- Will singing “My Way” in the Philippines get you killed?
Still, the odds of getting killed during karaoke may be higher in the Philippines, if only because of the ubiquity of the pastime. Social get-togethers invariably involve karaoke. Stand-alone karaoke machines can be found in the unlikeliest settings, including outdoors in rural areas where men can sometimes be seen singing early in the morning. And Filipinos, who pride themselves on their singing, may have a lower tolerance for bad singers. [via]
- Salon.com on Kevin Smith: The face of flying while fat:
And then I read Southwest’s apology to Smith, which includes such gems as “If a Customer cannot comfortably lower the armrest and infringes on a portion of another seat, a Customer seated adjacent would be very uncomfortable and a timely exit from the aircraft in the event of an emergency might be compromised if we allow a cramped, restricted seating arrangement.” And I think, first, “If we allowed a cramped, restricted seating arrangement? Because ‘The Greyhound of the Skies’ is positively roomy when there are no fat people on board?” And second, I think, “Translation: Fat paying customers’ fully expected discomfort only becomes a problem for us if it also makes the paying customers we care about uncomfortable.” [via]
- Speaking of apologies, does Tiger Woods owe you one? Probably not. [via]
- A neat, albeit a little disturbing, H.R. Giger cake [via]
- And finally, the truth behind elephant brain power:
“We are a bit limited by how little we know about elephants, but the odd glimmers we get seem to be rather remarkable.”
Incidentally, today is your last day to listen to Inside the Elephant Mind on the BBC player. [via]
news
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.
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]
Tuesday various
- The headline reads, Vegetative state patients can respond to questions. This seems significantly more scientific than some other recent stories in this area. [via]
- All I can really say to this argument — and to James Cameron’s own insistence that his actors were snubbed in the Oscar nominations — is that hey, if you want sci-fi films to be nominated more often, make better sci-fi films. Avatar an important movie (and so are Up and District 9 to some extent), but Avatar is not a particularly good movie. That’s just my opinion, but I think it’s a defensible opinion and one easily shared by members of the Academy. Maybe these movies aren’t being snubbed out of some lingering genre bias; maybe they’re just genuinely not as good.
There’s maybe some bias against computer-assisted performances like you’ll find in Avatar, but as Mark Evanier writes:
There may be a solid argument that in Avatar, Sigourney Weaver is “acting” her role just as certainly as she acts any roles she plays. But you can’t argue that when we see her performance, we’re only looking at the work of Ms. Weaver with the guidance of Mr. Cameron. There are a lot of other people making that character like that…enough to make it feel inappropriate for an award that honors individual achievement. I’m not saying that’s right or wrong. But I think that’s how it is.
- Word to the wise: don’t look at porn while at work. And definitely don’t look at porn while your office computer is on live television. [via]
- I have to say, I really loved this Previously On Lost 2: Lost In Five Minutes video. Huge props for actually covering all the big moments of the past five years — though also huge spoilers if you’ve never seen the show. [via]
- And finally, speaking of Lost, Todd VanDerWerff (who might just be my favorite television critic at the moment) explains why, while it’s okay for a show to have a plan, it’s usually better for them to work around it:
Could you plan out a TV show to the extent that some Lost fans seem to want the series to be planned out? As a matter of fact, you could, but it almost always ends up being a lesser series. Look, for example, at ABC’s big Lost replacement hopeful FlashForward, now off the air until March in hopes that absence will make viewers’ hearts grow fonder. The series’ creators—David S. Goyer and Brannon Braga—entered the series with a hard and fast plan for where all of the plot points would lead and for where all of the characters would go. This was one of the things that made the show so attractive to networks, who’d been burned by serials that often seemed to have no idea where they were going before. In practice, though, it’s been woefully terrible. The plot, confined by the fact that it knows exactly where it’s going and what all of the characters are going to do, can’t make any of the organic evolutions that any TV series needs to make to be successful. Everyone’s trapped and hemmed in by a plan that has no wiggle room. (A similar thing happened to the vaunted ’90s sci-fi series Babylon 5, though unplanned and uncontrollable events there forced enough of a sense of organic evolution onto that series that it had a little breathing room.)
Tuesday various
- Anybody wanna chip in together and buy Miramax?
- I mean, I’d be happy to write Errol Morris another letter like this if you think it would help. (I love how Weinstein asks Morris for casting suggestions to play himself.)
- Well that’s just weird: Barack Obama and Scott Brown are cousins. [via]
- Texas bans a children’s book because they thought it was written by a Marxist. Not only is that pretty dumb, they were also wrong. [via]
- And finally, are there aliens already among us? Inside us?
Frank Drake, who conducted the first organized search for alien radio signals in 1960, said that the Earth — which used to pump out a loud tangle of radio waves, television signals and other radiation — has been steadily getting quieter as its communications technology improves.
Drake cited the switch from analogue to digital television — which uses a far weaker signal — and the fact that much more communications traffic is now relayed by satellites and fiber optic cables, limiting its leakage into outer space.
“Very soon we will become very undetectable,” he said. If similar changes are taking place in other technologically advanced societies, then the search for them “will be much more difficult than we imagined.” [via]