Month: November 2005

• Words:
  • The Guardian’s Top 20 geek novels [via]
  • Literature Map [via]
  • Dean Koontz: racist?
  • J.T. LeRoy: non-existent? [via]
  • Gwenda Bond’s Personal Best list of the soon-to-be-no-more Sci Fiction
  • Wanna be on a Hard Case Crime cover? [via]
  • Comics After Katrina [via]
• Pictures:
  • Carved eggs [via]

  More carved eggs [via]

  • Monet’s Land of the Lost paintings [via]
  • The New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest [via]
  • Cartoon character skeletal structures [via]
  • Dream houses [via]
  • Stupid Comics¹ [via]
  • Bob Marley and Yoda
  • Tom Judd’s Everyday [via]
• Movies:
  • The Call of Cthulu as silent movie [via]
  • Watching all six Star Wars movies simultaneously [via]
  • “War Photographer” (Quicktime) [via²]
  • The Ultimate Star Trek Collection — for just $4,000 (or $2,500 with Amazon’s discount)! [via]
• Music:
  • 700 Hobo Names³ (mp3) [via]
  • “My 36 Favorite Punk Songs” [via]
  • The Broken Record –“pieces together musical tidbits from hundreds of vintage children’s records, creating crazy new songs with a modern feel.” [via]
  • Paul McCartney to beam concert into space — I guess so Martians can now be bored by his last few albums, too
• Science!:
  • Death by Caffeine⁴ [via]
  • Physics of cow-tipping [via]
  • Creator of the Flying Spaghetti Monster gets an $80,000 book advance
  • LED-equipped, battery-powered faucet turns water a luminescent blue [via]
  • “Non-lethal” laser rifles [via]
  • Cocaine traces detected in River Thames [via]
  • New lemur named after John Cleese — the Avahi cleesei
  • Leap second proposal sparks row⁵ [via]
  • Top 10 Missing Links [via]
  • On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets: An Empirical Study [via]
  • Possible federal regulation of quantum computers — although maybe that can wait until they’re actually invented? [via]
  • The Collier Classification System for Very Small Objects [via]
  • A Stanford University study finds that men and women see humor very differently.⁶ [via]
  • Approach to the Black Hole at the Galactic Core (Quicktime) [via]
  • A User’s Guide to Time Travel, plus Being Invisible, the Antigravity Underground, and 8 Super Powers [via]
• Quotes:
  • “All good horror stories are metaphors…” Anita Gates (registration or BugMeNot required)
  • “If it made the six of us laugh, that was it. End of conversation.” – Terry Gilliam
  • “”I was thinking of retiring but what would I do? Probably just travel.” – Michael Palin
  • “Those bastards! Why they always gotta be compromising the vision of a subversive cinematic rebel like [Joel] Schumacher?” – Nathan Rabin
  • “There was a show. Not that many people saw it in broad terms, but it was beloved. Full of humor, love and pain. And though it was a hard-sell emsemble piece with no huge names it in, it got made into a (roughly) 40 million dollar pic — and with the cast intact. That doesn’t happen a lot, but it should, and it did with this film. That’s right. I just cannot wait to see RENT. – Joss Whedon
  • “Drip, drip, drip — each drop of functionality painfully and expensively squeezed into your living room, every time you want to do something you used to do for free. That’s not a business-model. That’s a urinary tract infection.” – Cory Doctorow
• Other:
  • Maunsell Army Sea Forts [via]
  • Trading a paperclip for a house [via]
  • 66 Ways to Be Annoying at Monopoly [via]
  • Katazukue: the tidy table — with built-in conveyor belt [via]
  • The E-Mail Time Capsule [via]
  • Baby turtle found in Folgers coffee⁷ [via]

³ Remi describes it, pretty accurately I think, as “Vikings vs. Demons in the arena of ROCK!”

³ Just FYI: the mp3 is about an hour long, so keep that in mind before listening. Also of interest: a collection of images inspired by the list.

⁴ What they don’t appear to say — and this leads me to wonder about the results — is in what time span this much caffeine would be fatal. x-number of cups one right after the other, gulped down as fast as you can go? x-number of cups over the course of a day? It definitely can’t be x-number of cups of coffee over the course of a lifetime, because then Starbucks would be the single greatest mass murderer on the planet.

⁵ “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.” – Douglas Adams

⁶ Is that why there were usually more guys than girls at Monty Python Society meetings? Or is it just because we took all the good roles?

Conservative Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson told citizens of a Pennsylvania town that they had rejected God by voting their school board out of office for supporting “intelligent design” and warned them Thursday not to be surprised if disaster struck.

If ever there was an argument against “intelligent design,” Pat Robertson is it.^*