[press] News in Briefs … the wit and wisdom of Page 3 girls …
HOLLIE says there is no need to panic over the Chancellor’s spending cuts. She said: “£6.2billion sounds like a colossal figure. But if you imagine public spending as a giant pizza, we’re talking about barely a few anchovies. And I can’t stand the salty little beggars anyway.”
[funny] What have we today? … great collection of green ink letters written to newspapers in the early nineties … ‘My eight-year-old boy is a strange lad. He’s bothered about the planet and interested in butterflies and insects as well as other animals. He never watches football. Do you think he’s going to be gay? (Daily Star)’
He had sold, he believed, between 25 and 35 million copies of The Longest Day and 400,000 hardcover copies of The Last Battle in the United States alone. Yet each book had cost him some $150,000 to research. “I have no less than 7,000 books on every aspect of World War II. My files contain some 16,000 different interviews with Germans, British, French, etc,” he wrote. “Then there is the chronology of each battle, 5×7 cards, detailing each movement by hour for the particular work I’m engaged in. You may think this is all a kind of madness, an obsession. I suppose it is.”
‘It can be hard to identify the cinematic progenitors of the Curtis aesthetic because his films sometimes seem like outward manifestations of the world wide web. His projects reorganise and remix previously existing material with new interviews and fieldwork into a new kind of narrative, one that seems analogous to a web browser with 20 tabs open at once. They debunk the utopian ideologies of earlier eras while offering grand, unifying narratives to make sense of our current hyperlinked universe, and succeed to the extent that viewers can keep several complicated arguments in their heads at once. After one emerges from the hypnotic sway of a Curtis film, it can take several days of reflection and research to assess the validity of his arguments.’
[history] Scott and Scurvy … a long wonderfully written look at the history behind the treatment of scurvy and how the was cure was misunderstood and forgotten at the start of the 20th Century … ‘They had a theory of the disease that made sense, fit the evidence, but was utterly wrong.’
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[html] The Origins of the <Blink> Tag … the creation story behind the most annoying HTML tag … ‘I remember thinking that this would be a pretty harmless easter egg, that no one would really use it, but I was very wrong. When we released Netscape Navigator 1.0 we did not document the blink functionality in any way, and for a while all was quiet. Then somewhere, somehow the arcane knowledge of blinking leaked into the real world and suddenly everything was blinking. “Look here”, “buy this”, “check this out”, all blinking. Large advertisements blinking in all their glory. It was a lot like Las Vegas, except it was on my screen, with no way of turning it off.’
[tags: Internet][permalink][Comments Off on The Origins of the HTML Blink Tag]
[comics] Christ, It Works for Everything … ‘It was recently theorized that all New Yorker cartoons could be captioned
with “Christ, what an asshole” without compromising their comedic value. I discovered this is true of virtually all comics, old and new…’
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[politics] Adam Boulton loses his rag as Nick Clegg coos at Labour … Marina Hyde’s summary of yesterday events is well worth a read … ‘Loosely speaking, then – in fact, speaking with a looseness likely to be matched only by David Cameron’s bowel movements – that is where we are now. It should go without saying that in the time it takes to press the send key we shall be somewhere else entirely. Indeed, given that the cliche of the hour is that “we are in uncharted territory”, the cartographers should surely name these coordinates the Straits of WTF and be done with it.’
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[tags: Apple, Funny, Weird][permalink][Comments Off on The Mozzarella Cheese Head of Steve Jobs]
6 May 2010
[politics] My Moment Is Yours, Ed Balls … Michael Portillo on tonight’s potential “Balls Moment” … ‘My name is now synonymous with eating a bucketload of shit in public.’
I remember once I had a woman come in who was really on the edge of a breakdown. She was talking about civil war and chaos, immigrants coming up the lanes of Sunderland with knives between their teeth to murder her. She was really in a terrible state.
“I just said to her ‘What paper do you read, love?’ and, of course, it was the Daily Mail. I just said ‘stop reading it and you’ll find life gets better.’ That’s the only advice I could offer.
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4 May 2010
[politics] Voter Power … ‘In the UK, the only voters with any real power to choose the government are those who live in marginal constituencies. Less than 20% of constituencies can be considered marginal.The rest of us have little or no power to influence the outcome of the election. Find out the power of your vote in this election.’
[tv] Performing Don Draper … On the conundrum that is Don Draper … ‘He cheats on his wife relentlessly, is a workaholic and an absentee father to his children, lies about who he is, abandons his former family (and, arguably, causes his brother to hang himself), is a borderline alcoholic, and is in general awfully prudish, judgmental, and bigoted for a sexually licentious fraud of a man. If this was your OKCupid profile, you would not be attracting Don’s caliber of women. (Or would you?) But we find ways to forgive or excuse him.’
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[internet] Getting depressed with this whole Social Media thing … ‘Where is the social technology, the social news, the social web? Instead we get networks flooded by marketers looking for ways to manipulate us all under the guise of having conversations. Instead we get flooded with follow and friend requests where 4 out of 5 are spammers or marketers. Instead we get a Web that is being treated like a business acquisition where we are nothing more than shares to be bought and sold.’
[life] On Black Elephants … ‘A “black elephant” […] is an event which is extremely likely and widely predicted by experts, but people attempt to pass it off as a black swan when it finally happens.’
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[funny] Gangsters Love Pooh … also Tigger, Piglet and Eeyore – epic background fail.
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24 April 2010
[comics] Chris Ware’s Rejected Fortune Cover … ‘He accepted the job because it would be like doing the 1929 issue of the magazine, and he filled the image with tons of satirical imagery, like the U.S. Treasuring being raided by Wall Street, China dumping money into the ocean, homes being flooded, homes being foreclosed, and CEOs dancing a jig while society devolves into chaos.’
[comics] The Unpublished Moore … a comprehensive list of the the Alan Moore’s whims, unfinished scripts and lost work … ‘Cerebus #301 Status: Unpublished. I believe a full script exists for this one (which involved Cerebus being summoned during a seance in the modern day), but it was intended to be a Moore/Bisette/Veitch project, and is unlikely to appear now due to ill-will among the creators.’
[comics] Watching the Watchman – St Albans comics legend Dave Gibbons interviewed … ‘I bumped into a friend of mine called Mick McMahon, who lived in Colney Heath, at the station at St Albans and he had this artwork under his arm. It turned out to be the first Judge Dredd job, and he said it was this new comic being done at IPC called 2000AD…’
[politics] Guido Fawkes Dreaming – The Change Coalition: ‘In what is the iconic picture of the election, Cameron walks out of his Millbank headquarters along the Thames embankment to 4 Cowley Street where Nick Clegg greets him and together they walk purposefully towards the Mall surrounded by photographers and cameramen as crowds cheer…’
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[iphone] Victor Keegan: My First iPhone App … a retiring Guardian tech writer on the thinking behind his first iPhone app …‘This month I finally left the Guardian after nearly 47 years. At the end of last week I had my 70th birthday and today my first iPhone app came out.’ [via Meg]
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[tags: People][permalink][Comments Off on The 2010 DeathList]
14 April 2010
[blogs] High Court: Moderate User Comments And You’re Liable … ‘A blog owner can avoid liability for user-generated content that appears on his site without being checked or moderated, the High Court has ruled. But fixing the spelling or grammar in users’ posts could lose him that protection, it said.’
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13 April 2010
[comics] Alan Moore – The Spanish Impersonation … ‘When I was young I travelled to Andorra and bought a radio cassette player. However, I usually travel to fourth dimension.’
[space] Voyager 1 & 2’s Infinite Playlist … ‘These songs were etched into a 12-inch, gold plated copper record that was placed aboard the two spaceships in 1977.’ [via Kottke]