1 July 2009
[twitter] OMG: Tweeting parliament … Simon Hoggart Twitters From Parliament … ‘15.00 Go to toilet myself. Ignore sign reading “peers only”.’
2 July 2009
[conspiracy] Unmasking the Mysterious 7/7 Conspiracy Theorist … BBC News on a supposedly pursuasive conspiracy theory about London’s 7/7 bombings … ‘In the absence of a public inquiry into the 7 July bombings, conspiracy theories have filled the vacuum. One of the more inflammatory involves a man hiding behind an Arabic-sounding pseudonym taken from a sci-fi film starring Sting. […] The 56-minute homemade documentary opens with a view from space and the words: “A message from Muad Dib”.’
[comics] Grant Morrison Tells All About Batman and Robin …
One of my all-time favourite Batman panels was written by Haney and drawn by Jim Aparo and shows Batman strolling down the sunlit streets of Gotham, checking out the mini-skirted girls and accompanied by the line to end all lines: ‘Yes, Batman digs this day!”
3 July 2009
[apollo] Apollo 11 Moon Landing … another collection of material on the Moon Landing – this time from the Guardian … Tim Radford: ‘Above all, it was a moment of human drama, played out with fragile, gleaming technology against a backcloth of infinity.’
6 July 2009
[swineflu] Pig Death Flu Apocalypse Virus … Tom Reynolds — a London Ambulance Man — on Swine Flu … ‘Our call rate has gone from the normal 4,200-4,500 calls per day to around 5,200-5,700 in the last few days. This is an increase of around 26% Rather obviously this is having us run ragged.’
11 July 2009
[doom] Doomwatch … calculating what we should be scared of today .. ‘Right now, the Daily Mail thinks you should be quaking in your boots about: murder, swine flu, iran, north korea, thatcher.’
12 July 2009
[apollo] Haynes Owners’ Workshop Manual To Apollo 11
… fun idea – a Apollo 11 manual done as a DIY Car Maintenance Guide … More on the manual from the Register: ‘Of course, the book doesn’t actually invite you to wander down to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC and pop the spark plugs out of the original command module, but it does offer “an insight into the hardware from the first manned mission to land on the moon”.’
… fun idea – a Apollo 11 manual done as a DIY Car Maintenance Guide … More on the manual from the Register: ‘Of course, the book doesn’t actually invite you to wander down to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC and pop the spark plugs out of the original command module, but it does offer “an insight into the hardware from the first manned mission to land on the moon”.’ 13 July 2009
[comics] Alan Moore’s Youngblood Proposal … more notes from Moore on how to revamp some of Rob Liefeld’s Awesome characters … ‘Before I get onto the details of the first issue, however, I’d better run through some of my thinking on the restructuring of both the book and the Youngblood team into something at once new and at the same time “classic,” whatever that means in a field that produced Brother Power, the Geek…’
14 July 2009
15 July 2009
[comics] The X-Men Universe Relationship Map … ‘Dashed Line – Signifies one of the parties is from an alternative reality.’ [via DYFL?]
16 July 2009
[comics] Go Look: Eight page preview of David Mazzuchelli’s new comic Asterios Polyp and a slideshow of Superheroes Decadence by Donald Soffritti (a look at what happens when comic heroes and villains get old).
[books] An Interview With Michael Lewis …
‘When I write a long magazine piece that gets attention I feel like it’s more widely read now than it was ten years ago, by a long way. In fact, it feels excessively well read. Twenty years ago I might get a couple of notes in the mail and I’d hear about it maybe at a dinner party. And that would be the end of it, and it would go away very quickly. Ten years ago it would get passed around by email, and it would seem to have a life to me that would go on a little longer. Now the blogosphere picks it up and it becomes almost like a book: it lives for months. I’m getting responses to it for months. And I don’t think the journalism has gotten any better. It’s just the environment you publish it in is more able to rapidly get it to the people who are or might be interested in it.’
[comics] The Comic-Book Guide to SIM Hacking … report from the Register – you can download the comic here.
17 July 2009
[apollo] Remembering Apollo 11 … fantastic – as always – photo gallery from The Big Picture.
[funny] So I Had Sex With A Piñata – From Photo’s on TV … (if i had a Tumblr this would have been on it) … [via DYFL!]
19 July 2009
[apollo] How Michael Collins became the forgotten astronaut of Apollo 11 … profile of Michael Collins and his experience of Apollo 11 …‘Minutes later, Columbia swept behind the Moon and Collins became Earth’s most distant solo traveller, separated from the rest of humanity by 250,000 miles of space and by the bulk of the Moon, which blocked all radio transmissions to and from mission control. He was out of sight and out of contact with his home planet. “I am now truly alone and absolutely alone from any known life. I am it,” he wrote in his capsule. […] Such solitude would have unnerved most people. But not Collins. He says the emotion that he experienced most during his day alone in lunar orbit was that of exultation.’
20 July 2009
[apollo] The Giant Apollo 11 Post … Kottke does a big round up of Apollo 11 links of interest on the internet.
[comics] Stephen Frears drawn to Tamara Drewe … ‘Tamara Drewe, Posy Simmonds’s comic strip about a journalist who ruffles feathers in a rural writers’ retreat, is to be turned into a film by Stephen Frears. The director of The Queen and The Grifters is reported to have cast former Bond girl and St Trinian’s graduate Gemma Arterton as the title character, a newspaper columnist whose recent nose job transforms her into a seductive flirt, to the chagrin of the quiet village’s womenfolk.’
21 July 2009
[space] Abandoned Space Technology … photos of neglected earthbound US and Russian Apollo Era hardware … ‘Abandoned Russian Shuttle found in Arabian Desert’ [via more(ish)]
[funny] For Sale – Do You Want A Porn Laptop? … ‘It runs internet pretty fast and I already have about 200 favorites of porn sites saved in my favorites for firefox. It works for porn perfectly, but not big or fast enough for music/video editing or any of that. I wouldn’t type any credit card info with it though, like I said it has some viruses and spyware…’
[comics] After Watchmen, What’s ‘Unfilmable’? These Legendary Texts … Wired looks at some susposedly unfilmable comics and books … On Sandman: ‘Too long. Spanning 74 issues and more than a decade, if you count spinoffs and standalones, Neil Gaiman’s decorated mythopoetic fantasy starring Dream, Death and other revered, abstract personifications is stuck in film limbo. “There is talk of an HBO Sandman,” Gaiman told Wired.com in March, “because no one quite knows what to do with it. But the truth is, if anybody is going to make [it] a movie, it will probably be a kid in film school right now to whom The Sandman was the most important thing ever. It will take the amount of commitment, dedication and madness that Peter Jackson brought to Lord of the Rings to get it on the screen…”‘
22 July 2009
[comics] Reinventing The Pencil: 21 Artists Who Changed Mainstream Comics (For Better Or Worse) … On Chris Ware: ‘Ware marries his fetish for design with a singularly sardonic voice and a God’s-eye perspective on his characters, creating an overall tone that’s like a turn-of-the-century circus poster crossed with the post-war angst of literary lions like John Updike and Richard Yates. Ware’s influence is mostly seen among the younger alternative crowd and contemporary commercial artists, but his use of staccato pacing and visual repetition has popped up in a number of superhero comics over the past decade as well.’
23 July 2009
[comics] Robert Crumb’s Genesis … scans from a preview of Crumb’s latest work taken from the New Yorker … [via Metafilter]
[comics] Grant Morrison Interview By The Onion A.V. Club … On what appeals to him about comics as a storyteller: … ‘The essentially magical qualities of inert words and ink pictures working together with reader consciousness to create a holographic Sensurround emotional experience. What else?’
24 July 2009
[health] Kill or Cure? … a website analysing The Daily Mail’s cancer coverage… ‘Help to make sense of the Daily Mail’s ongoing effort to classify every inanimate object into those that cause cancer and those that prevent it.’
[curtis] It Felt Like a Kiss – The Film … Adam Curtis’ new experimental film is available to view for a short time exclusively from his blog … ‘When a nation is powerful it tells the world confident stories about the future. The stories can be enchanting or frightening. But they make sense of the world. But when that power begins to ebb… the stories fall apart…’
26 July 2009
[funny] Kemp Folds … Go Look — a blog of folded photos of Ross Kemp.
27 July 2009
[life] Malcolm Gladwell On The Psychology of Overconfidence … ‘Running an investment bank is not, in this sense, a game: it is not a closed world with a limited set of possibilities. It is an open world where one day a calamity can happen that no one had dreamed could happen, and where you can make a mistake of overconfidence and not personally feel the consequences for years and years—if at all. Perhaps this is part of why we play games: there is something intoxicating about pure expertise, and the real mastery we can attain around a card table or behind the wheel of a racecar emboldens us when we move into the more complex realms. “I’m good at that. I must be good at this, too,” we tell ourselves, forgetting that in wars and on Wall Street there is no such thing as absolute expertise…’
[music] How it feels to be sued for $4.5m by the RIAA … ‘I came home from work to find a stack of papers, maybe 50 pages thick, sitting at the door to my apartment. That’s when I found out what it was like to have possibly the most talented copyright lawyers in the business, bankrolled by multibillion-dollar corporations, throwing everything they had at someone who wanted to share Come As You Are with other Nirvana fans.’
[tv] My Shags As A Whore – Mitchell and Webb on Belle de Jour … ‘Being a prostitute is brilliant.’ (more…)
28 July 2009
[comics] Time is a Four-Lettered Word by Grant T. Morrison … scans of Near Myths #2 from 1978 – some of Grant Morrison’s earliest published work.
29 July 2009
[comics] Charlie Adlard: giving life to the zombies of the Walking Dead … the English artist of fabulous zombie comic The Walking Dead interviewed by The Times … Adlard: ‘The zombies are the easiest thing to draw in the book. I make them up as I go along! The hardest thing I find is doing pages and pages of people just talking to each other. The Walking Dead has lots of that but the challenge is to make it look interesting.’
30 July 2009
[comics] Recommended First Comics … A bunch of writers from the Onion’s A.V. club discuss which comics to recommend to new readers … ‘Alan Moore’s and David Lloyd’s V For Vendetta is the good book I reach for when preaching to the heathens. Moore’s dense, self-loathing Watchmen seemed to turn off as many people as it turned on, at least when I tried to recommend it to newbies. But V For Vendetta’s mix of comfort-food dystopia, muted humanism, bleak poetry, and technical virtuosity is a far more palatable icebreaker, and one that serves equally as an entree into mainstream and underground comics. And the bottom line? In spite of its grim tone and literary air, it’s still got a guy in a cape and a mask kicking ass.’
31 July 2009
[books] Forgotten Bookmarks … ‘I work at a used and rare bookstore, and I buy books from people everyday. These are the personal, funny, heartbreaking and weird things I find in those books.’ [via MetaFilter]