- Roger Ebert on trivia:
The fatal flaw in the concept of trivia is that it mistakes information for knowledge. There is no end to information. Some say the entire universe is made from it, when you get right down to the bottom, under the turtles. There is, alas, quite a shortage of knowledge. I think I will recite this paragraph the next time I’m asked a trivia question.
- In all the talk about whether or not Google should be allowed to scan massive numbers of books and make them available in electronic form — a matter that’s still not yet resolved, due to pending litigation — there’s one question I haven’t seen raised a lot: can Google even do this well? There’s some evidence here to suggest not. Certainly, even if Google Book Search goes ahead, it may need some significant work. [via]
- Mad Max fan builds replica Interceptor, moves to Outback. I’d make a Thunderdome joke, but I think we’re all trying to get beyond Thunderdome.
- Police baffled as dozens of “suicidal” cows throw themselves off cliff in the Alps. Warning, there are some images (not terribly graphic or close-up, but potentially distressing) of the dead cows. [via]
- And finally, given that I’m taking tomorrow off, I find it pretty easy to sing the praises of the four-day workweek. I wonder if I could broach the idea of my telecommuting one day a week. Most everything I do is via e-mail, and working on manuscripts that are delivered via e-mail, and there are even some things — most recently checking if a video was on our YouTube channel, which ironically is blocked at the office — that I can only do at home. I don’t have any serious expectations that it could happen, but it’s an interesting thought. [via]
various
Wednesday various
- Patton Oswalt on the joy of failure:
I never want to get to a point where I feel like I’m done. Or like I got it. You always want to have that, “Oh shit, this wall just collapsed, and there’s a whole room behind it to explore.â€
I posted a quote from the interview just the other day, but I think the whole thing’s worth checking out, even if you’re not immediately familiar with Oswalt’s comedy or acting. I also like what he says about the internet:
We haven’t seen it yet, but there’s going to be a generation that comes up where the new trend will be complete anonymity. It’ll be cool to have never posted anything online, never commented, never opened a webpage or a MySpace, never Twittered. I think everyone in the future is going to be allowed to be obscure for 15 minutes. You’ll have 15 minutes where no one is watching you, and then you’ll be shoved back onto your reality show. I think Andy Warhol got it wrong.
I’ve read mixed reviews of Oswalt’s new movie, Big Fan, but I’ve heard a couple of really intelligent interviews with him and director Robert D. Siegel, so I’m eager to check it out.
- Fox rebooting Fantastic Four. This seems to be the new thinking in Hollywood: if your last attempt was a financial or critical failure — and the 2007 Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer movie was arguably a little of both — don’t even wait, just re-boot the whole thing. Studios used to wait a respectable few years, time enough to slink away and let the shame and stink of failure dissipate, but that’s happening less and less. Eight years separate the abject failure of Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin and Christopher Nolan’s reboot of the franchise with Batman Begins, for instance, while only five years separate Ang Lee’s Hulk and Edward Norton’s (not so incredible) version. The gap is narrowing — and with the recently proposed Battlestar Galatica re-reboot and this Fantastic Four news, the gap seems to be disappearing altogether. As Gerry Canavan jokes, “In the future franchises will be rebooted before the first film even comes out.”
Still, I guess one way of looking at this is that Hollywood is now committed to remaking movie franchises over and over again, no matter how many times it takes, until, finally, they don’t suck.
Although, as the AV Club points out, this may just be fallout from the recent Disney acquisition of Marvel:
Before Marvel settled down with Disney, it had tumultuous affairs with several other studios. With Sony, for instance, it had a baby called the Spider-Man series. And Marvel’s time with Fox produced several offspring, including film series based around the X-Men, Daredevil, and the Fantastic Four. By the terms of that arrangement, Fox has the rights to make movies around those characters (plus Fantastic Four hanger-on the Silver Surfer) in perpetuity so long as it doesn’t stop making them.
This too-soon reboot, then, might not go anywhere or even be expected to go anywhere. It may just be a ploy to hold on to some rights that would otherwise revert to the Mouse.
- Speaking of the Disney/Marvel merger, while I think it’s too soon to know for sure what (if anything) this will mean for the future of Marvel, I tend to agree with Mark Evanier’s take:
This isn’t about publishing. Disney didn’t say, “Gee, it would be great to own a comic book company!” They could have started fifty comic book companies for four billion clams. This is about characters and properties which can be exploited in many forms. The publishing of comic books may or may not always be one of them…..[T]he future of Spider-Man has very little to do with the Spider-Man comic book. That hasn’t mattered for a long time.
And while I tried my own hand at some Marvel/Disney mashups two days ago, I think I prefer these more artistic ones. [via]
- I worry that some future journalism students will see this story and wonder, “what’s the big deal with paying your sources?” [via]
- And finally, some terrific photographs of the same spots in New York City, composited into a single shot based on similarity. It’s a neat trick. [via]
Wednesday various
- Jack of all trades, master of none? The people who multitask the most are the ones who are worst at it. I’d post some further thoughts on this, but I’ve got about fifteen dozen other things I need to do right now.
- Zack Handlen looks for meaning in the films of Michael Bay. An unenviable task, to be sure:
[Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen] is, by any sensible measurement, a lousy piece of work. But it has a personality behind it. That personality is childish, shallow, and has some definite issues with women, but every time Bay frames up those giants staring to the heavens, I don’t have a doubt in my mind that the son of a bitch means it. I sort of wish I could mean it too. Because sometimes the shit gets real, and that’s when winners have to fuck the prom queen, since fate rarely calls on us on a moment of our choosing to stop a giant asteroid from killing everyone we love.
- Jonesing for some poetry? Swindle is “an automated daily aggregator of contemporary poetry,” pulling in poems from literary journals, magazines, and other RSS feeds. Its creator describes it (at Bookslut) as “a little like Google News, if Google News had been built by a virtually unpublished poet using a second-string web server and a three-year-old book about web programming.”
- Meanwhile, on a somewhat related note, A Brief History of Appropriative Writing. This was interesting, more so than I expected actually, though I still have issues with appropriation without attribution or at least passing acknowledgment. Artists borrow or steal all the time — that’s the nature of art — but it’s good form, if nothing else, to acknowledge the debt where it exists. [via]
- And finally, while I wouldn’t necessarily mind seeing Jack Harkness on Doctor Who again — and I think the ending of Children of Earth definitely made that a workable possibility — I definitely don’t want to see the two shows combined. Doctor Who can go into dark places — by its nature, there’s few places it can’t go — but it’s still at it’s heart a smart adventure show and at least partly aimed at kids. Torchwood, on the other hand, is best when it’s at its darkest…even it it’s at its worst when it’s just being dark (read: sexualized and “adult”) for its own sake. I don’t want the Doctor to be Torchwood‘s comic relief, any more than I want Captain Jack to be a dose of dreariness in Doctor Who. John Barrowman fits well into both worlds, but I’m not convinced the two worlds would fit well inside each other.
Then there’s The Longest Poem in the World, which, at about 4,000 verses a day, “aggregat[es] real-time public twitter updates and select[s] those that rhyme.” It’s an intriguing project, although any resemblance to good poetry is probably accidental. (There’s something reminiscent of flarf about these “verses.” I wonder if any of my tweets have ever turned up there. [via]
Tuesday various
- J.R. Blackwell on high school:
If my life now was like high school, if my “real life” as they say, was at all like the lack of freedom and harassment I experienced while in high school, then things wouldn’t be going well for me at all. Perhaps then, that is how high school prepares you for real life – but showing you what you have to work hard to stay away from – how your earning power gives you freedoms that if you lost, you would lose your freedoms as well. Perhaps high school is a warning for the young mind – fail, and you will go someplace very much like here, except in that place, there isn’t a prom.
- Frederik Pohl, who at 89 was just awarded his high school diploma would seem to agree:
Pohl speculates that perhaps, if he had finished high school, he might have gone on to spend the rest of his career at American Car and
Foundry, instead of writing multiple science fiction classics.”Just quit school, kids!
- A contest to pick the funniest joke and, surprisingly, none of them are terrible? What are the odds? Obviously your mileage may vary, and some — like the winner, I think — are maybe more drolly amusing that laugh-aloud funny, but in any “ten best” list, you expect at least some real clunkers. [via]
- Just how ridiculous are the “birthers”? Well… [via]
- And finally, while I debate buying this
G.I. Joe Complete Collector’s Set (no, seriously. I am honestly tempted), here’s…
Monday various
- Need a little extra bees and honey in your sky rocket? Cockney rhyming slang to be added as an option to some East London ATMs. Silly merchant bankers!
- An interesting article on the new graphic novel version of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, although I’m not so sure about the whole “comic books are the anti-book” sentiment that seems to be running through it. [via] It may be time for me to revisit Bradbury’s original novel, especially in light of the man’s own sometimes puzzling pronouncements about it in recent years. I love Ray Bradbury maybe more than any other writer, and it’s possible he’s earned his curmudgeonly ways, but it can be a lot easier to love the words than the man.
- Still, the man’s an absolute darling compared to, say, Lord of the Flies author William Golding [via]
- Dear Tom Ridge: too damn little, too damn late. I didn’t even like you all that much when you were my governor.
- And finally, John Scalzi has been getting some flack in certain circles for his write-up of design flaws in the Star Wars universe, but the man isn’t wrong. (Even the six-year-old me, who can’t help but pester, “Well, maybe the Sarlaac isn’t native to Tatooine,” has to accept that.)