- Robots with synthetic skin? [via]
- They don’t build safes like they used to.
- Underground chefs? I had no idea, but apparently, there are more than a few. [via]
- If you’re going to hack an electronic voting machine, this is the way to do it. [via]
- And finally, the YouTube Time Machine. [via]
letters
Tuesday various
- The United States of Star Wars. I apprently live in/on Coruscant, or at least in its suburbs.
- The strange and sad life of science fiction author F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre. [via]
- Corn syrup manufacturers want to change the name to corn sugar. This is actually a pretty canny (if cynical) move, trying to capitalize on the mistaken belief that lots of sugar is okay for you, in whatever quantity, as long as it’s not that nasty, unhealthy high fructose corn syrup. If nothing else, this would confuse the issue for consumers even more. [via]
- And yet where, might I ask, are the actual Dalek blueprints in question?
- And finally, it’s Zombie Week at Tor.com! Though it is possible to take this whole zombie thing too far…
Thursday various
- So now it’s not “what the founding fathers meant” but “what the mid-nineteeth-century fathers meant”? Look, Iowa GOP, it seems to me that, if the best you can come up with is a version of a constitutional amendment that was never actually ratified, you’re grasping at straws. [via]
- Bloomsbury will e-publish a one-million-page Churchill archive. I’m imagining some lonely archivist shouting, “But it’s one million and one pages!” and being told to quietly get rid of the offending page. But that’s probably just me.
- “Carpe diem” doesn’t mean “seize the day“? Man, Robin Williams was a terrible teacher! [via]
- Man, more rejection letters should be like this. (Conversely, less of them should be like this.)
- And finally, first this, now this. I have got to start riding the subway more often!
Tuesday various
- I don’t imagine this is going to end well — FlashForward fans plan to fall over and act unconscious:
According to Variety, fans of the show will assemble in front of ABC network and affilate offices in New York, L.A., Chicago, Detroit and Atlanta on June 10 and for 2 minutes and 17 seconds are going to pretend to be passed out—just like the 2-minute-17-second blackouts on FlashForward.
- Am I the only one who thinks “celebrate originality” is maybe a weird tagline to an ad that basically just repurposes the Star Wars cantina scene?
- I’m not sure I agree with everything Christopher Miller suggests on how to write a rejection slip, but I am amused by his contention that “rejection slips are the most widely and attentively read short literary genre.” [via]
- Warren Ellis suggests asking these important questions when writing:
1) What does that character WANT?
2) What does that character need to do to GET what they want?
3) What are they prepared to DO to get what they want?
- And finally, a fascinating profile of Haim Saban, still perhaps best known as the man who (curse him) brought us Mighty Morphin Power Rangers [via]:
At twenty, while he was serving in the Israeli Defense Forces, Saban made his entry into show business. He told the owner of a swimming pool where a band played that he was a member of a far better band. Saban didn’t really play an instrument, and he didn’t know a band. But he found one, and took the businessman to a club to hear it, claiming that he wasn’t playing because he had hurt his arm. He named a price that was double what he had learned the band was making, and then approached the band members with his offer and his condition: let him join. “They said, ‘For double the money, we’ll figure the whole thing out.’ †He eventually learned to play the bass guitar a little, but occasionally during the first few months he performed with both his speaker and his microphone turned off.
Tuesday various
- An inspiring profile of Roger Ebert and his struggles with losing his voice (and food, drink, strength) to cancer and how his life has changed since then. [via]
- Apparently, we were once this close to Israeli President Albert Einstein.
- Oh man, why did no one tell me yesterday was International Grover Appreciation Day?
- I think there’s an argument to be made that new and valuable art can emerge from appropriation, but wholesale lifting of entire pages without acknowledgment is still plagiarism and, therefore, still wrong. That much seems pretty clear-cut to me. [via]
- And finally, if I’d know this was what the Olympics was like — “Try to imagine Pegasus mating with a unicorn and the creature that they birth….I somehow tame it and ride it into the sky in the clouds and sunshine and rainbows. That’s what it feels like.” — I’d have been watching from the beginning.