- Why is Top Gear apparently exempt from the BBC’s editorial guidelines and the duty not to fake the facts? [via]
- The science of the trailer [via]
- Dear Photograph [via]
- Keira Rathbone’s Typewriter Art. Just stunning. [via
- And finally, ‘The Wire’ meets ‘iCarly’. Warning: pretty big spoiler for The Wire. Possibly for iCarly, too, for all I know. [via]
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Monday various
- I am strangely fascinated by NASA’s book for the visually impaired, Getting a Feel for Lunar Craters. It’s sold out right now; they do have the text and an audio version freely available, but that seems like it misses the whole point of a tactile book. [via]
- Have we all been playing Monopoly wrong all these years? I like Waxy.org’s post about it, in which Andy Baio writes, “It’s interesting to see a commercial game see the same sort of cultural variation as other children’s folk games.”
- TV’s ‘Cash Cab’ kills pedestrian in Vancouver. Reality television is dangerous, people! [via]
- Can you survive Baltimore’s 5k run? Sounds like The Wire meets The Walking Dead. [via]
- And finally, the Empathic Civilisation [via]
Tuesday various
- Dyslexie, A Typeface Designed To Help Dyslexics Read. [via]
- Sure, it was silly and ridiculous when it happened on The Office, but it can be deadly serious when your GPS gives you the wrong information. [via]
Suddenly, that suggestion that mapmakers sometimes intentionally include false information to prevent copyright infringement sounds fairly irresponsible.
- On the pleasures of dining alone [via]
- Speaking of food, this may be the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen. And I watch Bizarre Foods pretty regularly. Seriously, it’s perfectly SFW, but you may want to exercise caution visiting that link, much less watching the video. It’s of a “dancing squid” in a Japanese restaurant, reportedly, and it seems like nothing more than cruelty masquerading as novelty.
I am not a vegetarian, and I’ve eaten squid. I quite enjoyed the calamari I had on Saturday evening, for instance. But I think we have an obligation towards the food that we eat, the animals that we kill to sustain us. If they give up their lives, they deserve a quick an merciful end. They do not deserve to be toyed with like this.
That said, if it’s fake…I’m not sure I feel a whole better about it. Although there’s a lot of evidence and commentary (here as well) to suggest it’s real.
- And finally, on a happier note, Monty Python member Graham Chapman isn’t going to let a little thing like being dead stand in the way of his making a new movie.
Wednesday various
- Human Centipede II already banned in the UK for sexual depravity. The description of the film sounds pretty horrific to me, even beyond the pale — and I’m someone who, amazingly enough, found some things to…well, not enjoy, exactly, about the first film, although I was less immediately repulsed by it than I would have expected. (Watching it over Twitter with friends may have softened the blow.)
But the idea of censoring it, of banning it from the country, doesn’t sit entirely well with me. I tend to agree with Sarah Ditum of The Guardian on this:
You get extremes of intelligence and stupidity as well as extremes of unpleasantness in horror, and if we’re happy to start banning stuff because of the latter, we might be losing a lot of stuff that falls into the former camp.
- Meanwhile, the fact that there will be a G.I. Joe sequel — and that it may very well star The Rock — fills me with a weird manic delight. The original was one of the most gloriously dumb movies I have ever seen. I am so renting any sequel, as terrible as it is likely to be.
- A lot of really interesting thoughts on X-Men: First Class. Though I liked it well enough — more than I expected to, less than I might have hoped — I’m not sure it deserves all this deep thought. But it’s all very interesting nonetheless. Spoiler warnings, of course.
- Any story that starts with “the night a drunk John Lennon and Harry Nilsson heckled the Smothers Brothers and got in a fight with Pam Grier” has got to be good.
- And finally, Paul Simon is simply a true class act. [via
Wednesday various
- Scott Tobias on Fast Five:
Fast Five may be lizard-brain escapism—and there’s something unsettling about how it lays waste to Rio’s desperately poor favelas—but nonsense this well-orchestrated is a rare and precious thing.
- Genevieve Valentine on Priest:
Basically, Priest exists as an example of what happens when a team of creative people all get a concussion at once.
- John Seavey on Smallville — and, more specifically, why it is not Doctor Who:
And then, the next night, I watched “The Doctor’s Wife”. And while I won’t spoil anything, because the episode is very wonderful, very surprising, and many people probably haven’t seen it yet, I will say that it is the epitome of everything that Doctor Who is and everything that Smallville isn’t. Instead of being an “epic game-changer” that really doesn’t change anything, not even really the things it’s obligated to change…this was a normal, everyday, stand-alone non-arc episode that just happened to transform everything you thought you knew about forty-eight years of the series. And it did it almost casually.
Doctor Who is, and always has been like that. It’s never been afraid to reinvent itself, not even after forty-eight years. It’s a bold, inventive show that has no boundaries, no self-imposed rules, and no orthodoxies to uphold. That’s why it attracted a writer of the caliber of Neil Gaiman, whereas Smallville has had to content itself with Geoff Johns and Jeph Loeb. That’s why it’s still going and why I don’t think it’ll ever stop. Because it’s a show that can do anything…and one that will do anything.
- And speaking of shows that promise but don’t deliver on change, Zach Handlen on House:
It’s like a game, really. Each year, the writers have to come up with some new way to trick us into thinking that the show is moving on. And then, come next season, they have to find some way to undo all those changes, because in House-land, we can have the illusion of growth but not growth itself.
Everything I’m reading leads me to think that my decision to quit on the show at the start of this year was wrong only in that it came too late.
- And finally, Existential Star Wars [via]: