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London Bloggers [Comic Blogs][Other Blogs] | 20 April 2014
[politics] The Certainty of Donald Rumsfeld (Part 1) … Errol Morris On Donald Rumsfeld … ‘Not just him but the entire building was in denial. Doug Feith – don’t get me started on Doug Feith – told me that they had a Marshall Plan all set to go in terms of rebuilding Iraq. And he pointed to this stack of huge three-ringed binders, all of them black. There must have been about 10 of them stacked up on top of a cabinet. And I asked to see them, and he said, “No, you can’t. It’s classified.” And I said, “Well, O.K., I understand that, I guess.” But I raised it to somebody else within the next couple of weeks. I said, “Well, Doug Feith showed me the Marshall Plan for Iraq.” And this person laughed, and he said, “Mik, that was the Marshall Plan.” It was a copy of the original Marshall Plan, not a plan for Iraq.’
19 April 2014
[movies] Irrational Treasure … a look back at the last ten years of Nicolas Cage movies… ‘The main problem with the notion that Cage squandered his post-Oscar momentum on dumb action movies and thereby lost something irretrievable is that Cage’s sellout movies are more consistently entertaining than just about anybody else’s. His inherent absurdity infects and elevates them; Cage’s own expansive persona fills in the gaps in action-movie characters without qualities.’
18 April 2014
[history] The Last Places … the remarkable story of how Henry VIII’s wine cellar came to be perfectly preserved under the Ministry of Defence Main Building in Whitehall … ‘Writing in a 2010 issue of the AA Files Andrew Crompton describes the design of the poetically named MoD Main Building, which was “so slow in coming out of the ground that it became know as the Whitehall Monster.” In addition to the understandable delay caused by World War Two, Crompton ascribes its astonishing twenty-one year construction to the fact that the MoD Monster has “embedded within it a series of spaces that seem to have more to do with sympathetic magic than functional architecture.” Included among these embedded spaces are a Gothic crypt, a crooked staircase that leads nowhere, “five very fine eighteenth-century interiors” – the first ever preserved outside of a museum – and, of course, Henry VIII’s long-lost wine cellar.’
17 April 2014
[comics] Heads or Tails … a wonderful new comic strip from Chris Ware about the life of a penny.
16 April 2014
[email] The First Emoticon May Have Appeared in… 1648 … Alexis Madrigal attempts to push back the history of the Smiley to the 17th Century … ‘Why would anyone care about a smiley face in a poem from the 17th century? For me, it’s like a wormhole that connects our time with theirs. If you’d been alive in 1648, you might have considered that a colon and a parenthesis form a smiley face. Our ancestors looked upon the same marks on the page and saw the possibilities that we take for granted. While emoticons have probably been independently invented many times-the earliest documented use of the smiley face with a nose, :-), comes in 1982-Herrick very well could have been the first.’
15 April 2014
[wikipedia] TL;DR Wikipedia … condensed Wikipedia … ‘Ayn Rand was American novelist, best known for developing the philosophy of Objectivism, which apparently states that every college freshmen must get really into Objectivism.’ [via Qwghlm]
14 April 2014
13 April 2014
[bullshit] New-Age Bullshit Generator … ‘Nothing is impossible. Self-actualization is the driver of aspiration. You and I are entities of the dreamscape.
Traveller, look within and enlighten yourself.’
12 April 2014
[2001] 2001: A Space Odyssey (2012 Trailer Recut) … a trailer for Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as a modern summer blockbuster. [via Kevin Church]
11 April 2014
[titanic] This is what the menu on the Titanic looked like … ‘We’re down with roast beef and brown gravy for lunch, but jacket potatoes for breakfast?’
10 April 2014
[ios] The Ultimate Guide to Solving iOS Battery Drain… useful guide to dealing with a common issue on iPhones … ‘Step 1: Disable Location and Background App Refresh for Facebook.’
9 April 2014
[comics] The Twelve Best Covers Of Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen … ‘If I could own one piece of original comic book art, this would be it. In one image the entire run of Jimmy Olsen, and the entire Silver Age of DC Comics is encapsulated. The caption on the cover proclaims Jimmy Olsen to be “The Red-Headed Beatle of 1,000 B.C.!” and the screaming girls reinforce it. Everything about this cover is great, but the best bit is Superman declaring that Jimmy has become as popular as Ringo.’
8 April 2014
[london] What is it like to live on Britain’s most expensive street?… ‘Eskimo Ice services draws up outside one house – the company delivers ice sculptures for parties, and its website shows glassy ice lions and carved statues of the London skyline. Elsewhere, a van – Anglo-Italian marble installation – is delivering bespoke marble, granite, limestone and porcelain tiles. Gardeners arrive in a van marked Siddeley landscape design (a company that also appears to work on mammoth private estates in China and Russia). British Security Technologies is parked outside another mansion, its van promising in italic lettering: “We’ll Keep You Safe ‘n’ Sound Tonight.” A vehicle drives up to provide swimming pool and whirlpool maintenance. There is also a fire-protection services van, an emergency plumbing car and Rentokil pest control – because, it seems, money offers no real protection against fire, rats and plumbing catastrophes.’
7 April 2014
[comics] Lew Stringer’s 7 Ages Of Fan! …
6 April 2014
[comics] Here Is the Greatest Collection of Superhero Dancing GIFs the Internet Has Ever Known … ‘That Rhythm Is Infectious!’
5 April 2014
[property] Terrible Real Estate Agent Photographs Tumblr … ‘Jean-Paul Sartre said “hell is other people”. It is not. Hell is this patio.’
4 April 2014
[tide] High Tide / Low Tide Pictures … some pictures of the UK coast contrasting high tide with low tide (by Michael Marten).
3 April 2014
2 April 2014
[books] Capote’s Co-conspirators in “In Cold Blood” … a look at what’s true and untrue in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood … ‘In his 1988 biography of Capote, Gerald Clarke reveals that the redemptive coda at the end of the book, in which Dewey encounters a friend of Nancy Clutter’s in a cemetery, was fiction: their conversation, which Capote relates in direct quotes, never happened. Even so, Capote is right to suggest that any narrative representation of events is an accumulation of “selected” details, and that the process of selection and arrangement through which a writer converts disparate facts into an absorbing story entails an inevitable measure of artifice.’
1 April 2014
[conspiracy] Confessions of a Non-Serial Killer … What it’s like to be part of a conspircacy theory and incorrectly identified as as serial killer… ‘As I understand it, Penn first decided I was the culprit after analyzing the Zodiac’s messages to the San Francisco Chronicle and determining that the murderer was an artist with the initials HOH, whose crimes formed, on a map, some sort of graphic having to do with a radian (the angle formed by laying a circle’s radius along its circumference, about 57 degrees) and Mt. Diablo, a Bay Area landmark. There is also something about water, whose chemical formula is sometimes written HOH, and my initials (my middle name, which I rarely use even as an initial, is Henry).’
31 March 2014
[funny] Bollocks is Britain’s first language … ‘The Institute for Studies found that most Britons were fluent speakers of bollocks, and could talk bollocks on almost any subject without the need for facts or logic. Professor Henry Brubaker said: “Bollocks is a rich and vibrant language that enables the speaker to sound knowledgeable despite being what we linguists call ‘a knob’.’
30 March 2014
29 March 2014
[books] Meanwhile, on Tumblr… ‘Big hair, one shoe, no knickers. we’ve all been there.’
28 March 2014
[suicide] The Woman in 606 … well written investigation into the suicide of a woman in Seatle …
What could she be trying to communicate through all that stuff about being from the future? I asked. What about the flour she poured everywhere? 27 March 2014
[ipsum] Translating Lorem Ipsum … What does the filler text “lorem ipsum” mean? … ‘The text itself has been designed not to communicate, to have the look of text but no meaning – but meaning bubbles up through it nonetheless. The 16th-century printer who came up with it got there by mangling Cicero’s ‘De finibus bonorum et malorum’, an exposition of Stoicism, Epicureanism and the Platonism of Antiochus of Ascalon. Though most of the metaphysical subtlety has been wrung out, sense hasn’t completely: the text is haunted, as Derrida might have put it, by the piece of writing it once was.’ [via As Above]
26 March 2014
[comics] Watch Alan Moore Do Magic… … ‘But yes, I can definitely, definitely do like, real magic…’
25 March 2014
[comics] Matt Fraction on Batman #405 … interesting analysis of two pages from Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s “Year One” arc on Batman … ‘Miller’s still calling shots here more often than not. The longer and longer I’ve written comics the less and less interested in that control I become; besides, if you write your shit the right way the variations of interpretation any artist worth a good goddamn will come at you with will all be what you wanted or better anyway… There are no significant coloring notes at all nor environmental ones – the rain it would appear was entirely Mazzucchelli, the time of night and everything else Lewis, smartly working backwards from the following issue.’
24 March 2014
[crime] What the Kitty Genovese Story Really Means … turns out most of what I knew about the murder of Kitty Genovese is wrong … ‘The Times story was inaccurate in a number of significant ways. There were two attacks, not three. Only a handful of people saw the first clearly and only one saw the second, because it took place indoors, within the vestibule. The reason there were two attacks was that Robert Mozer, far from being a “silent witness,” yelled at Moseley when he heard Genovese’s screams and drove him away. Two people called the police. When the ambulance arrived at the scene-precisely because neighbors had called for help-Genovese, still alive, lay in the arms of a neighbor named Sophia Farrar, who had courageously left her apartment to go to the crime scene, even though she had no way of knowing that the murderer had fled.’
23 March 2014
[comics] Script Robot Moore and Art Droid Gibson Celebrate Their Eagle Award For Halo Jones … ‘The celebration’s over! Back to work’
22 March 2014
[tech] Spring Cleaning Who Has Access to Your Social Media Data … useful tips for managing Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn … ‘Just like the spring cleaning rule that says, “If you haven’t worn it in six months, throw it out,” you should use the same edict with your online data: “If you haven’t logged in to an app or site in six months, revoke its access.”’
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