linkmachinego.com
22 July 2000
[comics] A review of the latest Preacher collectionAll Hell’s a-Coming. ‘The characters continue to be chipped away at: Custer lost his eye in the previous volume, having it sucked out of its socket by God. We lose pretty much all the sympathy we had for Cassidy, and Starr, the most powerful man in the world, having lost not only an eye, all his hair and a leg, now loses his genitals to an attack dog. “My cock is in the bitch’s mouth,” he says, “and not in a good way.”‘
[illness] newsUnlimited profiles Malaria. ‘Malaria, or rather P. falciparum , which infects both humans and mosquitoes, is such a fearsome adversary partly because of its protean life-cycle, which makes it seem like some mythical beast. The “thing” in the movie Alien shocked audiences when it burst out of its original pod in one form and then destroyed poor John Hurt’s stomach when incarnated in another. This Plasmodium goes through no fewer than five such transformations in its brief life.’
21 July 2000
[pop] Hours of fun with Perpetual Bubblewrap… [requires Flash]
[film] newsUnlimited reviews High Fidelity. “All the way through the film, from the opening titles to closing credits, there is a passionate, encyclopaedic love of music, combined with a disconcerting sense that this love is a kind of autism or arrested development, a symptom of some poignant deprivation of real love.”
20 July 2000
[comics] The Dave Sim Memorial Note From The President Archive — a collection of writings from the creator of Cerebus. Sim on Superman: “Superman, as originally conceived, as a force for the common man, as an answer to the mindless tyranny with which his name (as a term) had come to be identified, as a foe of corruption and injustice, as the embodiment of FDR-style liberalism and the epitome of the notion that one individual can, should and must, of necessity, make a difference; in all this Superman … Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Superman… the only true Superman… stands as a beacon of freedom shining as brightly for an adult who holds the ideals of the character sacred as he does for a child seeing him and learning them for the first time. As a symbol of the nearly limitless power of imagination, he has inspired creators for five decades to take up pen and brush in pursuit of excellence, to weave our tapestry once more. To aspire; that one day we might know a tenth… a hundredth of the greatness implied in knowing you are Jerry Siegel. You are Joe Shuster. You are the creators of Superman. And that no monumental and tragic injustice can strip you of that mantle. As comic book creators, this is our greatest heritage… and our greatest debt.” [via Come in Alone]
Thora Birch as Enid[film] UpcomingMovies.com covers Ghost World. ‘Clowes said the film is about, “the lives of two recent high school graduates from the advantaged perch of a constant and (mostly) undetectable eavesdropper, with the shaky detachment of a scientist who has grown fond of the prize microbes in his petri dish.”‘
[weatherman] Bill Giles reviews the Perfect Storm. ‘I thought the actor who played the weatherman was lightweight. The forecaster didn’t get as excited as most broadcasting weather forecasters would do if they saw this once-in-100-years storm coming along. He just sat there. For most of us, our eyes would of have gone glazed and we would have got up and started screaming “I want more time” before broadcasting”.’
19 July 2000
[movies] What it says on the tin — Soup goes to the Movies. ‘In a comically wrenching scene, Ewan McGregor plays Mark “Rent-boy” Renton, preparing to detox himself of his heroin addiction: “Relinquishing junk. Stage one, preparation. for this you will need one room which you will not leave. Soothing music. Tomato soup, ten tins of. Mushroom soup, eight tins of, for consumption cold. Ice cream, vanilla, one large tub of. Magnesia, milk of, one bottle. Paracetamol, mouthwash, vitamins. Mineral water, Lucozade, pornography. One mattress. One bucket for urine, one for feces and one for vomitus. One television and one bottle of Valium. Which I’ve already procured from my mother. Who is, in her own domestic and socially acceptable way also a drug addict. And now I’m ready. All I need is one final hit to soothe the pain while the Valium takes effect.”‘
[children] A father talks about his daughter’s reaction to the muder of Sarah Payne. ‘When I arrive home my daughter has more news about Sarah. “She’s dead,” she says. “It’s really sad isn’t it Daddy?” she says. Yes, I say, it’s horrible, and prepare for one of those painful conversations about why anyone could do this. But she walks off. A couple of minutes later she calls me back. “Daddy, have you seen the fairy house I made?” she asks.’
[games] ClassicGaming.com’s Games of the Week Index. Hours and hours of fun. My favourite? Probably Arkanoid or maybe Marble Madness.
18 July 2000
[comics] Frank Miller is apparently going to do a comic book about the life of Jesus. Can you imagine it? [via The Warren Ellis Forum]
[bridge] Somebody call in Howard Roark — newsUnlimited talks about the emotional design of the millennium bridge. ‘At one stage, the architects successfully re-submitted some rejected drawings by making the sky bluer and the bridge users younger. “What Nor man absolutely correctly judged,” says Fitzpatrick, slipping easily into a public relations abstraction, “was generating the sense of wonderment”‘.
17 July 2000
[cheese] Check out The Online Cheese Comparator. Mine is Port Salud — “A semi-hard cheese, produced in Entrammes in North West France. Port Salut has a plastic texture, a cream colour, and a mild taste. It is matured for around 4 weeks.” [via Yungee]
[true] Life is always stranger than fiction… the true story of a runaway princess, an american marine and the US Media‘Colbert adds: “no matter what the ending, it’s still a movie.” So is it being cast already? Aloe thought Brad Pitt was “a bit too laid back… Jason is a real John Wayne character, a young Steve McQueen all-American renegade, completely without fear.” Freddy Prinze Jr has already been suggested and Aloe says they want at least one big star, probably male. For the princess, Selma Hayek has already been mentioned and Aloe reckons that Shannon Elizabeth from American Pie would be ideal.’
16 July 2000
[weblogs] Excellent weblog: Follow Me Here. “‘You can only tell the shapes of things by looking at their edges…’ Some weblogs are about weblogs and weblogging; others about the web and computing; my kind is still about the world. Follow me to some of its “sharp edges” as found on the web. “
[photos] Hunter S. Thompson and Grant Morrison— Seperated at birth?
[aliens] The Observer on the search for alien life in space. “On other worlds, it has remained rooted at the level of amoebas, microbes, and primitive pond life. All aliens are scum, in other words – an observation with crucial implications. As UK astronomer Ian Crawford points out in the latest issue of Scientific American , we may be ‘the most advanced life-forms in the galaxy’.”.
15 July 2000
[weblogs] Every wondered what the word Barbelith means? Grant Morrison: “The word ‘BARBELiTH’ is derived from a dream I had when I was about 20 or 21 and coincided with my first structured ‘magical’ experiences and a minor nervous breakdown (in the dream, BARBELiTH was the name of some higher dimension or alternate reality). Like a lot of stuff in INVISIBLES I used the name unconsciously when I needed something to call the red circle that represents our Universe’s placental twin. I’d taken the etymology as far as ‘bearded stone’, which seems much less interesting and less weirdly appropriate than ‘alien stone’. My real life is getting more like the comic every day (in ways I should have suspected but didn’t really expect on this scale). There’s more on the red circle and its many meanings in DOOM PATROL #54, I just realised. That issue was written in near-trance so fuck only knows what’s been trying to get through all these years.”
[web] Zdnet on Ego-Surfing. ‘[..]Fouts says ego surfing is about more than the need for recognition. “I don’t have any real desire to be in the public eye,” he says. “It lets me know how accessible I am to the world. It’s nice to know that some random person from my past could find me.”‘
[comics] Yet another interview with Warren Ellis“I suspect that, to successfully write superhero books through your thirties and forties, you either have to have genuine brain damage — Grant Morrison and Alan Moore come to mind — or be genuinely infantile. Grant and Alan and a bunch of others write great superhero comics because they are mad and that sick energy infuses the work. Too many others look more and more to me like confused, ageing writers-become-hacks making a vampiric living off the young. I’d rather not end up as the comics version of Art Linkletter. Or Krusty The Klown.”
14 July 2000
[cams] newsUnlimited on Being Caprice. “It made me think, also, strangely, of Mrs Thatcher. In the mid-80s, Mrs Thatcher was interviewed by Russell Harty for a seemingly anodyne series called My Favourite Things. Mrs Thatcher’s favourite things included Bovril toast and, pride of place on her mantelpiece, a porcelain depiction of the recapture of the Falkland Islands by Royal Marines. I firmly believe her downfall can, in part, be attributed to this creepy revelation.”
[comics] The wisdom of Preacher“I mean look at me: My head looks like a penis, I’ve got one leg, one ear, one eye, and my cock’s been replaced with a rubber tube.”
13 July 2000
[some random blog] I read somewhere that a smelly dot company swaps embarrassing stories with a taxi ride from a cokehead. I was thinking that when the scooby snack loves, the herbal remedy leaves. I read somewhere that the mobile phone seldom buys an new techy toy from a radioactive screensaver. An impromptu mouse gets RSI, and an umbrella about the internet magazine redesigns. But, the outer microprocessor blogs with some lover. An unstable domain remembers a domain inside some uber-geek, and a domain around some weblog works for a fuck-buddy. Oh, and hey, check out notsosoft sometime. You might like it.
[vicars] The case of the missing Vicar. ‘Late last week, another churchwarden at St Paul’s, Captain Ian Powe, was arrested in connection with the allegations of harassment against Follett. Powe, who commanded HMS Yarmouth during the cod war, was released on bail and will have to return to Belgravia police station on August 8. He has vigorously protested his innocence. “I used to have an expression that worse things happen at sea,” Powe said earlier this week. “I’m not using it any more.”.’
[photo] Great Photo of Stanley Kubrick on the set of 2001. “My God. It’s full of stars.”
12 July 2000
[comics] I’m trying to avoid the X-Men but Salon profiles Stan Lee and manages to mention Jack Kirby. It quite literally amazes me that the media still believe the myth that Lee created most of the Marvel characters. Lee was just the editor of those comics. “Jack Kirby returned to the company that year and, lore has it, found Lee sobbing while movers took the furniture out of Marvel’s offices.” [via Slashdot]
[photo] Young William from The Guardian’s Left a Bit Gallery. “Apart from the hair nothing has changed.”
[bulls] newsUnlimited profiles an English toreador. “The gore, shouts and sand seem impossibly remote two days later, as El inglés – The Englishman, a title he increasingly uses in tourist fights – looks back on his dual career as a toreador and supplier of fitted kitchens in Salford.”