You Sank My Battleship!
From the CNN front page:
Listen, I understand that I may not fully grasp all the subtleties of a good game of footy, but these new naval rules are just confusing.
Category: goo brain
Call Gamera
Listen – I know this oil leak in the gulf sucks, but:
What if a cat 5 hurricane came sweeping through, carrying a funnel of oil over land? What if that funnel, in its rampage, ripped down some live powerlines, powerlines whose sparks ignited the towering Oil-iccane, turning it into a 150mph flame storm?
I’m not saying it’s a good idea, but if you think truckasaurus moves tickets…
Edit: Poop! Apparently XKCD had the same idea, although with less Truckasaurus and more alligators.
Final Countdown
This story made its way amongst the word-jugglers the other day, and I just wanted to add a few quick thoughts:
Last typist refuses to switch to laptop, gets boot from Writers Room in Greenwich Village
The ribbon has run out on the last typewriter at a Manhattan writers’ den.
Skye Ferrante has spent six years at the Writers Room in Greenwich Village, blissfully banging away on his grandmother’s 1929 Royal typewriter. – More
The thrust of the article is that the guy is put out that he’s not allowed to haul his Nana’s hammer-box into the room so he can play at being a writer for the afternoon. I don’t mean to be the cantankerous jerk, but – well, I’m going to: there may have been a time when smoking cigars and pinching strange ladies’ bottoms were also permissible behaviour in the area, that doesn’t mean it’s still done.
We also used to think it was fine to display a quart of brandy in the office, you don’t see a mini-bottle in every modern cubicle however.
I love the classic action and satisfying clatter of a typewriter as much as the next guy, but sometimes you’ve got to take a tip from garage bands and know when to practice your art in the muffling confines of your own home.
Glass Houses
People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones – also, should pick up all the dead birds on their lawn.
Barbarian Arithmetic
Yesterday’s post got me thinking on the funny books of my youth.
When I was a kid, I used to pick up a lot of the magazine-sized Conan comics. I loved the gritty black and white art, and the general swashbuckling, but somewhere between thirteen and sixteen I came to realize that Conan’s largest problem year-after-year wasn’t actually the dark magic of Thoth-Amon, it was math.
In the earliest issues, every fight was a concern. Conan fighting two people at once involved a lot of ornate cussing and some doom-talk from the narrator. The problem was, just as with televisions, there was nowhere to go but up: three, four, five people at once – his enemies began to look less like swordsmen and more like angry soccer teams comprised of late-’80s WWF wrestlers.
If the books are still running, I have to assume by now his enemies are facing him in lengthy, easy to trim, rows – or feasibly they march along in single file as Conan cranks a comically over-sized meat grinder.
Archie, No!
This archive of Spire Christian Comics is a lot of campy fun, but the tales often seem to suffer from a bit of mixed messaging.
Again with the Farmville
Well, bring on the brass band and a slow golf clap.
They must have reinforced the CNN front page just to handle the counter-pressure of such a vacuous story.
Diving For 3D Dollars
I have to admit: I’m not usually terribly impressed with shipwreck-dive movies.
As a general rule I love ruins, and I’m always drawn in by the opening moments of ethereal stillness, but it doesn’t take a lot of barnacle encrusted video before I’m zoning out.
I think that’ll change when we can send down the technology to generate a detailed 3D model of a wreck interior.
Why spend long hours, and risk multiple trips into the freezing depths of the sea, when you can scan it once and explore for days from the comfort of your office chair?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKcpmo4pwRg]
Pavlov's Party Mix
While eating Shreddies, I sometimes begin to half-expect I’ll encounter a rogue pretzel or corn chip in my bowl.
Han Solo
One of the major issues with Jedi is that Han doesn’t get a single decent scene – he even falls for the old “step-on-a-twig-and-alert-the-guards” gag.
My guess is that Lucas felt a need to downplay his role to ensure Luke was the undisputed hero of the film, thus writing out the last likable character who could speak English.