weird

Tuesday various

Thursday various

  • A pair of weird stories about Japan’s disappearing old people.

    In the one case, it looks like just a combination of clerical error and magical thinking. (If your 89-year-old mother disappears, you should maybe inform the police, not keep paying her health insurance for a quarter-century on the off-chance that she’s still alive.) The other story is a whole lot more creepy, however. It’s one thing that they kept collecting the old man’s pension after he died. Did they have to keep his remains around for thirty years? [via]

  • It’s the end of an era. Well, several dozen eras, actually, starting quite possibly with the Mesozoic. Mary Hart is leaving Entertainment Tonight.
  • Oh yeah, this will be a surefire box office hit: a Jerry Garcia biopic that can’t use any of his music.
  • I kind of love these Comics, Everybody!: the histories of Hawkman and Xorn explained.
  • And finally, some absolutely stunning sculptures carved from pencils. [via]

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]

Monday various

  • Rachel Maddow takes on the “Scare White People” tactics of the right. That this is a tried and tested method for securing votes is only slightly less disheartening than the fact that it seems to be working even today. [via]
  • Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, whose story “Mouse and I” appears in the April 2010 issue of Kaleidotrope, writes about finding her voice as a Filipino science fiction writer:

    I found myself thinking, yet again, on what kind of science fiction a Filipino would write, and how a writer can break free from being someone who emulates the works of writers he or she has admired to become a person who writes with a voice and with a story that comes from the writer’s own soul.

    What things influence the Filipino writer then? What’s our backstory? How can I as a writer coming from a country that has been so colonialized and that is still trapped in a colonial mindset free myself so I can write the fictions that only I can write?

  • She also shares a really terrific talk on “The Danger of a Single Story” by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
  • Apparently there is no gravity [via] and time is disappearing from the universe. [via] Or at least, those are some theories.
  • And finally, I don’t know if this story, about a Bosnian man who claims to have been hit by meteorites six times, is made more or less strange by the possibility that it’s all a hoax.

Tuesday various

  • Last Thursday, I posted this image to Capper Blog, and I planned to follow up with the original source article here. Better late than never. The pictures there actually give you a better sense of these so-called infinity pools, and moreover just how high up and close to the edge they are. I think I’d be terrified to swim in one these. [via]
  • Going back even further on things I forgot to follow up on: back in June I posted about a link that was going around, suggesting that every actor reads the same newspaper. Well, Slate followed up on that link and found out the story behind the ubiquitous prop. [via]
  • The world really is a poorer place without Jim Henson, isn’t it? [via]
  • I can’t say I’ll miss Blockbuster all that much, but Matt Zoller Seitz makes a compelling argument that we’ve lost something with the company’s (now almost certain) passing [via]:

    I’m talking about the pre-Internet experience of daily life, which was more immediate, more truly interactive: in a word, real. Bland and aloof as it was, Blockbuster was a part of that — and for certain types of people, it was a big part. There was nothing special about Blockbuster as a business, but special moments did happen there, simply by virtue of the fact that the stores were everywhere, and they stocked a lot of movies, and people who wanted to see movies went there regularly, sometimes alone but more often in the company of relatives or friends. You’d go through the front door and pass the front counter — where an employee was checking in a pile of returned videos (when opened, the boxes went whuck!) and check out the new releases wall (Seventy-five copies of “Hard Target?” Seriously?). Then you’d fan out among the aisles and try your luck.

  • And finally, some video game-related links: