- I think I’m going to make a movie called Vaguely Historical People Killing Things and Shouting at Each Other.
- You know, Jeff VanderMeer is probably right: “in another 40 years lots of folks are gonna be laughing at lots of stuff we think works just fine now.”
- John Seavey makes the argument that Heroes is actually the best Watchmen adaptation ever. Yeah, I’m just not seeing it.
- “French celebrity philosopher” (how’s that for a title!) Bernard-Henri Lévy has come under fire recently for quoting a philosopher who never existed. [via]
- And finally, I didn’t watch this year’s Super Bowl, not even for the ads nor the stirring triumph of the New Orleans Saints. So I luckily missed this Dodge advertisement, though I got a general vibe from the internets that there was sexism aplenty that evening. The internets, they did not lie. So it’s nice to see someone parody the ad so skillfully, simply by reversing the genders.
various
Tuesday various
- An inspiring profile of Roger Ebert and his struggles with losing his voice (and food, drink, strength) to cancer and how his life has changed since then. [via]
- Apparently, we were once this close to Israeli President Albert Einstein.
- Oh man, why did no one tell me yesterday was International Grover Appreciation Day?
- I think there’s an argument to be made that new and valuable art can emerge from appropriation, but wholesale lifting of entire pages without acknowledgment is still plagiarism and, therefore, still wrong. That much seems pretty clear-cut to me. [via]
- And finally, if I’d know this was what the Olympics was like — “Try to imagine Pegasus mating with a unicorn and the creature that they birth….I somehow tame it and ride it into the sky in the clouds and sunshine and rainbows. That’s what it feels like.” — I’d have been watching from the beginning.
Monday various
- So first the Discovery Channel created this commercial, which was actually kind of awesome. It was set to the tune of a traditional campire song (which was itself set to the tune of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Heart and Soul”). And then Randall Munroe created this webcomic, riffing off the commerical, which was itself pretty awesome. And now that awesomeness has gone one step further. Honestly, where else are you going to see Neil Gaiman singing while bouncing on a trampoline with his daughter? Or Cory Doctorow in full red cape and goggles regalia? This is just seriously fun. [via]
- Meanwhile, here’s the Ultimate Graphic Novel (in six panels). I don’t think they missed anything. [via]
- While I’m on the subject of comics and artwork, check out Derek Chatwood’s terrific illustrations. The short stories that accompany the drawings are worth reading, too! [via]
- Apparently, you can remove scratches from your DVDs using just a banana and some toothpaste. Time to MacGyver up! [via]
- And finally, the world’s luckiest sports fan? [via]
Thursday various
- “I will come and find them and kill them so dead I’ll murder their ancestors!” Yeah, that sounds like Harlan Ellison.
I don’t think he’s being completely unreasonable, despite the typical fervor of his invective. The publisher might have been tempted to rewrite his blurb, and I don’t think it should have done so without his permission. (We edit author endorsements at work all the time, usually for length, but also for other reasons, like if it repeats words or phrases used in other blurbs or in the book’s description. But we always ask the endorser’s permission first.) But I do note with amusement, as others do at the link above, that Ellison’s alter-only-under-pain-of-death endorsement contains a spelling error.
- Some rookie mistakes: advice for first-time novelists. [via]
- At the beginning of the year, I made the odd — and, given that I work in publishing, probably self-defeating — pledge not to buy any new books in 2010. I did this for one reason: to compel me to get through the mountain of as yet unread books that I already own. (“Mountain” here being a relative term.) Yet it seems like every day, there’s a new book — or, in this case, set of books — that I’d like to own. I may just have to break down and declare this pledge, this moratorium on buying new books, a failure. [via]
- Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Yeah, but only the boring stuff before 1877. [via]
- And finally, How to Report the News. [via]
Wednesday various
- Number 9, number 9… I’m in there somewhere.
- Dear god, it’s a pig on wheels!
- Noel Murray:
It doesn’t take much tweaking to turn a great idea for a TV series into something ridiculous. Want to make a show about a diverse cross-section of humanity forging a new society? Or about race relations in Manhattan? Or the dangers of humanizing automatons? Slant it the wrong way, and you may end up with Gilligan’s Island, Diff’rent Strokes, or Small Wonder.
His whole review of the latter’s 1st season DVD set is interesting — though it will come as no surprise to anyone who saw the show growing up (or who has been forced to cap it regularly on HCC) that it’s pretty terrible.
- Is it just me or does the Authors Guild’s argument here seem to be: “we could lose, so we won’t fight, because even if we won, we’d have to keep fighting, so we’ll just give up”? Frankly, I think I may be with Ursula K. Le Guin on this one.
- And finally, you wouldn’t think an episode of the ’90s Hollywood Squares would be particularly funny, but I think this one’s definitely worth it, just for Gilbert Gottfried [via]: