Month: August 2010

Tuesday various

  • I’ll bet Chelsea Clinton didn’t have wedding invites this adorably geeky. [via]
  • Oh my god! The triceratops may never have existed! That’s so–oh, wait, it might have been the younger form of another dinosaur that looks almost identical except for some cranial features? And, if it is the case that they’re one and the same, palaeontologists will just rename them both triceratops? Wow, what seemed like a stunning revelation is curiously a non-story by paragraph’s end.
  • Syfy Announces Development Slate of 7 New Scripted Projects. Only eighteen of them are Battlestar Galactica or Stargate spinoffs. [via] [Related: Cracked on the Syfy Channel.]
  • I think what I find most interesting and amusing about this whole recent Neil Gaiman/Todd McFarlane thing is that the judge’s decision is ultimately an argument over comics continuity.
  • And finally, as someone who, as part of his day job, spends a great deal of time hunting down potential authors and reviewers at universities, can I just say how right xkcd is?

The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Mondays

Ever have a day that felt weirdly almost dream-like, nothing especially surreal or anything like that, very mundane, but where you kept waiting for the surreal to rear its head, and where you didn’t want it to, you didn’t want to pinch yourself and wake up, because you knew you’d just have to go through the same sort of mundane day all over again, this time in reality? Well, that’s what today sort of felt like.

Yeah, I don’t really get it either.

Monday various

  • It’s just a normal Monday here in New York, but it’s apparently Picnic Day in parts of Australia!

    Picnic Day is a public holiday in the Northern Territory of Australia which takes place every year on the first Monday of August. It was originally declared a public holiday to enable Darwin’s railway workers to go to Adelaide River for a picnic.

    I kind of love the specificity of that, the idea that an entire holiday sprung up just because that’s the day these workers had off from work. And come on, how can you not like a holiday called Picnic Day?

  • Justin Bieber has written a memoir. This is just ridiculous on so many levels.
  • Wait. Now Frank Miller worries about looking silly?
  • If Titanic II was intended as a cheap direct-to-video sequel to the James Cameron movie, that would be weird and maybe worth talking about. But since it’s just about a ship called Titanic II — and is really just your run-of-the-mill crappy direct-to-video disaster movie — it’s really not.
  • And finally…

    For the past 20 years, scientists at the Farallones have been documenting more than just puffin nests and shark breeding around the windswept archipelago 27 miles west of the Golden Gate. They’ve been keeping a daily log of their dreams, which tend to be eerily similar.

    Apparently, it’s called “day residue.” [via]