- The Amityville Horror house is up for sale. Anybody wanna go halfsies? [via]
- Well, there goes my dream of paying for the house by wearing a costume on Hollywood Boulevard. Are sights like this now really a thing of the past?
- And I guess I also won’t be able to afford a spot aboard this $1.1 billion “sea castle”. (In all seriousness, though, divorced from the politics and ridiculous price of the thing, a part of me does think the whole thing looks very cool.) [via]
- Maybe I can get a job pretending to be a foreign investor in Japan. [via]
- And finally, if I do, maybe I’ll be able to count myself among the luckiest people on Earth:
Well, maybe not. [via]
movies
Tuesday various
- Want another reason not to like 3D movies? The glasses are filthy!
- Speaking of going to the movies, should we really be encouraging people to use their phones in the theater?
- Continuing a theme…that giant octopus scene in Goonies? So glad they cut it. [via]
- Charles Schulz’s Teen Comics [via]
- And finally, the Internets Celebrities on “Stadium Status” [via]
Stadium Status from Internets Celebrities on Vimeo.
Monday various
- Two from Roger Ebert: on racial intolerance and on why he tweets.
- On the set of David Lynch’s Dune with Sean Young. Weirdly fascinating. I wonder if it’s at all worth revisiting that movie. I keep thinking I’ll re-read the book, but I think I’m worried it will just encourage me to read them all. [via]
- Charlie Stross on the iPad [via]:
The iPad doesn’t feel like a computer. It feels like a magic book — like the ancestor of the Young Lady’s Primer in Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. It’s a book with hypertext everywhere, moving pictures and music and an infinity of content visible through its single morphing page. The sum is much weirder than the aggregate of its parts. Criticizing the iPad for not doing Netbook-or laptop-like things is like criticising an early Benz automobile for not having reins and a bale of hay for the horses: it’s a category error.
- The Sea of Galilee is out of fish. [via]
- And finally,inside the Vatican’s private library. [via]
Body shots
I had a pretty decent, if largely uneventful, Saturday. I got a little more caught up on Kaleidotrope slush, finally reading everything submitted earlier than last month. And I watched this week’s episode of Doctor Who, which I quite enjoyed. Next week’s looks like another everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink’s-kid-brother sort of episode, but you certainly can’t accuse Steven Moffat of not having a plan. This evening I also watched Jennifer’s Body, which I can’t pretend to have enjoyed very much at all. Less than halfway through, I switched the lights back on and pulled out my iPad for distraction. Scott Tobias and Kyle Ryan go a long way towards explaining what’s wrong with the movie. It’s like a very badly written version of Ginger Snaps. I wish I could say the movie got better as it went — I genuinely enjoyed Diablo Cody’s previous movie, Juno and the one episode of United States of Tara I’ve seen — but I think it would be wrong to lie. Better to just move on…dot org. (Ugh.)
I did manage to get caught up, ever so briefly, in today’s World Cup match between the United States and England. I like soccer — I played for several years, up until sixth grade, and tried out (very unsuccessfully) for my high school team — but professional matches can appear to be very boring, with only brief spikes in excitement when someone gets close to scoring a goal. Those appearances might be deceptive — the rest of the world can’t be completely wrong, can they? — but I don’t think I’ll be getting up first thing tomorrow to watch the US in their next match, or any of the other matches. If I happen to catch some more, I’ll maybe watch, the same way I watched this year’s Olympics, but that’s probably it.
Beyond that, it was mostly just a quiet Saturday.
Thursday various
- Yesterday, when I was posting links to stories about babies, I neglected to mention Ardi Rizal a two-year-old Sumatran baby who smokes some forty cigarettes a day. I think, mostly, because I wanted to pretend he doesn’t. [via]
- Meanwhile, this is just heartbreaking [via]:
A German biologist says that efforts to clean oil-drenched birds in the Gulf of Mexico are in vain. For the birds’ sake, it would be faster and less painful if animal-rescue workers put them under, she says. Studies and other experts back her up.
- Whereas this is just…fingerprinting to take out a library book? Seriously? The huge privacy issues aside, how does this improve the system for the library or the patron? [via]
- A couple of periodic tables:
- The Periodic Table of Superpowers — I shall henceforth refer to Superman always as OAFSISpVxVhSn. [via]
- And Periodic Table of Women in SF — There is, of course, a meme going around for this, where you bold the names you’ve read and star the ones you’ve never heard of, but if I were to do it, I think it would just reflect how unread I am. If nothing else, this is a good place to start a reading list. [via]
- But finally, speaking of women I don’t want to spend any more time with, A.O. Scott’s review of Sex and the City 2:
Yes, it’s supposed to be fun. And over the years audiences have had the kind of fun that comes from easy immersion in someone else’s career, someone else’s sex life, someone else’s clothes. But “Sex and the City 2†is about someone else’s boredom, someone else’s vacation and ultimately someone else’s desire to exploit that vicarious pleasure for profit. Which isn’t much fun at all.