- Following up on yesterday’s revelation that Michael Palin didn’t like A Fish Called Wanda when he first read the script, here’s a letter sent by a “comedy script editor” to the BBC, calling Fawlty Towers — incidentally named the all-time top British television program by the BFI in 2000 — “[a] collection of cliches and stock characters which I can’t see being anything but a disaster.”
- Following up on the Wonder Woman post on Monday, here’s two more dissenting views.
- This I Write Like meme is getting torn apart all over the place, notably here [via] and here [via]
I’d post my own results, but they change with every different piece of text I have “analyzed,” and none seem remotely accurate — a weird mix of ego-stroking and insult.
- And that’s one way to ensure fewer comments… [via]
- And finally, Zombies: The Kid Vector:
Here’s somethin they don’t tell you, but you better listen good if you want to survive out there: It’s the kids you gotta watch out for. They stay in the shadows, in the dark. When you see ’em, they don’t run right at you like the big ones, they stay back, let you come in closer. You think you’re rescuin a kid, you get in close and BAM! The dead brat goes for your throat or face, workin for a quick kill.
monty python
Wednesday various
- Six degrees of literary separation? [via]
- If nothing else, I think this elaborte fake ATM is proof that you don’t need a carefully designed forgery to fool a lot of people. [via]
- The Cracked Guide to Fonts [via]
- You know, I’m sure Tin House‘s heart was in the right place with this prove you bought a book somewhere before you submit anything policy, but it’s not hard to see why it’s upset some people.
- And finally, an interview with Michael Palin:
I’m very proud of the fish-slapping dance we did in Python. We rehearsed this silly dance where John Cleese hits me with a fish and I fall into Teddington Lock. We were so intent on getting the dance right that I didn’t notice the lock had cleared and instead of it being a 2ft drop into the water it was a 15ft drop. I’m very proud of doing that.
The rest of the interview is pretty interesting too — he didn’t think A Fish Called Wanda was a good script when he first read it — although residents of his “worst place ever,” Prince George, British Columbia, might not love it.
The Wednesdayness of it all
I didn’t know this until today, and I wish I hadn’t found it out under such terrible circumstances, but the Haitian Consul of New York is directly next to the building where I work. There were local news vans parked all down our stretch of Madison Avenue this evening, setting up shop, conducting interviews. My heart (and, if I could, more money) goes out to the survivors of yesterday’s terrible earthquake.
In other news…well, there isn’t much other news. I had alphabet soup for lunch this afternoon, which isn’t especially exciting or noteworthy, but I enjoyed it, and it was a coworker’s birthday, so we had cookies and cake later in the day. I’m attending a conference at the Waldorf Astoria tomorrow, which should at least break up some of the monotony. And that’s about it. It’s been a decent but very uneventful week for me.
Right now, I’m just watching an episode of Monty Python. I own the boxed set, so I’ve decided to go through and watch them all again. For somebody who calls himself a Python fan, I think there’s a significant handful I’ve actually never seen. (Truth be told, it was the records and then the movies where I first fell in love with the show, back in junior high. I never saw a single episode until college.) It seemed high time I remedied that.
Saturday night is alright for blogging
When I look back over today, I really have no idea where it all went.
This morning, I caught an early show of the deeply disappointing horror movie Daybreakers. It has an intriguing premise, and a well imagined world in its vampire society that comments nicely on our own, but it’s boring and badly plotted as a story. It’s inventive visually, until it starts just being annoying visually, and by the end I was just looking for the door. If it had been the movie like it seemed it was going to be in its first twenty minutes, however, it could have been something.
After that, I came home for lunch, eventually went for a short walk, and settled in to watch the final installment of that Monty Python documentary I bought on DVD earlier this week. I think it’s convinced me to re-watch the original episodes and movies, and maybe even listen again to their records — which is where I first learned to love the group and British humor.
And that, such as it was, was my Saturday. How about you?
Saturday leftovers
- Michael Schaub on being an English major:
I remember being an English major at a Big 12 school in the mid-’90s. This was an agriculture- and engineering-heavy school where liberal arts departments were isolated in a building that permanently smelled like paint thinner. Whenever I’d tell people I was an English major, they’d look incredulous and say “What are you going to do with that? Teach?” Like in the same tone you’d say, “What are you going to do with that? Trade blowjobs for meth?” Good times!
I was an English major at a pretty agriculture- and engineering-heavy school myself, so I know the feeling. Even my undergraduate advisor told me, “You know, you really can’t get a job with this degree.” (My advisor within the English department was a lot more encouraging, but I met with him all of once, the day I declared, and he left Penn State around the time I graduated. So take from that what you will.)
- Are you now, or have you ever been, a Lovecraftian horror? [via]
- Will we be telling our grandchildren (or even our children) about this thing we used to call “fish”? [via]
While the climate crisis gathers front-page attention on a regular basis, people–even those who profess great environmental consciousness–continue to eat fish as if it were a sustainable practice. But eating a tuna roll at a sushi restaurant should be considered no more environmentally benign than driving a Hummer or harpooning a manatee. In the past 50 years, we have reduced the populations of large commercial fish, such as bluefin tuna, cod, and other favorites, by a staggering 90 percent. One study, published in the prestigious journal Science, forecast that, by 2048, all commercial fish stocks will have “collapsed,†meaning that they will be generating 10 percent or less of their peak catches. Whether or not that particular year, or even decade, is correct, one thing is clear: Fish are in dire peril, and, if they are, then so are we.
- Sorry I missed this around Halloween (and by dint of not living in Chicago), but I think a zombie-preparedness fitness class is a terrific idea!
- Has xkcd been watching the Penn State Monty Python Society’s Mall Climb?
- Ken Jennings takes the logic of Pixar’s Cars maybe a little too far.
- Speaking of Pixar, this Pixar opening parody is pretty great. [via]
- Imagine if the producers of FlashForward had gone with Robert J. Sawyer’s original concept and made the Large Hadron Collider responsible for everything that happens? Imagine how laughable the show might seem then. [via]
- I’ve never been remotely tempted to buy a bootleg DVD, despite an abundance of them on the streets of Manhattan. Still, their cover art can be pretty delightfully bizarre. [via]
- NBC sued over font usage. Really.
- Well, Coldplay does kind of put me to sleep anyway… [via]
- According to a recent survey:
Almost half of British consumers have lied to their friends about seeing a classic film to avoid the embarrassment of admitting ignorance of great movies.
I’m reminded — as it seems I often am, often enough that I should probably get around to reading the book — of the literary parlor game described here, where everybody one-ups each other with all the books they haven’t read. (The “winner is an American professor who, in a rousing display of one-downmanship, finally announces that he’s never read Hamlet.”)
For the record, of the “top ten classic films people most lie about seeing,” I’ve seen all but one of them. Can you guess which one I haven’t seen? [via]
- I often find it a little ridiculous what parts of the internet they do and don’t block in my office: blogger.com, but not www.blogger.com; twitpic.com, but not Twitter itself. We have a YouTube channel, for instance — I’d link to it, but there’s nothing there right now — except I can’t visit it at work, even when I’m working with our UK team to upload video to it. Glad I’m not the only person who thinks these policies are a little outdated:
As I’ve said a whole bunch of times, the “competition†for those of us in traditional media industries—book publishing, broadcasting, newspapers and magazines—is no longer other book publishers, broadcasters, or newspapers and magazines. Instead, our “competition†is now the plain fact that, even if you stipulate that 99.9% of the for-free internet is worthless nonsense, the remaining 0.1% is large enough to absorb anyone’s attention full-time for the rest of their life. For anyone with an internet connection, running out of interesting things to read is completely a thing of the past.
- This is probably the subtlest Rickrolling I’ve ever seen. [via]
- And finally, Birds on the Wires [via:
Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.