‘Rare massage (for me), then dance practice. No pain, no gain. Awkward but fun, this dancing. I still can’t do Macarena.’ [link]

[funny] Funny Japanese anime summary of British stereotypes … ‘Fish ‘n’ Chips!’ [more…]

[funny] ‘Come on ladies, skank it up! There’s no shame in being a whore!’ — Overheard in a School in Utah.

[books] The Little People – the best book cover ever … A horror novel about evil Nazi Leprechauns with whips? WANT! [via Moreish]

[nixon] Great moments with Mr. Nixon. … some great quotes from ex-President Richard Nixon …

Nixon: I do not mind the homosexuality. I understand it. (14-second beep to hide personal information) But nevertheless, the point that I make is that goddamit, I do not think that you glorify on public television homosexuality… even more than you glorify whores. Now we all know that people go to whores. … we all have weaknesses. But, goddammit, what do you think that does to kids? What do you think that does to 11 and 12 year old boys when they see that? … You know what happened to the Greeks! Homosexuality destroyed them. Sure, Aristotle was a homo. We all know that. So was Socrates.

Ehrlichman: But he never had the influence that television had.

[hhgttg] The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy On Towels … ‘A towel… is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have.’ — Dougas Adams

[ufo] First Contact: The Man Who’ll Welcome Aliens … Jon Ronson meets the chairman of Seti’s Post-Detection Taskgroup …

…you can tell the abductees are lying or delusional because their descriptions of the aliens and their craft are always so unimaginative. As he writes in The Eerie Silence, the giveaway is the banality of the aliens’ putative agenda, which seems to consist of grubbing around in fields or meadows, chasing cows or cars like bored teenagers, and abducting humans for Nazi-style experiments.

[comics] Wally Wood Should Have Beaten Them All … overview of the comics career of artist Wally Wood … ‘Wood was a tremendously ambitious journeyman. He had a genius and a love for a medium that, until recently, ground down its abundant geniuses, celebrating creation while pointedly not rewarding the creator.’

[comics] Belltoons – The Steve Bell Cartoons Website … The Guardian’s main editorial cartoonist has a (new?) website.

[funny] Worth a Look: Meanwhile, In Finland … Pick Two … Armageddon

[comics] Jack Kirby Was The 20th Century …

He was the existential loner outcast from society who sought solace by riding the waves (the Silver Surfer). He was the military industrial complex (Nick Fury). He was the hippies who rejected the Cold War consensus, and wanted to create their own counterculture (the Forever People). He was the artist who tried to escape his degrading background (Mister Miracle). He was feminism (Big Barda). He was Nixon and the religious right (Darkseid and Glorious Godfrey).

[wisdom] Malcolm Tucker on Bloggers: ‘I read all the blogs because I’m an under-employed fat fucking loser with nothing better to do with my time than sit in my bedroom like a fat space hopper in a tracksuit reading inconsequential, un-spellchecked shit, fabricated by other fat fucking losers.’

[funny] Little Kid Does Worlds Best Batman Spoof … “Max, what do you want for dinner?” “JUSTICE!”

[internet] In Praise of Online Obscurity … ‘In 2007, [Maureen Evans] began a nifty project: tweeting recipes, each condensed to 140 characters. She soon amassed 3,000 followers, but her online life still felt like a small town: Among the regulars, people knew each other and enjoyed conversing. But as her audience grew and grew, eventually cracking 13,000, the sense of community evaporated. People stopped talking to one another or even talking to her. “It became dead silence,” she marvels. Why? Because socializing doesn’t scale…’

[comics] Wilson … Tom Spurgeon produces the first review of Wilson – Dan Clowes latest comic … ‘It’s Clowes being Clowes, and Wilson all by itself makes 2010 a pretty good year for comics no matter what happens from here on out.’

[google] How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web … Steven Levy is given an interesting look behind the scenes into Google’s search engine …

Indeed, [Microsoft] the company that won last decade’s browser war has a best-served-cold approach to search, an eerie certainty that at some point, people are going to want more than what Google’s algorithm can provide. “If we don’t have a paradigm shift, it’s going to be very, very difficult to compete with the current winners,” says Harry Shum, Microsoft’s head of core search development. “But our view is that there will be a paradigm shift.”

[funny] Worth A Look: Underskin – A Map Of The Human Body … Brainiac has no time for love … Superhero Headquarters

[lmg] Ten Years Of Link Blogging … Ten years and 5407 posts to be exact – I did it. As we say on the internets: OMFG! w00t! FTMFW!

[quote] ‘What’ll it be next? Choice extracts from the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations? Trotting out the Nietzsche and the Shelley to dignify some old costumed claptrap? Probably. Sometimes you wonder, in an interconnected universe, who’s dreaming who? — Grant Morrison.

[quote] ‘Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day. There’s genocide, war, corruption. Every fucking day, somewhere in the world, somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else. Every fucking day, someone, somewhere makes a conscious decision to destroy someone else. People find love, people lose it. For Christ’s sake, a child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church. Someone goes hungry. Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman. If you can’t find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don’t know crap about life.’ — Robert McKee in Adaptation.

[quote] ‘The best you can hope for in this life is that your delusions are benign and your compulsions have utility.’ — Scott Adams, Crazy or Disciplined?

[quote] Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72:

On page 39 of California Living magazine I found a hand-lettered ad from the McDonald’s Hamburger Corporation, one of Nixon’s big contributors in the ’72 presidential campaign: PRESS ON, it said. NOTHING IN THE WORLD CAN TAKE THE PLACE OF PERSISTENCE. TALENT WILL NOT: NOTHING IS MORE COMMON THAN UNSUCCESSFUL MEN WITH TALENT. GENIUS WILL NOT: UNREWARDED GENIUS IS ALMOST A PROVERB. EDUCATION ALONE WILL NOT: THE WORLD IS FULL OF EDUCATED DERELICTS. PERSISTENCE AND DETERMINATION ALONE ARE OMNIPOTENT. I read it several times before I grasped the full meaning.

[religion] God Watches You Google … a religious blog poses the question of how we should feel about the morality (or lack of) displayed in our search requests …

This woman goes from searching about pregnancy, to realizing that the father does not want to keep the baby, to researching abortion clinics, to researching whether she can, according to her faith, choose abortion, to dealing with a miscarriage. And at the end of it all, life goes on and she seems ready to be married.

What is so amazing about these searches is the way people transition seamlessly from the normal and mundane to the outrageous and perverse. They are, thus, an apt reflection of real life. The user who is in one moment searching for information about a computer game may in the next be looking for the most violent pornography he can imagine. Back and forth it goes…

[blogs] The Power Of Ten … Meg Pickard celebrates 10 years of blogging. Congratulations Meg! :) … ‘A decade feels like a long time in so many ways – when I look back at my early posts and think about what I was doing back then and where I was in life, I am amazed how far away it feels. But throughout those ten years there have been very few of the 3692 days (more or less) when I haven’t written something on the blog, or scribbled something in draft, or at very least thought about it and felt guilty for not having sufficient time to devote to doing it.’

[funny] Worth a Look: Unhappy Hipsters … Coming Soon From BBC Worldwide … 10 Reasons To Avoid Talking On The Phone.

[comics] The 6 Most Realistic Moments In “Kick-Ass” … ‘Completing the Hit Girl Realisim Trifecta, there’s the scene where she–again, a tiny child–accurately shoots a pistol in each hand, scoring headshots on a roomful of bad guys. Issues of recoil are, of course, negated by the littlegirlium factor…’

[comics] Happy 10th Blogiversary Neilalien! … as far as I know Neilalien’s blog and Doctor Strange / Steve Ditko fan site was the first comic blog. Amazingly, after ten years he still seems to handroll his own blog pages, which proves he’s either old school or an alien – I can’t make up my mind which… Congratulations Neil!