15 February 2014
[politics] Toward a Unified Theory of Scandal-Naming … on the devaluing of the “-gate” suffix for scandal … ‘Column-inch-limited headline writers in Argentina, Azerbaijan, Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Poland, South Africa, and especially the UK have all imported “-gate” for their own homegrown scandals. Many involve sports. Some involve bolognese sauce: The Montreal restaurant community was rocked last year by Pastagate, when Québéc’s language enforcers warned an upscale restaurant to stop using Italian words like “pasta” on its menu instead of the French equivalent. Very few rise near the level of Watergate. We need a new term for these sub-gate scandals.’
14 February 2014
13 February 2014
[comics] Garry Trudeau On Extended Break From Doonesbury … ‘I’ve always thought of myself as a comic-strip lifer, which is common in our industry and an annoyance to younger cartoonists. I love working for newspapers, and can’t imagine life without them. Which is why I’m keeping one foot in with the Sundays.’
12 February 2014
[politics] Rory Stewart: ‘The secret of modern Britain is there is no power anywhere’ … a fascinating interview with a Tory MP …
In a way, he says, ordinary Afghans are far more powerful than British citizens, because at least they feel they can have a role in one of the country’s 20,000 villages. “But in our situation we’re all powerless. I mean, we pretend we’re run by people. We’re not run by anybody. The secret of modern Britain is there is no power anywhere.” Some commentators, he says, think we’re run by an oligarchy. “But we’re not. I mean, nobody can see power in Britain. The politicians think journalists have power. The journalists know they don’t have any. Then they think the bankers have power. The bankers know they don’t have any. None of them have any power.” 11 February 2014
[comics] The UK Government is now *literally* getting its immigration policy from Judge Dredd … ‘Citizenship is a privilege – Not a right!’
10 February 2014
[mac] Unboxing a 30-year-old Macintosh 128K … ‘On eBay, gdavis6610 has been selling classic Apple equipment for a few years. In 2012, he sold a Macintosh 128K for $3519.84, over $1000 more than the original launch price. Fortunately, he takes pretty detailed photographs of his eBay kit. Here are some photos from his memorable unboxing of the original Macintosh 128K.’
9 February 2014
[crime] Mug shots from Newcastle in the 1930’s …
8 February 2014
[people] New Blog Piece On Woody Allen To Settle Everything … ‘The truly essential 1,200-word online article, which, given its unique and illuminating insights into the topic and its wealth of arguments previously unconsidered by all other blog pieces on the subject, definitively answers all open questions about the 20-year-old case and effectively ends any dispute over Woody Allen’s culpability, how Americans should feel about his work, and his eventual standing in the annals of American cinema.’
7 February 2014
[posh] The 28 Poshest Things That Have Ever Happened … ‘This birth announcement in The Times: On 29th March 2013, to Emily (née Kew) and Christian, a son, Biggles George Fittleworth, and a daughter, Posie Betsy Winifred, a brother and sister for Tuppence.’
6 February 2014
[watergate] The Red Flag in the Flowerpot … a writer looking at the personal archives of Ben Bradlee (Woodward and Bernstein’s editor) exposes doubts about some of the reporting of Watergate …
Later in the interview, Ben talked about Bob’s famous secret source, whom he claimed to have met in an underground garage in rendezvous arranged via signals involving flowerpots and newspapers. “You know I have a little problem with Deep Throat,” Ben told Barbara. 5 February 2014
[quote] The Unknown Unknowns … a quote from Donald Rumsfield. ‘…there are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know.’
4 February 2014
[books] How To Tell If You’re In A Hemingway Novel … ‘You are alone at sea. How you hate the sea, but how you respect the fish inside of it. How you hate the kelp. How indifferent you are to the coral.’
3 February 2014
[batman] Batman is a Hoarder! … ‘No! I might wear that again!!!’ …
2 February 2014
1 February 2014
[stories] Periodic Table of Storytelling … an attempt at distilling TV Tropes down into a table of classic story elements.
31 January 2014
[comics] In The Comic-Book Pages Of 2001, Two Sorts Of Genius Collided … comparing and contrasting Stanley Kubrick and Jack Kirby’s versions of 2001: A Space Odyssey … ‘The 2001 comic also caught Kirby at a low creative ebb. He’d poured a lot of himself into his Fourth World saga for DC, without much to show for it, and by the time he returned to Marvel, Kirby was back to thinking of himself as a hired gun, sweating to fill as many pages as his bosses required, governed by the mentality of a boy who grew up in a ghetto during the Depression. Where Kubrick was a meticulous planner, taking years to develop a project and fussing over every detail, Kirby was a disorganized workaholic, who according to his wife Roz would accidentally throw away about half the good ideas he scrawled onto notepaper and napkins, and who felt like he was on the verge of destitution if he didn’t generate at least 20 pages a week.’
30 January 2014
[life] Decoding Cancer-Addled Ramblings … a remarkable post on Ask Metafilter where the commenters partially decode the last messages of a Grandmother who died twenty years ago… ‘AGH, YES! Sorry for the double post, but: OFWAIHHBTNTKCTWBDOEAIIIHFUTDODBAFUOTAWFTWTAUALUNITBDUFEFTITKTPATGFAEA Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name… etc etc etc’
29 January 2014
[wikipedia] 12 Spectacular Acts Of Wikipedia Vandalism … More from Buzzfeed but the vandalism of Spot the Dog’s wikipedia entry is worth a look … ‘Where’s Spot? Is he under the stairs? Is he in the box? No. He’s at the bar: Sipping whiskey. Sucking on cigarettes. Suffering.’
28 January 2014
[health] How do vaccines cause autism? … a useful website for anti-vaxxers.
27 January 2014
[Religion] God Admits He Rarely Forgives … ‘Speaking to reporters, God, who admitted that He is “generally motivated more by anger and spite than forgiveness,” reiterated that being forgiving is “not in [His] nature,” and on the whole constitutes a small part of what the Lord does every day and what He feels He should do every day.’
26 January 2014
[movies] Hans Zimmer: ‘Going for Gold? I’m not ashamed of it! It paid the rent.’ … Hans Zimmer interview from the Guardian … Going for Gold Theme on YouTube
…the chuckling man on the other end of the phone line is happily claiming the theme tune for British TV game show Going for Gold, during an interview wind-down conversation about British TV prompted by his (British) colleague Russell Emanuel. 25 January 2014
[books] 19 Book Cover Clichés … a look at the remarkable similarities between the cover images of modern books… ‘Woman holding a birdcage for some reason – Must be a spooky tale in the Woman in Black vein.’
24 January 2014
[tv] How should Homeland ‘reset’ for season four? … Stuart Heritage’s ideas for Season four of Homeland … ‘The absolute worst thing that Homeland could do this year is keep Dana around to snarl up a third of every episode by accidentally running over a nun on a Segway or Snapchatting a picture of her pubes to the Queen or whatever.’
23 January 2014
[comics] Stan Lee, The Man And The Myth … Chris Sims on Stan Lee’s legacy… ‘Stan Lee’s greatest talent, for good or ill, was never writing comics, or even editing them. It was promotion. I touched on this in an earlier column, but the real magic of Stan Lee’s contribution to Marvel wasn’t just filling Kirby and Ditko’s panels with five-dollar words and screeds against the commies. It was that brash, aggressive style that put a face (not coincidentally, his own) behind the comics. From very early on, the letters pages were clear to let readers know that “Stan and Jack” were the ones behind the adventures of the Fantastic Four, and again, you can’t really overstate how revolutionary that was. This was a time when creators were rarely if ever credited, but Lee – ironically, given the reputation that would come out over the years for stealing credit and hogging attention – was part of the crowd putting their names right there on page one.’
22 January 2014
21 January 2014
[books] Tsundoku … the Japanese word for buying books, not reading them and leaving them to pile up.
20 January 2014
[text] Cthuvian Ipsum Generator … A lorem ipsum generator from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos … ‘Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.’
19 January 2014
[web] Have I Been Pwned? … a service that allows you to check if any of your usernames or passwords been compromised in recent website security breaches.
18 January 2014
[politics] Why do British prime ministers never wear wedding rings? … ‘The last married male occupant of 10 Downing Street to wear a wedding ring in public was Harold Wilson, who was PM from 1964 to 1970 and 1974 to 1976.’
17 January 2014
[funny] Dread Singles on Twitter … a Lovecraftian singles feed… ‘HOT SINGLES IN YOUR AREA, PEELING BACK THE SKIN OF THE INFINITE, PEERING INTO THE DYING HEART OF THE LAST TRUE MYSTIC, YOLO THEY HISS, YOLO’
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