- The first four Harry Potter books condensed. Lovely. [via]
- Geeks, Girls, and Media Misogyny: The Saga Continues:
I can accept that questioning a actor or actress about their geek bona fides when part of their job involves selling their project to the public, including the geeky public, and especially when it’s a geeky project may seem like a good idea, except for one thing: it’s only women whose geek cred is called into question, time and again.
If nothing else, arguing that sexy women can’t be geeks seems to be forgetting one simple thing: smart, geeky women are sexy.
- Writers and Kitties. Does exactly what it says on the cat food tin. [via]
- I think what I like most about this article from the New York Times about booksellers who are also authors is this revelation from author Jonathan Lethem:
“I have the habit of accumulation,†he said. “When I first met my wife, my kitchen cabinets were full of books.
- And finally, seriously Marie Claire? Seriously, “nutritionists”? Easily the most ridiculous is the woman who skips lunch and then eats an entire box of macaroons for dessert at night. There’s a lot of calorie counting going on in almost all of these, but very little healthy eating. [via]
food
Wednesday various
- The end of an era: the last typewriter factory in the world shuts its doors. [via]
- How food breaks sway the decisions of judges] [via]
- Comics re-imagined as secondhand paperbacks [via]
- “The closure of the Japan-based factory that has the monopoly on production of a tape crucial to the TV and film industry has Hollywood insiders scrambling to cope with the shortage.” [via]
- And finally, an exclusive interview with the writer of Fast Five [via]
Today Now! Interviews The 5-Year-Old Screenwriter Of “Fast Five”
Tuesday various
- I am not a Pennsylvanian barber. Just so you know.
- Well, it’s no Donald Glover for Spider-Man, but I don’t see how George Takei could do any worse.
- What if your favorite album was a book? A neat concept, if you ignore the sort of crappy slideshow presentation…and pretend the misspelling in Never Mind the Bollocks was intentional. [via]
- Bristol Palin’s Nonprofit Paid Her Seven Times What It Spent On Actual Teen Pregnancy Prevention. I wish I could say I was remotely surprised. [via]
- And finally, the world’s most expensive hot dog. I probably won’t be eating this — even though this place apparently is just a 15-minute walk away from my office — and I’m naturally a little disgusted by the excess of it. But I’m at least impressed they didn’t cheat, like a lot of “most expensive” chefs seem to, with gold plates or silverware or something else to artificially inflate the price. Well of course something’s expensive if it’s coated in diamonds. The parts you can’t eat shouldn’t count. [via]
This did, of course, also make me think of Heather.
Monday various
- It will probably come as no surprise that McDonald’s new oatmeal is actually sort of bad for you. [via]
- Or that the TSA’s full-body, backscatter radiation scanners are quite likely worse for you than the TSA’s faulty research earlier suggested. [via]
- And speaking of radiation — as it seems we must, daily, given the unfolding disaster in Japan — how close is your home to a nuclear power plant? Me, I’m just under fifty miles from Indian Point. [via]
- Was Doctor Who villain Davros actually created by a 13-year-old boy in 1972?
- And finally, the Monty Python Guide to Being a Better Boss. I’m not entirely convinced I’d want to work for this person.
Wednesday various
- Your end-times moment of the day: chocolate drought predicted by 2014 [via]
- Did you know “the total literature of Iceland is [only] under 50,000 books”? Makes the idea of putting it all online not sound so far-fetched, now doesn’t it? (And is this the literary equivalent of a seedbank? A Canticle for Sveinbjörn perhaps?) [via]
- So Fringe might actually be safe from cancellation? We just have to hope a network executive wasn’t ly — oh crap, it’s doomed, isn’t it?
- Say what you will about Joe Biden, the man certainly has a sense of humor about himself. [via]
- And finally, the Zombie Tabernacle Choir. Some things don’t have to be useful or even particularly interactive to still be sort of strangely neat. [via]