Hey! Matthew Baldwin stole my idea!
Okay, okay, so I’m not the only one to ever think of it, but still. I’d just like to point out, because it may never happen again, that I was four years ahead of The Morning News.
Found via Backwards City.
Month: October 2005
An extended DVD, a sequel, and now a TV show? I don’t know about you, but I think the first movie alone was more Sin City than anyone would ever need.
Linkpharm:
- Honor Monty Python: promote surreal humor. There’s some other great stuff here, too. My own favorites are George Clinton and Pi equals
- Speaking of pi: a terrific music video from Hard ‘n Phirm, with the digits of pi sung in harmony to the 190th decimal place. [via]
- More music: “Baby Got Back” as folk song [via]
- More video:
- Men in Coats, a comedy magic act [via]
- the aptly titled Tom Cruise Kills Oprah [via]
- Romance of the Jedi (I think this one may give the recut Shining trailer a run for its money) [via]
- More music and video: All your base are belong to…well, Queen, apparently, at least according to this terrific Flash mash-up of AYB with “Bohemian Rhapsody” [via]
- More weird translations:
- the lyrics to the theme to Sesame Street translated into Klingon [via]
- English As She Is Spoke vs. Babelfish! [via]
- More magic: David Copperfield to ‘magic’ girl pregnant. You just can’t make things like that up. [via]
- Serenity in 2000 words or less [via]
- Drive-through video stores [via]
- How to make a secret bookshelf door [via]
- The worst scifi sentences ever published and a few thousand science fiction covers [via]
- More cover stories:
- the American Society of Magazine Editors’ top 40 magazine covers of the last four decades [via]
- a modest proposal for no more author photographs [via]
- I’m okay with that, as long as this gets to be the jacket photo of Tom Delay’s tell-all book from prison.3
- TV news euphemisms [via]
- Paradise Lost as a movie? No word yet on which role Keanu Reeves will play. [via]
- The Simpsons neologisms1 and The Simpsons in Arabic [via]
- Some cityscapes:
- San Francisco made out of jelly [via]
- Reinventing Newark, visions of the city that never was [via]
- the beautiful Europe Underground [via]
- Cities of the Future [via]
- Edible moon buggies? [via]
- 22 comic panels that always work [via]
- More comics:
- More life imitating art:
- Some life becoming art5 [via]
- And some life life just not getting this art thing at all (more on the painting in question)
- Video-game developers are, on the whole, white heterosexual men with a college education. While it’s sad that other groups are under-represented in the field, is anyone really surprised?
- Surf and turf all in one package: Mysterious ‘half-animal, half-plant’ marine microbe discovered by Japanese researchers [via]
- the Skeptics Annotated Bible [via]
1 Fake words.
2 There’s just something inherently silly about a character with the last name “von Doom,” isn’t there?
3Okay, okay. I’ll settle for him just going to prison. Or for him just going away. Can’t we at least swing that?
4 Gaiman has more to say on the subject here:
I’ve noticed a few times in the last decade that Science Fiction, as a body of literature, has been at its most accurate as a predictive medium in the places that nobody knew or expected or imagined — often in the places that people weren’t even certain at the time were Proper SF. Every now and again I find myself reading the papers and realising that Ballard wrote it already, or Dick.
On the whole, I don’t think science fiction is too reliable a predictive tool, and I suspect it gets just as much, if not more, wrong than it does right. (For instance, not to bust The Sun‘s bubble, but I don’t know that William Gibson was the first to suggest the Internet, or even that the vision of it in Neuromancer much resembles what we have today.) Gibson’s “The Gernsback Contiuum” is a powerful reminder of why we should probably be thankful that sci-fi often gets the future wrong, but it is still interesting to note where and how our present resembles (or doesn’t) the science fiction of the past.
5 Although, when I die, I think I’d prefer to maybe go with something like this. [via]
Out of boredom, and in part inspired by this post from Generik, I’ve set up a new blog for captioning pictures. Everybody’s invited to make with the funny. And if you have no clue what this whole capping thing is all about, you could do worse than to check out Inventing Situations and Mr. Grant’s Capper National Laboratory.
The Friday Random 10, “Guess the Lyric, Win a Kewpie Doll*” Edition:
The back porch where we first kissed is where we said so long[“The Way” by Scott Miller & the Commonwealth, guessed by HilleviW]Don’t put your faith in love, my boy, my father said to me[“Lemon Tree” by Peter, Paul & Mary, guessed by John]The guy’s got a nose that’s four foot long[“Nosey Joe” by the Brian Setzer Orchestra, guessed by HilleviW]- Luego de tu adios senti todo mi dolor
The paper holds their folded faces to the floor[“Brain Damage” by Pink Floyd, guessed by Betty]They say that all good things must end some day[“A Summer Song” by Chad and Jeremy, guessed by HilleviW]The kiss my lover brings, she brings to me[“And I Love Her” by the Beatles, guessed by Nyssa]And now I understand what you tried to say to me[“Vincent (Starry Starry Night)” by Don McLean, guessed by John]Well, Shakespeare, he’s in the alley with his pointed shoes and his bells[“Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again” by Bob Dylan, guessed by Nyssa]It’s at times such as this she’d be tempted to spit if she wasn’t so ladylike[“All This Useless Beauty” by Elvis Costello, guessed by HilleviW]
* If kewpie doll is unavailable, satisfaction of a job well done will be substituted.