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London Bloggers [Comic Blogs][Other Blogs] | January 9, 2015
[religion] The pope has said that he would baptise a Martian – but would they want our religions? … ‘The Vatican has already covered the angles, it seems. In 2008, its chief astronomer, José Gabriel Funes, publicly accepted that there could be life on other planets. “Why can’t we speak of a ‘brother extraterrestrial’?” he said. “It would still be part of creation.” Aliens might even be closer to God than us, Funes suggested, and humans could be the “lost sheep” of the universe.’
January 8, 2015
[quotes] Flash Card Quotes …
January 7, 2015
[crime] Steve Bell on the Charlie Hebdo Magazine Attack … ‘Why are the fuckers still laughing at us?’
[food] Ten of the most impressive food heists … ‘In 2009, a man and woman in New Zealand were arrested after being caught with boxes containing 20 1kg blocks of vacuum-packed cheddar, stolen that morning from a train. As the police chased the couple, cheese was flung out of the vehicle on to the road, in what will probably go down as one of the more bizarre car chases in history. It is said that cheese is the most stolen food type. One report in 2011 went so far as to label the product “high risk” after finding £4.9m of it was stolen in the UK that year alone.’
January 6, 2015
[funny] 36 Truly Terrifying Middle-Class Injuries … ‘Today I suffered the most middle class injury ever. I hurt my wrist while rinsing kale.’
January 5, 2015
[comics] Ed Brubaker Looks Back At Batman Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 … Brubaker is interviewed by Chris Sims … ‘I was at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and [DC Executive Editor] Mike Carlin was there. He had been reading the flats of Scene of the Crime when they were coming in because he was a fan of Michael’s — my whole career is based on editors being fans of artists that I’ve worked with. So Mike Carlin came to me and said “Why don’t you try and write something for the DCU?” And I said “I don’t think I have any ideas for superheroes.” [Laughs] This is fifteen years ago, and I can look back on it now and it’s funny that I would’ve said it, but at the time, I really didn’t think I could do anything like Batman, and he said “Well, if you can write a mystery comic, you can write Batman.” So he just insisted that I do something, and I went home and sat around trying to think of a pitch for a one-shot, and they were still doing Elseworlds at the time, so I pitched Gotham Noir. Which was how I ended up getting hooked up with Sean Phillips, too.’
January 4, 2015
[science] Is the Universe a Simulation? … ‘But one fanciful possibility is that we live in a computer simulation based on the laws of mathematics — not in what we commonly take to be the real world. According to this theory, some highly advanced computer programmer of the future has devised this simulation, and we are unknowingly part of it. Thus when we discover a mathematical truth, we are simply discovering aspects of the code that the programmer used. This may strike you as very unlikely. But the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom has argued that we are more likely to be in such a simulation than not. If such simulations are possible in theory, he reasons, then eventually humans will create them — presumably many of them. If this is so, in time there will be many more simulated worlds than nonsimulated ones. Statistically speaking, therefore, we are more likely to be living in a simulated world than the real one.’
January 3, 2015
[fails] 11 Spectacular 3D Printer Failures … ‘Just because you have a 3D printer doesn’t mean you’re going to make anything remarkable. It doesn’t even mean you’re going to wind up with what you set out to produce. Believe it or not, 3D printing requires some skill. And when you don’t have it, things go delightfully askew.’
January 2, 2015
[serial] Jay Speaks Part 3: The Collateral Damage of an Extremely Popular Podcast about Murder … Jay On life after Serial: ‘What’s so frustrating about this is that there haven’t been any clear fights. It hasn’t been confrontational. It’s been a hundred little things that have happened, like cars parked outside my house for an hour, somebody just stops talking to me at work before I was let go, people taking pictures. It’s the doorbell ringing, and my wife jumping up six feet into the air, because she’s so scared. It makes me feel paranoid. And it also makes me really angry, because the mistakes I’ve made are on me and not on my family. And there’s a part of me that just wants to break away from them and live in the bushes or the Appalachian mountains, so they can be safe.’
January 1, 2015
December 31, 2014
[crime] Exclusive: Jay, Key Witness from ‘Serial’ Tells His Story for First Time [Part 1 | Part 2] … ‘From the way he carried himself, at least, it looked like he had never lost anything before. And it was really hard for him to deal with being on the losing end. In that situation, he was the loser. And people were starting to find out he was a loser, ‘Oh, you and Hae aren’t together anymore. She got a new boyfriend?’ And he didn’t know how to deal with that. And the other thing about it, I mean, there looked like there was real hurt and pain. What else could motivate you to choke the life out of someone you cared about? He just couldn’t come to grips with those feelings. However he ended up doing it—whether it was premeditated, an involuntary reaction at that point in time—he just couldn’t come to grips with being a loser and failing. He failed; he lost the girl. I know that he came from a very strict religious background and that he was uneasy with some of the things he was doing. He was having a hard enough time with that itself. There were some big forces going on that didn’t have anything to do with Hae.’
December 30, 2014
[joke] Possibly The Best And Most Convoluted Knock Knock Joke Ever… a masterclass in how to derail a joke with Facebook comments … ‘Knock Knock. Who’s There? Irish Stu…’
December 29, 2014
[bbc] The BBC? It’s biased against tall women … amusing examination of recent complaints to the BBC … ‘There were the accusations of bias. These included claims that the BBC was being anti-Ukip, pro-Ukip, pro-Israel, anti-Israel, pro-climate change, too Left-wing, too Right-wing, pro-No vote in the Scottish referendum, pro-Thatcher, anti-Thatcher, anti-men, anti-women, pro-gay, pro-Royal, pro-Darwinism, anti-Formula 1, and anti-Staffordshire bull terriers.’
December 28, 2014
[zen] Wisdom from the 15th Century Zen Monk Ikkyū … ‘If you someday come looking for me, I will be in a shop that sells fine seafood, a good drinking place, or a brothel.’
December 27, 2014
[serial] ‘Serial’ Podcast Finale: A Desire for ‘Eureka’ as the Digging Ends … More thoughts on the conclusion of Serial … ‘The last episode was a tangled and heartfelt yet frustrating hour of radio in which Ms. Koenig hemmed and hawed and pored back over old evidence and asked, “Did we just spend a year applying excessive scrutiny to a perfectly ordinary case?” The answer to that question, apparently, is no and yes, and yes and no. Unlike the conclusions of Agatha Christie novels, real life can make only murky puddles.’
December 26, 2014
[crime] Death Row Guard Has Always Had Soft Spot For The Innocent Ones … ‘McFadden acknowledged he has felt a personal and enduring emotional connection to virtually every one of the not-guilty death row inmates he has known, from those assigned shoddy public defenders who failed to secure a plea deal, to those sentenced on the basis of clearly fabricated police evidence and later-recanted testimony, to those who were mentally unfit to stand trial in the first place.’
December 25, 2014
[xmas] ‘Jingle Bells, Batman Smells-‘
December 24, 2014
[ipads] MacStories Must-Have iPad Apps 2014 … interesting collection of software for the iPad concentrating on workflows and automation and showing how far the iOS platform has matured … ‘There’s a few tasks that I still can’t get done on an iPad, but the list is shrinking, and, thanks to iOS 8, developers are coming up with new ways to make working on iOS more feasible and pleasant. I don’t use my iPad as a computer just to prove a point or because it’s a popular topic among readers and listeners of Connected: I need my iPad, the apps it runs, and the workflows I’ve created to automate what I do on iOS.’
December 23, 2014
[movies] How the Death of Mid-Budget Cinema Left a Generation of Iconic Filmmakers MIA … ‘Francis Ford Coppola made four of the finest films in motion picture history, but he can’t get a movie produced anymore; after a ten-year exile, he made three films between 2007 and 2011 that were basically self-financed (via his lucrative wine-making business). “You try to go to a producer today and say you want to make a film that hasn’t been made before; they will throw you out because they want the same film that works, that makes money,” he said at the Marrakech International Film Festival.’
December 22, 2014
[serial] The ‘Serial’ Ending Never Belonged to Us, or Even to Adnan — It Was Koenig’s All Along … Another article on the conclusion of Serial … ‘But the most heartbreaking thing about “Serial” —and what made it so uncannily engrossing in the wake of Eric Garner and Michael Brown — is its portrayal of a system that is more powerful than it is fair. Yes, it’d be satisfying to know if Adnan did it, and if he didn’t, who did. But the more interesting question—and the scarier one, too—is how he ended up in jail despite nobody being sure, beyond the shadow of a doubt, if he was guilty.’
December 21, 2014
[comics] The Sensual Santa … ‘Be a Sensual Santa! It’s Contagious!’
December 20, 2014
[xmas] Find the hidden words in Santa’s Christmas word search … ‘HAIL SATAN / CONSUME FLESH’
December 19, 2014
[life] This scientist solved the mystery of belly button lint … ‘It was mostly people that had stomach hair who also typically found belly button lint. He proved it by shaving his own stomach, and seeing that he didn’t produce any belly button lint until his hair grew back. He also confirmed the seemingly obvious fact that lint originates from shirt fibers in two ways: by seeing that it always matched the color of the shirt he was wearing, and by chemically analyzing the lint and finding that it was mostly made of cellulose (the material that makes up cotton). It also contained some nitrogen and sulfur, likely from sweat and skin cells.’
December 18, 2014
[music] We Didn’t Start the Fire Pedia … a list of all the things in We Didn’t Start the Fire by Billy Joel sorted by their popularity on Wikipedia … ‘Berlin (1,080,805) / Einstein (352,130) / J.F.K. blown away (325,980)’
December 17, 2014
[serial] Serial nears its end, but the Reddit detectives keep working … a look at the impact of Serial as it concludes on Thursday …
Recently Tanveer actually found himself on the phone with Adnan, trying to explain the online furor over Serial. Adnan has no experience of social media, he says, so Tanveer had to find another metaphor to explain things. “Reddit is like road rage,” he says he told Adnan. People were very reactive and emotional. And under cover of anonymity, lots felt free to say things they would never say to Adnan’s face. “For Adnan, it was hard to fathom because Adnan’s been in jail,” Tanveer said. “Adnan said: ‘In my world, if you’re not ready to say something to someone’s face, you don’t say it.’” December 16, 2014
[ukip] UKIPSum … Lorem Ipsum for people who won’t use foreign placeholder text … ‘Since the passage of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act, the nation has been beset by serious storms and floods. One recent one caused the worst flooding for 60 years. The Christmas floods were the worst for 127 years. Is this just global warming or is there something more serious at work? I can’t go into a bank with a motorcycle helmet on. I can’t wear a balaclava going round the District and Circle line. So why should Islamic women be allowed to wear burqa or veiled niqab in public buildings and in certain private buildings’
December 15, 2014
[sea] Tjipetir mystery: Why are rubber-like blocks washing up on beaches? … ‘The word Tjipetir turned out to be that of a rubber plantation in West Java, Indonesia, which operated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The blocks were not strictly rubber – they are most likely gutta-percha, the gum of a tree found in the Malay Peninsula and Malaysia. It was used in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries to insulate telegraph cables on the seabed. Before modern plastic began to be widely used, gutta-percha was also made into such items as golf balls, teddy bear noses, picture frames and jewellery, among many others.’
December 14, 2014
[comics] Judenhass … Dave Sim’s comic about the Holocaust is now available in the public domain. Download from the Judenhass website or Sequential.
December 13, 2014
[politics] Revealed: how Nigel Farage and Ukip begged for Enoch Powell’s support … What a suprise – it turns out Enoch Powell is one of Nigel Farage’s heroes … ‘Mr Farage, the Ukip leader, was branded “a pound shop Enoch Powell” by Russell Brand, a comedian, during a debate on the BBC’s Questiontime programme on Thursday night. The links between Mr Farage, Ukip and Mr Powell have been unearthed by The Daily Telegraph in letters to Mr Powell held in a university archive.’
December 12, 2014
[space] NASA’s Other Peanuts Traditions … a look at the history between NASA and Charles Schulz’s Peanuts … ‘NASA asked Schulz for permissions to use his two famous characters as call signs for the [Apollo 10] mission, something the artist considered a highlight of his career. Some of Schulz’s friends brought up the “what ifs” – what if the mission failed and a crew of dead astronauts was forever synonymous with his characters? Schultz replied simply that if the astronauts could risk their lives on the mission, he could risk his characters. Charlie Brown and Snoopy became semi-official mascots for Apollo 10, even though they weren’t included in the official mission logo. People brought Snoopy dolls in to NASA to lay on top of the crew’s simulators. Apollo 10’s LM is still flying. The crew burned all the LM’s fuel after rendezvousing around the Moon to send it into a wide solar orbit. British astronomer Nick Howes is trying to find it.’
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