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"I like the keyboard cat videos where they show the cat briefly before tragedy arrives. It sort of changes the whole meaning behind the keyboard cat videos. Instead of just celebrating human tragedy it seems as though the keyboard cat anticipates it, like he’s this omniscient trickster just looking on, aloof and smug, as people wander unwittingly towards misfortune. It’s as though all of life that came prior to an accident was just an elaborate trap, bait meant to draw fools towards an accident and humiliation and having finally caught his prey the keyboard cat celebrates joyously. Aha! we think, so that’s the trick, fortune and misfortune are all the same in the end, distinguished only by whether it is happening to us or to another, and by whether we can hear the song of the keyboard cat, pounding out a tune looking down on us, the fools below."
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Trailer for Rivers of a Lost Coast, a new documentary, at least in part about Bill Schaadt, the greatest fly fisherman who ever lived. From a 1974 Sports Illustrated profile: “The intensity with which he fishes is inspiring. He began to eat his lunch one-handed. He would cast, then in the several seconds it took for the line to sink, he would take a quick bite of a sandwich, set it down and retrieve the fly, cast again, take another bite. He fishes from dawn to dark with no stops in between for food or conversation. One time he was fishing a run so wide he had to wade within two inches of the top of his chest-high waders and then make 100-foot casts. Realizing this effort was far too strenuous to maintain for long, he went up to the car and brought down his sign painter’s step ladder, which he then carried out to where he had been wading. He climbed up on it and fished in comfort. And when Schaadt arises tomorrow or the next day, or next year, it will be with the same enthusiasm for fishing that he had 20 years ago. When he hooks a fish he often screams and yells. Fishermen nearby who don’t know him figure, “Boy, that must be the first one that guy ever caught.” (via troutunderground).
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Terms never actually used in the original Star Wars Trilogy films:
Terms never spoken in dialogue, but used in script
Y-Wing
Snowspeeder
Tusken Raider
Tagge
Motti
Wampa
Cloud City
Sith
EwokTerms neither spoken in dialogue nor used in script
Palpatine
A-Wing
B-Wing
AT-AT
AT-ST
TIE Interceptor
TIE BomberAlthough many of these terms were popularised by the toys, not the films, you would at least have learned many of them if you sat through the credits.
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Amazon reviewer bixx 456 reviews Wolfram’s “A New Kind of Science:
“Why you are reading this review
I can only imagine how fortunate you must feel to be reading my review. This review is the product of my lifetime of experience in meeting important people and thinking deep thoughts. This is a new kind of review, and will no doubt influence the way you
think about the world around you and the way you think of yourself. Bigger than infinity Although my review deserves thousands of pages to articulate, I am limiting many of my deeper thoughts to only single characters. I encourage readers of my review to dedicate the many years required to fully absorb the significance of what I am writing here. Fortunately, we live in exactly the time when my review can be widely disseminated by “internet” technology and stored on “digital media”, allowing current and future scholars to delve more deeply into my original and insightful use of commas, numbers, and letters. My place in history My review allows, for the first time, a complete and total understanding not only of this but *every single*
book ever written. I call this “the principle of book equivalence.” Future generations will decide the relative merits of this review compared with, for example, the works of Shakespeare. This effort will open new realms of scholarship. I am the author of all things It is staggering to contemplate that all the great works of literature can be derived from the letters I use in writing this review. I am pleased to have shared them with you, and hereby grant you the liberty to use up to twenty (20) of them consecutively without attribution. Any use of additional characters in print must acknowledge this review as source material since it contains, implicitly or explicitly, all future written documents.” -
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Lobster in two services
I’ve been obsessing about this dish for 5 years, and somehow never quite got the chance it eat it. Anyway for my 32nd birthday we headed to No Signboard Seafood in Singapore, and sealed the deal.Service 1 is Sashimi lobster tail served fresh on a bed of ice. It’s so freshly slaughtered that the lobster head continues to waggle its antennae and legs in an (understandably) angry fashion while you eat its sashimi.
Service 2: Lobster head deep fried in butter.
The complete photo set, including pictures of my gurning deleriously happy cholesterol stuffed face is here.
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"In the midst of chaos—a plane just crashed right in front of him!—Krums’s first instinct was to take a picture and load it to the web. There was nothing capitalistic or altruistic about it. Something amazing happened, and without thinking, he sent it out to the world. And let’s say he hadn’t. Let’s say he took this incredible photo—a photo any journalist would send to the Pulitzer board—and decided to sell it, said he was hanging onto it for the highest bidder. He would have been vilified by bloggers and Twitterers alike. His is a culture of sharing information."
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How to Be a Leading Hollywood Player When You're Lazy - by Ricky Gervais
Be in charge. Then you can do anything. If you’re not in charge, always play characters who have your haircut. That saves an hour in the morning. No wigs, no beards. Forget it. I had to wear a beard for one day. Ridiculous. Forty minutes. No. My haircut: ten minutes. And don’t choose ridiculous costumes. Choose normal clothes. Ordinary trousers, ordinary shoes that you can put on yourself. Costume: five minutes. Hair and makeup: ten minutes. That’s it. No costumes. No wigs. Own haircut.
Two: Do your own accent. You don’t want to have vocal coaching. Don’t do anything that needs skill. If there’s a scene and it says ” … rides a horse,” say, “You do not need me to ride that horse.” Because you’ll have to learn how to ride a horse. That could take, like, two weeks. Too busy. Too much trouble.
Three: Always say that your character should be sitting down. Don’t ever be standing at the beginning of a scene. So if it starts off, “There’s a knock at the door, you get up and answer the door,” you’ll be up and down for eight hours. Convince them that you should sit there and say, “Come in.” When we were filming Ghost Town, I tried to convince the director, David Koepp, that we should do a remake of Ironside together. It’s the old TV drama with Raymond Burr as a detective in a wheelchair. Also, I’ve always wanted to play someone in a coma. Just comes out of it at the end. I was really jealous of Colin Farrell when I found out that Phone Booth was shot in just 16 days. Some of it, he was sitting on the floor of the telephone box. One location, sitting down.
Four: If there are long and complicated monologues, cut them. Say, “I don’t think I’d say that.” No one will think you’re being lazy; it comes across as integrity. (via Treough)
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"1. Road Runner cannot harm the Coyote except by going “beep, beep”.
2. No outside force can harm the Coyote — only his own ineptitude or the failure of Acme products.
3. The Coyote could stop anytime — IF he was not a fanatic.
4. No dialogue ever, except “beep, beep”.
5. Road Runner must stay on the road — for no other reason than that he’s a roadrunner.
6. All action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters — the southwest American desert.
7. All tools, weapons, or mechanical conveniences must be obtained from the Acme Corporation.
8. Whenever possible, make gravity the Coyote’s greatest enemy.
9. The Coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures.
10. The audience’s sympathy must remain with the Coyote." -
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"Made in Toyko was about ridiculous hybrids: a department store with a driving school on the roof; a cement factory integrated with the workers’ dorms. They called these ridiculous, pragmatic spatial phenomena dame [dah-may] architecture, using the Japanese term for “no good.” Such ad hoc, aggressively undesigned accidents stick in my mind as I read about Tomason [also spelled Thomason and Thomasson in English]. If dame architecture is the awkward result of relentless functionality, Tomason are the useless, abandoned leftovers. Stairs to nowhere are a favorite. Bricked up windows are a close second. Tomason are the flashings and detritus of the incessant churn of building, destruction, and redevelopment that characterizes the Japanese city. No clean slates here, no way."
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"Even critics give Apple a pass on iPhone 3G woes" - Wired News
My iPhone ran out of battery for the 11th consecutive day today. I’ve had dropped 3G data connections ever since I updated the software to 2.0.2. Right now it’s stuck on the Apple screen of death while I try to restore it to factory settings. No free pass from this critic. Android is sounding sweeter every day.
