19 August 2001
[movies] That Loving Felon [Part 1 | Part 2] — interview with Ray Liotta … ‘It strikes me that Ray Liotta is probably capable of unconditional love himself. I found an extraordinary sweetness in him, sometimes accompanied by his too-much-information type of honesty. What makes him seem maniacal are his eyes, but they are also what make him seem angelic. There’s an amazing play of hard and soft, and people like that. Women like that homicidal lunatic that is dangerous but also tame and sweet. He shrugs: ‘I guess. When you play a bad guy, there’s never just one note. Even killers want to be loved.”
18 August 2001
[web] Top Quotes on DoomWorld IRC — wit and wisdom on a VAST scale … ‘my spanking will revolutionize the way all u people function as individuals’ [via NTK]
17 August 2001
[weblogs] Recommended for bloggers using Windows… blogBuddy. ‘blogBuddy is a small application written in Delphi which enables remote control of blogs on blogger.com. Using blogBuddy you can post new entries as well as edit existing post. Template control is also available.’
[politics] Are you a Woolly Liberal? ‘Walking home late at night, a man accosts you and snatches your wallet. Later, you fantasise about: Ann Widdecombe in Downing Street working to put more bobbies on the beat.’ [via Meg]
[politics] Me? A member of the liberal elite? — The Guardian tries to find some members of the Liberal Elite … ‘”A Home Office minister said to me,” says John Wadham, the Liberty chairman, sitting by a fan in his windowless office, “that the more we complain about civil liberties disappearing, the more the government like it, because it plays well with the Daily Mail.” He does not even bother to look disappointed. In his scuffed Doctor Martens shoes and small rimless glasses, he could pass for a defeated radical activist from the early 80s. It is probably just as well that his office does not have a view. Within sight of the Liberty headquarters, there are at least two CCTV cameras.’
[movies] Various celeb quotes and stories on Christopher Walken … ‘I was riding in a car with Christopher and some other people, going to our location. [while filming Communion] It was a fairly long drive, through beautiful countryside, and it started to get too quiet, so Christopher started singing “Mac The Knife” in Yiddish!’ [via Fark]
16 August 2001
[books] You ask the questions: Peter Ackroyd. On genuinely disturbing parts of London: ‘There are a couple of spots of London that have always interested me. One of them is a small area known as Angel Street by the old wall of Newgate Prison, which has been a haunted spot for many centuries. It was here that the black dog of Newgate used to be seen in spectral form — certainly not a place for the faint hearted. Stew Lane is another spot. It’s a little-known alley that leads from the river upwards to Upper Thames Street. It’s dark and narrow — I’ve never known why it’s called Stew Lane or what happened there, but it is a curiously uncomfortable place.’
[lorem ipsum] What does the filler text “lorem ipsum” mean? ‘Lorem ipsum was part of a passage from Cicero, specifically De finibus bonorum et malorum, a treatise on the theory of ethics written in 45 BC. The original reads, Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit . . . (“There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain . . .”). McClintock recalled having seen lorem ipsum in a book of early metal type samples, which commonly used extracts from the classics. “What I find remarkable,” he told B&A, “is that this text has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since some printer in the 1500s took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book; it has survived not only four centuries of letter-by-letter resetting but even the leap into electronic typesetting, essentially unchanged.” So much for the transitory nature of content in the information age.’ [Related: loremipsum.org, thanks to Marcia]
15 August 2001
[distraction] Prison Inmate Population Information Search — find out if you have a namesake locked up in New York State… ‘NO INMATE ON FILE BEARING THE NAME SHRUBXXXX’ [thanks, Andy]
[weblogs] Wacky Brit has done an updated list of the Most Popular Links on UK Weblogs. [Related: Blogdex continues to improve — it’s well worth a look.]
14 August 2001
[random] Pass Notes covers The Girl from Ipanema … ‘It seems the widow of Antonio Carlos Jobim is still disgruntled about her husband leching after the foxy Brazilian lovely. The heirs to the songwriters’ fortunes say the gently swaying, golden Heloisa has no right to call her shop The Girl from Ipanema.’
[stuff] Linkage:
[media] The Man Who Killed the Media … Media Guardian profile/interview with Michael Wolff. ‘…Wolff’s view is that the world’s media barons are less powerful than they were in the days of Henry Luce or when Americans could watch only three television channels. He calls the combination of America Online and Time Warner “a bit of ridiculousness”, indicative of the media industry’s desperation to find new ways of making money. He is dismissive of the industry’s current vogue to own distribution networks such as cable and television channels, for example. “They’re trying to turn themselves into utilities. They go from one grail or shibboleth to another. They are hustlers and charlatans all,” he says with some relish.’
13 August 2001
[comics] Fisher Price Theatre Presents… Catcher in the Rye [Part 1 | Part 2] by Evan Dorkin. ”If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and that David Coperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.’ [via Venusberg]
[music] Northern Rock — Miranda Sawyer profiles and interviews New Order. ‘…everything collapsed. New Order came out owing £600,000. Then, in the midst of the carnage, someone found a piece of paper signed by the Factory directors that read: “The musicians own the music and we own nothing.” Which meant that the bands could sign huge publishing deals for all the tunes they’d already written, as well as recording contracts for future music. London records stepped in to claim New Order, “like the cavalry”, says Sumner. Chaos all round. The piece of paper effectively whisked Factory’s only assets away from the hands of the debtees. Sumner remembers going up in front of the liquidators. “They just couldn’t believe this piece of paper existed. But it did. No contract, just this bit of paper. They tried to make out that we’d written it a couple of days earlier, but honest to God we didn’t. But,” he grins, “if it hadn’t existed, we would have written it…”‘
[theroux] ‘The girl is hallucinating or it is a fabrication’ … Christine Hamilton: No, I only know what a swingers’ party is because I recently met Mr Louis Theroux who made a programme about them and I understand from him that a swingers’ party is a wife or husband-swapping party.
12 August 2001
[web] Something I’ve just noticed — Google’s cache is really up to date at the moment … LMG, or if you prefer … Haddock or NotsoSoft or Plasticbag.
[teeth] Something Rotten — William Leith on his teeth… an extract from his book British Teeth. ‘He put his drill down, picked up another tool, a hooked needle, and loomed over me again. He poked the new tool deep into the open roots of my tooth. He was looking at something. The wadding! He had found the wadding. Godzinski dipped the needle into the hole in my jaw. Then he removed the needle from my mouth and sniffed at it. Some of the purulent wadding was on the end of the needle. Godzinski offered the needle to his nurse, as if it were a special treat. “Smell that abscess,” he said.’
11 August 2001
[comics] No Laughing Matter — Salon covers Gary Groth’s views on Scott McCloud’s Reinventing Comics … ‘Faced with a dwindling comic book readership, distribution centered on hobby shops and the depressing news that market leader Marvel is still struggling to emerge from bankruptcy, comic artists and publishers are in a vulnerable state. The Net, like a tornado heading for a trailer, is bound to have some effect, good or bad. “It’s like opera,” says Steve Conley, creator of Astounding Space Thrills, a daily adventure webcomic. “The fighting is so fierce because the stakes are so small. No other industry could have this kind of debate because no other industry is so small and close-knit.”‘ [Related: McCloud Cuckoo-Land (Part 1) (Part 2) — Groth rebuffs McCloud’s Reinventing Comics. McCloud responds… McCloud in Stable Condition Following Review, Groth Still at Large]
10 August 2001
[comics] Grendels and Mages — an interview with Matt Wagner from Sequential Tart … ‘Seriously, I view Hunter [Rose] as one of those flash inspirations – one that almost creates itself. Greg Rucka claims that Hunter is my Athena, that he sprang fully formed and armed from the labyrinthine recesses of my brain. He also claims that no one other than me should ever write a Hunter story and, I must admit, I think he’s right.’
[books] First chapter of Sonic Boom — a book about Napster, MP3’s and the future of music … ‘From that moment forward, Fanning would appear frequently dressed in a Metallica T-shirt, most famously as a presenter at the MTV Music Awards, where Ulrich sat in the audience looking sick. It was difficult to say whether the Beavis and Butthead like fashion statement was meant to be mocking or merely the honest expression of a fan laced with a little irony. Whatever the case, Ulrich made clear that, as far as he was concerned, being a Napster user and a Metallica fan were incompatible: on television and the Internet, he directly told fans who used Napster that the band didn’t want their types.’
[quote] Tinned Pineapple. ‘…I took the tin off myself, and hammered at it with the mast till I was worn out and sick at heart, whereupon Harris took it in hand. We beat it out flat; we beat it back square; we battered it into every form known to geometry – but we could not make a hole in it. Then George went at it, and knocked it into a shape, so strange, so weird, so unearthly in its wild hideousness, that he got frightened and threw away the mast.’ [Related: Project Gutenberg Etext of Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome]
[weblogs] Tom has some interesting comments from Keith Waterhouse about how to do a good column in a newspaper. Much of it applies equally well to weblogs … ’13) I is 106 years since Jerome K Jerome related his difficulties in trying to open a tin of pineapple in Three Men In A Boat. Unless you can improve this classic account, keep your problems with packaging to yourself.’
9 August 2001
[comics] Quick profile of Dan Clowes … ‘Time spent with his book “Ghost World” — now a film that opened here Friday — leaves you with the sense that the gentleman responsible for it must be some frustratingly inaccessible, enervated, neurotic ogre. But Clowes looks like David Hyde Pierce with a more keyed-down demeanor. If Clowes is a dork, it’s from the inside out, his geek sensibility being something he shares with those who read him. Otherwise, he appears to be surrounded by outer peace.’ [via Comic Geek]
[wtf?] Okay, Swingin’ Chicks of the ’60’s — spot the odd one out: Angie Dickinson, Marianne Faithfull, Sharon Tate and…. Truman Capote?! ‘…in that same book Truman also declares what should be inscribed on his tombstone, “an excuse, a phrase I use about almost any commitment: I TRIED TO GET OUT OF IT, BUT I COULDN’T.”‘
8 August 2001
[comics] Roger Ebert on Ghost World … ‘Seymour and Enid are too similar to fall in love; they both specialize in complex personal lifestyles that send messages no one is receiving. Enid even offers to try to fix up Seymour, but he sees himself as a bad candidate for a woman: “I don’t want to meet someone who shares my interests. I hate my interests.”‘ [via Link Worthy]
[70’s pulp fiction] Sextacular! — the Guardian profiles the life and books of Jacqueline Susann. ‘…The result was Valley of the Dolls, “the sensational truth about the glamour set on a pill kick”, a careening, gossipy, salacious ride of a read about three women trying to make it, hampered by cads and drugs. She satirised [Ethel] Merman as a blowsy has-been, and based an actress-singer battling with weight and drugs on Judy Garland. Thanks to years of listening at dressing-room doors, her dialogue was irresistible. Caked in kohl, tripping on hairspray (as well as sleeping pills, diet pills and amphetamines), in her Pucci print frocks and lacquered wigs, she rose at dawn to serve truck drivers breakfast – to make sure they’d get her books out in time – then schmoozed booksellers all day, and stayed up late partying with the glitterati.’
7 August 2001
[weblog] Pop Quiz, Hot Shot — Marcia wants to know about blogging styles … LMG is unashamedly: ‘hunt around other weblogs for a few interesting links so you at least have something to post?’.
[quote] ‘You’ve become a significant threat to the national security structure. They would have killed you already but you got a lot of light on you. Instead they’re trying to destroy your credibility. They already have in many circles in this town. Be honest, your only chance is to come up with a case. Something, anything. Make arrests, stir the shit storm, hope to reach a point of critical mass that’ll start a chain reaction of people coming forward, then the government will crack. Remember, fundamentally people are suckers for the truth — and the truth is on your side, Bubba.’
[stuff] Metafilter is on holiday so I’ve decided to mine the archives …
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