[drink] The Heaviest Drinker in the Animal Kingdom … Today I learned it is very hard to get hamsters drunk. ‘Alcohol goes straight from the gut to the liver, which starts breaking down the mind-altering toxin that is ethanol. Hamster livers are “so efficient” at processing ethanol that very little ends up in their blood, says Tom Lawton, a critical-care doctor in Bradford, England. But when the hamsters got injected with ethanol, the substance could bypass the liver and go into their bloodstream and then their brain-hence much wobbling and falling over. Hamsters’ alcohol tolerance is likely an adaptation to their hoarding lifestyle.’

[music] Angie Dickinson and Lee Marvin perform Steve Reich’s Clapping Music … brilliantly edited.

[time] COVID Standard Time … ‘Today is Tuesday, March 674th, 2020.’

[twiiter] The Most Deranged Twitter Posts of 2021 … ‘The great thing about the former Number 10 adviser Dominic Cummings is he’s not really a person, as such – he’s a late-period Aaron Sorkin character, a Steve Bannon manqué, a Hogarth of words. He is what a very, very dumb person thinks a very, very smart person is like. He is the one person who understands that – whatever happens – posting will always return to its origins. He is, in other words, a man with a blog. This post reads like someone beat Dominic Cummings over the head with a rock, and then asked him to both describe the contents of The Prince and the political events of 2021. It is unintelligible, and it is exactly what this country deserves.’

[space] Billionaires Explain Why Space Is The Next Frontier … ‘I would like to ruin space for everyone.’

[comics] Roscoe Moscow: Who Killed Rock’n’Roll? Parts: 1-10 | 11-20 | 21-30 | 31-40 | 41-50 |51-60 … Early Alan Moore strip from 1979-80 published originally in Sounds.

[anime] Decades Later, An Animator’s Complaint Discovered In Akira … ‘At around the 38-minute-mark in the movie, there’s a Caution sign on some medical equipment. Underneath, it looks like English is written, but it’s actually Japanese that was written in the Latin script. In English, the text translates to: Why do we have to fill in this far! Knock it off! Enough’

[tv] What Was the First TV Show to Reference the Internet? … ‘The X-Files had to have been among the first shows to use the web in a storyline, in “2Shy,” which originally aired in November 1995. The episode features a mutant serial killer who sweet-talks self-conscious women online, convinces them to meet in-person, then pulverizes their flesh for sustenance. (Moral of the story: Chat with strangers online and an alien will turn your body into goo.)’

[comics] A Hellraiser Christmas from Kevin O’Neill … [via Twitter]

[politics] Meet the man who created the ‘Christmas is cancelled’ myth … ‘Looking back 23 years on, Chubb is amazed that his team’s suggestion to promote two months of events in Birmingham city centre under the banner of “Winterval” continues to resonate. “We put it to the council, they liked the idea, and it didn’t seem necessary to explain to anyone why we did it,” he says, explaining that the programme covered everything from BBC Children in Need events to Diwali celebrations and Christmas parties. “That’s why the furore that happened afterwards was a surprise – maybe we were a little naive.”’

[xmas] Jay Rayner’s 10 Christmas food commandments … ‘Thou shalt eat trifle for breakfast on Boxing Day. It’s Christmas. The usual rules do not apply.’

[tv] Is “Succession” the Best Sitcom on Television? … ‘What makes any good sitcom work is an ability to repeat itself with small differences. Kendall is still a wimp who swings between self-satisfaction and an insatiable hunger for reassurance, and Strong is fantastic in his portrayal of this back-and-forth. But in Season 3 he fashions himself as a woke warrior, which opens up new satirical avenues for the show. “Fuck the patriarchy,” this patriarch manqué shouts at the press on his way into a charity gala. “Another life is possible, brother,” he tells Tom, urging him to leave Logan’s camp. (“Fuck you, plastic Jesus,” Shiv tells Kendall at one point, hitting the nail on the head.) He is also obsessed with tracking the public’s response to his newfound reputation as a whistle-blower, asking Greg to “slide the sociopolitical thermometer up the nation’s ass and take a reading.” The hapless sidekick checks Twitter and notes that Kendall is “the No. 1 trending topic, ahead of Tater Tots.”’

[beans] Things full of Beans that shouldn’t be full of Beans … Go look at a revolting gallery of baked bean photos.

[docu] The 78 Best Documentaries of All Time A great list of documentaries from Vogue. … ‘The Fog of War – Errol Morris’s Academy Award-winning portrait of Robert S. McNamara-roundly recognized (and vilified) as the architect of the Vietnam War-organizes his subject’s reflections on his life and career into a list of maxims about war and human error, with what The New York Times called “the cumulative message suggesting that in wartime nobody in power really knows anything.” It is not a film meant to reassure its viewer. “Believing and seeing are both often wrong,” goes one lesson. “Rationality will not save us,” says another. The final (and saddest) is delivered by Mr. McNamara with a smile: “You can’t change human nature.”’

[comics] Blocky Mania: The Perfection of Artist Mick McMahon … A nice overview and gallery of the art of Mick McMahon. ‘Few other artists have illustrated Judge Dredd, Tank Girl, Batman (in issues of the fondly-remembered Legends of the Dark Knight anthology series; McMahon has said that he drew it for the money, and he thinks it shows in the finished pages), and Sonic the Hedgehog, but McMahon’s run on the latter character is as important for a generation of readers as his Dredd was for their parents. He also got into design work for video games and toys, and started introducing digital tools into his process. McMahon never stopped moving forward, no matter what.’

[xmas] ‘It looks like fresh sewage!’: We taste test Christmas dinner flavoured foods – from soup and crisps to sarnies … Stuart Heritage reviews festive food. ‘Costa sells mac and cheese boxes all year round, and they generally taste like something that gets slid underneath prison doors during budget cuts. But now that it is Christmas, Costa has unveiled its pigs in blankets mac and cheese, which is – brace yourself – regular mac and cheese, but with some cocktail sausages balanced on top. First, this isn’t remotely Christmassy. It’s the sort of thing that restaurants put on children’s menus for kids who don’t yet know how to chew. Second, eating it made me so miserable that my soul gave up and left my body. Thanks a lot, Costa. How nice is it? 1/5’

[xmas] The Christmas Sandwich Reviews … Feeling Listless is reviewing pre-packed Christmas sandwiches and it reads like a much more personal, tougher (and expensive!) blog project than I ever might have imagined. I think how he feels about festive sandwiches at the end of this will be interesting. ‘When I told the check out person that I’d travelled all the way from Liverpool to visit Booths near Burscough (I’m terrible at small talk) and she gave me the requisite bemused interest, I knew it was probably a good thing I didn’t mention it was just to buy a sandwich because that would have been silly. But nevertheless for the purposes of this survey I did indeed travel to Ormskirk then walk for three quarters of an hour to a non-descript retail park just off the A59 in order to taste what this particular supermarket had to offer in the way of a festive butty…’

[xmas] How to make your own Die Hard Christmas tree ornament … ‘ If you really want to go for it, you’ll probably need to go find one of these foil gift boxes to cut up. Otherwise, you can do what I did and use tin foil and a cereal box. You’ll also need scissors, tape, a cereal box, a color printer, and a toilet paper or paper towel tube.’

[comics] Ditko League of America! …

[tv] ‘We were two tortured idiots trying to make TV’: The Adam and Joe Show, 25 years on … ‘One of the most striking things about rewatching The Adam and Joe Show is how well most of it has aged (there are notable exceptions, including a debate about the relative merits of vinyl versus CDs). That’s partly because – comfortingly or depressingly, depending on how you look at it – mainstream entertainment hasn’t actually changed that much. The subjects of their parodies – Star Wars, Friends, Loose Women – remain ubiquitous. People Place, their very funny pastiche of daytime TV programmes that “take on these really massive subjects but do them in a huge hurry, and involve members of the public and just rush them all the time”, as Cornish puts it, remains painfully spot-on.’

[books] The Origins of Raoul Duke… How Hunter S. Thompson created his alter-ego. ‘Although Duke played no real part in this breakthrough book about the infamous motorcycle gang, his name was casually included in a list of outlaws near the end. Readers at the time must have been baffled, as this was the first time Thompson had ever used that name. However, it was not the first time that the words “Raoul Duke” had appeared next to each other in print. The improbable appellation had popped up in a series of articles in December 1965-a month when Thompson was furiously scouring newspapers from across North America in search of material for his book, which he considered a meditation on the media as much as the biker gang. In the midst of his press binge, he more than likely stumbled upon a series of stories about an unassuming businessman from Calgary by the name of Raoul “Duke” Duquette…’

>> A Picture of Stan Lee in the 1970s.

[comics] Neil Gaiman on Desert Island Discs … On Books: ‘My dad, always my dad… would literally pat me down because I had been known to hide books under my jumper and he would lock them in the car. And it never really worked, because wherever we were, I could normally find something to read. It just wouldn’t have been what I wanted to read, but suddenly… I’d be off in the corner reading The Joys of Yiddish by Leo Rosten or something, because it was the book that I found.’

[comics] Like Colonel Sanders: The Stan Lee Era … A deep dive into the life of Stan Lee via two recent biographies. ‘Lee’s final years were a strange mixture of global fame and outlandish hustling. He enjoyed filming his Hitchcock-like cameos for the MCU movies, but got only token fees for them and avoided sitting through the premieres: ‘Stan hated superhero films,’ his business manager told Riesman. A parade of unreliable associates – including a memorabilia mogul who claimed to be Michael Jackson’s best friend – tried to persuade him they’d found a way to turn his celebrity into cash.’

>> I don’t know who needs this today but here’s the Red Army Choir covering Daft Punk’s Get Lucky.

[socialmedia] I Made the World’s Blandest Facebook Profile, Just to See What Happens … A look at the toxicity of Facebook. ‘After just two weeks on the platform, consuming only content that Facebook’s recommendation systems selected for me, I found myself at the bottom of a rabbit hole not of extremism but of utter trash-bad advice, stolen memes, shady businesses, and sophomoric jokes repeated over and over. Facebook isn’t just dangerous, I learned. It doesn’t merely have the ability to shape offline reality for its billions of users. No, Facebook is also-and perhaps for most people-senseless and demoralizing.’

[life] The Misconception About Baby Boomers and the Sixties … ‘The boomers get tied to the sixties because they are assumed to have created a culture of liberal permissiveness, and because they were utopians-political idealists, social activists, counterculturalists. In fact, it is almost impossible to name a single person born after 1945 who played any kind of role in the civil-rights movement, Students for a Democratic Society, the New Left, the antiwar movement, or the Black Panthers during the nineteen-sixties. Those movements were all started by older, usually much older, people. The baby boomers obviously played no substantive role in the passage of the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act, or in the decisions of the Warren Court, which are the most important political accomplishments of the decade. Nor were they responsible for the women’s movement or gay liberation.’ [Thanks Feeling Listless]

[movies] Dune / Terry and June Mashup …

[books] Why Stephen King keeps coming back … A look at the longevity of Stephen King. ‘Even though I’ve been thinking about him and reading him for years, it wasn’t until a couple weeks ago, reading the 2003 foreword to The Drawing of the Three, the second book in his Dark Tower fantasy epic, that I think I finally got Stephen King. There, King writes about what led him to create the series, which at that point was five books in, and would rapidly conclude with two more a year later. He’s trying to figure out why he wanted to write these books. He chalks it up to the American in him: the urge to “build the tallest, dig the deepest, write the longest.” This, I think, is King’s lasting influence, and why generation after generation comes back to him. It’s his Americanness – not the lived reality of America, which many have claimed is what perennially draws people to his work, but its fiction, made flesh.’

[people] What lies beneath: the secrets of France’s top serial killer expert … The fascinating story of a fraudulent French expert on serial killers. ‘Bourgoin’s friends withdrew from him, and began to await, with a fair amount of dread, his unmasking. But his star continued to rise. “What astounded me was not so much that he told tall tales, because I knew he was that way, but rather that everyone swallowed them whole,” the other friend said. “It was the unseriousness, not to say the sheer idiocy, of the media.” The indulgence of the publishers, the newspapers, the television stations and even the police might have been more forgivable if Bourgoin’s work had been more insightful, offered more than morbid titillation, the first friend said. “But there was never, ever, ever the slightest beginning of a hint of a shadow of analysis, of reflection,” he said.’