- Painless Protein Scaffold Lets Cavity-Ridden Teeth Re-Grow From the Inside Out [via]
- The Complete Harry Potter Story In One Comic [via]
- Dolce & Gabbana in dock over ‘killer jeans’. What William Gibson calls “The life-threatening labor required to ma[k]e the jeans of people who don’t do physical labor look somewhat as if they did.”
- Can you tell the difference between these Letterman and Leno monologue jokes? I sure couldn’t. [via]
- And finally, Betty has an odd, random thought:
…namely that if a zombie apocalypse were to suddenly erupt, whatever clothes I’m wearing right now could very well be what I’m shambling around biting people in forever, or at least until someone gets a clear head shot. This idea especially tends to occur when I’m wearing a t-shirt that would be just a little too apt in the circumstances. Like my Farscape “Irreversibly Contaminated” shirt. Or the one that says, “Life Is Short. Read Fast.” Or my Monty Python and the Holy Grail pajama pants. (“It’s only a flesh wound!”) In this fashion, I manage to simultaneously amuse myself and kinda creep myself out.
books
Tuesday various
- Abercrombie & Fitch will pay Jersey Shore cast to stop wearing its clothes. How have I gone this far without ever directly encountering either? (And how can I continue this pattern of unexpected grace?)
- Now you can watch The Big Lebowski with a bunch of random people on Facebook. I am intrigued by this…but not at all interested in participating. I’ve watched — and riffed on — movies with friends online, and enjoyed that experience. But Facebook’s system seems designed mostly to send money to Facebook, which is something I’m considerably less interested in doing.
- Angry Robot’s WorldBuilder, on the other hand, seems like a much more intriguing communal experience. It’s, again, not one I’m likely to participate in myself, just because I don’t tend to seek out secondary worlds like this — fan fiction, role-playing games, etc. — but there’s something potentially very cool (and profitable, obviously) about a publisher embracing and facilitating this kind of thing right out of the gate. [via]
- Aled Lewis’s mashups of historical paintings with ’80s adventure games. There’s only a few of these here, but they’re really quite amusing. [via]
- And finally, Whiny Tea Partiers feel threatened by Jane Yolen:
Why all the fuss? I believe it’s because Jane explained what was wrong in clear, straightforward language — a knack that way too many liberal pundits have lost. If exposing children to books and literacy is good, then what Ron Johnson is doing to schools and libraries is bad. If children being cared for in a public health clinic is good, then what Ron Johnson is doing to healthcare funding is bad. Johnson tacitly admits that these things are good, and that the general public sees them as good, by using them as props for his photo session. He wants the benefit of being associated with them. Then, in real life, he does his best to trash them. Simple.
What venues like Moe Lane and WTAQ News Talk are really saying is that Jane Yolen made them feel bad. She got through to them. They can’t really argue with her, so they throw sh*t in her general direction, but still: she got through to them.
Tuesday is not the new Monday
I seem to be feeling a lot better today. Not quite 100% — I’m still feeling the effects of allergies and, occasionally, I think, remnants of those allergy meds — but much better than I was last night, when I went to be around 10:30 with a box of tissues beside my head. (It was actually really annoying, knowing that I could make it all go away, the sneezing and sniffling and itchiness, with just one little pill, but the trade-off of vague but persistent unease just isn’t worth it.)
Other than the allergies, it was a pretty normal day. I got some things accomplished at work; I finished reading a really nice book. I may go to sleep a little early again tonight, but overall Tuesday was a lot better than Monday.
Wednesday various
- The slow (but perhaps inevitable) death of Borders:
In 2001, Borders would go on to partner with Amazon.com, allowing the online book retailer to handle their internet sales for them, if you can believe it. There’s a photo of Jeff Bezos and then-Borders president and CEO Greg Josefowicz shaking hands to celebrate the partnership. Josefowicz has weatherman hair and a broad smile, and he’s beaming past the camera with the cocksure giddiness of a guy who thinks he just got rid of all his problems because he sold his dumb old cow for a handful of really cool magic beans. But when you pull your eyes away from Josefowicz’s superheroic chin, you notice that Jeff Bezos is smiling directly into the camera with keen shark eyes. His smile is more relaxed, a little more candid than Josefowicz’s photo-op-ready grin. It’s the face of someone who’s thinking, I finally got you, you son of a bitch. [via]
- The slow (and ongoing) death of Wikipedia:
After years at the top result on practically every Google search, Wikipedia has lost its urgency. Kids who were in 8th grade in 2004 have gone through their entire high school and college careers consulting (i.e. plagiarizing) Wikipedia; to them, Wikipedia is a dull black box—editing it seems just a bit more possible than making revisions to Pride and Prejudice. [via]
- Apes From the Future, Holding a Mirror to Today:
But it has to be said that the movie science fiction of the original Apes era, with its now laughably primitive effects, in some ways benefited from its technical crudeness: the spectacle rarely got in the way of the ideas, and when the ideas are engaging, as they are in the first “Planet of the Apes†and “Escape,†the simple effects function like sketches, indications of some greater, not fully realized, narrative and intellectual architecture.
- The Playboy Club as female empowerment? O RLY?
Perhaps the good news is that we’ve now reached the point where it’s considered smart marketing to push a feminist spin on your show about Playboy Bunnies. Perhaps we’ve reached the point, in fact, where you have to try to fit your show into a “we have smart and strong women characters” mold. (Earlier in the tour, we had a panelist argue that Entourage had some of the strongest female characters on television, which raised eyebrows similarly.) Perhaps it’s good news that strength, like sex, presumably sells. Just don’t look for it here.
- And finally, a little late linking this, but: Remembering legendary Cleveland rock critic Jane Scott [via]
Tuesday various
- Orange goo near remote Alaska village ID’d as eggs. Well that’s one question answered… [via]
- Help provide free copies of Slaughterhouse-Five to students at book-banning high school. I sent them five bucks myself last night.
- Are smart people getting smarter? (See also: Everything Bad Is Good for You.) [via]
- Stan Lee is determined to create new superheroes for every man, woman, and child on Earth, isn’t he?
- And finally, How to Build a Newsroom Time Machine. This is kind of wonderful…even if the notion that they’ll need to teach this kind of course again twenty years from now is kind of predicated on the idea that there will be newsrooms twenty years from now. [via]