[funny] Only A 30% Chance Of Cthulhu, Say Fracking Experts … disappointing news from the Daily Mash. All Hail Cthulhu!

Roy Hobbs, an engineer with Shell, said: “By my calculations the Shadow Lord Cthulhu currently rests nine leagues deeper than the shale gas so I’m sure it’ll be fine.

“Nevertheless, we have some of the best hooded, eyeless priests in the industry who will be on call 24 hours a day to maintain the sanctity of the work site through a series of incantations and holy artefacts, as well as checking for hard hats and security passes.”

[iphones] How to set up mail aliases on iPhone, iPad … useful, if fiddly tip – I’d not thought this was possible with Gmail on the iPhone.

[alanmoore] BBC News confirms Alan Moore is the “Greatest Living Englishman” and “Knows The Score” …

[go look] Weapon of Mass Instruction, An Art Car Tank That Gives Out Books … ‘Argentina-based Raul Lemesoff created the Arma De Instruccion Masiva (Weapon of Mass Instruction), a converted 1979 Ford Falcon formerly belonging to the Argentine armed forces, to distribute free books to people on the streets of Buenos Aires.’

[people] Interview with Larry David … good but not deep – David apparently avoids interviews …

Despite his success, he says he retains a pessimistic outlook. “Whenever something good happens to me, it’s usually followed by something terrible,” he told the Writers Guild of America recently, when accepting its Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for “outstanding contributions to the profession of the television writer”. “This [award] has got disaster and doom written all over it. I mean, it’s a great honour but it’s not worth getting hit by a bus.”

[simpsons] Matt Groening Reveals The Location Of Springfield … ‘Springfield was named after Springfield, Oregon. The only reason is that when I was a kid, the TV show “Father Knows Best” took place in the town of Springfield, and I was thrilled because I imagined that it was the town next to Portland, my hometown. When I grew up, I realized it was just a fictitious name. I also figured out that Springfield was one of the most common names for a city in the U.S. In anticipation of the success of the show, I thought, “This will be cool; everyone will think it’s their Springfield.” And they do.’

[london] Shit London … ‘These are photographs of the unintentional human comedy that surround us in the city. It’s the flotsam and jetsam of city life , the overlooked minutiae , the tragic , the grotesque and the basest of base. It’s the adapted posters , the dirty joke on the back of a van , the mispelt signs , the glory hole in the public loo , that weird shop down the end of your road and the knob graffiti strategically placed for maximum effect.’

[ipad] What’s On Warren Ellis’ iPad? … ‘Managing information is a big part of my job. So the topslice is: Twitterific, for Twitter. Flipboard. Reeder, for reading Google Reader (which is wired into Pinboard for saving links and Instapaper for reserving long articles for later). BBC news app. Guardian for iPad in Newsstand. Foreign Policy for iPad. The Economist in Newsstand. These are all daily, sometimes hourly checkpoints for me. Can’t do without them.’

[gambling] The Man Who Broke Atlantic City … a great longread for the weekend – the true story of a man who took on the casinos and won by playing their games/systems better than they do …

Largely as a result of Johnson’s streak, the Trop’s table-game revenues for April 2011 were the second-lowest among the 11 casinos in Atlantic City. Mark Giannantonio, the president and CEO of the Trop, who had authorized the $100,000-a-hand limit for Johnson, was given the boot weeks later. Johnson’s winnings had administered a similar jolt to the Borgata and to Caesars. All of these gambling houses were already hurting, what with the spread of legalized gambling in surrounding states. By April, combined monthly gaming revenue had been declining on a year-over-year basis for 32 months.

For most people, though, the newspaper headline told a happy story. An ordinary guy in a red cap and black hoodie had struck it rich, had beaten the casinos black-and-blue. It seemed a fantasy come true, the very dream that draws suckers to the gaming tables.

But that’s not the whole story either…

[books] What Dr. Seuss Books Were Really About … I have only recently discovered that Dr Seuss was a genius – better late than never!

[food] The 10 Most Disgusting Foods in the World … some of these have to be seen to be believed… Enjoy! … ‘Balut is a fairly common and unassuming street food available in both the Philipines and Vietnam. It has also earned a widespread reputation as one of the all-time grossest ethnic delicacies. Most of the eggs with which Americans are familiar are unfertilized eggs. The balut, though are fertilized duck eggs, incubated or allowed to grow invitro for a certain length of time, usually a few weeks. Peel back the shell and along with a typical soft-boiled eggy interior is also the small inert body of a fetal duck-small bones, feathers, beak and all, some more developed than others. Most accounts suggest slurping it right from the shell with a pinch of salt.’

[people] Go Look: Paul Dacre checks out Sid Vicious at Baton Rouge Airport in the 1970s.

[war] 30 Years Since the Falklands War … some fascinating pictures from the Falklands War – and not just the usual ones you see published in British Newpapers.

[dailyfail] How the Daily Mail Conquered England … The New Yorker Profiles The Daily Mail … ‘The Mail has an oral quality, prompting the exclamations of wonder or disgust that attend what the media critic Roy Greenslade has called “Hey, Doris!” stories. Its quirks include a love of aviation, and the annoying habit of inserting real-estate prices into stories that have nothing to do with them, such as the death in a ski-resort accident of a boy whose parents “live in a £1 million house.” Its columnists range from sensible to unhinged. (One, Liz Jones, recently wrote about stealing her husband’s sperm in an attempt to have a child without his permission, earning her the nickname Jizz Loans.)’

[history] Complaints Medieval Monks Scribbled in the Margins of Illuminated Manuscripts … ‘Now I’ve written the whole thing: for Christ’s sake give me a drink.’

[comics] Ware’s World: Inside The Home Of Cartoonist Chris Ware … pictures of the delightful home of one of the world’s most talented cartoonists! ‘As an unabashed admirer of Mr. Ware’s work, I’ve read many an interview with him, and I’ve seen photos of his historic home previous, but I wasn’t prepared by how amazing it would be. Ware’s collection lives throughout the warm and tastefully decorated home. Atop mantlepieces sit his handmade mechanical wonders like his Acme Book Dispenser, his Quimbies The Mouse and Sparky The Singing Cat sculptures. Behind glass doors live Gasoline Alley and Peanuts merchandise, Krazy Kat dolls, Buck Rogers rockets, and many other items of amazement from bygone eras.’

[comics] Crumb On Others Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 … Robert Crumb On “Famous And Infamous” people. Crumb Meets Jim Morrison: ‘I forget what the exact circumstances were, but he brought Jim Morrison over to my house one day. I think I was still living with Dana at the time, but I don’t remember if she was there. S. Clay Wilson was there. But Morrison, he seemed really over the hill by then. It wasn’t too long before he died. He just seemed like a kind of puffy-looking, overweight guy who was burned-out from too many drugs. He just sat in the corner kind of mumbling. [laughs] He was wearing this greasy, suede jacket with that fringe hanging off the sleeves. He had greasy, long hair. He did not look like the adonis that you saw in the photos a couple years before. But you know, that kind of worship that he received, when you’re young, it’s really hard to survive intact. He probably took too many drugs, but I don’t know. I don’t know what his problem was. He didn’t seem brilliant or anything to me. He didn’t have any insight or anything interesting to say. He just seemed like the typical hippie you would see on Haight Street at that time, mumbling about the drugs and shit…’

[books] H. P. Lovecraft: The man who haunted horror fans … BBC News On H. P. Lovecraft … ‘The Call of Cthulhu is the most famous tale of his invented mythos, which is itself a stage in Lovecraft’s attempts to create a perfect form for his preoccupations and for the weird tale. The mythos was also meant to counteract the over-explanation and lack of imaginative suggestiveness he found in conventional occult fiction. The following year Lovecraft wrote The Colour out of Space, which he later regarded as his best work. It tells the story of a strange meteorite that blights a farming community. “It was just a colour out of space”, but it is Lovecraft’s purest symbol, the strongest expression of his sense that the universe, and anything living out there in the dark of space or time, is indifferent to man.’

[kubrick] The Overlook Hotel … brilliantly well-done Tumblr dedicated to… ‘Ephemera related to Stanley Kubrick's Masterpiece of Modern Horror, 'The Shining'’

[press] Dail Mail Ethics Memorandum circa 1966 … A different time, a different Daily Mail … ‘No member of the staff intrudes or is called to intrude into private lives where no public interest is involved.’

[funny] Adam Buxton Reads Out YouTube Comments For ‘Apple Mac Music Video’ …

Resume, references, password: Job seekers get asked in interviews to provide Facebook logins … ‘[Justin] Bassett, a New York City statistician, had just finished answering a few character questions when the interviewer turned to her computer to search for his Facebook page. But she couldn’t see his private profile. She turned back and asked him to hand over his login information. Bassett refused and withdrew his application, saying he didn’t want to work for a company that would seek such personal information. But as the job market steadily improves, other job candidates are confronting the same question from prospective employers, and some of them cannot afford to say no.’

[life] Kevin Kelly – We Are Stardust: ‘Where did we come from? I find the explanation that we were made in stars to be deep, elegant, and beautiful. This explanation says that every atom in each of our bodies was built up out of smaller particles produced in the furnaces of long-gone stars. We are the byproducts of nuclear fusion. The intense pressures and temperatures of these giant stoves thickened collapsing clouds of tiny elemental bits into heavier bits, which once fused, were blown out into space as the furnace died. The heaviest atoms in our bones may have required more than one cycle in the star furnaces to fatten up. Uncountable numbers of built-up atoms congealed into a planet, and a strange disequilibrium called life swept up a subset of those atoms into our mortal shells. We are all collected stardust. And by a most elegant and remarkable transformation, our starstuff is capable of looking into the night sky to perceive other stars shining. They seem remote and distant, but we are really very close to them no matter how many lightyears away. All that we see of each other was born in a star. How beautiful is that?’

[comics] Neil Gaiman and Todd McFarlane: The Story So Far (March 1993 – March 2012) … Pádraig Ó Méalóid tells the story of the long and convoluted legal battle between Gaiman and McFarlane over Spawn and Marvelman … ‘Although Gaiman and McFarlane’s first meeting in court was on the 1st of October, 2002, nearly ten years ago now, the cause of their dispute goes back nearly ten years before that, with roots set in place some years before that, again. So, in an attempt to put it all into some sort of context, I’m listing what I see as the main points of their dispute, in chronological order, as exactly as I can, along with some earlier events, to put it all into context.’

[funny] Mary Had A Little Lamb…

[tv] Why TV Is Broken … interesting anecdote about how children who use on-demand media perceive broadcast television … ‘When the commercials are over, it is some live action teen show. She is not impressed. “Can I choose?”, Beatrix asks. She’s still confused. She thinks this is like home where one can choose from a selection of things to watch. A well organized list of suggestions and options with clear box cover shots of all of her favorites. I have to explain again that it does not work that way on television. That we have to watch whatever is on and, if there is nothing you want to watch that is on then you just have to turn it off. Which we do.’

[stuff] Some links I’ve had in my “ToBlog” list for far too long…

• The 50 Best Pun Stores … a collection of funny shop names.
• Wine bottle FAIL… Lorem ipsum on a French wine label
• Flash Fun: “When the guy stops running, place the cursor about 1 inch above his head.”
• Google Reader Sanity for Greasemonkey … Makes Google Reader useful.
• Goths Up Trees … a tumblr exploring Goths in their natural habitat – up a tree.

[terrorism] The Dubai Job … a fascinating look at a semi-botched assassination of a high-ranking Hamas leader by Mossad…

‘The rest of the investigation that Tamim conducted, however, was meticulous and efficient in a way that no one, least of all the Mossad, had expected. A source close to the investigation said that the moment Tamim concluded that Al-Mabhouh had not died of natural causes, he ordered his people to search Dubai’s extensive databases and identify everyone who had arrived in the emirate shortly before the killing and left soon after. This list was then cross-referenced against the names of visitors who had been in Dubai back in February, March, June, and November of 2009, all the times of Al-Mabhouh’s previous visits. The short list that emerged was then checked against hotel registers, and footage from hotel security cameras at the times these individuals checked in made it possible to put a face to each name. Tamim then compared these visual identifications to the footage from the Al Bustan Hotel at the time of Al-Mabhouh’s death, which gave him the names of the assassins. And searching databases of financial transactions gave him the identities of the rest of the team, all of which Dubai authorities posted online for the world to see.’

[funny] Buying This Thing Will Make Me Happy … ‘It’s really cool. They just started making it and not many people have one yet. It does all sorts of stuff and can fit in my pocket, but it can also get bigger than that if I want it to. Plus it’s made by a company I trust to put out things that will make me happy.’

[comics] Alan Moore: The Biography … full length biography of Moore from Lance Parkin is due late next year … ‘This is going to be, I hope, the definitive literary biography that explores the life and career of Alan Moore and goes a little wider than either my previous book or Storyteller, placing Moore in the context of the British and American comics industry, as well as the underground, occult and countercultural scenes.’