[gmail] Gmvault … great little cross-platform backup solution for Gmail which dumps your email in flat files to a local disk.

[water] All the Water on Planet Earth … picture showing what would happen if all the water in the world was collected into a ball on the surface of the Earth.

[tv] Law & Order & Food … today’s favourite Tumblr … ‘You Have The Right To Remain Delicious.’ [via Waxy]

[history] Easter island heads have bodies!?? … I never realised the heads on Easter Island had bodies – this blog has some great photos … ‘ It’s generally accepted that the statues were made sometime between 1250 and 1500 AD. There is controversy surrounding why the bodies are buried. Was it time and erosion, or were they buried on purpose? Aliens? The soil surrounding the bodies for so long has preserved interesting carvings…’

[shining] This is Uncanny: Number-play in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ … ‘If one needs further proof of Kubrick’s fascination with number play, the title page of his copy of Stephen King’s novel of The Shining is filled with Kubrick’s own handwriting as he works out creative ways to use the number 217. Room 217 was the number of the dead woman’s room in the novel, which Kubrick changed at the request of the Timberline Hotel management. His selection of 237 was not without forethought.’

[batman] NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA… BATMAN!

[funny] Dr Hedgeh’s Door Sign … ‘FAO: Whomever keeps adding ‘og’ to the end of my doorsign. STOP IT.’

[bdj] How To Blog Anonymously (and how not to) … Brooke Magnanti (aka Belle de Jour) gives a master class in how to avoid detection from the press and nosy bloggers like me …

The timing of everything as it happened was key to why the papers did not immediately find out who I was. The old blog started in 2003, when most press still had to explain to their audience what a blog actually was. It took a while for people to notice the writing, so the mistakes I made early on (blogging from home and work, using Hotmail) had long been corrected by the time the press became interested.

Today, no writer who aims to stay anonymous should ever assume a grace period like that. It also helped that once the press did become interested, they were so convinced not only that Belle was not really a hooker but also that she was one of their own – a previously published author or even journalist – that they never looked in the right place. If they’d just gone to a London blogmeet and asked a few questions about who had pissed off a lot of people and was fairly promiscuous, they’d have had a plausible shortlist in minutes.

[comics] Art Spiegelman visits Maurice Sendak in 1993 … ‘Childhood is cannibals and psychotics vomiting in your mouth!’

[life] Alfred Hitchcock On Happiness … ‘A clear horizon — nothing to worry about on your plate, only things that are creative and not destructive… I can’t bear quarreling, I can’t bear feelings between people — I think hatred is wasted energy, and it’s all non-productive. I’m very sensitive — a sharp word, said by a person, say, who has a temper, if they’re close for me, haunts me for days. I know we’re only human, we do go in for these various emotions, call them negative emotions, but when all these are removed and you can look forward and the road is clear ahead, and now you’re going to create something — I think that’s as happy as I’ll ever want to be.’

[comics] Before Watchmen, Nineteen Eighties Style … Bleeding Cool covers DC Comics first (failed) attempt at Watchmen II … ‘[A well placed DC source] confirms another anonymous ex-DC source that it was planned for Andy Helfer to write The Comedian and Michael Fleisher would be offered Rorschach.’

[japan] Tetrapod beaches of Japan … I’d never heard of Tetrapods – and this article includes some evocative photos of them on the Japanese shore … ‘Hit the beach anywhere in Japan, and you are likely to see endless piles of tetrapods — enormous four-legged concrete structures intended to prevent coastal erosion. By some estimates, more than 50% of Japan’s 35,000-kilometer (22,000-mi) coastline has been altered with tetrapods and other forms of concrete.’ [via As Above]

[life] A Timeline of the far future … 7.9 billion years from now: ‘The Sun reaches the tip of the red giant branch, achieving its maximum radius of 256 times the present day value. In the process, Mercury, Venus and possibly Earth are destroyed. During these times, it is possible that Saturn’s moon Titan could achieve surface temperatures necessary to support life.’

[movies] Alien: A Film Franchise Based Entirely on Rape … some horror movie analysis from Cracked.com … ‘Admittedly the guys in the audience get off a little easy — gestation of a normal human takes 9 months and involves a lot of bloating, puking, and hormonal surges that generally make women miserable. But Kane’s man pregnancy results in a sore throat and the need to eat spaghetti. Note the “sore throat” comes as a result of an alien wang having been forced down his throat, which he fortunately does not remember. The birth, on the other hand, is another story…’

[life] Procrastinate Now and Panic Later … I’ve been procrastinating about posting this for so long that the meme is dead – better late than never.

[history] Supercalicontentious … fascinating look at the history of the nonsense word Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious … ‘When New York District Court judge Wilfred Feinberg issued his ruling, he threw up his hands at the thicket of spelling variations: “All variants of this tongue twister will hereinafter be referred to collectively as ‘the word,’ he wrote. “The word” had been used since the 1930s, according to sworn affidavits from two people who had grown up in New York. That, along with musical differences between the two songs, was enough for the case to be thrown out Shortly after Feinberg made his ruling, a Disney librarian uncovered a smoking gun: a use of the word, spelled “supercaliflawjalisticexpialadoshus,” in the March 10, 1931 issue of the Daily Orange…’

[funny] The Only Thing That Can Stop This Asteroid is Your Liberal Arts Degree … ‘Anyone can learn how to land a spacecraft on a rocky asteroid flying through space at twelve miles per second. I don’t need some pencilneck with four Ph.D’s, one-thousand hours of simulator time, and the ability to operate a robot crane in low-Earth orbit. I need someone with four years of broad-but-humanities-focused studies, three subsequent years in temp jobs, and the ability to reason across multiple areas of study. I need someone who can read The Bell Jar and make strong observations about its representations of mental health and the repression of women. Sure, you’ve never even flown a plane before, but with only ten days until the asteroid hits, there’s no one better to nuke an asteroid.’

[politics] Has Jeremy Hunt Resigned Yet? … ‘Sorry Adam, You’ve Got To Go…”

[funny] People Who Don’t Know How to Spell “Cologne” … ‘I smell like colon.’ [via Waxy]

[comics] Cheque That Bought Superman Rights Sold For Super Price … ‘Jerome Siegel and Joe Shuster from Cleveland were paid $130 (£82) for all the rights to Superman by Detective Comics, later known as DC Comics.’

[funny] Only A 30% Chance Of Cthulhu, Say Fracking Experts … disappointing news from the Daily Mash. All Hail Cthulhu!

Roy Hobbs, an engineer with Shell, said: “By my calculations the Shadow Lord Cthulhu currently rests nine leagues deeper than the shale gas so I’m sure it’ll be fine.

“Nevertheless, we have some of the best hooded, eyeless priests in the industry who will be on call 24 hours a day to maintain the sanctity of the work site through a series of incantations and holy artefacts, as well as checking for hard hats and security passes.”

[iphones] How to set up mail aliases on iPhone, iPad … useful, if fiddly tip – I’d not thought this was possible with Gmail on the iPhone.

[alanmoore] BBC News confirms Alan Moore is the “Greatest Living Englishman” and “Knows The Score” …

[go look] Weapon of Mass Instruction, An Art Car Tank That Gives Out Books … ‘Argentina-based Raul Lemesoff created the Arma De Instruccion Masiva (Weapon of Mass Instruction), a converted 1979 Ford Falcon formerly belonging to the Argentine armed forces, to distribute free books to people on the streets of Buenos Aires.’

[people] Interview with Larry David … good but not deep – David apparently avoids interviews …

Despite his success, he says he retains a pessimistic outlook. “Whenever something good happens to me, it’s usually followed by something terrible,” he told the Writers Guild of America recently, when accepting its Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for “outstanding contributions to the profession of the television writer”. “This [award] has got disaster and doom written all over it. I mean, it’s a great honour but it’s not worth getting hit by a bus.”

[simpsons] Matt Groening Reveals The Location Of Springfield … ‘Springfield was named after Springfield, Oregon. The only reason is that when I was a kid, the TV show “Father Knows Best” took place in the town of Springfield, and I was thrilled because I imagined that it was the town next to Portland, my hometown. When I grew up, I realized it was just a fictitious name. I also figured out that Springfield was one of the most common names for a city in the U.S. In anticipation of the success of the show, I thought, “This will be cool; everyone will think it’s their Springfield.” And they do.’

[london] Shit London … ‘These are photographs of the unintentional human comedy that surround us in the city. It’s the flotsam and jetsam of city life , the overlooked minutiae , the tragic , the grotesque and the basest of base. It’s the adapted posters , the dirty joke on the back of a van , the mispelt signs , the glory hole in the public loo , that weird shop down the end of your road and the knob graffiti strategically placed for maximum effect.’

[ipad] What’s On Warren Ellis’ iPad? … ‘Managing information is a big part of my job. So the topslice is: Twitterific, for Twitter. Flipboard. Reeder, for reading Google Reader (which is wired into Pinboard for saving links and Instapaper for reserving long articles for later). BBC news app. Guardian for iPad in Newsstand. Foreign Policy for iPad. The Economist in Newsstand. These are all daily, sometimes hourly checkpoints for me. Can’t do without them.’

[gambling] The Man Who Broke Atlantic City … a great longread for the weekend – the true story of a man who took on the casinos and won by playing their games/systems better than they do …

Largely as a result of Johnson’s streak, the Trop’s table-game revenues for April 2011 were the second-lowest among the 11 casinos in Atlantic City. Mark Giannantonio, the president and CEO of the Trop, who had authorized the $100,000-a-hand limit for Johnson, was given the boot weeks later. Johnson’s winnings had administered a similar jolt to the Borgata and to Caesars. All of these gambling houses were already hurting, what with the spread of legalized gambling in surrounding states. By April, combined monthly gaming revenue had been declining on a year-over-year basis for 32 months.

For most people, though, the newspaper headline told a happy story. An ordinary guy in a red cap and black hoodie had struck it rich, had beaten the casinos black-and-blue. It seemed a fantasy come true, the very dream that draws suckers to the gaming tables.

But that’s not the whole story either…

[books] What Dr. Seuss Books Were Really About … I have only recently discovered that Dr Seuss was a genius – better late than never!