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Christmas Hamper of Linkygeddon

SANTA HE SAY YOU SHALL HAVE ALL THE LINKY YOU NEED THIS CHRISTMAS, PUNY HUMAN
BEHOLD:
Tigers and leopards like to play with pumpkins. Who knew?
The Anomalies make amazing hip-hop recaps of 80s sci-fi action films Predator and Robocop!
The great Tom Lehrer on video
The most inspirational short you will ever see
Andy Kaufman: Live From Hollywood – the comedy channel doco about Andy Kaufman’s stint as a wrestling heel, chopped up into YouTube-friendly pieces. I watched it with my hands over my face. Incredible. (Also: Robin Williams doing something you’ve never seen anywhere else – perfectly deadpan comedy.) (Bonus: That Letterman show incident, uncensored. Has Jerry Lawler ever broken kayfabe on the record and admitted it was all a big work with Kaufman? Apart from in the Carrey movie of course?
Bully watches and blogs Love Actually in realtime as the story counts down to Christmas. (Warning: Keira Knightley appreciation zone.) (Second warning: Richard Curtis adored here.) (Still fun though.)
How it should have ended – some dudes create alternative endings for films that ended in a way that they didn’t like.
I’m embedding this one because I like it lots: Playing For Change gets musicians around the world to contribute to a brilliant rendition of Stand By Me.

Also this one: Derren Brown does my all-time favourite Psyc experiment. A few years ago this was replicated at my university, and weirdly enough, older Maori people noticed significantly more than other ages/ethnicities.

Virtual sitting in a den watching old television. You need to adjust the aerials to get a good picture. It is called Betamaxmas, which is the winningest name of Christmas.
This will make sense to anyone who lamented Forry’s passing, and probably no-one else: dude makes boxes for imagined lines of Aurora Model Kits, like modern monsters and Lovecraft. And he sells them, shrinkwrapped, so you can have your model box sitting on your shelf unopened with an imaginary product inside.
The worst Christmas music ever created!
Some serious things:
Noam Chomsky explains why broadcast media fails in 3 minutes
Clive Thompson at Wired explains why we need more torture in our videogames
And finally: the first Mattel officially licensed Barbie in which Barbie is in the process of having her eyes plucked out of her face and devoured.
(There. That should keep you busy for a while.)

Rob Gilchrist: Disrespect that man

On April 21 I was gleeful at the work of activist Rob Gilchrist, who outmaneuvered local buffoon and spy-for-hire Gavin Clark. The quickwitted noble activist taking down one of the enemies of democracy! Wicked!
Then, today…
Oh.
Mr Gilchrist just got crossed off my ‘person of the year’ nominee list, it seems.
There’s heaps more to say about this, not least the obvious stuff about why the police feel they need to send informers into ordinary citizens action groups. But I still have a bad case of thesis, so this will have to do from now.
(Also, and yet again: nice work Nicky Hager.)

Linky. That’s the stuff.

Instead of working, I trawl my bookmarks to give you some lovely Friday linky. Er, I may have linked to some of this stuff before but I don’t think so.
Continuing the Watchmen parody theme: Blotchmen. Involves that poem about plums. You know the one.
Kiwi expat and comics genius Roger Langridge does Spongebob Squarepants in the styles of various old-time cartoonists. Delightful!
Mashed in Plastic: the David Lynch mash-up album. Haven’t listened to this yet.
Kamikaze Cookery continues. Featured in a recent entry: friend of this parish Johnnie Ingram, taking on f-in’ Gordon Ramsay.
And finally… oh lordy. I’m sorry. Donny and Marie Star Wars.

Man, Lucas woulda sent those Vader and Chewbacca costumes to the opening of a supermarket, wouldn’t he? And I’m sorry to say this, but there’s more after that one.

Monbiot on Marshall on Climate Change

In his fascinating book Carbon Detox, George Marshall argues that people are not persuaded by information(15). Our views are formed by the views of the people with whom we mix. Of the narratives that might penetrate these circles, we are more likely to listen to those which offer us some reward. A story which tells us that the world is cooking and that we’ll have to make sacrifices for the sake of future generations is less likely to be accepted than the more rewarding idea that climate change is a conspiracy hatched by scheming governments and venal scientists, and that strong, independent-minded people should unite to defend their freedoms.
He proposes that instead of arguing for sacrifice, environmentalists should show where the rewards might lie: that understanding what the science is saying and planning accordingly is the smart thing to do, which will protect your interests more effectively than flinging abuse at scientists. We should emphasise the old-fashioned virtues of uniting in the face of a crisis, of resourcefulness and community action. Projects like the transition towns network and proposals for a green new deal tell a story which people are more willing to hear.

George Monbiot column: “A beardful of bunkum”
Meanwhile, the Don’t Be A Rodney campaign has ended. A bunch of letters got sent. My feeling is they did have an effect, in that John key has clearly given a quiet steer to committee chair Peter Dunne to slap down Rodney’s nonsense. Ultimately, though, we have to wait and see how it goes down.

Stuff and Nonsense

Read through my thesis draft today, making copious scribbly notes all over it about things to change. Worst bit: realizing my intro section is an example of the kind of academic writing that I hate. Filled with jargon, poorly structured, obfuscatory and exclusive – the opposite of communication. The rest of it wasn’t so bad, but that first chapter was suffering. Too many word-processing passes over it to amend this and make that more precise, and it had lost whatever shape it once had. I need to take it apart and reassemble it I think, if I want to be proud to put my name to it.
It was John Ralston Saul in Voltaire’s Bastards who really made the case in a way that convinced me – that expertise in modern society is used as a tool for power and is bound up with developing an exclusive vocabulary that is then used to keep out outsiders. I don’t know that I buy the agency implicit in his argument, but I certainly buy the end result he notes, of knowledge being caught up in silos and unable to serve as a check on itself across disciplines, of the reification of knowledge divorced from reality, and the cult of expertise that results being deployed as a rationale for persisting with insanity in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary. (Witness: the economy, around the world, right now.)
Actually, that brings to mind a great bit in the Boston Globe on the rise of the economist blogosphere, populated by highly educated experts who don’t buy the orthodoxy and who have been providing running criticism as recent events have unfolded. Go see the article, it’s pacey and insightful. Particularly go see if you’re one of those people that publish books about how the internet dumbs people down and blogs are a fad or a negative-sum game.
Anyway. Thesis. Continues. Yes.
Also: I am troubled by the precedent set in this, not least because sexually explicit parodies of popular cartoon/comic characters are a hallowed tradition.
And in today’s DomPost, prime spot on the features page yet again goes to a climate change sceptic. Tim Pankhurst, get your newspaper under control already! This is humiliating! If I had to pay for it, I’d never read it!

Forry 1916-2008

The grandad of fandom died the other day. Forrest J Ackerman was the first great fan of science fiction and horror, an unfailingly nice gentleman whose passion for genre animated him throughout his life. His seminal magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland cast a long shadow over 60s pop culture, and his friendships with the greats of horror and science fiction were legendary.
Most of all, though, I think we should remember Forry for being one of the champions of culture as a horizontal experience, rather than a vertical experience – that the greatest fun can be had not from sitting in a darkened theatre watching a film in silence, but in gleefully talking about it with friends afterwards. He was one of the first fans, and he was perhaps the nicest and most generous of all of us.
I was lucky enough to see him talk and to meet him briefly, back in ’91. He made an impression as a very nice chap indeed. Thanks for everything, Forry.
LA Times obituary

Thesis Procrastination Linky

Y’know there’s the service in the UK where you text a question, any question, and someone on the other end texts back an answer? It’s kinda like google only you’re actualy interacting with a human being and the human being uses google instead of you and then texts back what google says. Anyway, d3vo revealed this linky – a live feed of the questions and answers as they happen. Heh.
Some very groovy architectural optical illusions.
Kate Nepvu at Tor.com is rereading all of Lord of the Rings and blogging about each chapter
I keep meaning to make a full post about this because it is so insightful and funny and revealing. But I’m busy. Anyway, it’s about why the finance world is in such bad shape, and the reason seems to ultimately be… well, that’s down to the Big Swinging Dicks. And I don’t mean that as in Cheney on the dancefloor. Go read and have your eyes further opened to the sheer insanity that is modern life.
And finally, via AG in da UK, here’s fun with stop motion – brilliant stuff it is too:

Climate change at STS forum

On 20 November I went along to see the dean of the science fac here at VUW, Prof. David Bibby, speak about his visit to the Science and Technology Forum in Kyoto and the climate change discussion there.
Some notes from what he reported:

  • No debate whatsoever about whether climate change was real and caused by human activity. 2 degrees of warming was seen as guaranteed, again without dispute.
  • Needs to be a complete systems change to bring about deep, deep cuts in carbon emissions. The upcoming (2009) Copenhagen conference was seen as the crucial moment by delegates.
  • Nuclear power was talked about as a done deal by delegates – there was no discussion, it is seen as necessary for baseload power. This means there needs to be massive reinvestment in this technology. (I find myself oddly sanguine about the potential shift to nuclear – my perception of the risks and damage of nuclear power is unchanged, but it is now very clear that conventional power generation is even riskier and more damaging.)
  • Carbon capture technology was seen as about 20+ years away from viability, tidal and 2nd gen biofuels tech about 10-20 years away, but wind, photovoltaic etc sources are available and viable now
  • Related: there is a serious choke point coming where we have to stop using current tech but switchover to new tech is incomplete – seen to be about 2030 to 2050. This will be a rough time.
  • A key issue will be poverty, which will skyrocket as oil price rises make food expensive, exacerbated by first-gen biofuels which also drive up food price
  • Disease will be another key issue – tropical diseases will invade the temperate world, but almost all medical drugs are for temperate-world diseases because that is where the research/development money has been over the years. (Basically, our failure to distribute our medical expertise evenly around the world is about to bite us in the arse.)

(check out the STS final statement here – it’s a small pdf)
The STS recommendations don’t carry any particular weight – basically they feed into the general conversation. Still, it is encouraging that heavyweights in the science and tech fields are united around the need for radical changes to enable environmental security. (Also, kinda scary.)