- Oh great. Now TMZ is running tour groups.
- Finally, a genuinely interesting use of those QR codes.
- The Mirror Project returns! Well, kind of. It’s an archive or time capsule of the internet that, not so long ago, used to be. If nothing else, it was neat to revisit my own entries.
- How copyright enforcement robots killed the Hugo Awards [via]
- And finally, Bill Wearing Socks:
Bill Wearing Socks from Niege Borges on Vimeo.
celebrity
Tuesday various
- Has literature always been dying since the beginning?
- Pictures of David Bowie doing normal stuff [via]
- The New York Times wonders if it should investigate the news. No, really. (More here.) [via]
- First Hybrid Shark Found: “The first-ever observed hybrid may be a sign the predators are adapting to climate change.” [via]
- And finally, The Thing in claymation [via]:
Thursday various
- I could be reading this wrong, but I think the New York Times compared Joe Frazier to Hitler.
- And Ethel Merman to Kim Kardashian.
- When is honey not honey? Apparently when it’s most of the honey sold in stores in the U.S.. [via]
- So presumably you’ve heard of If Day, right? It was “a simulated Nazi invasion of the Canadian city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, and surrounding areas on February 19, 1942.” Yeah, I’d never heard about it before either. [via]
- And finally, Cormac McCarthy’s Yelp page. Hysterical:
He pulled another cold french fry from the greasestained Happy Meal box. He ate it slowly. The sun rising behind him over the limestone bluffs. The barren valley and the road winding through it still in morning’s blue shadow. He wiped his hand on his jacket and checked the breech of the big Weatherby. Bullet as long as man’s finger sitting there. He lay down on the blanket, the rifle’s barrel resting on the saddlebag, and glassed downcountry with the telescopic sight. The dusty road was empty. He waited. [via]<.blockquote>
Tuesday various
- “The body of a Massachusetts woman went unnoticed for two days in a Fall River public swimming pool, which remained open to the public and was even visited by health inspectors, generating outrage and calls for an investigation.” More here, including how such a bizarre and awful thing could actually have happened. [via]
- I think this song by Paris Hilton is, predictably, dreadful, but I actually prefer when Hilton does stuff like this, when she’s at least doing something. The paparazzi paying attention to a lousy pop star is marginally better than its paying attention to a do-nothing heiress, right?
- Well I for one am shocked — shocked! — that drug trials aren’t conducted realistically in the world of superhero comics!
- Roger Ebert on Transformers: Dark of the Moon:
I have a quaint notion that one of the purposes of editing is to make it clear why one shot follows another, or why several shots occur in the order that they do.
- And finally, Improv Everywhere’s latest mission is just lovely:
I used to work right around the corner from that park. (We’re now maybe 10 minutes away.) [via]
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