Day: August 20, 2005

good ideas on how to write a song on fishing

• from fellow Monty Python Society alum Marc, Monty Python’s Holy Grail Ale (which I’ve actually seen online before, but which is worth the mention here)
• from Sharon, numbers station info. These I don’t think I was aware actually existed.
• backing up for a minute to speak again of Python, from Betty there’s a study of the Galaxy Song by Eric Idle (which reminds me, of course, of Estimating the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow). I wonder if Idle will have to revise the song now that it turns out we’re living in a barred spiral galaxy. As Poppy Z. Brite writes:
  

  I knew there was a restaurant at the end of the universe, but I didn’t know there was a bar at the center of the Milky Way. I want to go there and drink from a cup of stars.

  No worries, though. We’re still living in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm;

• from I don’t remember who, there’s this article , which in and of itself isn’t terribly interesting, unless you’re a carbon nanotube enthusiast (or a nanite with dreams of world conquest). But it is nice to see reference to a Monty Python sketch that actually serves as a pretty good metaphor for what the author is writing about. Usually — and I speak from experience, having looked these things up more than anyone ever should — quotes from Python, or pretty much any bit of popular culture, are just lame attempts to demonstrate how wacky the article or, worse, the author is.
• speaking of string, of course — string theory? — there’s this from Jeremy about ancient Incan computers
• and from a bunch of other MPS alums, there’s both Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Hazardous Dukes’ and Fear and Loathing in the Mystery Machine
• from defective yeti, a vision of sponsorship gone wild — that Dinty Moore sure does make some fine tastin’ quadractic equations!
• from Caitlin R. Kiernan, Christopher Walken for President (which, sadly, is a hoax) and this terrific picture (about which I even wrote a little poem)
• from Dave Barry, a news story about lab-grown meat
• from Whedonesque, an example of the Uncanny Valley effect at work, with this creepy production bust of Amy Acker
• from Generik, a bunch:
  

  the iPod Flea;
  a selection of bad album cover art, including this all-time party favorite;
  and the great and all-knowing Flying Spaghetti Monster

• from Boing Boing, a whole bunch:
  

  this 1966 toy “that can do permanent damage to the hearing of an adult;”
  these custom arcade tokens (including this one little Donnie Rumsfeld should never be allowed to play with in the first place);
  beer for kids, which is just plain disturbing;
  a gay Batman;
  even more about the “noodly master” including a $1-million-dollar challenge (in a similar vein to the challenge put forward by James Randi);
  and this terrific music video for the Avalanches‘ song “Frontier Psychiatrist” — which I first heard on a mix CD from Remi

• from Remi, two very cool short movies: the animated Super Tibetan Racer and the very funny Spin
• from Bookslut, the not terribly surprising revelation that Victoria “Posh Spice” Beckham has apparently never read a book;
• from Salon (subscription or sitting through the ads required), the news that Fiona Apple‘s long-shelved, much-leaked Extraordinary Machine album will finally see the light of day (though not necessarily in the same form some of us have heard already)
• from the Sci Fi Wire, news of two lawsuits. First, this one against the makers of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, including director James Cameron. I was particularly amused by this bit:
  

  The SF film, which starred Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger before he entered politics, was released in 1991 and featured a character that can transform its appearance, the trade paper reported.

  Oh, so that’s what T2 was about. I’m sure the readers of Sci Fi Wire would never know unless told that. And Schwarzenegger used to be in movies? Well who’d have thunk it? On its face, the suit might seem silly — are they going to sue every film in which shape-shifting creatures appear? It’s a long list — but one should keep in mind that Cameron also lost an earlier, similar lawsuit to Harlan Ellison over the first “Terminator” film. The second is this lawsuit against the makers of The Island, which doesn’t seem quite so silly on the face of it. In fact, when I originally saw the trailer for the recent film, the very first thing I thought of was Parts: The Clonus Horror. It’s been suggested that Hollywood should focus its energies on remaking bad movies instead of perfectly good ones, like it seems to do. And Clonus definitely was a bad movie. But apparently it wasn’t intended as a remake.

• moving on — because, yes, I have more links to foist on you…from Warren Ellis, there’s this upcoming Laurenn McCubbin photo show, which interprets Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. If I was going to be anywhere near Oakland in mid-September, I’d consider stopping by. Not just because I know these good people, or because it’s a terrific book, but because it looks genuinely interesting
• from Neil Gaiman comes an interesting auction for a good cause and the following amusing entry:
  

  Am in Providence for the day, helping settle my son into his new living quarters. I think he needs a copy of the Library of America H. P. Lovecraft as a housewarming present, so that when the geometries of the house become subtly wrong, and he finds himself having to rummage through old newspaper clippings to find out what happened to the apartment’s prior tenant, he’ll at least know that this is perfectly usual. That way he’ll also know to keep a diary explaining all this for us, and finally vanish… in a welter…. of italics and ellipses…

• from Nalo Hopkinson, a link to Shelley Jackson’s very interesting “Skin” project
• and finally, from who knows who — possibly some of the same people listed above, if only I could remember — comes the following:
  

  this story of a writer trying to turn fan fiction into something like a career
  Chaucer as rap: The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, yo!
  video-playing tombstones
  Britney’s Guide to Semiconductor Physics
  and God: A Career Retrospective