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1 December 2008
[tv] Every House Episode Ever … [via Robot Wisdom] Sidebar: Diction – Doctors are smart. You can show this replacing regular words with Doctor words.
Wrong: “Dammit House, you’re such a whiny bitch!”
Right: “Dammit House, your self-flaggelistic nihilism and anarchistic negation is just compensation from your hidden vulnerability!”
[books] The dumb, dumb world of Malcolm Gladwell … Andrew Orlowski tears into Malcolm Gladwell and fans … ‘Gladwell is a walking Readers Digest 2.0: a compendium of pop science anecdotes which boil down very simply to homespun homilies. Like the Digest, it promises more than it delivers, and like the Digest too, it’s reassuringly predictable. The most famous book Tipping Point, takes an epidemiological view of social trends and throws in a bit of network theory. You won’t draw anything more profound from this than “we’re all connected” – gee! …’
[twitter] Tony Benn is on Twitter … ‘I have been waiting for my website to be updated for a while. I feel this could be a decent stop gap. It is a little like a blog.’
3 December 2008
[comics] The End … Michael Lewis on Wall Street – twenty years after he wrote about it in Liar’s Poker … ‘This was what they had been waiting for: total collapse. “The investment-banking industry is fucked,” Eisman had told me a few weeks earlier. “These guys are only beginning to understand how fucked they are. It’s like being a Scholastic, prior to Newton. Newton comes along, and one morning you wake up: ‘Holy shit, I’m wrong!’ ” Now Lehman Brothers had vanished, Merrill had surrendered, and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were just a week away from ceasing to be investment banks. The investment banks were not just fucked; they were extinct.’
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4 December 2008
[comics] Watchmen Unmasked … Occult symbolism in an Alan Moore comic. Really?! … ‘On the morning of September 11th, 2001 A.D., I was not working. On my day off, my mother phones me at 7:00 PST to wake me up: “Something incredible is happening”. When the first tower came down, I saw the beast more clearly than I have ever seen it, and yes, for a moment it looked just like a giant octopus driving this giant building straight down DIRECTLY THROUGH THE PATH OF GREATEST RESISTANCE LIKE A NAIL. And I thought, “It’s Chapter Twelve of Watchmen. It’s a stunt, a gag, a hoax. Someone has done this thing to fool us all again. Who? WHO HAS DONE THIS THING TO ME?’ [via BeaucoupKevin]
[funny] The Charlian … Charlie Brooker takes over the Guardian’s front page … On his incompetence: ‘It recently took me 21 days to get round to replacing the lightbulbs in my kitchen, which for several weeks had been blowing one-by-one until finally the room was plunged into darkness. For 21 days I had to feel my way into the room like a blind man, then prop open the fridge door in order to have enough light to be able to see. Your eyes get used to it after a while. So does your brain. It became a routine. Soon opening the fridge felt as natural as flipping the light switch. Standing there, chopping onions in the artificial gloaming, all felt well with the world. It took an incident with a broken glass on the floor and a shoeless foot to nudge me in the direction of the nearest lightbulb stockist, and even then I instinctively used the fridge as an impromptu lamp for another two days before re-acclimatising myself to the concept of ceiling-based light sources.’
7 December 2008
[books] Gonzo’s back! … an interview with Ralph Steadman about Hunter S. Thompson … ‘Steadman didn’t go with Thompson on the fateful trip to Vegas, but he was there in spirit. “He thought of taking me, but in the meantime he’d met this lawyer called Oscar Acosta,” he laughs. “They had a lot in common, drugs-wise. So that’s why he decided not to take me. And anyway, as he said, ‘I might need a lawyer!'”‘
8 December 2008
[tech] Dec. 8, 1993: Location, Location, Location … A brief history of GPS from Wired. ‘…after Korean Airline Flight 007 wandered into Soviet territory in 1983 and was shot down with a loss of 269 lives, even the military thought there might be distinct advantages to sharing the GPS system with civilians.’
[politics] Looking: Epic Win … (more…)
10 December 2008
[comics] Pat Mills – The General In Charley’s War … Mills is interviewed about Titan Books reprints of Charley’s War. On Joe Colquhoun: ‘. He could convey so many subtle moods, characterise everything and everybody in the most exquisite detail. That is such a gift and I do feel it needs wider recognition. He was such a modest man, too. When I finished Charley, I offered him Slaine. But he said – no. He said he had no imagination! But he had such empathy, such compassion, such insight – if that’s not imagination, I don’t know what is. I truly believe he was a genius. Sometimes I would not even look at his finished art because I could lose an entire day just staring at the detail in his work. I’m sure many readers did the same.’
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[books] Philip Pullman answers your questions … ‘I am a devout believer in the complete democracy of text. It sounds to me as if you think reading is surrounded by rules and prohibitions and commands. It isn’t! Not a bit of it! Once a book is in your hands, ITS INTERPRETATION BELONGS TO YOU. You can read it in any way you like, and take away any meaning that makes sense to you. That’s the great freedom of reading.’
11 December 2008
Go Watch: Dominoes Made of Dominoes … ‘And those dominoes are made of atoms…’ [via Sore Eyes]
12 December 2008
[movies] Stuff About Stanley Kubrick – big page of links from a Kubrick fan.
15 December 2008
40 Inspirational Speeches in 2 Minutes … ‘Let us cut out their living guts one inch at a time, and they will know what we can do!’ [via Waxy’s Links]
16 December 2008
[life] Diamond Geezer on Woolworths shutting down: ‘Will nobody buy the 20 boxes of mint green Mingles stacked opposite the checkout? And don’t worry, because further inside there’s still a plastic rack of multi-coloured pic’n’mix. I suspect these scooped candies are a bit like the ravens at the Tower of London – when they’ve vanished, all is truly lost.’
18 December 2008
[funny] Periodic Table of Awesoments … ‘Aristole postulated that all good things were made of “win.” That was a pretty good guess, but he was drunk and probably also having an orgy. Modern day awesominers know there are actually 118 fundamental “awesoments” that compose all good things…’ [via The Daily Chump]
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[twitter] Jonathan Ross is on Twitter … ‘wondering what record I should play on first radio show . am maybe “You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone” by radio Birdman. Any thoughts?’
19 December 2008
[work] Revealed: Amazon staff punished for being ill … ‘[Amazon] Staff were warned that days off for illness, nonattendance or lateness would result in “points” against them. Any sick days, even if justified by a doctor’s note, resulted in a point against the worker.’
[lists] Wikipedia’s List of Common Misconceptions … ‘Thomas Crapper did not invent the flush toilet…’
22 December 2008
[maps] Motorway Map of the UK done in the style of the London Underground Map … [via iamcal.com]
[comics] Drawing Power … A “Prose Guy” takes a look at Graphic Novels and comics … ‘The most important thing [Daniel] Pink learned was that in America, we have a “restricted, constricted view” of what comics can be. “In Japan, you can get manga for how to deal with your finances, how to find a mate, cooking, history of Buddha, whatever,” he says. If you’re working in the medium, “you can do really good stuff, you can do really bad stuff. You can do sports, you can do documentaries. You can do gripping narratives, you can do cheesy narratives.” In other words, in the world of Japanese comics, you can do anything you want…’
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24 December 2008
[london] Evening Standard Headline Crisis 2008 … another years worth of the best of the headline boards from the Evening Standard – my favourite was: Police Arrest Batman … 
Click on the images for the full set
26 December 2008
[comics] Archaeologizing Watchmen … Dave Gibbons interviewed on his new book Watching the Watchmen … ‘The second time around, I am amazed by how much thought we put into Watchmen, how hard we labored over every detail. But I think that is one of the reasons for its longevity. In comics, there are depths that don’t reveal themselves immediately, and the stuff that you might consider anal about Watching the Watchmen — like the notes where I plot the rotation of a perfume bottle through the air — might not be particularly obvious to anyone who reads it. But those who do will note the consistency, the reality behind it all that exists in great depth. It gives it a more magical quality, which it wouldn’t have had if we just made things up as we went along or changed it to suit the latest continuity. It does give it a feeling of authority.’
31 December 2008
[comics] The Best Damned Comics of 2008 Chosen By The Artists … Dash Shaw: ‘Acme Novelty Library #19 by Chris Ware This is a predictable pick, but Ware is the greatest living cartoonist. It says that he drew this four years ago. What the hell? The comics he drew this week are the best comics of 2012 and 2013. I’m calling it now.’ [via Forbidden Planet’s Blog]
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