28 March 2007
[comics] For Sale on eBay: Ultimate X-Men, Collected 1-3 and 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 by Mark Millar and Andy Kubert.
[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.’
27 March 2007
[walking] Two useful walking maps of London: Students Guide to the Tube and London Pedestrian Routemap.
26 March 2007
25 March 2007
[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…’
[religion] The Atheist’s Greatest Nightmare… the Banana. [thanks Phil]
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…’
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]
22 March 2007
[news] Evening Standard: War Has Started … [more…]
[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.” 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]
20 March 2007
[comics] The Black Diamond Detective Agency Preview — pages from Eddie Campbell’s latest work.
19 March 2007
[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.’
[tv] Jack Bauer’s Twitter … ‘Can anyone recommend a good hand lotion? Conditions when I was in China were just torture on my skin.’
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.’
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.’
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.’
15 March 2007
[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.’
[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]
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.”
13 March 2007
[comic] Everything I needed to Learn About Comics I Learned from Arnold Drake … ’14. Monocles Always Work’
[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.”‘
12 March 2007
[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]
[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?’
11 March 2007
[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.’
[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.’
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.’
9 March 2007
[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.’
[wikipedia] Top 100 most-viewed pages on Wikipedia [via Waxy]
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.
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