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Saturday, July 31, 2004

Spamusement
Cartoons drawn from Spam subject lines.

Some of these are actually pretty funny.

we have located several horny women in your area
who will know?
this is pretty neat
you were wrong cabinet sanchez
give her more meat

Safe for work.
Which Simpsons character are you?
Find out here.

Jaimee and I both came up Lisa Simpson. But she's pretty close to Sideshow Bob, and changing one answer at a time I can come out anywhere from Krusty to Monty Burns to Bart to Ned Flanders.

It's America's most accurate personality test.
The 50 Worst Guitar Solos of All Time
You can't argue with science.
In the Name of Science and Man's Inhumanity to Everything
After 12 Monkeys [script], we somehow got into a whole thing about animal testing (necessary in some cases, maybe, but nonetheless horrendous, and almost certainly very rarely or never necessary) and ultimately into the fact that this sort of unethical testing has been done, quite deliberately, on humans.

I'm not just talking about the Nazis, either. It was done in this country, by our government, to its own citizens.

In both of the following two cases, racism was the accomplice.

The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments
Radiation Experiments on Humans

There's a book on all this whose paperback edition that I'm very anxiously waiting for; it's called In the Name of Science.
Friday, July 30, 2004

12 Monkeys
Still the best time travel movie ever. We've been rewatching it tonight.

Analysis from the best time travel website on the net.

UPDATE: Script to La Jetee, the French short that inspired 12 Monkeys.
Sleep disorders
Every writer or artist I know claims to have at least one sleep disorder (including me). Is there a connection between difficulty sleeping and creativity? Or are we all just self-aggrandizing Van-Gogh-wannabe whiners?

And what do we to sleep for, anyway? Opinions are divided.
Illusions, Delusions, Confusion, and the Madness of Crowds
Two links.

Illusions, Delusions, and Confusions: Mythical Geography in Antique Maps

Charles Mackay's Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
Directed Panspermia
Francis Crick, of Watson and Crick, the Nobel Prize winning discoverers of DNA, died today. He's well-known for his work in the '60s, but not for what he's done since (which hasn't been much).

Here's what I'll always remember about Dr. Crick. He believes life on earth originated through "seeding" by aliens. More from Wikipedia.

UPDATE: And don't forget Watson & Crick's uncredited collaborator, Rosalind Franklin.
The Greatest Movies Never Made
From The Guardian.
Grab ye quiver.
Try and remember what you learned in physics class. Shooting someone with an arrow is harder than you think. But, in this flash game anyway, very rewarding.

Another link stolen from Grand Text Auto.
Restraints/Constraints/a Trip to the Pr0n store.
Made curious by a post on grand_text_auto, I shot over to these other pretty cool sites. They deal with creating art within pre-set restraints. You know, like limiting the palette of colors in a painting, or writing using only mono-syllabic words.

MadInkBeard is a blog that deals with the theory of writing/literature created with restraints. The content was interesting and there are a large number of links on the right.
Worth a look.

I was nonplussed by constrained.org, although it looks like a nifty site if you are into writing stories and putting them on the internet, but just don't seem to enjoy our hat well enough.

endless limitations really got my goat in a whistle (that's a good thing, by the way) mainly due to this page on limitations imposed on writing.

Wizard. Who needs this frightening device?
Cuba Shows Farenheit 9/11 on Prime Time TV.
I'm sure this is everywhere on the internet by now, but just in case you haven't seen it....

Via Yahoo News.

Maybe they should have shown Kerry's speech instead, saved 9/11 for tonight.
Science GeekPress Friday
  • Piggybacking off this post from yesterday, I learn from GeekPress that both the Copenhagen Interpretation and the Many-Worlds Intepretation of Quantum Mechanics are discredited by the Afshar experiment, but the Transactional Interpretation is not.

  • Also at GeekPress, we find that scientists have created artificial prions in the laboratory. What are they, stupid? I've seen this movie.

  • What's it like to have a sense of supertaste? I myself was briefly cursed with the power of supersmell after living in a house with four other people (including one extremely unhygenic person) in Boston all summer in the year 2000. I can tell you, it was quite unpleasant; every odor was 8 times as pungent, everything smelt bad, and I was completely unable to eat.

  • Tired of wondering what to believe in? Belief-o-Matic is for you.
  • Thursday, July 29, 2004

    McSweeney's #13
    Finally got a chance to look at McSweeney's #13, the all comic-lit issue. It's awesome. I hope Pclem never wants it back.

    McSweeney's store
    Deferred from Princeton, lived to tell about it
    I read The Final Club by Geoffrey Wolff this week. Geoffrey is the "Gerry" of the two Wolff brothers.

    I picked the book up because (a) it's by Tobias Wolff's brother, and I wanted to see whether my brother or I is destined to be the better writer (tough luck, Gerry-fans); and (b) the book is about my old friend Princeton University, the college I stupidly attended in those alternate universes where I tried harder in high school and especially got better grades in pre-calculus (and had more extracurricular activities, including charity work, and also came from a rich, important family, while we're at it).

    Insofar as the book is about trashing Princeton, it amused me, although the chapter with the pretentious family-oriented application essay cut perhaps a little too close to home.

    Trouble is, "Princeton is a banal place" is a pretty banal subject for 367 pages.
    Boycott Delicious Coca-Cola
    I can put up this article (from Ireland's largest political weekly, no less) because I haven't had a Coke in over a month and a half. Bad Coke! Bad!
    After the War
    Alternative history map of the London tube. (Via Boing Boing.)
    My World's Collapsing
    Via Metafilter, I see that the principle of complementarity has been challenged by a recent experiment. Big stuff. No, I don't have any idea what it means.
    McSweeney's Minute
    Haven't put anything up here from McSweeney's in a while. So here's "Why I am Leaving the Troupe," apparently but not certainly part of their "letters unlikely to get a reply" series. It's a surreal little story about the important things in life: improv comedy, Oswego U, and Jesus.
    Wednesday, July 28, 2004

    Foam Cowboy Hat Fiction Series #2
    Thanks for all the posts and support of FCHFS #1, which is now available for viewing at our incomparable Foam Hat Archives.

    Now, take a gander at this photo, read the criteria below, and get a-scribing!
    Note: Story starts now. Story ends one week from today, Monday, August 2, 2004.




    To aid the story, and to give us all a common framework, here are some guides:

    On the bike is Ted. His girlfriend is Marlena. His roommate's name is Neutral. There are two other characters: one dubbed Tracy Dick, the other to be created. Post as many times as you like, but keep each post to about 1 or two paragraphs in length.

    Here's how the Backwards City Foam Cowboy Hat Fiction Series works: Build off the last person's post, writing a paragraph, a sentence, or just one word of action. Try to push the story forward with your post; don't just describe the characters, make them do something. And don't be afraid to take the story in a weird direction. Write whatever comes to mind.

    As before, posts of an inflammatory or offensive nature will be ignored and edited out of the final product. This is supposed to be fun, not a flamewar.

    This post will stay at the top for awhile. In general, you can always reach the latest hat by clicking on the foam hat picture to the right. Feel free to visit our Foam Hat Archives. Enjoy!

    I'm Will Ferrell, and I Approve This Message
    Ferrell spoofs a Bush campaign commercial.
    Center for Inquiry Responds
    Evidently the source saw my post from earlier. They said this link is a better one for reference. Definitely more up to date, prettier, and way more informative.
    Techblogging: Don't Buy a VAIO
    This isn't a techblog, and we don't talk about hardware much here, though we all our own level of experience with computers (I myself am considered something of an expert in juryrigging DOS 6.0 to play early '90s video games).

    But here's a piece of advice: don't buy a VAIO.

    Now, the VAIO is generally a good machine. I actually like it quite a bit, except for the fact that I've had nothing but hardware problems with it since the day I got VAIO #1 in 2001. The VAIO suffers from an incredible design flaw: After about five months of use, max, the power cord stops being consistently recognized by the motherboard. The computer flips between AC power and battery power over and over until the user is driven insane.

    VAIO #1 was unfixable. After five months (seriously) of tech support limbo and four separate attempts on Best Buy's part to fix it, I was given a full refund on VAIO #1 from the basically good-hearted but incompetent folks at Best Buy. In the meantime, VAIO #2 came free from the government as a result of my beloved Jacob K. Javits Fellowship. Because Best Buy offered me a free service plan to make up for the crappy service I'd earlier received, I bought it there.

    Guess what? In a few months I was having the same trouble with the new machine. A year after I'd gotten VAIO #2, the power issue was so bad that I had to bring it in for service. By that point, the computer was unusable; it wouldn't recognize the power card at all.

    Came back fixed in just two weeks (good work, Best Buy!), broke again in four months (bad work, Best Buy). It's in the shop again now.

    According to the terms of the service plan, they have to issue me a new computer after it breaks for the fourth time. Don't think I'm not counting.

    I'm really looking forward to that sunny day in the next few years when I can just get a Mac.
    Who built the pyramids? Space aliens.
    Don't ask me if this is parody or real. I can't tell anymore.
    "One in a million shot."
    Okay, so I admit, I'm too lazy to read the article, (link to Scientific American dot-com), but here's the headline: The Law of Large Numbers guarantees that one-in-a-million miracles happen 295 times a day in America.

    The article also talks about a book called Debunked! and makes me think about the work my girlfriend's brother does, which is chair the "Center for Inquiry" in New York City, a secular-humanist think-tank of sorts. I think they also have their own magazine, or group of them. While you're there, disregard the antiquated web-design and focus on the words, dudes.

    I got to have a pretty good talk with Fay's brother Austin about cyborgs and transhumans when I visited the office last spring. (the office in the Rockefeller center is pretty cool, by the way) Here's an article he wrote pertaining to some of that, The New Perfectionism.

    A small passage:
    What would it mean to become posthuman? That depends on what “being human” amounts to. There is what might be called a moral sense of humanity defined by conventional values, somewhat of the kind Captain Kirk tried repeatedly to explain to Mr. Spock on the original Star Trek...[snip snip editing]

    It is bad philosophy to identify the human essence with the human genome in its present state. To do so is to buy into the antiquated notion that a creature’s nature is immutable or unchanging. This intellectual vestige of the eternal, Platonic “species essence” was undermined by Darwinian biology and its insistence on the primacy of change and mutation.


    Oh, yeah, the punchline to the headline joke....I almost forgot.
    My Lovely Tabloids. Guliani for VP
    My friend Will got himself a cool, obscure RPG the other day called "Pandemonium!"I haven't sat down to read it yet, but the premise is pretty cool. The whole thing is based on the world of tabloids. The book design at once suffers (the text is hard to read at points, all crammed together) and benefits (lots and lots of cool pictures, probably made with my favorite low-tech design tools, a xerox machine and some tracing paper) from this association. Click here to see the book cover.

    You play some strange character (Elvis Impersonator/Ufo Hunter, for one Archetype) lost in some strange world that, and this is the best part, is based on a real tabloid from the stores. That's right, no modules or source books or anything extra to buy. You just get a character, grab a tabloid, and start flipping through. The book has some tables that help structure/randomize (however you want to look at it) the events in the tabloid into a "cohesive" and playable story. Works for me.

    So. Here's some tabloids to help you get started playing:

    The National Enquirer : Top Stories today include Martha Stuart's hired lesbian bodyguards, and Mayor Guliani being secretly courted for the position of Vice President. (the second one is scary enough to warrant a follow up)

    Weekly World News : Way more my style and closer to what the makers of Pandemonium had in mind. (Did you know they made Bat-Boy into an off-broadway musical?)

    And if none of that suits your fancy, go over to the Tetley tea Quickbrew site, and make your own Tabloid cover. (which, actually, after a few minutes of shock - not at the content, but simply because you have to use what images and headlines Tetley provides for you - I found quite entertaining.)
    What the Future Looked Like Yesterday
    Find out here at Transportation Futuristics.
    The Convention
    We've been talking up a storm about the convention over at Three Guys. If you missed the coverage tonight, it's a damn shame, because you missed an simply indescribable speech by the first black president of the United States. It was a historic night.

    If you live in Greensboro, you need to come over to my house and borrow the tape. Everyone should see this speech.

    More commentary forthcoming soon, no doubt, from a couple of other skinny kids I know with funny names who believe America has a place for them too.
    Tuesday, July 27, 2004

    $$$$$
    The second Foam Cowboy Hat Story is still going on, don't worry. Click here (or just scroll down) to read the story so far, and help us keep it going.

    When you're done with that, you might start wondering: how else can I help the BCR get on its feet? Lucky for you, there's a number of ways. The rich are invited to donate money to us directly. (Remember, charity begins at obscure literary journals on the Internet.)

    But what if you aren't rich? At no cost to you, you can use our Amazon clickthroughs to give us big kickbacks on all the stuff you buy. You can also apply for an Amazon credit card, a ten second application which instantly earns us both $20. We've already made over $150 through our association with Amazon, and every little bit helps.

    Most importantly, we're now accepting subscriptions. Twelve dollars gets you two literature-packed issues, with the first issue due in the fall.

    Thanks for your support, and enjoy the Backwards City!
    Isamu Noguchi, Buckminster Fuller (Stamps)
    I've never really gotten excited about a book of stamps before, but the book I bought today was so cool looking, I had to get three.

    I hadn't even heard of Isamu Noguchi before today, either. There's a lot to know.

    And to think I almost got the Buckminster Fuller stamps. There's a lot to know about him, too.
    Hey! Wake up, people!
    The foam cowboy hat story seems to have stalled at 8 11. What's up, guys? A *lot* of you haven't written anything yet. Let's go! Help us make this project a success.

    Check out Foam Hat #1 while you're at it. Then get to work on Foam Hat #2.
    Robots of the World Unite
    Great art gallery for the Robo-Equality Party. Prints are only $40. I might get one.



    (via BoingBoing)
    Paging Ezra Plemons
    They're developing a game for the X-Box and other platforms based upon the Star Wars LEGO license. Wild. It's like they read our minds.
    Maybe this is how we should elect our president?
    My housemate hates the television. Movies are alright, occasionaly (read: when it's a film she's picked out), but regular old channel flipping is right out the window. So last night I spent the evening glued to my laptop, listening to a stream of the good old Democratic National Convention. That's right, you can get ALL DAY of it "Gavel to Gavel" they say, without commercial interruption over at the official convention website.

    (what do they do while commercials are going on, you ask? Bring out a celebrity to sing an old song with new, Kerry-based lyrics! It's worth tuning in, just to roll your eyes at!)

    But that isn't what this post is about. Really, I was struck by how much the next 100 so days will be about "Spreading the Gospel of Kerry." You know, showing pictures of him, telling everyone about his life, all that stuff.

    Well, why couldn't we just let our canidates do all that on a blog, then vote for the blog we liked best? That's how they are doing the "BlogaLog" Dating contest on everyone's favorite sexy site, Nerve.com. There are so many reality-based-television-show-based-jokes I could make right now....but since I'm not allowed to watch tv, and am instead looking at personal ads on the internet, I just can't make them.
    Ruining it for Everybody
    Salon has an new interview up with memoirist Jim Knipfel (a writer I hadn't heard of) that's pretty successful, in that it makes me want to pick up one of his books and see what he's all about.
    Geeks Like Us: Kerry and his Model Airplanes
    via Instapundit, this picture from TIME warms my heart too (although unlike Instapundit I'm a Bush partisan desperate to hold onto a flailing candidate).



    Look, he's like us!
    Disneyland, 1968
    Pictures of America's park from the year America broke. Via Cory Doctorow and Boingboing, of course. Look how clean and, well, futuristic Tomorrowland looks!

    He's got other nostalgia-inducing pictures, too.
    Monday, July 26, 2004

    Rocktoons
    Cariactures of your favorite rock stars. No Bruce, horribly. They Might Be Giants, though.
    Perverse
    This is absolutely insane:
    Federal charges were filed against Adam McGaughey, creator of the popular SG1Archive.com website - a fan website devoted to the MGM-owned television show Stargate SG-1. The charges allege that the website engaged in Criminal Copyright Infringement and Trafficking in Counterfeit Services. The charges were the culmination of a three-year FBI investigation, set in motion by a complaint from the Motion Picture Association (MPAA) regarding the content of the SG1Archive.com website.
    More from MetaFilter here. Tired of the corporate plutocracy yet? It's only going to get worse.
    Buffy Swearing Keyboard
    Don Ezra Cruz showed me this. He's sick.

    Seriously, don't even click the link, it's so stupid.
    And Peter Lorre as...Gollum
    The Lord of the Rings made up out of old movies. Starring Humphrey Bogart.
    Another Reason I Won't Shop Wal-Mart
    Fark sells this article as "Wal-Mart to carry 'W' ketchup exclusively"

    It doesn't quite live up to that headline, but it does talk about the Wal-Mart vs. Costco rivalry as one that mirrors the political situation of this coming election. Also gives a shout-out to Google.

    Full article at the Boston Times.

    While you're here...don't forget to look at the superb political blog, Three Guys, and go over to McSweeney's daily reason to oust Bush.
    Welcome to the Future
    What ordering a pizza will be like in a few years.
    No, this is awesome
    In 1976, DC ran an Elsewords of Superman coming to Earth in 1976, projecting the future and then projecting Superman's role in it. It's pretty amazing. Although, once again, I must ask: Hey Reality, where's my flying car?



    The main site index has a bunch more lost comic gold.
    Lemmings
    The original Lemmings, online. Awesome. A little slow, maybe. But awesome.
    Cars with feelings
    Toyota's working on cars that can express emotion.

    That's great, guys, but there should be flying cars by now. How about getting on that?
    Sunday, July 25, 2004

    It's the little things
    Eskiv is an incredibly well-designed, incredibly addictive flash game.

    Pilot your circle to each square. Avoid the blue circles. Bravo.

    (via the increasingly essential Little Fluffly Industries)
    Wordcount
    Presenting the 87000 most common words in the English language (in order).
    bradysomething
    Some shows you just can't believe they made. Presenting The Bradys, an attempted '90s updating of The Brady Bunch. Bobby's paralyzed from the waist down, Peter's afraid he might get AIDS, Jan's infertile, and Marcia's an alcoholic.

    It's all true.

    More here and here.
    The Daedalus Test
    Just your average brainteaser involving a 4-dimensional labyrinth (including optional shortcuts through the 5th dimension), a multiple-choice-happy Minotaur, and a bad of 222 marbles.
    The Matrix Vs...
    ...Dark City

    ...The Invisibles


    I considered buying The Invisibles once--it's supposed to be amazing. But it's also in 7 volumes at $13.95 a piece, so I didn't. After I make it big, maybe.
    Apples to Apples
    We played a fun, different game tonight: Apples to Apples. Here's how it works. Your hand consists of five nouns. A card is overturned which has an adjective on the back--you have to match one of your nouns to that adjective, and the player whose turn it is to be the judge picks what they consider to be the best match. Repeat.

    Judging from the two games we played, poets seem to be better at this game. I don't know why that is, but I'm not happy about it. I usually fell way behind immediately, and then started to catch up as the game went on and my Surrealist matches became more and more attractive to the judge.

    My only criticism of the game is that the selection of nouns and adjectives seems a little off--a little too G-rated, in a way. The game was at its best when the matches were truly out of the blue, and yet oddly right--which didn't happen enough, because too many of the cards were just generic words. Still, I'd play it again.

    I was talking recently with someone about board games. It seems hard for a board game to break into the ranks of the true classics: stuff like chess, Scrabble, checkers, Monopoly, Risk, Trivial Pursuit. What's the last new board game that truly become a classic? Pictionary? Taboo? Balderdash?

    It's the same problem that my father once identified with rock music: Broadly speaking, all our icon slots are all filled up already. Nobody can break in.
    Saturday, July 24, 2004

    How To Be A Philosopher
    I used to want to be a philosophy professor. Kind of still will be, I think; the border between English and philosophy is pretty porous, especially when I'm choosing the syllabus.
    Star Wars III has a title
    Revenge of the Sith. I'm kind of surprised that Lucas went with the title that everyone predicted 10 years ago (it was always either that or Rise of the Empire), but as Star Wars titles go, it's up there with The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi.

    I have to admit that I'm somewhat excited for this movie despite myself, even though I know we're just going to get burned again. Stupid George Lucas.
    In other news...
    The Big Lebowski remains the greatest story ever told. God, I love this movie.

    Big Lebowski random quote generator.

    Big Lebowski soundfiles

    The Dude's House: Forum

    Lebowskifest

    Script

    The Dude abides. I don't know about you, but I take comfort in that. It's good knowin' he's out there, the Dude, takin' her easy for all us sinners.
    Lot's Wife
    Finished reading A Prayer for the Dying by Stewart O'Nan today. It's just about the bleakest book I've ever read: the story of an diptheria outbreak in a small town shortly after the Civil War. There's a lot in here about God, and faith and doubt, and how to go on living in the world of death--and believe me it doesn't pull any punches. The front cover describes the novel as a mix between Stephen Crane and Stephen King--that's pretty close, although I'd add "edited by Sylvia Plath and agented by Dr. Kevorkian."

    I'd reread Man's Search for Meaning as a existential antidote, but someone stole it from me five years ago. Damn you, Nina Baliga! Or whoever it was.

    What this novel really put me in mind of was "Lot's Wife," my favorite work in the Cleveland Museum of Art. You can't get a full sense of the piece on the 'net; it's mixed media, and just a little three-dimensional. In person, it's incredibly powerful. But you get the idea.

    Notable quirk: A Prayer tor the Dying is written entirely in second person. O'Nan basically pulls off this nearly impossible task for 200 pages, although it goes without saying that If On A Winter's Night A Traveler remains the best second person novel ever written.
    Creature Comforts
    Bioengineered home appliances. Creepy. People have nightmares about things like this.
    The Ken Show
    The Washington Post profiles the Man Who Ate Jeopardy!.

    I kind of wish I've been watching this. But I hardly ever watch TV anymore. I watch a couple of HBO original series on my computer through perfectly legal means, and a lot of DVD shows and movies, it's true--but not much first-run stuff on the TV itself.

    Sometimes I wonder whether to hate Ken, or love him.
    Friday, July 23, 2004

    Anchorman
    Saw Anchorman tonight. Now, some people on this here blog don't care too much for Will Ferrell. They think he shouts too much. And yes, 80% of the comedy in this movie is shouting.

    But if you've ever laughed at Will Ferrell, you'll probably like it.
    Do communist bears love honey?
    Forget The Tao of Pooh. Embrace The Mao of Pooh.
    Donnie
    From Salon, in honor of the rerelease: Everything you wanted to know about Donnie Darko but were afraid to ask. At least read pages 5 through 7, if not the whole thing.

    UPDATE: Turns out they did Mulholland Drive, too.
    Fleep
    Fleep is a 44 strip comic series by Jason Shiga, about a boy who suddenly finds himself trapped in phone booth sealed in concrete. Can he escape using the contents of his pockets (two pens, a paperback novel, three coins and 20 ft of unwaxed dental floss)?

    Commercial disaster? You bet.
    But it's pretty wild.
    Morning roundup
    The 10 Laws of Bad Science Fiction

    The Four-Word Film Review Site

    Crosby-Nash for President. Stills and Young had no comment.
    Thursday, July 22, 2004

    Requiem #1: Floppers, Duncan, and Chocolate Toxicity
    Right. So, I'm back from a week in NYC. At home in Greensboro, my dog Duncan has been busy eating all my things. Most were non-important; junk I left lying around or things simply not "elevated enough" to keep him out of it. Floppers was a combination of the two; a milk chocolate bunny bought for me an easter or so ago by Duncan's real mom, my lady fay. Fay and I went out last night, only to return to the carnage left behind after Floppers' demise.

    My response first was, "Floppers was a butt face, anyway." But it quickly changed to, "How much chocolate does it take to kill a dog?" We've all heard not to feed chocolate to dogs, right? It kills them, right?

    Yes, yes it does. Or rather chocolate is full of somethings called methylxanthines, that kill cats and dogs. The main slayer is called theobromine, which Hershey's has a specific link to. Others are caffeine and theophylline. From one site,"Dogs freely ingest toxic amounts of chocolate if it is left accessible. A potentially lethal dose in a 16 pound. dog is only one pound of milk chocolate. People stop eating chocolate before ingesting toxic levels." Tell that to my friend Brian, who once ate 48 Kit-Kats in 48 hours & had to get a shot of cortizone.

    So yeah. Turns out Duncan hadn't eaten very much. Floppers was a meager 49 or so grams of Milk Chocolate. According to this table he was well under the limit for a 40 pound dog. He didn't have any side effects or anything. Just a foil-laced crap in the morning.

    Anybody else have some good "Dog/Cat/Human eats way too much chocolate" stories?
    Shatner
    Shatner covers Pulp's "Common People."

    Shatner sings "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."

    Shatner sings "Mr. Tambourine Man."

    And, of course, the infamous, the classic, Family Guy-parodied, Shatner sings "Rocket Man."

    But if you think all that's scary, then mister, you haven't seen Leonard Nimoy sing "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins."

    UPDATE: Shatner sings Neil Diamond's "Shiloh."

    Brent Spiner (Data) singing "Time After Time."

    UPDATE 2: Shatner reads from Henry V. What a world.

    UPDATE 3: I can't link directly to the MP3s, but you MUST go to this site and listen to a) Leonard Nimoy sing "Put A Little Love In Your Heart" but b), and especially, Jerry Springer singing "Mr. Tambourine Man." Trust me, listen to Springer. It will change your life. Other good stuff there too.

    UPDATE 4: I found the clip of Stewie doing Shatner doing "Rocketman." For some Unfortunately, the people who put it up synched it up with the real "Rocketman," but this is the best I can do right now. New link.
    The Golden Age of Science Fiction

    Pretty awesome class project. Information on 50s scifi, from The Day The Earth Stood Still to Attack of the 50 Foot Woman to The Tempest in Space, Forbidden Planet.

    Born without a sense of smell
    It's harder than you think.
    Alleyoop
    Neat office-themed flash game. Catch the paper your officemate throws at you, and make a basket.

    UPDATE: Check out Little Fluffy Industries, which is a clearinghouse for these sorts of games.
    What The F%&^*(#&
    This link doesn't exactly contain spoilers, but it does information on the cast for 24 next year, so it'll be highlight-to-read from here on out. It's really pretty innocuous stuff, basically just a cast list.

    "Everyone has been shown the door, aside from Kiefer." That means no Palmer, no Tony, no Michelle, no Chloe, no Chase, and no Kim. Okay, so the last two cast changes are a plus. But completely revamping the show for what you consider to be its final season is a completely bullshit move that will NOT go over well. Jack won't even be working for CTU Los Angeles anymore. He'll be in Washington, working for DoD.

    Now, maybe this is misdirection, and as the show goes on it'll bring some of these old characters back into the plot. If that's the case--if Tony et all are in episodes 5 and up or something--all is forgiven. But if they're dumping Tony (and to a lesser extent, if they're dumping Palmer), it's completely unacceptable. They've been there since the beginning.

    You can't start over four years in, guys. They should drop this stupid plan, keep CTU, and keep our beloved cast of backup characters (minus Kim, including Tony and a retired President Palmer). Blaming the cast for a show's troubles, which I assume is what's happened here, is the sign of hack writers. The big problem with last year's arc wasn't that you had to fit in plots for all these secondary characters, it was that you just made the story up as you went along, just like always. PLAN THE PLOT OUT IN ADVANCE.


    Usually it takes them at least twelve episodes to completely screw up. This year it's happened before Episode 1.

    PS: 24 direct-to-DVD? Am I missing something here? How long's it gonna be?
    Who Watches The
    Interesting interview with Alan Moore, the writer of The Watchmen (widely considered the greatest superhero story ever told), is up at Salon--in their books section of all places. More fuel for the fire that comics books will replace the novel.

    If you do decide to pick up the collection, and why not, be sure to check out The Annotated Watchmen, here.
    Wednesday, July 21, 2004

    Erskine Bowles
    ...was in town tonight, and Jaimee and I went down to see him. I talk about it over at my politics blog.
    Diversions
    Nothing pressing, this is just cool.

    UPDATE: Oh, wow, check this page out too.

    It's too bad you can't make images like these your Windows background.
    Science Wednesday
    When I was a kid, I always wondered: What if what I call purple, someone else calls green? What if the visual appearance of colors is totally reversed in other people's brains?

    Turns out I wasn't so far off. Women can differentiate between colors in the red-orange spectrum better than men can.
    Neat
    Cool page on the so-called "Sleeping Beauty" problem in probablity. You'd do well to just skip down to the ones about the clones, because for whatever reason those are a lot easier to understand.

    For what it's worth, I think the thirders are committing a logical error, for exactly the reason expressed by this variant:
    A coin is flipped 10 times in a row.
    If (and only if) it comes up tails each time, then you are cloned a million times.

    When you are wakened, after the possible cloning, you (and clones of you) are asked "Were they all tails?"
    If you answer correctly, you live happily.
    If you answer incorrectly, you are tortured and killed.

    The paradox is that thirders would answer yes to this question.
    Flipping a coin and having it come up heads doesn't retroactively change the probability of heads coming up to 1.

    UPDATE: This one says it even better.
    A fair coin is to be tossed without your seeing it, and you will be asked for your credence that it has landed tails. If it lands heads, you will be asked once; tails, you will be asked twice, but the second time you will be compelled to give the same answer as the first time. You know all this in advance.

    The answer is obviously 1/2.

    This is effectively the same as SB's scenario.
    Does anyone support the thirder position here?
    Brother, can you spare a job?

    Innovative anti-Bush ad, in the style of a 1930s cartoon. Would be worth looking at even if you were a rabid Bush supporter, which thank heavens you aren't.

    Possibly/probably belongs on the other blog, but I put it over here because of its creative and artistic nature. Isn't it something?

    (via boingboing)


    Tuesday, July 20, 2004

    Bowman
    Pretty good Tank Wars-style battle game (with bows).
    Reading...
    ...went pretty well, although I managed to almost make a thematically destructive slip of the tongue in the very first sentence. But I don't think anyone noticed but me.

    The story was "Fear and Trembling," a story that was included in my thesis that is in non-trivial ways a response to Soren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. Summary and discussion here and here.

    Maybe someday one of the several magazines it's at now will pick it up, so you can read it.
    This Land is My Land - Bush v. Kerry // Ezra guarantees wet britches.
    It's my last day of a week long stint living in the center of the universe, New York City. Admittedly, I've been pretty lazy - just getting wasted and wandering the streets looking at people, rather than work on the redesign for our site or soliciting local artists as per my initial plan - but I've managed to drudge up some pretty good stuff, all of which will flood this blog in the next day or so (upon my later than timely return to GSO).
     
    Sucks a fat butt that I won't be in Greensboro to see Mr. Canavan's reading. He always knocks the crowds out of their socks. Instead I'll probably be drunk, back from a night of debauchery-lite with my host family, watching this really, really, really fantastic
    political parody from Jib Jab. I must say, this thing is tha bomb.
     
    UPDATE - Computer I am using doesn't want me to make fun links. Just copy paste this into a browser window : http://www.jibjab.com/thisland.html. You'll wet your britches, I guarantee. (time of britch-wetting in non-disclosed, semi-possible alternate future. If you get there, you'll know.) 
    Attention assassins: reading tonight
    I'm giving a reading tonight at the Green Bean in Greensboro on S. Elm St, along with five other luminaries of the MFA Program here. (Looks like Virgil Renfro, possibly Jennifer Whitaker, possibly Blythe Winslow, Greg Shemkovitz, Clay Sturges, and me, possibly in that order.) Starts at 8. I'm completely unprepared.
    AICN inteviews Hurwitz and Hayden
    Have I mentioned yet that AICN is promoting the hell out of this movie?

    Feel the hometown love.
    Is the tree real?
    The 100 Most Important Art Works of the 20th Century, here.

    Surprised to see Guernica coming in at #2, though if somebody had to beat Picasso, I'm glad it was Picasso.

    Popping in at #12, one of my all-time favorite paintings: Magritte's The Human Condition I, a painting of a painting that obscures what's behind it.

    Monday, July 19, 2004

    Mao II and DeLillo
    As I've said before, I like Don DeLillo. What I admire about him most is his ability to naturally incorporate arcane points of critical theory and philosophy into his work. The caveat for reading DeLillo, however, is that he (unlike, say, Calvino) is perfectly willing to let his ideas completely overshadow his characters.

    There's the voice issue, too. As time goes on, DeLillo seems to have found a kind of flat banter that all his characters share, a voice that it seems only logical to conclude is not entirely dislike his own.
    DeLillo novel: A novel in which all the characters sit around talking as if they're in a DeLillo novel.
    Perhaps not unrelatedly, DeLillo is a writer whose early work is generally considered better than his later.

    But I'm shooting BBs at a giant.

    Mao II's principal figure is a writer, which suggests a certain kind of self-consciousness novel (almost precisely of the type that this one is). The best part of the novel, for my money, are the periodic digressions into deep thought--of which there are many. But the novel has the same deeply felt millennial ennui that we expect from DeLillo--the idea that here, at what we collectively identify as the end of history, we have no idea how to live.

    This novel isn't not the mindbender that White Noise is, and not as much fun as the Oswald-themed Libra. But it's not the masturbatory Underworld or Cosmopolis, either. It's a DeLillo novel of the middling sort--which means it's worth reading.

    One quote:
    "For some time now I've had the feeling that novelists and terrorists are playing a zero-sum game."
    "Interesting. How so?"
    "What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous."
    "And the more clearly we see terror, the less impact we feel from art."
    Sunday, July 18, 2004

    Dude, you're stoned
    Long-winded, meandering, characteristically self-indulgent review of Randolph, NJ's own Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle from Harry Knowles of AICN. Harry seems pretty lukewarm about the movie, especially given the fact that they've been promoting the hell out of it.

    At the end of the review, Harry says of Hurwitz and Hayden:
    The writers are funny, and they have the potential to be really funny if they just stop saying or writing to the point of making their parents laugh and thank of them as being normal.
    Harry, I know these guys. You're knocking on the gates of Hell.
    Ugh
    Russian scientists have developed a technique to turn blood into chocolate, yogurt, and milk.

    Part of me hopes this is just typical Russian journalism (read: wildly false). Ugh again.
    Harry Potter and the Post-Capitalist Ethos in Decline
    Someone in France is thinking too hard.
    I, Robot
    Just got back from seeing I, Robot with my dad. As someone who read a ton of Asimov in my dark years (7th and 8th grades), after I saw the "robot army of doom" trailer I had pretty low expectations. Surprisingly, though, I thought the adaptation held up pretty well.

    People have said that "these aren't Asimov's robots"; actually, they pretty much are. Basically every robot story Asimov ever wrote was about malfunctions of the Three Laws: robots that get locked in a conflict between two laws, robots that find a clever way to break them, robots that extend the laws to unexpected conclusions, robots built without some portion of the laws that behave in unexpected ways. Asimov--not to mention the three writers who continued the Foundation series past his death--was acutely aware that "3 Laws Safe" was anything but. [EDIT: Looking over my copy of Robot Dreams, which is a republication of several of Asimov's robot stories including some of those from I, Robot, it's apparent just how many of the individual bits in the movie were taken directly from the source material. This wasn't nearly as egregious an adaptation as people were saying.]

    Granted, as some have said, the "hordes of killer robots" trope is a silly, action-movie way to explore it, but the seed is plainly there in Asimov's work.

    Harry Knowles has the last word at AICN: this movie really should have been called iRobot. It really is the marriage of Asimov's more paranoid stories and the iPod-as-symbol of our dependence on gadgets.

    It's a decent movie, though not a great one (and the climax has plot holes you could drive a supercomputer through). If you've ever read Asimov, you have no choice but to see it. And if you haven't read Asimov--well, if you're not in 8th grade and a nerdy boy, you probably missed the boat, but if you see the movie, you'll at least get the gist.
    Frodo
    Feel like you'll have nothing to live for after Peter Jackson finally makes The Hobbit? Worry not, dear nerds: Doug Kern says that Lord of the Rings will and must be remade.
    Well, the cops finally let out Madame Marie, for telling fortunes worse than previously believed
    Who knew that there was a real Madame Marie? I never did. But it's true:
    Stephen Castello said the Springsteen reference, while helpful to his mother's career and much appreciated, is fictional. She was never arrested, he said, out of envy or for any other reason.

    "It gave her a lot of publicity, but my mother stands on her own merits," he said. "When Asbury Park is mentioned, they think about the Stone Pony, they think about Convention Hall, they think about Madame Marie."
    Link to "Fourth of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)".
    Saturday, July 17, 2004

    Oneironaut (dream sailor)
    Check out this article on lucid dreaming from this weekend's New York Times Magazine. Then rewatch Waking Life again.

    Part of me really wants to learn how to do this. The other part of me thinks that sleep is something not to mess with.

    I'll take one of those NovaDreamer helmets, though.
    Your next hour
    Found photos. A constantly updated collection of random photos found on the Internet. Strangely addicting.
    Old School
    Today, courtesy of Pclem, I read Tobias Wolff's Old School, the sort-of sequel to This Boy's Life, Wolff's memoir of his early years. Both books are great.

    Unlike This Boy's Life, Old School purports to be a novel. It wasn't quite what I was expecting; Old School doesn't bring up many of the threads from This Boy's Life, and isn't quite as personal as the first book was. Its unnamed, first-person hero--who bears more than a passing similarity to Tobias Wolff himself--is a budding writer in his last year of private high school. The true heart of the book, however, is found in the three well-known writers who visit the prep school and interact with its students.

    As a budding writer myself, needless to say I found it fascinating.

    This isn't Dead Poets Society. It's not about the students as much as it's about words. But for a novel that's so preoccupied with the related questions of "What is a writer?" and "How do I become one?", it doesn't lack heart. When the narrator makes a very bad choice at the start of the last third of the book, the sudden return to reality, to story, is deeply moving.

    If I had any complaint, it'd be that the last thirty or so pages of the book are somewhat anticlimatic after that trainwreck. (You'll know what I'm talking about when you read it.)

    I love Tobias Wolff. I'm kind of surprised how much I do, because he's much closer to "conventional" that any of the other writers that I regularly read. (His Gerriest story is probably "Bullet in the Brain" from The Night in Question, which Michael Parker brought in during my very first MFA workshop as a better version of the story I'd tried to write, and which is still one of my favorites nonetheless). I eat up everything of Wolff's that I pick up. And that part of me that still wants to write like Hemingway really wants to write like Tobais Wolff.

    That guy's all right.
    Everybody's out on the run tonight, there's no place left to hide
    Off to New Jersey for the weekend. Blogging will be decreased (promise) but non-zero (sorry, Pclem!).

    You can spend the time I'm gone comparing 100 book lists from Britain, Britain, Nonfictiononia, Scifinerdistan, and America.

    Atlas Shrugged
    ? Seriously, America? Smells like a Randroid vote manipulation to me. I guess I'll give you Ulysses, though.

    Peace.
    What's wrong with the novel?
    Salon knows. Interesting article on "maximalism" or "hysterical realism" or "recherché postmodernism" or whatever you want to call it--I believe Pclem prefers the simple and elegant "poop"--a literary style which some (at least two) critics think is killing the novel.

    For my part I basically agree with Laura Miller. As I've said before, Infinite Jest didn't do much of anything for me, though I loved White Teeth by Zadie Smith (and like everyone else hated The Autograph Man.) I like DeLillo, too, a lot--I've been meaning to post something about DeLillo just as soon as I finish off Mao II, which is taking me a while. Short version: I think everyone interested in language and literature should read White Noise. It's an immensely important novel. And Libra (the Kennedy assassination novel from Oswald's perspective) is great too.

    I enjoyed Franzen's The Corrections a whole lot and bought it for my mother, though it really is about 100 pages too long. I've never really dug Pyncheon, but I'm still going to read Gravity's Rainbow someday. And the great granddaddy of them all, Ulysses, is incredible; you wouldn't want to throw that out.

    Even my little-known, much-beloved The Mezzanine, the story of a man climbing the escalator after his lunch break (which surely qualifies as hysterical realism/maximalism/poop) is a great and funny novel, not overly long (150 pages), though it is focused on hilarious theoretical disgressions rather than plot. But it's great, and funny. There are a lot of books in this subsubgenre we wouldn't want to do without.

    But for every book like this I like, there seems to remain an immense number of books (often by the very same authors) that are simply unreadable. Like Raymond Carver's minimalism, maximalism seems to have the potential to completely destroy one's ability to write, once you allow it to get in the way of your story. You can take it too damn far.

    Just write a good book, I guess is my point, and I'll party with your aesthetic vision. Otherwise, you suck.
    The Lynch
    If Mulholland Drive left you scratching your head, I have the site for you.
    Friday, July 16, 2004

    Trinity
    59 years ago today, we ruined the world.

    As My Eyes Became Accustomed to Her Science, My Sight Was Restored
    Boingboing has a post up with a bunch of funny proposed one-hit-wonder-sequel titles, piggybacking off this post from McSweeneys.

    The possibilities truly are endless.
    Robots
    3 Laws Unsafe: A new site dedicated to exploring what's so bad about Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics.
    List of people by cause of death
    This is a list that you don't want to get on. Deliciously morbid/morbidly delicious.
    No longer searching for Bobby Fischer
    Apparently they found him in Japan trying to leave the country with a fake passport. He's currently wanted in the United States for playing an illegal chess game (seriously).

    Also of note: Bobby Fischer's Pathetic Endgame (from The Atlantic)

    UPDATE: Check out Fischer's Chess+, Fischerandom chess.
    Jack Black to play Green Lantern? What?
    That's what AICN is saying, anyway.

    Doesn't seem to be an especially good fit, given that the Green Lantern--the Hal Jordan Green Lantern, anyway, the one everybody thinks about--is one of the most tragic characters in DC Comicdom.

    I saw Heat Vision & Jack, and it was funny enough, but I wouldn't shoehorn it into a Green Lantern comedy. I mean, how many jokes about the color green and color yellow can you make? What's this movie going to be about?
    Szobor Park
    Another park (this time in Hungary) filled with forsaken Communist propaganda. Amazing photos of the art style known as "Soviet realism." I learned that phrase in college; thanks, TA Amy!

    Thursday, July 15, 2004

    Dictionary of Wrestling Terminology
    Finally understand what I'm talking about when I talk about kayfabe, angles, faces, heels, jobbers, turns, shoots, heat, and swerves. And then blame Shankar for teaching me all this.

    (In all seriousness, wrestling terminology is surprisingly useful for narrative study of any type. Sophisticated, even.)
    Why I Am Not A Painter
    I think I would rather be a painter, but I am not. How to make an oil painting, from start to finish.
    The Plague
    Boingboing is pointing to a pair of amazing awareness ads campaign from Aides, a French AIDS organization, which put Superman and Wonder Woman into hospital beds.



    Link to Superman ad.
    The Dropa Discs:
    Hieroglyphic, possibly translated stone tablets found in the mountains of Chinese near the graves of strange humanoid beings (certainly aliens),

    or,

    What the Government Doesn't Want You To Know.

    More here, here, and here.
    Blondes really are dumber
    Well, kind of.
    Gum Blondes
    Chewing-gum-as-art. #5 is Buffy. Thanks, Neil! (No link till you update.)
    It's Stalin's World

    ...we just live in it.

    Pictures of "Gruto Parkas," nicknamed StalinWorld, a sculpture garden devoted to Stalin-era Soviet propaganda. (You'll have to scroll down a little to see them.)

    The Internet: it's the next best thing to actually being in Lithuania.

    (via Boingboing.)
    Attention Nerds
    New Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow trailer is out.

    This is the movie that uses modern CGI technology to replicate the 1930s vision of the future: giant robots, airships, that sort of thing. You can see the influence of film noir in the trailer.

    It's supposed to be amazing; apparently two sequels were greenlighted on the strength of preproduction alone. Watch for it.
    JJ Abrams admits season three of Alias sucked
    Says season four won't suck quite so bad.
    Real men of genius
    The history of Sequoyah, the man who invented the Cherokee syllabary. The literary rate of the Cherokee people went from 0% to 90% in just a few years.

    Omniglot is a pretty great site in general for lingustics and writing. Tons of information.

    (via metafilter)
    Wednesday, July 14, 2004

    July 27th is National Barbie in a Blender Day
    Mark your calendars.

    Something's not right
    I showed this site to my father a while ago, and he suggested that I put it up here. It's a description of and link to the pilot episode of X-Files spin-off The Lone Gunmen, which focuses around a horror we've all become too familiar with: a plot to crash a jetliner into the World Trade Center.

    But here's the kicker: It aired seven months before 9/11.
    When Worlds Collide
    Politics meets literary theory in George W. Bush as Presidential Simulacrum.
    I am not interested in George W. Bush's corporeal being but rather in his flatness and in the way that his obvious deficiencies are "spun" by supposedly disinterested media pundits. Bush's estrangement from the real -- evident in his unfamiliarity with geography, history, ordinary English syntax and semantics, and a fund of common knowledge -- stems from his own lack of reality. George W. Bush does not exist.
    We should be so lucky. One more choice quote:
    When Bush stammers publicly about freedom, democracy, and the axis of evil, American media commentators gloss his remarks positively. Reporters and pundits chronically overestimate Bush in much the way Chance's admirers do, discoursing about him as if he actually possessed a political philosophy and an understanding of government policies. They overlook, understate, or make excuses for his slipshod syntax, reliance on clichés, and inability to answer either theoretical or factual questions. They inevitably refer to him as if he were a "real" person with a complex sensibility, rather than a simulacrum entirely composed of sound bites and photo opportunities.
    Aw hell, one more:
    While in public, Bush appears to interact amiably with the media, in the center of government -- away from public observation -- he is disconnected, like an unplugged machine. At a January 30, 2001, meeting with the National Security Council, O'Neill remembers, "the president said little. He just nodded, with that same flat, unquestioning demeanor that O'Neill was familiar with." [13] Behind closed doors, Bush no longer connects or exists. His principal function has been lost. In this respect he is like an expensive, hand-waxed automobile, gleaming in the darkness of a garage. The car is intended for rapid motion and for public display. When its owner-driver is at the dinner table, he has no need of the car.
    Problems with the blog?
    I mucked around with the template today trying to fix the problem we've been having on certain Internet Explorer browsers. If you have any kind of trouble reading the blog--the left sidebar appears all the way down the page, things are spaced out wrong, words overlap--please let me know, either by leaving a comment or by sending me an email at editors@backwardscity.net. Let me know if you have any problems with Three Guys, too--I found out today that it wasn't posting at all on Safari browsers because of a weird quirk.

    Thanks.
    Dead Like Me
    Last night Jaimee and I rented the first couple episodes of Showtime original series Dead Like Me. I had pretty high hopes for the show, because the talk has been that it's just like if Buffy and Six Feet Under (the first season, anyway) had a baby and they named it Dead Like Me. Unfortunately, the show is more like Touched by an Angel and Joan of Arcadia had a kid who always followed Buffy around on the playground.

    Review continues in the comments. I don't want to take up the whole front page for this.
    7967
    I know it's somewhat hackish to keep publicizing the number of hits we get each day, but I'm really impressed with these numbers. Yesterday we had 7,967 hits, including 2029 reloads, for a grand total of 9996 visitors.

    I think that's super.
    Tuesday, July 13, 2004

    Backwards City Foam Hat Story Project 1.1
    IT'S STARTED: Click here to read the story so far...and then continue it.

    UPDATE : THANKS FOR ALL YOUR HELP ON THIS ONE! We're very happy with the results. Posting has stopped and our Crack Team of editors will shave this down into one cohesive beast and it will be up in a day or so. In the meantime, get ready for Hat #2.

    Normal posting is still going on down the page. Scroll down, or else use the "Recent Posts" sidebar at left to see what has been added since you were last here.

    We'll be keeping this post at the top of the page as long as interest in the story holds.
    Keep it going!


    --

    First in a fabulous and magical series.

    Instructions:

    Below, you will find a picture. Look at it for a second. Below the picture, you'll find comments. The first comment might be posted by the pictured or the editors. The second comment should be posted by you. If that one's taken, then post the next available.
    Why?
    Story.
    We want to create a narrative here, a scene, a tale, a story. Make your contribution as long or short as you like. Use those that came before yours as a force. Make it funny, make it sad, make it sound good, make it sound bad. Let's laugh and cry together, just like on a commercial. Make it make sense. At least a little bit. Your sentence can end or you can let it dangle. (She shouted, "Blue, my ass," right before stepping in...)

    When your done, wait. Someone will jump in.
    Then, repeat as desired.

    The most important thing is POST. This is going to rock.

    Fair warning: Comments that the editors determine are offensive will be deleted. Comments complaining about the deletion of a previous offensive comment will also be deleted.

    At the project's conclusion, the results will be edited into a seamless whole by our crack team of narratologists and will be archived (pending future publication) at http://www.backwardscity.net. And now....the Foam Cowboy Hat Series #1.



    (Note: if two people post off the same thread, just roll with it. Use one or both as you desire to keep the story going. It'll all work out in editing.)
    New Posts
    Any new posts will be going underneath the Foam Cowboy Hat for at least a day or so. Just scroll down or check the "Recent Posts" column in the sidebar. This will be standard procedure whenever we're doing a Foam Cowboy Hat thing.

    Also, you can always reach the latest Foam Cowboy Hat series by clicking on the question marked foam cowboy hat at the top of the sidebar.

    The game starts at noon. Have fun.
    The Geek Hierarchy
    Another old-time Internet classic. Find out where you stand.
    The Picture of Everything
    Still cool.

    Large view here.
    More optical illusions
    Someone calling me a "lamer" in the comments in this post gave me the name of Akiyoshi Kitaoka, who has a number of awesome optical illusions at his site. Check him out. And thanks, Anonymous!
    When pigeons bite back
    A BBC profile on "Mike" and the scambusters at 419eater.com.

    Never get scammed by Nigerians again!
    Shades of Gray
    A feature length film made for $2,000, available for free here. I've only watched chapters 1,2,and 11--and judging from the trailer some parts of it are American Pie-inspired (read: stupid)--but it's a pretty astoundingly impressive effort, especially given the budget.

    Not safe for work because of "profanity, immaturity, strong displays of sexuality and politically incorrect stereotypes."

    Trailer here.
    Outfoxed
    I thought some people over here might be interested in this review of Outfoxed from Salon:
    I'm a neutral observer, of course, here to give you a fair and balanced report. But some people would say that Fox News Channel is nothing more than the private right-wing propaganda machine of a sneaky right-wing billionaire who is -- now these are just the facts, people -- not an American at all but some kind of Down Under, funny-accented, shrimp-on-the-barbie-eating, crocodile-hunting, profoundly un-American Australian, for goodness' sake.
    Fox News stinks, just ask anyone.

    Any Greensborovians want to go see it?
    Ebay Comic Book Auction
    Check it out:

    Superman 1
    Batman 1
    Spiderman 1
    X-Men 1
    and many others...



    Pretty amazing collection. I think the guy's right, it probably is worth over a million dollars. Easily.

    Anyone got $250,000 to spare?
    Monday, July 12, 2004

    It was the best Christmas ever
    Thanks to a link from Boingboing, Backwards City had its best day ever today: an incredible 3375 unique visitors and 1050 reloads, new records for us in both categories. We're starting to get linked to off other blogs as well, which is exciting, and should have a bounce effect that continues well into, well, tomorrow.

    People just love the dancing almond illusion.

    But we're not resting on our laurels. As of tonight, 19 posts have been made in the Foam Cowboy Hat Story Series #1. Can we get that up to 40 by tomorrow? It's not up to us--it's up to you.
    Earth's Magnetic Field Collapsing--Civilization Doomed
    Oh hell.

    UPDATE: Now the NY Times article is up. This kind of sucks.
    Pac-Mondrian
    Pac-Mondrian combines the transcendent perfection of Pac-Man with the aesthetic genius of Piet Mondrian. There's never been a higher concept flash game.

    Seriously, this cracks me up.
    Buttons of famous underground cartoonists
    This one is for all you Duders out there.
    I see a man--who died suddenly--he's associated with the letter J or K
    In honor of Six Feet Under's bizarre new subplot, we present: The Skepdic on Coldreading.

    The Skeptic's Dictionary is great in general.
    The Forbidden Library
    What's been banned and why. It's so hard for me to imagine every advocating the banning of any book. But check the site: it seems like every book that's ever been written has made somebody's list. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?
    Novels are out, Graphic Novels are in
    ...says New York Times. Damn. Missed it by that much.

    Comic lit is pretty cool though.
    Our Brains Don't Work
    This image is actually perfectly still. Isolate or focus on any one part of it and you'll see that its apparent movement is just a very strange optical illusion.

    [NOTE:Our page was just redesigned, and the full image no longer fits on the page. For a bigger, much more impressive version of this image, click here.]



    Freaky.

    UPDATE: Welcome Boing Boing readers! While you're here, why not get involved in our Foam Hat Story Project??

    UPDATE 2: Anonymous in the comments brings to my attention Akiyoshi Kitaoka, apparently the creator of the almond illusion. Didn't know who made it, man, I just found the file someplace.

    Anyway, please, check out some of his other work. A lot of similiar optical illusions. Completely amazing.
    Sunday, July 11, 2004

    Beyond the Palace hemi-powered drones scream down the boulevard
    Abandoned NJ: Lost and ruined treasures of the Garden State.

    I still can't believe they tore down The Palace. And I've never even been there.
    How long do we have?
    You can't argue with statistics.
    Meta/Meta
    Hey, co-editors: do you guys want me to change our template to a show/hide style, like I've done at Three Guys? Advantage is that more headlines are shown on the page, the disadvantage is that all the text is hidden unless show/hide is clicked. Let me know. Do readers even care? Do we have any readers?
    The Self-Destruction Handbook
    Finally a self-help book we can all get behind. With great cover art by exploding dog!
    The Art of Marilyn Manson
    Just about exactly what you'd expect.
    Field Guide to the Nomenclature of Philosophy
    Don't go philosopher-hunting with it.
    Saturday, July 10, 2004

    Too weird not to post
    Ridley Scott's 1979 classic Alien in thirty seconds reenacted by cartoon bunnies.

    UPDATE: Holy crap, Neil's right, there's others.
    Uncle Gerry Reviews Everything
    One thing I wanted to mention yesterday is that we ate at the best restaurant in Wilmington yesterday. It's called Nikki's Fresh Gourmet, and it's located at 16 Front St. No webpage apparently, but here's a quickie review from the UNCW student paper. Cheap, great. 16 Front Street.
    I liked blogging so much, I bought the company
    In an effort to keep the Backwards City free from things that don't belong here, I'm going to be politics-blogging at Three Guys with long-time fan favorite Shankar Duraiswamy and brash young upstart megaheel Frinibarf Agrajag.

    Up first: How was the rally?

    There'll be some crossposting, but mostly, you should bookmark both sites. You don't want to miss a minute of my exciting commentary.
    Friday, July 09, 2004

    Damn
    Driving down 421 towards Fayetteville yesterday, Jaimee and I passed a Wal-Mart that was situated 50 yards behind an open graveyard.

    It would have made a perfect picture. And us without our camera.
    Noun (adjectival aside) verb--aside (interior aside)--object link (tertiary aside) preposition question mark
    Geez, what an ugly-looking post that last one was. I'm supposed to be a writer?

    Anyway, here's what editions of H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds have looked like roughly every year for the last 106 years. Pretty excellent.
    Capturing the Friedmans
    Have to back up this post by the (normally unreadable) David Bernstein over at the Volokh Conspiracy (the Village Voice piece he links to is great too). Capturing the Friedmans is a completely excellent documentary--not in the Super Size Me sense of being an amusing stunt or in the Fahrenheit 911 sense of being effective propaganda (though both too are great movies)--but in the sense of actually being an incredibly moving, extremely disturbing, incredibly thought-provoking work of cinematic art.

    Find a video store that has it (Blockbuster may not, but someone does) and check it out. I'll wait.

    ...

    Now that you've seen the movie, you're prepared to enter into two different but equally fascinating areas of discourse:

    (The Local) To what extent if any were either or both Friedmans actually guilty of the crimes of which they were accused? What makes you think so?

    (The Meta) Is the documentary filmmaker beholden to the truth (that Jesse Friedman is almost certainly largely if not entirely innocent, that the filmaker knows it, could have proved it, and chose not to) or to his art (since the ambiguous version of the movie is far better than the non-ambiguous version would or could have been)? That is, must the artist take a side?
    Next time I'll tell you about the Go Master who lives in the closet and only ever says "AhGoooooooo?"
    Been yearning to play Go with me, but don't have the patience to put up with my tutoring? Then do I have the site for you: The Interactive 'Way to Go.'
    Do Psychics Ever Help Police Solve Crimes?
    Ask again later. Outlook not so good.
    Thursday, July 08, 2004

    Kerry/Edwards Rally
    There's apparently a Kerry/Edwards Rally (with mysterious "Musical Guest"!) in Raleigh this Saturday at 1 pm. Jaimee and I are going on our way back to Greensboro--anybody from the 'boro want to meet us there? Let me know.

    You'll need to stick this fish in your ear print out your complimentary ticket at johnkerry.com.

    I can almost guarantee this will be the most electrifying political rally you attend all week.
    Rhetorical questions
    Can your all-time desert island top ten include greatest hits compiliations, or must it be all original releases? I think the answer to this question says a lot about a person.
    I Ain't One To Gossip
    But distant Canavan family relative Larry Flynt sure is. Did George W. Bush pay for an illegal abortion in 1970s? Gosh, I don't know. But we should spend at least as much time as we spend investigating twenty-year-old failed land deals. It's the American way.
    Off
    Well, I'm off to look at wedding dresses for 170 consecutive hours. We'll be in Wilmington all weekend, so posting from me will be light and cryptic until Sunday. Have a good weekend everyone.
    Happy One-Day-Late Birthday To My Father!
    That cat's all right.

    (For some reason I thought TODAY was the 7th.)
    In Lighter News...

    Rumor has it that The Return of the King: Extended Edition will hit theaters before it goes on sale on DVD in November. Of course it's a complete Kill Bill-style ripoff, but I'll be there.

    I can't wait for The Hobbit.
    Paging the Comic Book Guy
    I deleted a much longer post on this subject because it was essentially inappropriate for the BCR (I'm trying, guys)--but anybody with any interest in politics at all should check out TNR's scoop on what Bush has planned for the end of the month:
    A third source, an official who works under ISI's director, Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq, informed tnr that the Pakistanis "have been told at every level that apprehension or killing of HVTs [High-Value Targets] before [the] election is [an] absolute must." What's more, this source claims that Bush administration officials have told their Pakistani counterparts they have a date in mind for announcing this achievement: "The last ten days of July deadline has been given repeatedly by visitors to Islamabad and during [ul-Haq's] meetings in Washington." Says McCormack: "I'm aware of no such comment." But according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that "it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July"--the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.
    That this man still has any support at all completely astounds me. "Worst. President. Ever."
    Wednesday, July 07, 2004

    "You Don't Support Democrats. Why Should Your Ketchup?"
    Good lord.

    Official CDC Disease Trading Cards
    Geez. (Here's set 2.)

    I guess even the children of terrorists need hobbies.
    Responding to My Detractors
    There's been a little kerfluffle in the comments underneath my Annie Hall post below. Check it out if the question "Is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind a xerox copy of Annie Hall?" interests you. I know it interests me.
    Merciful Zeus!
    FOUR Buffy telemovies? That's what Spike is telling people in Australia. Well, either four or zero. (Via Aint It Cool News)
    Marsters did not provide any detail on the movies other than that each would focus on one particular character, and that either all four would be made or none at all. As far as Marsters was aware, only he has comitted to the project so far.
    Yes, it'll definitely be an overarching story, as people had expected.

    So who will the core four be? You've got to figure that one will be Buffy in there's any way in God's Green Earth that it can possibly be Buffy (and in Hollywood, anything is possible). So that's Spike for (say) the first one, and Buffy for the last one if possible. Other contenders, as far as I can see: Angel (though he says he's done being Angel), Willow, Faith, Illyria, Giles, Dawn, Gunn, Wesley (don't ask me how), Andrew, the much-loathed-but-still-okay-with-me Connor, Xander, Principal Wood, and Jennifer's beloved Lorne, in roughly that order.

    Make mine Spike, Willow, The Adventures of Wesley and Illyria, and The Return of Buffy, Starring Angel, and I'm sitting pretty. Needless to say, they'll make Andrew the thread that ties all four all together (the "droids" of the piece, as it were). And you're gold. This is a great, great day.

    UPDATE: Oh. I seem to recall four characters standing in an alley at the end of Angel. That might just be our four.

    UPDATE 2: Marsters's exact words are here. He really hardly said anything. But don't rain on my parade.
    Who is John Edwards?
    He's a great man. No, just kidding, just kidding, this is the guy. Great article about Edwards, trial lawyers in general, and the nonsense that is "tort reform." I'm telling you, this dude's gonna be pres-o-dent.
    Tuesday, July 06, 2004

    Old People Key to Human Evolution
    ...says New Scientist. The gist:
    Caspari and Lee found a five-fold increase [in] the number of individuals surviving into old age in the Early Upper Palaeolithic period - around 30,000 years ago. This coincides with an explosive population growth of modern humans and the spread of archaeological artefacts that suggest the development of more complex social organisation.
    ...
    Anthropologists have long suspected that older people may have played an important role in the development of early human societies by providing extra care for children, helping to accumulate useful information and strengthening kinship bonds.

    The so-called "grandmother hypothesis", based on studies of African hunter-gatherer groups, suggests that infertile women are vital for successful child-rearing despite being unable to produce children themselves.
    What does this mean? It means Kurt Vonnegut was right again when he wrote in Slaughterhouse Five:
    One of the biggest moral bombshells handed to Billy by the Tralfamadorians, incidentally had to do with sex on Earth. They said their flying-saucer crews had identified no fewer than seven sexes on Earth, each essential to reproduction. Again: Billy couldn't possibly imagine what five of those even sexes had to do with the making of a baby, since they were sexually active only in the fourth dimension.

    The Tralfamadorians tried to give Billy clues that would help him imagine sex in the invisible dimension. They told him that there could be no Earthling babies without male homosexuals. They could be babies without female homosexuals. There couldn't be babies without women over sixty-five years old. They could be babies without men over sixty-five. There couldn't be babies without other babies who had lived an hour or less after birth. And so on.

    It was gibberish to Billy.
    Exactly Correct
    Tom Tomorrow does it again. (Warning: stupid Salon commercial first. Working for Change doesn't have stupid commercials.)

    I'd post the image here, but that might not be exactly "legal." He's dead on, though. Check it out.
    I bet they could go slower
    The fifth note in "Organ^2/ASLSP" sounded yesterday. This strange piece by John Cage has been playing "as slowly as possible" since September 5, 2001, and will be completed in 2639.

    You can hear the first three notes at the NPR site, as well as a couple of stories about it. More here from AP.

    (via BoingBoing)
    More Hughes
    Kerry wrote the preface to a new collection of Langston Hughes poems, due out next month. Who knew?

    No link on Amazon yet, but here's a link to Four Trials, Edwards' book (which is supposed to be excellent).

    That's enough Edwards excitement for now.

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