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Monday, February 28, 2005

'America's Forgotten Atrocity'
"A unique hybrid people, the Acadians offered a wiser, kinder vision of settling the continent. Instead, they became the victims of North America's first ethnic cleansing campaign." At Salon.
In August of 1755 an extraordinary plan went into action along the Atlantic seaboard of North America, in what is now the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. In village after village, all male householders were summoned to mandatory meetings with British authorities, where they were captured and imprisoned as hostages against the surrender of their homes and families. Houses were burned to the ground, livestock indiscriminately slaughtered, fields of crops laid waste. Those who resisted were beaten, and sometimes shot, while those who fled into the forests were hunted down like rabid animals.

...

These were the Acadians, a French-speaking hybrid people long cut off from their European origins who occupied a strange position on the margins of American history and in between the imperial ambitions of Britain and France. For 150 years they lived along the coastline of what are now the Maritime Provinces, forging extraordinarily warm relationships with their Indian neighbors and insisting on their own neutrality as sovereignty of the region swung back and forth between the great powers.

Ultimately, the Acadians' oddness and specialness would lead to their destruction. But while their culture lasted they seemed to represent an alternate vision of North American settlement, one based more on friendship, accommodation and cultural exchange than on conquest, war and extermination. As Yale historian John Mack Faragher documents in his major new history of the Acadians and their downfall, "A Great and Noble Scheme," this semi-literate fishing and farming people forged a prosperous, autonomous and nearly idyllic society that was unique in the Western world.
I'd never heard of this before. Fascinating. Terrible.
Things You Might Not Think Are Difficult Are Actually Very Difficult
Take, for instance, defining the kilogram.
extremespells.com
The most trusted and caring name in effective spell casting, period.
All the Movies I Hate All in One Place
Upcoming Sequels & Remakes.
I Pledge Allegience to the Flag of the Thirty-Eight States of America
Proposal for a redrawing of the state boundries based upon population centers. Weird idea. Sucks that I'd *still* live in Carolina. And I kind of like Jersey the way it is. So no dice.
More Worst Case Scenarios
How to Hotwire a Car

How to Pass a Lie Detector Test
The Eleven Worst Songs of 2004
You may begin to notice a pattern.
Angel 1, Lunatics 0
FCC Rejects Angel Indecency Complaint.
It was one of two scenes from a November 2003 episode of "Angel" that were not "sufficiently graphic or explicit to render the program patently offensive" by contemporary standards, the FCC said in denying an indecency complaint from the Parents Television Council.

...

One scene involved Angel in an intimate moment with a female character in which Angel's hips are seen "moving back and forth," the Parents Television Council said in its complaint.

In the scene depicting the female vampire biting the neck of her partner, also a vampire, both characters had clothes on and "their breathing is heavy," the complaint said.
What's particularly amusing is that the episode in question, "Destiny," involves the longest, most violent, knock-down drag-out fight in all 12 seasons of Buffyverse. The two characters go at it for like thirty straight minutes. It's brutal. Passion-of-the-Christ brutal.

In any event, why would you watch a show about vampires in the first place if you're this easily bugged out? Oh, wait, I know why.

(Thanks to Neilbear for the pointer.)
Jonathan Lethem, Men and Cartoons
As I've said, high recommendation for Jonathan Lethem's new book of short stories, Men and Cartoons, which I finished last night. Lethem has catapulted himself near the top of my favorite-authors list recently, in no small part because I think he's lived a little like me and writes a little like me (or maybe that should be the other way around). I'm still a little wigged out by the way his recent essay in The New Yorker (not online) ran through some of my top writers more or less in the order I was exposed to them: Vonnegut, Calvino, DeLillo. I plan to dig around in his dark, science-fictiony past in the very near future.

Lucky for you, you don't have to take my word for it. You can read a couple of stories from Men and Cartoons online.

Super Goat Man
The Glasses

I wish "The Spray" were online. That was the story that really made me sit up and say, "We're dealing with something special here." "Super Goat Man" is pretty good, though.

Great collection. As I said, one-of-if-not-the best I've read since I read Back in the World and The Night in Question back-to-back in November 2002.
A Guide to SF Chronophysics
Übergeek alert. The exact terminology you'll need to argue about the logic of time travel movies ad infinitum.

(See also this, this, and this, as well as Continuum, "the roleplaying game of genuine time travel." I warned you about the geek thing, didn't I? Via MetaFilter.)
Sunday, February 27, 2005

Shroud of Turin: Still A Forgery
"I believe it to have been faked. But that's not something I can prove," he said. "What I have demonstrated is that in order to produce an image like the one on the Shroud, nothing more is required than the cloth itself, and a painting on glass. All things available to a medieval. A forger would have three-dimensionally encoded a photonegative onto cloth, without even being aware of the completeness of his art, or for how long he would be confusing the rest of us."
Oscar Winners
History's
Tonight's
Pikmin 2
Well, I bought Pikmin 2, and well, I shouldn't have. You let me down, Shigeru Miyamoto. You let me down.

I enjoyed the first game, so I expected to enjoy the second. I don't know why my appreciation was so much lower. Oh, wait, I do know; I got the first game for next to nothing, while I paid almost full price for the second. Burn.
NYTimesMagazineFilter
Good pictures in this week's New York Times Magazine. And the winner is: Kal Pen, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.
Liberal Bias in Academia
Horrors! Aaron Schwatz's weblog:
A shocking recent study has discovered that only 13% of Stanford professors are Republicans. The authors compare this to the 51% of 2004 voters who selected a Republican for President and argue this is “evidence of discrimination” and that “academic Republicans are being eradicated by academic Democrats”.

Scary as this is, my preliminary research has discovered some even more shocking facts. I have found that only 1% of Stanford professors believe in telepathy (defined as “communication between minds without using the traditional five senses”), compared with 36% of the general population. And less than half a percent believe “people on this earth are sometimes possessed by the devil”, compared with 49% of those outside the ivory tower. And while 25% of Americans believe in astrology (“the position of the stars and planets can affect people’s lives”), I could only find one Stanford professor who would agree. (All numbers are from mainstream polls, as reported by Sokal.)

This dreadful lack of intellectual diversity is a serious threat to our nation’s youth, who are quietly being propagandized by anti-astrology radicals instead of educated with different points of view. Were I to discover that there were no blacks on the Stanford faculty, the Politically Correct community would be all up in arms. But they have no problem squeezing out prospective faculty members whose views they disagree with.
Via Boing Boing.

On a more serious note -- why isn't anyone concerned about the shocking lack of ideological diversity in, say, corporate America? A year ago, 80% of Fortune 1000 CEOs supported Bush, and only 11% supported Kerry. In 2000, the bias was even more outrageous; 86% of CEOs voted for Bush. Why are liberals being locked from the reins of power in major corporations, and how long must this go on?
Plaztik Press
Presenting Plaztik Press, the online literary journal devoted entirely to stories and poems about plastic surgery.
4-1-1
Who knew that someday Information would really be Information? The last time I called 411, the woman on the Sprint PCS Information number refused to give me the phone number for our local movie theater, insisting that she could tell me the movie times of any movie I wanted to see. Today I called, and I was told I could find out "sports scores" on the same line. What a world we live in.
Saturday, February 26, 2005

Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto
A. Van Jordan has said, "Arigato on High Point Rd. in Greensboro has the best sushi in North America."*

This is true.

--
* This is not a quote.
New New *NEW* Internet-Only Hitchhikers Movie Trailer
The best one yet. It's meta, you see.
Arthur Rackham's Illustrations to Alice in Wonderland
... are here, from a larger site that includes his illustrations to The Wind in the Willows, Mother Goose, and, best of all, Gulliver's Travels. The images can be sent as electronic postcards.

Previous Wonderland blogging here and here.
They Say Time Is the Fire in Which We Burn
How language shapes our understanding of time. From The Guardian:
The researcher is Rafael Núñez, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego, who is interested in how we develop abstract ideas like time. Núñez now believes that he has definitive evidence that the Aymara have a sense of the passage of time that is the mirror image of his own: the past is in front of them, the future behind.

...

Time, as Einstein showed, is a tricky concept to nail down, and all languages resort to metaphor to express it. In fact, with staggering monotony, they all resort to the same metaphor: space. If an English speaker says: "We are approaching the deadline," he or she is expressing imminence in terms of nearness, a property of physical space. Anyone listening will understand exactly what he or she means, even though the deadline is not an entity that exists in the physical world. Núñez says: "There is no ultimate truth that you could discover that is outside that metaphor."

So if temporal landmarks don't exist except in our heads, where does our notion of time come from? And why do we feel so strongly a sense of time as motion? In all Indo-European languages including English, but also in languages as diverse as Hebrew, Polynesian, Japanese and Bantu, speakers face the future. Time flows from a point in front of them, through their current position - the present - and back to the past. The Aymara also feel time as motion, but for them, speakers face the past and have their backs to the future.

The Aymara word for past is transcribed as nayra , which literally means eye, sight or front. The word for future is q"ipa , which translates as behind or the back. The Jesuits undoubtedly noticed this oddity in the 16th century, when they ventured up into the mountains to spread the word. More recently, linguistic anthropologists have puzzled over what it means. In 1975, Andrew Miracle and Juan de Dios Yapita Moya, both at the University of Florida, observed that q"ipüru , the Aymara word for tomorrow, combines q"ipa and uru , the word for day, to produce a literal meaning of "some day behind one's back".
Via Gravity Lens.
Mother Teresa: Views Differ
I stumbled across this Christopher Hitchens interview about The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice on linkfilter, and since I've mentioned the book before, I thought I'd link to it.

It really is an interesting book, with a lot of worthy things to say, even if the whole idea of writing a diatribe against Mother Teresa rightly strikes most people as somewhat deranged. It's out of print now, I think, but you can find it in used bookstores and college libraries.

I miss the old, contrarian Snitchens. The new Bush-worshipping, bomb-'em-all-and-let-the-lack-of-a-God-sort-'em-out Snitchens is awful.

UPDATE: It's not out of print.
What Goes On
A list of every single time the Beatles screwed up. Every fan is different -- some are obsessed crazy dedicated. Neat site though.

(Both this and the last one where at MetaFilter)
Winnie from The Wonder Years Answers All Your Math Questions
It's all available on danicamckellar.com. Just click on "mathematics" in the sidebar and scroll down. Winnie's got a published math proof, and Paul became Marilyn Manson -- so what's up, Kevin Arnold?
Friday, February 25, 2005

A Scanner Darkly / Waking Life
Trailer for Richard Linklater's new adaptation of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly, which looks to be animated in the same way Waking Life was.

Waking Life is a funny movie. I like it a lot, mostly because I view it as a kind of index of interesting things one might think about. The movie's dialogue may be a little sophomoric, as some of its critics (Jaimee) have said, but nonetheless it's a good jumping off point for your own mental wanderings. I dunno. If you're willing wade through the metaphysical posts on this blog, you'll probably like it well enough. And it's certainly something different.

Most links via Boing Boing.
And Today's Award For Saddest Article Goes To...
"Sad, Lonely? For a Good Time, Call Vivienne" in The New York Times.
HONG KONG, Feb. 18 - Men, are you tired of the time, trouble and expense of having a girlfriend? Irritated by the difficulty of finding a new one?

Eberhard Schöneburg, the chief executive of the software maker Artificial Life Inc. of Hong Kong, may have found the answer: a virtual girlfriend named Vivienne who goes wherever you go.

Vivienne likes to be taken to movies and bars. She loves to be given virtual flowers and chocolates, and she can translate six languages if you travel overseas. She never undresses, although she has some skimpy outfits for the gym, and is a tease who draws the line at anything beyond blowing kisses.

If you marry her in a virtual ceremony, you even end up with a virtual mother-in-law who really does call you in the middle of the night on your cellphone to ask where you are and whether you have been treating her daughter right.
Mr. Men and Little Misses
Officially.
Unofficially.
Nostalgia via MetaFilter.
Attention, Wal-Mart Shoppers
College kids have taken to hanging out in Wal-Mart after hours and playing games like scavenger hunt and football in the aisles. This is apparently a national phenomenon; the kids in my 101 class were telling me just yesterday, without any prompting, that they do this in their local Wal-Marts too.

And they were pretty pleased about it.
Will the Avian Flu Kill Us All?
That's what Michael Specter wants to know in this week's New Yorker. The article isn't online, but an an interview with the writer is.

The answer is yes.

UPDATE: There's a looks-to-be-good "Personal History" by Jonathan Lethem in the magazine this week too, also offline-only. I don't have time to read it at the moment, so I'll just say that Men & Cartoons, which I'm halfway through, is already the best collection of short stories I've read since my Tobias Wolff kick of late 2002. (Honorable mentions go to George Saunders and UNCG's own, no-longer-banned-from-campus-for-life George Singleton.)

Pretty good week for The New Yorker. Kudos. Though I haven't seen the story this week, and if it's poo, it'll ruin everything.
What Were Einstein and Gödel Talking About?
That's what Jim Holt in this week's New Yorker wants to know.
Thursday, February 24, 2005

'Taller Babies Make Richer Men'
"One of the best predictors of a man's income at age 50 is his height - at the age of 1."
The Eye of Science
Photographs of the microscopic world.
'Seeing is Believing'
A two-hour report on UFOs from Peter Jennings is coming on ABC right now.
My Dinner With White Supremacists...at Applebee's
Amusing/frightening article at sfweekly.com.
"I'm glad that he referred you to us," hater Kevin says, then asks how long I've been a "race activist."

I tilt my head back and reflect, "I started to dislike Canadians, then moved on from there." Under my breath, I mutter, "Fucking Canadians."
Nickel & Dimed
Double re-recommendation for Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel & Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.

(1) It's a fantastic look at the lives of the invisible poor, the sorts of people you don't see sitcoms about. If you haven't read it yet, you should.

(2) It's a great book for Comp 101. It's probably been the single most popular book I've used in all my .7 months of teaching. The kids really dig it, and it gets them talking. (It's been much smoother going than The Things They Carried, which I used last semester, and which is also a great book.)
High-Concept Media Spotlight
The Superfriends act out Office Space.

Not since the Superfriends Wazzup! have the Superfriends been redubbed so expertly.

(Via MetaFilter)
The Future, Conan?
The first episode of the new Battlestar Galactica series is available for free and uncut at scifi.com. I hope all TV companies start doing this. I honestly don't see why they don't. It's all out there anyway on BitTorrent; instead of fighting it, why not cash in?

I'd even pay a little for tv-show-on-demand. Not a lot; but a little. I think a lot of people would.
Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Hitch: "Ohio's Odd Numbers"
Holy crap. In next month's Vanity Fair, Snitchens says the Ohio election results look suspicious, and poops on Diebold to boot.
Common Errors in English
Grate sight.
There's Treasure Everywhere
Rare Bill Watterson Art (For the Calvin Connoisseur).
"Menagerie, A Child's Fable"
For all those teachers of introductory literature courses out there, I wanted to throw out some praise for "Menagerie, A Child's Fable." Don't be misled by the title or the whole talking animals thing -- it's not a child's fable by any stretch of the imagination. It's one of the few allegories I've taught where the students actually enjoy talking about the allegory. (Usually talking about allegory just makes students hate the story, and me.)

I like to do a group exercise with this story where the students write their own constitution for the Pet Shoppe -- "Your job is to create a set of rules that will keep the animals from destroying each other." They get a kick out of the assignment, and so do I. Today I had some students half-seriously considering a constitutional fishocracy, or possibly a fishtatorship, before settling in with rule-by-parrot.

Today I was especially pleased with the story, as it led my second class got into a really interesting discussion about religion. Both classes touched on the whole idea that the cruel, drunk, and probably dead Pet Shoppe owner, Mr. Tilford, represents God, but the second class really ran with it. Did bad things happen in the Pet Shoppe because the animals lost their faith that Mr. Tilford would return? What does that say about our society's increasing secularization? And how does any of that square with the reality of Mr. Tilford's cruelty? The dude puts kittens in blenders. How could the animals not be better off without him?

I can't believe I've never mentioned this story before. It practically teaches itself.
Two From Salon
  • Confessions of a Hollywood Sellout: How Lisa Lutz spent a decade rewriting a direct-to-video mob farce.

  • What to Read: by Salon's book critics. As if you needed more books you don't have time to read.
  • It's a Magical World, Hobbes, Ol' Buddy
    Let's go exploring. Every Calvin & Hobbes strip ever. This is great.

    Cease & desist in 5...4...3..
    The Unified Field Crossover History of the Universe
    Skilled nerdologists have finally constructed the Unified Field Crossover History of the Universe.
    Tetris 1-D
    The amazing thing is, it's actually sort of fun.

    UPDATE See also, Progress Quest. Thanks, MetaFilter!
    That *Is* Weird
    Novelist Stephen Elliott's father has been posting extremely negative reviews of his books on Amazon.com. Apparently the offending reviews have now been removed, but the post itself is fascinating. (Via Boing Boing. I've given up my day-old schtick of calling Boing Boing Bling Bling. America weeps.)
    Computer Cracks 5x5 Go
    Big news (for nerds) from the computing world, as the 5x5 Go board has been solved. Normal go games are played on a 15x15 board; the smallest board anyone actually plays on is 9x9. (My $90 desktop Go program won't even let me play on a 5x5; the smallest it allows is 7x7.) It's an amazingly complex game, you see. For this and many other reasons, Go is the greatest game ever.

    You should learn to play.

    Panda Egg: The best client for the International Go Server

    (Thanks to DonEzraCruz for noticing this, and here's hoping his blogger account starts working again soon.)
    Tuesday, February 22, 2005

    Fontleech
    The Free Font Blog.
    Massive Episode III Spoiler Photo Gallery
    This is too impressive not to post, but people who don't like spoilers should definitely, definitely not click the link. Someone has compiled every Episode III photograph available and laid them out in order to tell the story of the film. Warning: Massive, massive spoilers.

    (The site's real busy; here's the cache. All this via Bling Bling.)
    RU-21 Red: 'Never Be Sober Again'
    The Russian makers of the hangover cure have developed a pill that delays the oxidation of alcohol and prolongs drunkenness. Yeah, this is gonna work out well:
    Mr Chiabery, who was born in what was then the Soviet republic of Georgia, said: "I'm not sure I'm going to market it in the USA. I don't want it to become a party drug. We are for responsible drinking."
    (Via Bling Bling)
    The Short List for the Inaugural International Booker Prize
    The new £60,000 award is open to writers of all nationalities who write in English or are widely translated. And the nominees are:
    Margaret Atwood (Canada)
    Saul Bellow (Canada)
    Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombia)
    Gunter Grass (Germany)
    Ismail Kadare (Albania)
    Milan Kundera (Czech Republic)
    Stanislaw Lem (Poland)
    Doris Lessing (UK)
    Ian McEwan (UK)
    Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt)
    Tomas Eloy Martinez (Argentina)
    Kenzaburo Oe (Japan)
    Cynthia Ozick (US)
    Philip Roth (US)
    Muriel Spark (UK)
    Antonio Tabucchi (Italy)
    John Updike (US)
    Abraham B Yehoshua (Israel)
    Obviously Garcia Marquez and Kundera are my picks here, though I'd be happy enough with an Atwood, Bellow, Oe, or Roth pick, and you've got to root for a Polish science fiction writer, you've just go to. I like the one short story of Cynthia Ozick's I've read.

    Mostly, I just feel chastened by the number of people on this list I haven't read yet, particularly Gunter Grass, who I'm told I should. And look for a PClem implosion if Updike wins.
    We Were So Offended By These Clips, We Just Had to Watch Them Again and Again
    Oh, Parents Television Council, what are we doing to do with you?
    internetcases.com
    Recent court decisions involving the Internet.
    In Death, Staff Members of Project Mayhem The New Yorker Have Names
    Nice little obituary for Eleanor Gould, long-time copy editor and Grammarian for The New Yorker.
    Monday, February 21, 2005

    ESA: There's a Giant Frozen Ocean Just under the Surface of Mars
    Whoa.
    Hunter S. Thompson's Infamous Nixon Obituary
    Here. I still find it hard to believe the guy is really gone, and I wasn't even such a huge fan. I've got to get to a bookstore this weekend.

    Duke's recent ESPN columns, including the bold prediction of a (sigh) Kerry victory (and another from Rolling Stone on Campaign 2004) are provided free of charge.
    Thank God Somebody Finally Figured Out the *Real* AARP Agenda
    Damn you, AARP!



    Yes, this is a real attack ad from the right.
    Pygmalion
    ...in novels, movies, theater, and art

    ...in interactive fiction
    Salon Says People Should Read The Silmarillion
    I tried, okay? But it's unreadable.
    UNCG's Own Stuart Dischell in The Washington Post
    ...as part of this week's Poet's Choice. I've heard him read this poem. It's funny and good.
    Hunter S. Thompson Has Committed Suicide
    Awful.
    Sunday, February 20, 2005

    The Second Greatest Story Never Told Digital Storytelling Competition
    Text meets flash. Via MeFi.
    Outstanding Shockwave Application #527
    Kaleidoscope. Just wiggle your mouse.
    Bobbie Z
    I have four issues of The New York Review of Books stacked up in my office. The educator's rate seemed like a good deal at the time, and I thought I'd enjoy reading an infinity of book reviews.

    I haven't opened one yet. Been busy.

    But this week they've got a take on Bob Dylan, Chronicles, and everything else that's actually persuaded me to check out what I paid for. Click the link if you think you should.
    Hey, PClem Was Right
    Project X is good. I thought PClem's review from way back in November was pretty much on the money:
    Here's one for you, easily the best new book I've read all year: Project X by Jim Shepard. It starts out weird and kind of funny and slowly disintegrates into a troublesome, crushing tragedy. This guy can write. There's no bullshit, no fluff. He really gets inside a kid's mind. When you think you know what's going to happen, Shepard changes direction.
    All I'd add is that the tragic engine here is so visceral and so spooky-real that you don't exactly want to read on but also can't put the book down. Like PClem I only wish that it were longer; I think I'd like a sequel (Project Y?) to explore what happens after.

    I understand why the book ends where it ends; to borrow the language of physics, the book culminates in a kind of narrative singularity, beyond which continuing the story is impossible. But still...the story's not over. I need to know more.

    Also, Jim Shepard apparently attended Randolph Intermediate School between 1992 and 1994. I remember all this. Except, you know, that.

    The paperback comes out April 12th.
    Saturday, February 19, 2005

    How to
    ...eat sushi

    ...draw a woman

    ...destroy the earth
    The Maoist International Movement Reviews Videogames
    Because somebody has, damnit. Don't miss their reviews of SimCity 3000 and KoTOR.

    (Via MetaFilter)
    Identity Crisis
    I borrowed the DC Universe Identity Crisis miniseries from John "Local Comics Guru" Lanning recently, and got a chance to read it today. I'd only intended to read one or two, but I couldn't put it down. It's not as good as Watchmen (nothing is), but it's in the same ballpark. Check it out when the trade comes, if you're into that sort of thing.

    Kill a superhero? That's nothing.
    Kill his wife? Now there's a story.

    I only wish they'd gone further in showing how far super-powered individuals might be tempted to go to. Like any franchise, DC holds back. They shouldn't.
    Sledge Hammer!
    The classically bad television series that ended its first season with a nuclear explosion that killed the entire cast and destroyed Los Angeles -- and then got renewed for a second season -- has a devoted online fan-site, Sledge Hammer! Online.
    Science Locates Brain's 'Spidey Sense'
    Following the Asian tsunami, scientists struggled to explain reports that primitive aboriginal tribesmen had somehow sensed the impending danger in time to join wild animals in a life-saving flight to higher ground.

    While some scientists discount the existence of a sixth sense for danger, new research from Washington University in St. Louis has identified a brain region that clearly acts as an early warning system -- one that monitors environmental cues, weighs possible consequences and helps us adjust our behavior to avoid dangerous situations.
    Washington University in St. Louis has more details.
    This Year's Girl (Scout Cookies)
    ...are now available. Be warned. There are a couple of girls standing at an intersection in the Friendly Center, and they got me to buy some, and I don't even like Girl Scout Cookies*.

    --
    * I love Girl Scout Cookies. All the excess weight on my body is from Girl Scout Cookies, mostly one particular year, my junior year of college, the first year I had any money of my own to speak of, and I spent it all on 999 boxes of Girl Scout Cookies.
    Growing Our Empire
    You now can get copies of Backwards City Review at the following bookstores:
  • Bull's Head Bookstore in Chapel Hill, NC

  • Quail's Ridge Books in Raleigh, NC

  • McIntyre's Fine Books in Pittsboro, NC

  • Chop Suey Book in Richmond, VA
  • and you can still get issues from:
  • The Regulator Bookshop in Durham, NC

  • Mac's Backs Paperbacks in Cleveland, OH

  • The Writer's Center Book Gallery in Baltimore, MD

  • Project Pulp on the web
  • but the absolute best way to get copies of BCR remains our website. Remember, our $10 introductory subscription offer ends March 1st!
    Friday, February 18, 2005

    The Livejournal of Miss McDonald
    Everyone has an obsession. Hers is dressing like Ronald McDonald.
    Koko the Monkey Is a Pervert
    Holy smokes:
    Two former employees of the Gorilla Foundation, home to Koko the "talking" ape, have filed a lawsuit contending that they were ordered to bond with the 33-year-old female simian by displaying their breasts.

    ...

    One example: "On at least two incidents in mid-to-late June 2004, Patterson intensely pressured Keller to expose herself to Koko while they were working outside where other employees could potentially view Keller's naked body. ... On one such occasion, Patterson said, 'Koko, you see my nipples all the time. You are probably bored with my nipples. You need to see new nipples. I will turn my back so Kendra can show you her nipples.' "
    It definitely sounds like somebody at the Gorilla Foundation has a screw loose:
    The suit, in any case, says that Patterson would interpret hand movements by Koko as a demand to see exposed human nipples. She warned Alperin and Keller that their employment with the foundation would suffer, the suit says, if they "did not indulge Koko's nipple fetish."

    During at least three visits, the suit says, "Patterson communicated to Alperin that exposing one's breasts to Koko is a normal component to developing a personal bond with the gorilla."
    (Via MetaFilter)
    Debunking the 9/11 Conspiracy Theories
    Hearing some crazy stuff about missiles being shot at the Pentagon and the World Trade Center being brought down by controlled-demolition explosives? Popular Mechanics is there with the facts.

    [conspiracy] Or have THEY gotten to Popular Mechanics too? [/conspiracy]
    Brushing Your Teeth May Lower Stroke Risk
    But I'm still not gonna do it.
    Join Us Tonight at the Green Bean for the Backwards City Review Launch Party
    Who: Us, with music by Benthic Jones
    What: BCR Launch Party
    Where: The Green Bean, 341 South Elm Street, Greensboro, NC
    When: Friday, February 18th, 7-9 pm
    Why: Why not?
    How: With much rocking, one assumes.

    Bring your checkbook (or a tenspot) to get your copy of BCR #1. The ten-dollar introductory rate for a year's subscription ends March 1st.
    Thursday, February 17, 2005

    Is Ezra on Drugs, or Is It the Whole Universe?*
    Pretty bitchin' picture of the Don created by an accidental (and in-no-way-replicable) combination of settings on the digital camera and lighting in Leslie's apartment.



    --
    * As far as I can tell, it is the universe and not Ezra that is on drugs.
    Paging David Bowie
    Is there life on Mars?
    I'm the New Bugs Bunny
    Bugs goes manga. America fails to react.
    Scary or Not, I Still Love This Company
    Today Google launched a new version of its toolbar. In addition to the usual, great features, this new version includes a spell checker, a Word Translator that automatically translates any word you want into any other language, and an AutoLink feature that automatically turns addresses, vehicle identification numbers, and package tracking numbers into links.

    Is it me, or did Google just get a little scary?

    Feature write-up #1
    Feature write-up #2
    Give Me Fifty Thousand Dollars Or I'll Kill This Bunny
    Oh, Internet, you should be ashamed of yourself. I don't know what's worse -- that this website actually exists, or that he's apparently already raised $14,000.

    BCR fundraiser?
    BRUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCE
    Happy belated birthday to Shankar: there's a new Springsteen album coming out April 26th.
    Warning Signs
    Japanese Warning Signs

    Hawaiian Warning Signs

    Cool site and cool comparisons, but watch out while you're clicking around; other locations on the site are wildly not safe for work.

    (via Boing Boing)
    MoDo on GannonGate
    I don't always like her column, but when she's good, she's good:
    I'm still mystified by this story. I was rejected for a White House press pass at the start of the Bush administration, but someone with an alias, a tax evasion problem and Internet pictures where he posed like the 'Barberini Faun' is credentialed to cover a White House that won a second term by mining homophobia and preaching family values?

    At first when I tried to complain about not getting my pass renewed, even though I'd been covering presidents and first ladies since 1986, no one called me back. Finally, when Mr. McClellan replaced Ari Fleischer, he said he'd renew the pass - after a new Secret Service background check that would last several months.
    Can you imagine the attention this would be getting if Clinton were president? Obviously, I don't care if he's gay, and I don't care about what he does in his private life, on the Internet, or in the White House for that matter -- but the hypocrisy is rank.

    GC UPDATE: Jon Stewart tackled this issue on the Daily Show last night. Watch through to the end or you'll miss Stephen Colbert's single funniest report ever.
    The History of the Universe the Earth America in 200 Words or Less
    Neat, but a touch America-centric by the last fifty words or so. We're hardly a footnote as far as the rest of the universe is concerned.
    Shotgun Golf with Bill Murray
    By Hunter S. Thompson.

    The death of professional hockey in AMERICA is a nasty omen for people with heavy investments in NHL teams. But to me, it meant little or nothing -- and that's why I called Bill Murray with an idea that would change both our lives forever.
    Ancient Sculptures As They Were Meant To Be Seen
    Painted.

    I can't be alone in this -- I like the unpainted versions better. Is that just because it's the style that I'm used to, or are they really more aesthetically pleasing when they're bare?
    Hand-Painted Movie Posters from Russia
    Neat.



    (Both this post and the last one via Boing Boing)
    Top Fifty Fantasy and Science Fiction Works for Socialists
    An odd way to make a list -- why would socialists want or need to read different books than normal people? -- but interesting results nonetheless with some surprises, including Beloved, Frankenstein, Gulliver's Travels, and a little bit of Dick just for me.
    Wednesday, February 16, 2005

    Name Wizard
    Tracking the popularity of baby names over the last century.

    Ezra: 402 in 2003
    Patrick: 92 in 2003
    Thomas: 36 in 2003
    Gerard: Not in Top 1000 in 2003
    Jaimee: Not in Top 1000, ever

    I could play with this thing all day.
    Global Warming, 1928 - 2004


    Wow.
    New Hitchhiker's Guide Movie Trailer
    Don't panic. It will be good.
    Does Changing Lanes Get You There Faster?
    No.
    Tuesday, February 15, 2005

    Now & Then
    How comic artists draw now, and how they drew then.
    What's Worth Reading In The New Yorker This Week
    ...has been cancelled. Everything worth reading this week is offline. If you get the magazine, though, don't miss "Outsourcing Torture," on our government's continuing efforts to torture innocent people, and "Sole Survivor," on the role of shoes in history.
    Our Two Million Dollar* Ad Budget
    is gone, and we're glad. Our ad showed up at the house today in the latest issue of Poets & Writers. You can see it in the bottom left-hand corner of page 80-C (its in the "Literary Newstand" section of the magazine, between pages 80 and 81) Does anyone read that section? Especially online? (I dare you to find that section from the front.)

    I think it looks good, though, and I hope it helps get the word out. For fans of writing who are venturing out to AWP in Vancouver this year, you'll see this issue plenty. Tell everyone you know about us.

    For those of you not going, but going to be in Greensboro this weekend, Launch Party on Friday at the Green Bean on Elm street. 7-9. Fear the cheap beer. Hear Bethnic Jones rock the house. Meet me and punch me in the nose for a small* fee.


    *Two Hundred Fifty Dollar
    Holy Prepuce!
    Wikipedia's entry on the foreskin of Christ.
    gametheory.net
    How we work. Play around.
    GQ's 100 Funniest Jokes of All Time
    You'll laugh at least once.

    I believe Dr. Kevorkian is onto something. I think he’s great. Because suicide is our way of saying to God, "You can’t fire me. I quit." -Bill Maher

    (via MeFi, which has more. I should say, both the GQ link and the MeFi link are not safe for work. The MeFi link in particular devolves into really off-color jokes in about ten seconds flat.)
    Today's Hot Irony Injection Courtesy of McSweeneys.net
    Things a Lieutenant Would Say to His Men Before Combat If, Instead of Soldiers in a Central American Revolutionary Conflict, He Thought They Were Characters in Contra for Nintendo.
    This Just In: Missile Defense Still Doesn't Work
    From CBS news. It doesn't work, and it will never work (more, more, more).

    The *tests* alone cost $85 million a piece.

    The budget for missile defense for fiscal year 2005: $10.2 billion.

    Budget for FY 2006: $8.8 billion

    Likely total cost of the missile defense system: as much as 1 trillion dollars by 2030.

    Cuts in the 2006 Bush Budget include cuts in Medicaid, cuts in education, and drastic cuts in or the outright elimination of hundreds of programs that actually make people's lives better, including food stamps, Head Start, the EPA, OSHA, the CDC, and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

    Not that I'm bitter.
    Contestant on NBC Reality Show Commits Suicide
    Terrible. I'm surprised this hasn't happened before (in America -- the article says it happened after the first Survivor in Sweden). But don't worry, fight fans:
    Mark Burnett, the show's executive producer, said: "Nothing changes. I'm not even going to make any edits because it's real." Mr. Burnett said that at some point, the series will make a mention of Mr. Turpin's death, probably in an onscreen message at the end of an episode.

    Still, the suicide presents NBC and the show's producers with the quandary of how to deal with Mr. Turpin's death without disrupting the show. Each week two boxers are selected to fight and become the central characters in that week's episode. Mr. Turpin would thus be a principal character in at least one show and if he won his first fight and continued on the series, he would be an even more significant factor.
    In the world of the future, there's a reality tv show called Suicide! whose theme revolves around self-inflicted death. Be the last person to kill yourself, win 10,000 euros. It'll be huge.
    Crick's First DNA Doodle
    ...has been found among his papers. This is what we really look like.

    Angel Season Five Released Today
    What was probably the best season of either Buffyverse show* is released on DVD today, bringing the Buffyverse to completion (until we get a new series, damnit).

    This makes me a little sad.

    --
    * Angel Season Five was damn good. I'm not going to argue if you think Buffy Season Three was better, or Season Five, or Angel Season Three for that matter. But Angel Five edges them all out.

    You broke my heart, WB. You broke my heart.
    Monday, February 14, 2005

    Interview with Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson
    From Cleveland Scene, 2003.

    Who knew the guy was living in Chagrin Falls the whole time I was living in Cleveland? I seriously would have tried to track him down, if I had known.
    I Never Promised You Functional Immortality
    ...but Ray Kurzweil has.
    Ray Kurzweil doesn't tailgate. A man who plans to live forever doesn't take chances with his health on the highway, or anywhere else.

    As part of his daily routine, Kurzweil ingests 250 supplements, eight to 10 glasses of alkaline water and 10 cups of green tea. He also periodically tracks 40 to 50 fitness indicators, down to his "tactile sensitivity." Adjustments are made as needed.

    "I do actually fine-tune my programming," he said.

    The famed inventor and computer scientist is serious about his health because if it fails him he might not live long enough to see humanity achieve immortality, a seismic development he predicts in his new book is no more than 20 years away.
    Hot dog!
    Superheroes and Philosophy
    Newsarama has a preview, including the chapter on Superman.

    It's the genre of abstruse academic discourse I was born for.

    Obligatory Amazon Link

    (Via Gravity Lens)
    Sonny's Blues
    God, what a great story. I wish I could teach it every day.

    All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours. I just watched Sonny's face. His face was troubled, he was working hard, but he wasn't with it. And I had the feeling that, in a way, everyone on the bandstand was waiting for him, both waiting for him and pushing him along. But as I began to watch Creole, I realized that it was Creole who held them all back. He had them on a short rein. Up there, keeping the beat with his whole body, wailing on the fiddle, with his eyes half closed, he was listening to everything, but he was listening to Sonny. He was having a dialogue with Sonny. He wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water. He was Sonny's witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing -- he had been there, and he knew. And he wanted Sonny to know. He was waiting for Sonny to do the things on the keys which would let Creole know that Sonny was in the water.

    And, while Creole listened, Sonny moved, deep within, exactly like someone in torment. I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a piano. It's made out of so much wood and wires and little hammers and big ones, and ivory. While there's only so much you can do with it, the only way to find this out is to try; to try and make it do everything.

    And Sonny hadn't been near a piano for over a year. And he wasn't on much better terms with his life, not the life that stretched before him now. He and the piano stammered, started one way, got scared, stopped; started another way, panicked, marked time, started again; then seemed to have found a direction, panicked again, got stuck. And the face I saw on Sonny I'd never seen before. Everything had been burned out of it, and, at the same time, things usually hidden were being burned in, by the fire and fury of the battle which was occurring in him up there.

    Yet, watching Creole's face as they neared the end of the first set, I had the feeling that something had happened, something I hadn't heard. Then they finished, there was scattered applause, and then, without an instant's warning, Creole started into something else, it was almost sardonic, it was Am I Blue. And, as though he commanded, Sonny began to play. Something began to happen. And Creole let out the reins. The dry, low, black man said something awful on the drums, Creole answered, and the drums talked back. Then the horn insisted, sweet and high, slightly detached perhaps, and Creole listened, commenting now and then, dry, and driving, beautiful, calm and old. Then they all came together again, and Sonny was part of the family again. I could tell this from his face. He seemed to have found, right there, beneath his fingers, a damn brand-new piano. It seemed that he couldn't get over it. Then, for a while, just being happy with Sonny, they seemed to be agreeing with him that brand-new pianos certainly were a gas.

    Then Creole stepped forward to remind them that what they were playing was the blues. He hit something in all of them, he hit something in me, myself, and the music tightened and deepened, apprehension began to beat the air. Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it must always be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.

    And this tale, according to that face, that body, those strong hands on those strings, has another aspect in every country, and a new depth in every generation. Listen, Creole seemed to be saying, listen. Now these are Sonny's blues. He made the little black man on the rums now it, and the bright, brown man on the horn. Creole wasn't trying any longer to get Sonny in the water. He was wishing him Godspeed. Then he stepped back, very slowly, filling the air with the immense suggestion that Sonny speak for himself.

    Then they all gathered around Sonny and Sonny played. Every now and again one of them seemed to say, amen. Sonny's fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others. And Sonny went all the way back, he really began with the spare, flat statement of the opening phrase of the song. Then he began to make it his. It was very beautiful because it wasn't hurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning we had yet to make ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood at last how he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did. Yet, there was no battle in his face now. I heard what he had gone through, and would continue to go through until he came to rest in earth. He had made it his: that long line, of which we knew only Mama and Daddy. And he was giving it back, as everything must be given back, so that, passing through death, it can live forever. I saw my mother's face again, and felt, for the first time, how the stones of the road she had walked on must have bruised her feet. I saw the moonlit road where my father's brother died. And it brought something else back to me, and carried me past it. I saw my little girl again and felt Isabel’s tears again, and I felt my own tears begin to rise. And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.

    Then it was over. Creole and Sonny let out their breath, both soaking wet, and grinning. There was a lot of applause and some of it was real. In the dark, the girl came by and I asked her to take drinks to the bandstand. There was a long pause, while they talked up there in the indigo light and after awhile I saw the girl put a Scotch and milk on top of the piano for Sonny. He didn't seem to notice it, but just before they started playing again, he sipped from it and looked toward me, and nodded. Then he put it back on top of the piano. For me, then, as they began to play again, it glowed and shook above my brother's head like the very cup of trembling.
    (excerpt clipped from here)
    Inside Autism
    Daniel Tammet is an autistic savant. He can perform mind-boggling mathematical calculations at breakneck speeds. But unlike other savants, who can perform similar feats, Tammet can describe how he does it. He speaks seven languages and is even devising his own language. Now scientists are asking whether his exceptional abilities are the key to unlock the secrets of autism.
    Search Inside This Book -- Google Edition
    I love this company.

    (Although, in fairness, Amazon did it first.)
    Cory and I Think Alike
    Cory's review of Bizarro Comics comes just a few days after I read the book myself, having purchased it in North Carolina's greatest comic book store that I know of.

    He's right, it's pretty good. Some of them are a little *too* MAD Magaziney for my tastes, but others of them are funny and beautiful and sometimes even sad.
    Sunday, February 13, 2005

    It Was The Worst Plan Ever
    British scientists are trying to cure cancer using HIV.

    (Via Neil, via MetaFilter)
    i met a possum
    Fun for the whole family that does not have a brain: Homestar Runner's Teen Girl Squad.
    Bunnies in Lights
    Three new bunny movie reenactments at AngryAlien.com:

    Freddy vs. Jason
    Scream
    Texas Chainsaw Massacre

    GC UPDATE: Looks like STARZ is also paying for ten more:
    The Rocky Horror Picture Show
    Pulp Fiction
    Highlander
    The Big Chill
    Clerks
    The Karate Kid
    Thelma & Louise
    The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
    Night of the Living Dead
    Weird Science
    Some of these should be wicked good.
    myfootprint.org
    How much of the planet are you wasting?

    For Greensboro readers, our city has about 225,000 people in it, and it really doesn't make a huge difference whether you think Greensboro's weather is more like St. Louis or Atlanta. (Having never been to either place, what do I know? I choose St. Louis on latitude grounds. When I went back and did Atlanta, my footprint only dropped by .3 acres.)

    My ecological footprint is 13 acres. If everyone lived like me, we would need 3.2 planets.

    (The average ecological footprint in America is 24 acres per person; worldwide, there exist 4.5 ecologically productive acres per person. So, yeah.)
    Saturday, February 12, 2005

    Wilmingtonblogging -- Part 2
    After BDobo's Jaimee let me spend some time in North Carolina's best comic store that I've been in, Fanboy Comics, where I made some prety excellent purchases, the most excellent of which is clearly The Zombie Survival Guide. Ezra's got first crack at it after me -- the man deserves it -- but after that, you're welcome to read it, if you want to survive the coming Apocalypse.
    Wilmingtonblogging -- 1
    Today I had the pretty great experience of bringing a totally new restaurant into existence through sher force of will. We were driving around Wilmington, looking through Jaimee's parents' Coastal NC Coupon book for someplace to eat. I knew that where I really wanted to eat was BD's Mongolian Barbeque in Cleveland, OH, the second-greatest restaurant in all the world. Failing that I'd settle for any Mongolian-style restaurant.

    The place also had to be very close, because we were starving.

    It was a hopeless effort. But as I flipped through the pages--hungry, desperate, but never losing faith--suddenly, there it was: BDobo Mongolian Grill, 419 S. College Rd., not five minutes from where we were.

    And it was good.
    Friday, February 11, 2005

    Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude
    *Finally* got the chance to finish up Fortress of Solitude, which I started on the plane ride back from the cruise at the start of January and continuously got distracted from.

    I went in with a little bit of trepidation, because Casey, the same person who turned me on to the *fantastic* Motherless Brooklyn (blogged here) told me this one was unreadable. But I really dug it. There's a certain universality -- at least for males; call it panandrony, maybe -- about Dylan's experiences, even if Boerum Hill in Brooklyn is nothing, nothing, nothing at all like Randolph, NJ.

    I guess there are problems. I'm not sure how I feel about the last section, which is good and enjoyable to read, but at the same time seems to suffer from the same kinds of structural problems that plagued the ending of Kavalier and Clay. Maybe what I read as structural problem is just a hip new style I don't get. If I saw it in a workshop, I'd bitch and bitch, but at the end of this novel I'm willing to roll with it.

    Speaking of Kavalier and Clay, does this book have comic book shoutouts? Oh yes. It's got a little bit of a shoutout to everything.

    The best passage, for me anyway, was when the characters develop the theory that any group of four people imprints on the Beatles.

    Now Dylan's friend Linus Millberg appears out of the crowd with a cup of beer and shouts, "Dorothy is John Lennon, the Scarecrow is Paul McCartney, the Tin Woodman is George Harrison, the Lion's Ringo."

    "Star Trek," commands Dylan over the lousy twangy country CB's is playing between sets.

    "Easy," Linus shouts back. "Kirk's John, Spock's Paul,"Easy," Linus shouts back. "Kirk's John, Spock's Paul, Bones is George, Scotty is Ringo. Or Chekov, after the first season. Doesn't matter, it's like a Scotty-Chekov-combination Ringo. Spare parts are always surplus Georges or Ringos."

    "But isn't Spock-lacks-a-heart and McCoy-lacks-a-brain like Woodman and Scarecrow? So Dorothy's Kirk?"

    "You don't get it. That's just a superficial coincidence. The Beatle thing is an archetype, it's like the basic human formation. Everything naturally forms into a Beatles, people can't help it."

    "Say the types again."

    "Responsible-parent genius-parent genius-child clown-child."

    "Okay, do Star Wars."

    "Luke Paul, Han Solo John, Chewbacca George, the robots Ringo."
    We've always played this game among our group of friends -- most classically with Muppet Babies, but also with LoTR, Star Wars, and basically everything else -- but attempting to universalize it in this way is about three levels of critical sophistication higher. Great idea.

    Good book. It's on to Men and Cartoons for me, now, after Project X (Egan-blogged here).
    Thursday, February 10, 2005

    North Korean Propaganda Posters
    A whole web gallery full of 'em.

    I guess the world's newest nuclear power isn't sweating it, either.

    Via Boing Boing.
    Commie Star Trek
    All about Kosmicheskaya Militsiya, a Soviet knock-off of Star Trek from the late '60s.
    Perhaps one of the weirdest borrowings from Star Trek has Dobraydushev and a reanimated Peter the Great challenging holographic supervillains Adolf Hitler and John D. Rockefeller in a chess tournament—to the death!

    The one episode that left me completely baffled involves a planet where kimono-clad humanoids relax while robot "slaves" do all the work. Dobraydushev scolds the kimono people for not treating their mechanical servants as social equals—comrades," in his words—and eventually convinces both sides to unite in fraternal harmony. I hadn't a clue about this one—until I learned this fun fact: the Red Army used to award medals for bravery to tanks and airplanes. Hey, machines are people, too, even if Jews and Uzbeks aren't.
    (Via Gravity Lens)
    CRWROPPS
    The Creative Writers Opportunities List. It's about a year and a half old, but I never saw it before this week (I stumbled across it while trying to do some promo work for the journal.) It's a pretty great list. Even if you don't want to sign up, you'll probably want to bookmark it.
    'Should I Track Down My High School Bully?'
    Great thread from ask.metafilter. Really interesting stories about people who did, people who didn't, and people who ran into their high school bully accidentally in a bar. Neat reading.
    Planetary
    I got a chance to read the first 12 issues of WildStorm's Planetary this week, and I have to say that it's one of the best premises for a superhero comic I've ever run across. Essentially, Planetary is the cleanup squad for abnormal activity -- a team of superpowered archeologists who study spaceship crash sites, interdimensional hotspots, and the like. Generally speaking they show up long after the action is finished, and have to figure out what happened. They're the cataloguers of strange reality.

    It's a great premise.

    The execution seemed a little off to me, though, mostly because the team remains three ciphers who show up randomly to investigate sites without ever examining themselves or their own situation. This changes as time goes on -- we meet the series's Big Bads in issue 6 (a WildStorm evil anaolgue of the Fantastic Four) we meet previous members of the team in issue 9, and there's a twist in issue 12 that you'll probably see coming a mile off but which is good anyway. The plots are beyond excellent; I just wish a little more attention had been paid to character here.

    Still, for superhero comics, you can't do much better.

    Planetary: All Over the World and Other Stories
    Planetary: The Fourth Man
    'Stop SETI!'
    We don't know who's listening.
    How to Close a Wal-Mart
    Unionize.
    The Secrets of Amusement Park Games... Revealed!
    Via Boing Boing comes a book by Brian Richardson that will teach you all you need to know to beat the crooked games at Six Flags or the shore.
    Wednesday, February 09, 2005

    Where Was David Bowie on Any Given Day Between 1974 and 1980?
    These are things we need to know.
    Battlestar Galactica Blog
    I just think it's neat that the showrunners have a blog. Wish Joss Whedon had one.
    People Are Strange
    It's funny. The class that -- if not rah-rah-revolution -- was at least willing to hear "The Lesson" out was the same class that was disgusted and offended by the Hendrix "Star-Spangled Banner" from Woodstock. The other class was filled with defenders of the status quo who couldn't care less what Miss Moore had to say -- but they got the Hendrix instantly.

    We'll see how they compare when I get to Omelas.
    City Art
    Street art in cities all around the world. Something close to the best website ever. Via MeFi.
    Sights and Sounds of the '30s
    Click here for all your Depression-era nostalgia needs. Don't miss the comics page.
    General Principles of Guerilla Warfare
    A handbook for asymmetrical warfare from infamous revolutionary and human-rights monster Ernesto "Che" Guevara.
    Irish Slaves in the Caribbean
    ...not that staying in Ireland under British rule was such great shakes, either.

    Via Linkfilter.
    They Put a Man on the Moon
    Outstanding panoramas of men on the moon.
    Tuesday, February 08, 2005

    Is It Hip to Snip?
    What does society do with people (like me?) who don't want to have children? From Salon.com.
    Outkast / Kill Bill Mashup
    Surprisingly fun.

    I love this whole illegal genre.
    supermanisadick.com
    Remember those absurd Silver Age comic book covers I linked to a while back? They've got their own website now. They're all good, but this one is so juvenile, it can't help but be my favorite:

    Paul is Dead: The Photographic Proof
    Wild stuff. If it were possible for animated .gifs and fuzzy photos to convince me of anything, I'm sure they'd convince me of this.

    UPDATE: And be sure to read the Paul Really Is Dead FAQ.
    Peasant's Quest: The Movie
    The movie...based on the game. HomeStar Runner never stops running for you.
    About One
    For the Pirahã tribe of South America, math is hard:
    Ask a member of the Pirahã tribe to count a cluster of pebbles, and even the brightest member of this isolated Amazonian tribe will probably respond with a blank stare. This is because the Pirahã do not have words for precise quantities or the action of counting--instead they quantify objects approximately, using words analogous to our "few" and "many." Even their word for one, "hói," might be more accurately translated as "about one," says Peter Gordon, PhD, a psychology professor at Columbia University Teachers College, who studies the tribe.

    For example, when Gordon placed nine objects on a table and asked seven Pirahã adults to make a group out of an equal number of nuts, not one of them used exactly nine nuts, according to research by Gordon published in the Oct. 15 special issue of Science (Vol. 306, No. 5695), focused on cognition and behavior.
    What this all suggests, contrary to current linguistic conventional wisdom, is that a lack of vocabulary for numbers does impact a culture's ability to count after all.
    Google Maps
    Need I say more?

    What a great company. This is amazing. I didn't expect anyone to improve on Mapquest -- both the greatest and the most overlooked computer application of the last decade -- so quickly, but Google managed.

    (via everywhere)
    Monday, February 07, 2005

    The Altruistic Gene
    Israeli psychologists think they've found the gene for altruism. So does this mean they can cure it?
    Dolls
    There was a Joey Stivic (Archie Bunker's grandson) doll? And it was anatomically correct?

    Even worse, there was a Talking Urkel?

    What?
    Drawn and Quarterly
    Chad Parenteau sent this site my way...it's Drawn and Quarterly, a great-looking all-comics journal.

    For those who love comics, we salute you.
    Movies From a Parallel Universe
    Steve Perry is...Robocop.

    Salon.com Books
    ..is good again today. Be smart and add it to your bookmarks. And read Shilling for Hitler, the story of how the academic community, intelligensia, and punditocracy defended a Holocaust denier while slandering his debunker. Includes a much-needed thrashing of Christopher Hitchens, whose early work bashing Mother Teresa I admire, but whose later work leaves me cold.
    The First Gay Marriage in the New People's Army
    Touching story from the Phillippines. Communist guerrilla meets communist guerrilla, they raid a few Army camps, hide out in the forest, boy loses boy, boy gets boy back again, guerilla and guerilla wed.
    Sunday, February 06, 2005

    The History of Public Toilets
    Because in the future present, everything will be interesting for 15 minutes.

    At Plumbing World.
    God, They'll Sell Anything
    How much would you pay to make first contact with a tribe that had never laid eyes on an outsider? Five dollars? Ten dollars?
    "I'm not giving 'em a Mini Maglite, and they're not gonna go out and get a plasma TV after we talk to 'em. Five minutes is all we do. My clients understand that."
    (MeFi)
    What Killed Cinema?
    Was it the blockbuster? Louis Menand in The New Yorker takes a look.
    The reason that those movies had such enormous grosses, despite terrible reviews and negative word of mouth, is that each opened on eighteen thousand screens simultaneously worldwide. As Shone says, about the typical blockbuster, “By the time we’ve all seen that it sucked, it’s a hit.”

    Hollywood studios distribute two hundred movies a year (down from between five and seven hundred a year in the studio era), and only a handful are blockbusters. But the blockbuster is where the money is. Every once in a while, there is talk about the return of the midsize film—the picture that costs twenty million or so to make, and that attracts interest and attention on its own merits. “Sideways” is this season’s poster child. “Sideways” is reported to have cost around sixteen million dollars to make (exclusive of marketing costs). After ten weeks, it had grossed twenty-two million dollars. You might be able to get Tom Cruise to walk across the street for twenty-two million dollars, but that’s about it. “Elektra,” a widely panned fantasy adventure which opened in the middle of January, the deadest month in the business, grossed twenty-two million dollars in two weeks. “Sideways” was unbranded by stars or title (and was not, in marketing parlance, “toyetic,” susceptible to merchandising deals). In those first ten weeks, it was shown on three-hundred and seventy screens. “Elektra” was based on a comic-book character, and it opened on thirty-two hundred screens. To put both pictures in true blockbuster perspective: “Troy,” which is considered a failure, has grossed just under half a billion dollars.
    The magazine also has a good love letter to the Cleveland Orchestra this week, too -- my one regret after four long years in Cleveland was that I never made the time to go -- but that article's not available online.
    Electric Lighting Causes Breast Cancer?
    We just can't win.
    Their theory that artificial light can cause breast cancer is simple. Prolonged periods of exposure to artificial light disrupt the body's circadian rhythms - the inner biological clocks honed over thousands of years of evolution to regulate behaviors such as sleep and wakefulness. The disruption affects levels of hormones such as melatonin and the workings of cellular machinery, which can trigger the onset of cancer, Stevens theorizes.

    "Mankind has only been exposed to these light sources for 150 years or so," Stevens said.

    So far, the theory is based largely on suggestive, but inconclusive, observational studies. For instance, night-shift workers such as nurses tend to be more prone to develop breast cancer than day-shift workers, and blind women are less likely to have breast cancer than women with sight.
    Our American Century
    "How I Entered the Hellish World of Guantanamo Bay." Interesting, horrible-if-it's-true interview in The Observer with one of the four British men recently released from Gitmo.
    My Addicted Son
    Great, terribly sad article in The New York Times Magazine about a father whose son is addicted to methamphetamine.
    Nick now claims that he was searching for methamphetamine for his entire life, and when he tried it for the first time, as he says, ''That was that.'' It would have been no easier to see him strung out on heroin or cocaine, but as every parent of a methamphetamine addict comes to learn, this drug has a unique, horrific quality. In an interview, Stephan Jenkins, the singer in the band Third Eye Blind, said that methamphetamine makes you feel ''bright and shiny.'' It also makes you paranoid, incoherent and both destructive and pathetically and relentlessly self-destructive. Then you will do unconscionable things in order to feel bright and shiny again. Nick had always been a sensitive, sagacious, joyful and exceptionally bright child, but on meth he became unrecognizable.
    Umberto Eco, "14 Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt"
    From the comments of the MetaFilter thread referenced earlier, here's Umberto Eco's article from 1995, "Eternal Fascism: 14 Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt." I'd never seen this before today, and I have to say, I'm pretty impressed with it.
    Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier for us if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, "I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the Italian squares." Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances — every day, in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt's words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling: "If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land." Freedom and liberation are an unending task.
    Kevin Smith Is 'Silent Bob' on Canada's Highest Rated Television Series, Degrassi: The Next Generation
    Monkeyfilter has all the details here. Two weird tastes that taste weird together, I'd expect.
    Fictional Cities and Imaginary Places
    Two great lists from Gravity Lens.

    Fictional Cities
    Imaginary Places
    Hunger for Dictatorship
    People on the left have been talking about this for a while now, but maybe it will start to get attention as more people on the right finally realize what is happening and say so publicly. Scott McConnell, in The American Conservative, on the growing fascist tendencies in right-wing thought:
    But Rockwell (and Roberts and Raimondo) is correct in drawing attention to a mood among some conservatives that is at least latently fascist. Rockwell describes a populist Right website that originally rallied for the impeachment of Bill Clinton as "hate-filled ... advocating nuclear holocaust and mass bloodshed for more than a year now." One of the biggest right-wing talk-radio hosts regularly calls for the mass destruction of Arab cities. Letters that come to this magazine from the pro-war Right leave no doubt that their writers would welcome the jailing of dissidents. And of course it's not just us. When USA Today founder Al Neuharth wrote a column suggesting that American troops be brought home sooner rather than later, he was blown away by letters comparing him to Tokyo Rose and demanding that he be tried as a traitor. That mood, Rockwell notes, dwarfs anything that existed during the Cold War. "It celebrates the shedding of blood, and exhibits a maniacal love of the state. The new ideology of the red-state bourgeoisie seems to actually believe that the US is God marching on earth—not just godlike, but really serving as a proxy for God himself."
    Food for thought. Read the whole thing. (Also via MetaFilter)
    The Jewish Hero Corps
    An all-Jewish superhero squad. What a terrific find from MetaFilter.

    My favorite is Menorah Man.

    Saturday, February 05, 2005

    Godfather: The Game
    Brando, Caan, and Duvall are providing the voices...but who do you play as? That's what I want to know.

    An open-ended Godfather game, where you could play as any character and achieve any result, would be pretty excellent.

    When you click the link, be sure to check out the trailer.
    Germans Love David Hasselhoff
    I have seen the face of evil, and it's David Hasselhoff's video of "Hooked on a Feeling."
    How the Media Fails Us: Election Edition
    An article from FAIR arguing that The New York Times failed the country by refusing to run articles critical of the White House close to the election, including a story on the unsecured ammunition dump and a major investigation into the so-called "Bush bulge" of the three debates.
    The Cuddly Menance
    Children's picture book turned into alien-invasion primer. Cool as hell.

    Via Boing Boing.

    Sex Without a Condom Makes Women Happier
    And so the latest in a long line of "why I can't use a condom" rationales was born.
    Hey Ya, Charlie Brown
    Heard the Outkast for the first time in a long time tonight. Thought immediately of this video of the Peanuts singing "Hey Ya!"

    I've linked to it before, I'm pretty sure, but it's still good.
    Ossie Davis Dies
    Hot on the heels of my praising his work in Bubba Ho-Tep, news comes that Ossie Davis has died.
    Friday, February 04, 2005

    Has There Ever Been a Higher Concept Movie Than Bubba Ho-tep?
    Bruce Campbell is a sixty-five-year-old Elvis Presley in the 2002 mummy thriller. Ossie Davis rounds out the cast as JFK.

    Answer: No. I can't believe this movie got made. Must be seen to be believed. You've got to rent this.

    And it's pretty good, too.

    IMDB link
    Amazon
    Super Bowl Myths
    From Snopes.com.
    The Sopranos on A&E?
    That's where the reruns will be. The most intriguing part of the deal, for me anyway, is this:
    As it did with TBS for ``Sex and the City,'' HBO will collaborate with A&E on crafting sanitized versions of ``Sopranos'' episodes that will be edited for any violent or sexual images and obscenities that wouldn't pass muster with advertisers or A&E's standards and practices department.

    ``Sopranos'' also was produced with so-called ``coverage'' shots: alternate scenes with cleaner language - and maybe even pasties on the strippers' private parts at Tony Soprano's favorite haunt, the Bada Bing.
    It'll be really interesting to see what they change, and what they leave in.

    Good thinking on their part to plan ahead and film alternate footage for syndication.
    New York Court Rules Gays Must Be Allowed To Marry
    A great day for America:
    A New York State court ruled Friday that same-sex couples must be allowed to marry.

    State Supreme Court Justice Doris Ling-Cohan said that the New York State Constitution guarantees basic freedoms to lesbian and gay people, and that those rights are violated when same-sex couples are not allowed to marry.

    The ruling said the state Constitution requires same-sex couples to have equal access to marriage, and that the couples represented by Lambda Legal must be given marriage licenses.
    Add New York to the list of states worth living in. This is great news.

    (Via Atrios)

    UPDATE: We still have to hope the New York Court of Appeals upholds the decision. So let's hope.
    Today in Great Writing
    Ivan Ilych died. (Thanks, Salon!)
    Stupid Crap That Ruins Movies
    FilmForce says James Marsden probably won't be back as Cyclops in X3, because he's taken a small part as Perry White's son in Superman Returns. Worse, Famke Janssen, who plays Jean Grey/The Phoenix Force, which the end of the movie suggested would be the plot of X3, might take a role in Superman too, meaning she can't be in X3 either.

    What's wrong with these people? Why would they want to ruin the continuity of the three movies over a pissing contest? It's so stupid.
    Everything you Need to Know About Writing Sucessfully: in Ten Minutes
    Wow, that was easy. By Stephen King.
    Thursday, February 03, 2005

    Hey Hey LBJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today
    Was LBJ the true liberal hero of the 20th century? Salon takes a look at a new book that argues he was. FDR could not be reached for comment.
    Robot World Cup
    I've been waiting my whole life for this. Make 'em life-sized, and get some humans with cybernetic implants for them to play against, and I'd say we're good to go.
    Neat 'Found Art' Project
    Via Boing Boing comes The Wurst Gallery's thrift store project, in which artists buy a cheap piece of art from a thrift store and modify it in their style.

    Some of these are pretty cool. Don't you think?
    Moriarty at AICN reviews H2G2
    ...this new Hitchhiker's movie could actually be good.

    And I definitely want one of these Marvin toys. (Direct link to picture.)
    Finnish indie films.
    I'm assuming they're indie films. Who knows, really. I ain't learn'ed in Finn-speak. I started here - a sort of viral marketing column on rpg.net - touting a new book by Juhana Pettersson that will, in Finnish, describe, even to laypersons, the ins and outs of role-playing games. Interesting quote dealing with the business of publishing:
    U.S. roleplaying writers take note: My publishing deal grants be 20 % of the price of every book sold, I own all rights to my own work and if there's no reprints from my publisher in two years, I can publish it again wherever I like. This is the advantage of working for a publisher of literature; you get treated like an author instead of a content provider.

    Next, I find myself here. A surreal place with lots of streaming video. The one starring Juhana has an opening five minute sequence that is right out of some of my Ajax-11 poems. Some dudes in gas masks and a woman who, I'm assuming, is a robot. Then I'm not sure what's going on. There's not enough action or speaking for me to figure anything out, so I just skipped to about 15 minutes in when we get a tre European psychological/theatrical/interpretive dance montage. Probably most closely related to any scene where the A-Team creates an armored tractor to drive them out of whatever danger they're in.

    I also like the animated film with spiders.
    The Super Bowl, As Predicted by Madden 2005
    Pats win, 26-21. You heard it here first.
    Ray
    Earlier today, PClem trashed Million Dollar Baby. But I'm not gonna trash Ray. Jaimee, Jennie, and I rented it tonight and really enjoyed watching it.

    I probably wouldn't give it the Oscar, though. This is a sentimental goddamn movie, and I'm just not sappy enough to go along. And I probably wouldn't give Jamie Foxx the Best Actor, either, though he does a great job as Ray -- and having not seen any of the other actors nominated, maybe he gets it after all. Can't Jim Carrey have it? Eternal Sunshine, son.

    As far as I can tell, this is just a really weak year for movies. I guess I'll just pretend The Incredibles sweeps all categories, even the ones it isn't nominated for, and leave it at that.

    PS: Second this guy's advice. When you rent the movie, don't try to watch the DVD's "Extended Edition" -- the cut is jumpy, terrible, and the transitions makes no sense. Watch the theatrical cut and the deleted scenes separate.

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