1 March 2011
[quotes] Found Quotes, 3 … The problem with Internet quotations is that many are not genuine. — Abraham Lincoln
2 March 2011
[comics] Dan Clowes Has A Website?! … ‘This website has been authorized by Mr. Daniel Clowes.’ [via Forbidden Planet]
3 March 2011
[tech] Self-Erasing Flash Drives Destroy Court Evidence … ‘For decades, investigators have worked with tape, floppy drives and hard drives that continue to store huge amounts of information even when the files they’re contained in are marked for deletion. Even wiping the disks isn’t always enough to permanently erase the contents. SSDs, by contrast, store data in blocks or pages of NAND-based transistor chips that must be electronically erased before they can be reused. As a result, most SSDs have firmware that automatically carries out “self healing” or “garbage collection” procedures that can permanently erase or alter files that have been marked for deletion.’
4 March 2011
[comics] Fantastic Four #74 Splash … a close-up look at the original art for a Jack Kirby splash page … ‘It’s funny to look at original production artwork and see where before computers came into use, the production personnel would cut out the month and date, then tape it to the publication information at the bottom of the page.’
5 March 2011
[books] The Hardy Boys The Final Chapter … interesting look at the life of the original writer of the Hardy Boys …
So her father was a hack?
“My father,” she said, “was a literate, sophisticated, erudite man.”
He was?
He loved Dickens, she said. “He was a great Joycean.”
He was?
“He corresponded with F. Scott Fitzgerald. He had aspirations to be that kind of writer.”
She seemed uncertain where to go with this.
Finally: “He hated the Hardy Boys.”
7 March 2011
[art] (Fake) Gilbert and George Are On Twitter …
Lucheon. Prolific as ever, we masturbated onto a stamp while soup simmered. Food: adequate. Stamp: no longer usable in any practical sense.
Gilbert & George
artfortwats
[comics] BY THE TAIL OF GLYCON! IT’S ALAN MOORE’S CHIN! … Revealing Passport Snaps Of Alan Moore.
8 March 2011
[comics] 100 Comics To Read Before You Die … worth-a-look, left-field comic reading list. On Morrison and Yeowell’s New Adventures Of Hitler:
At the time it was published Morrison was accused of being a Nazi propagandist by people who hadn’t read the series, which lampoons Hitler constantly and mercilessly. He’s depicted as a buffoon and a lunatic, hallucinating entire conversations over cups of tea and convinced that he’s being remorselessly pursued by a trolleybus full of people with chairs for shoes. He’s as mad as a fish. At the same time he’s portrayed as a limited kind of visionary, finding the seeds of National Socialism in the rich, dark soil of the British Empire while hearing Morrissey and John Lennon singing songs from the future in his wardrobe (Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now and Working Class Hero, respectively). Morrison knew the kind of controversy he was courting, even titling the first chapter ‘What Do You Mean, Ideologically Unsound?’
9 March 2011
[people] The Quaid Conspiracy … the story of how actor Randy Quaid and his wife ended up as fugatives living out of their car … ‘It was hard to wrap my mind around the web of intrigue she was spinning, with her nonstop rapid-fire delivery, a tale out of Thomas Pynchon, or perhaps just Law & Order: Los Angeles, that somehow involved the death of Michael Jackson and the “framing” of Mel Gibson. “I’ve spent three years figuring this out,” Evi said, detailing how her investigation had taken her to courthouses, record bureaus, and morgues, how she’d been knocking on strangers’ doors, looking for information. Randy listened intently, driving. I thought about how on Good Morning America he’d said how “very alive” he felt because of all this.’
10 March 2011
[kubrick] Stanley Kubrick Interviewed In Rolling Stone … On dressing the set of Full Metal Jacket: ‘To make that kind of three-dimensional rubble, you’d have to have everything done by plasterers, modeled, and you couldn’t build that if you spent $80 million and had five years to do it. You couldn’t duplicate, oh, all those twisted bits of reinforcement. And to make rubble, you’d have to go find some real rubble and copy it. It’s the only way. If you’re going to make a tree, for instance, you have to copy a real tree. No one can “make up” a tree, because every tree has an inherent logic in the way it branches. And I’ve discovered that no one can make up a rock. I found that out in Paths of Glory. We had to copy rocks, but every rock also has an inherent logic you’re not aware of until you see a fake rock. Every detail looks right, but something’s wrong. So we had real rubble. We brought in palm trees from Spain and a hundred thousand plastic tropical plants from Hong Kong. We did little things, details people don’t notice right away, that add to the illusion. All in all, a tremendous set dressing and rubble job.’ [via Daring Fireball]
11 March 2011
[movies] Behold: The Nicolas Cage Matrix … ‘Cage more than anyone has two distinct types of movie: serious, po-faced, issue movies and balls-out, crack-piped, bug-eyed brainwrongs.’ [via A Smursh Of Pete]
13 March 2011
[tv] What Is The Win/Loss Record Of The Prosecution In Law And Order?… … ‘The average for the first 10 years is a 74.6% conviction rate.’
14 March 2011
[life] Average Brit Has Three Mysterious Keys … ‘British people carry an average of nine keys around with them, but can identify only six of those, with no idea what the other three came from, or what they unlock…’
15 March 2011
[funny] Unreliably Witnessed: ‘A banker, a Daily Mail reader and a benefit claimant are sitting at a table sharing 12 biscuits…’
16 March 2011
17 March 2011
[links] Browsing:
- [funny] Go Look: Cletus and Billy Bob – What’s A Little Anal Probing Amongst Friends?
- [science] Peak Science … ‘Lehrer borrows a metaphor from Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation to argue that we’ve basically picked all the low-hanging fruit of scientific discovery – all Galileo had to do was be the first person to look at Jupiter through a telescope and he discovered four moons…’
- [twitter] Go Look: Mr Fry And His Twitter Friends
- [space] Saturn’s Hyperion: A Moon with Odd Craters … ‘Hyperion is about 250 kilometers across, rotates chaotically, and has a density so low that it might house a vast system of caverns inside.’
- [funny] Things My Dad Sends Me: Did Philip Fart?
19 March 2011
21 March 2011
[comics] Boy From The Boroughs … Alan Moore interviewed by Pádraig Ó Méalóid … ‘I would have been basically going through all the decades of her life, with her getting older in each one, because I liked the idea, at the time, of having a strip in 2000AD with a seventy or eighty year old woman as the title character.’ (Moore on the uncompleted books of Halo Jones)
22 March 2011
[space] Spacelog … linkable and searchable NASA transcripts of early space exploration … Apollo 11: ‘Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed. ‘ [via Kottke]
23 March 2011
[books] A Book Everyone Should Read? … another great book list from Ask Metafilter … ‘Another vote for “Catch 22”. It captures the essence of the twentieth century: ideology, war and the folly of bureaucracy.’
24 March 2011
[books] Counting H.P. Lovecraft’s Favorite Words … ‘One of the things any fan of Lovecraft discovers early on is that Lovecraft was very attached to certain words. We either laugh or groan every time we hear something described as “indescribable” or called “unnamable” or “antiquarian” or “cyclopean.” And sometimes we wonder how many times he actually used the words…’ [via As Above]
25 March 2011
[space] Cosmonaut Crashed Into Earth ‘Crying In Rage’ …
The space vehicle is shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes — though no one knows this — won’t work and the cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, is about to, literally, crash full speed into Earth, his body turning molten on impact. As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, “cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship.
26 March 2011
[tech] Microsoft Spends $7.5m On IP Addresses … ‘This kind of “black market” – or “gray market” – for IP addresses has been anticipated for some time. IPv4 is now scarce, there are costs and risks associated with upgrading to IPv6, and the two protocols are expected to co-exist for years or decades to come.’
28 March 2011
[food] The Greggs Adventure … one man’s epic odyssey to eat and review everything in Gregg’s the Bakers … ‘I actually ate around the bubble of lemon goo, and eventually chowed down the whole lot in one go. Yeah, that’s right. Right now, as I’m typing this, I am tripping balls. I think the comedown in about an hour’s time is going to be one for the books.’
29 March 2011
30 March 2011
[comics] Ten Great Moments In Cerebus … ‘I’m missing some of my favourites out here, like the whole prayer sequence (“Cerebus is a bad flyspeck!”) because the pacing of the series tends to mean a ‘moment’ can be ten or fifteen pages.’
31 March 2011
[web] Fifteen Sites That Forbid You To Link To Them … ‘Here, in 2011, are 15 sites I’ve not featured before, all of which try to prevent you linking to them (usually restricting the “right” to link to just the homepage or else requiring written consent). YOU’RE ALL IDIOTS. I have, of course, linked to them…’ [via David McCandless]