Learn how to interpret Regular Expressions the hard way.
The New Yorker’s famously picky cartoon editor has found the perfect cartoon.
Steve Leon showed me this clip of Herman Cain, US Republican would-be Presidential candidate, overdubbed with… words. That match the movements of his lips. It’s a thing. And it made me guffaw I tell you.
(This post is an election-free zone, Kiwis. Take a break, grab a cuppa, and make with the clicky.)
Thanks to the kindness of one @BKDrinkwater, I saw a movie in a cinema yesterday (second time this year! Whoop!) – it was Tintin, and it was fun, though I can see why the purists were furious – it was definitely a movie interpretation of Tintin, not just an adaptation. After which, some Wiki clicking revealed that there was a 1947 stop motion adaptation of the adventure Crab With The Golden Claws. Fascinating. Would love to see that.
Achewood is back! Don’t start with the most recent strip though. And don’t start at the start. Start… um… I dunno where. Randomly.
I haven’t even watched this yet but it’s getting muchas sharing by people who comment stuff like “amazing” and “so cool” so I reckon it’ll be worth your time.
Watch while you can: song medley at the Jim Henson memorial service. Clips from this incredible event never stay up on YouTube for long. This is wondrous and a bit heartbreaking.
Found that via the AV Club’s ongoing retrospective of the classic Muppet Show – which also makes the entirely accurate claim that Rita Moreno performing Fever is “one of the best of the best segments of any TV variety show ever”. Watch it. 2 minutes of incredible.
People liked something I put on Twitter during the deeply weird events of yesterday morning in NZ politics. It ended up on the Listener blog even (at 1pm). The best bit is that not ten minutes after I wrote that our PM came out with a line that really did sound like it was scripted by the greatest satirist of the antipodes:
“Key was asked if the investigation was an appropriate use of police resources.
‘The good thing is we’ve lowered the crime rate by seven per cent across the country so they do have a little bit of spare time'” (Source)
Humour is a funny thing. (See what I did there?) I’ve always been fascinated by the behind-the-scenes of laugh-getting, the hard graft that goes into working up a gag. Twitter itself is a bit like a giant gag-writer’s room, everyone chucking ideas and variants at the wall until something sticks. There was a great This American Life that looked inside the writer’s room for The Onion, and I’ve been listening lately to Robin & Josie’s Utter Shambles, which is a charming podcast that always seems to end up in a discussion about the nature of comedy-as-work. It’s an inside-baseball look at how comedians interact with each other and position themselves in relation to the rest of the world, and a reminder of just how distinctive is the comedian’s role in society. Highly recommended. The Alan Moore episode is great as a starting point, it’s how I got in.
Early Star Wars scripts! See how Lucas’s ideas evolved, if you have the patience. I’m more curious why no-one has tried to make a fan-film of one of these early versions…
Film critic Hulk on Happy-Go-Lucky. The all-caps Hulk-speak is exhausting, but stick with it if you’ve seen this film, because this is easily the smartest thing i’ve ever seen written about Mike Leigh’s semi-masterpiece.
So I have a Linky file where I bookmark all the odds and ends I come across while browsing the internets. It is a big file. But this week I don’t even need to dig into it because so much stuff has turned up this afternoon or in my email. So it will grow and grow and grow…
Geological Society of America finds the lair of the Kraken. (At least, an expert explains an ambiguous fossil site by speculating there was a real big scary octopus that ate plesiosaurs and then arranged their bones in pleasing patterns. Eek.)
A bevy of Twin Peaks linky:
* a Twin Peaks computer game, in retro 8-bit style, for free download
* the Dale Cooper tapes – digital version of the cassette tape of all Cooper’s reports to the mysterious Diane, including all the TV show reports plus a bunch more made specifically for this release
* amazing photos from the making of the final episode of the series, taken by actor Richard Beymer
The Kerning game! I got 100% on half of these, which made me far happier than typography has ever made me before. (Hmm, except maybe baiting people with messages in comic sans.)
Craig Ferguson has Amanda Palmer, moby, Stephen Merritt & Neil Gaiman performing “Science Fiction Double Feature” from Rocky Horror…
Halloween! Here is the AV Club on one of the most unnerving sequences I’ve ever seen on the big screen, the bit in the car from Scream 2. I remember singing the praises of this scene on the way home from the cinema, good to be reminded why I liked it so much!
And also for Halloween, you could do worse than dip into the deep weirdness of the Slender Man…
Great one-star review of Orwell’s 1984 on Amazon: “Jackson’s “Thriller”? (the soundtrack of the summer, and the biggest selling album of all-time) – not mentioned; Frankie Goes To Hollywood (their breakthrough year leading to world pop domination) – not a whisper…”
BBC Domesday project – snapshots from all across the UK in 1985, there to explore and compare to a growing number of 2011 updates.
My favorite moment—or moments, I should say—of my three visits to Occupy Wall Street was watching the open-air Big Apple double-decker tour buses drive past, full of tourists with their fists in the air! That was an amazing thing to see. Witnessing that sight, repeatedly, I might add, was as sure a confirmation as anyone should require that a little over a month after its improbably beginnings, OWS is becoming a mainstream phenomenon.
Fierce essay on the anti-Stratfordians, who think Shakespeare didn’t write his own plays. Not a takedown exactly – it takes as read that their position is nonsense – but a bracing assault on their way of thinking, drawing explicit comparison to creationists demanding schools “teach the controversy”. All sparked by that new film, of course.
And then there’s this guy doing Shakespeare in celebrity voices. Some uncommon ones in there along with the classics you all expect.
Found this filed in the wrong section of my bookmarks, no idea how long it’s been there. Aaaaages. Still cool. It is CuteRoulette, randomly delivering cute videos for cute cuteness! Except it seems to be bringing up a lot of dead links now. I assume it was curated, and is no longer being curated. Anyway, worth a look if you like cute videos cute cute kyoot kawaii.
The scariest thing about NZ’s current oilspill is that it’s so incredibly minor compared to other events elsewhere.
Anyway, let these linky drift towards your mental beach and collect on the pristine sand of your thought processes:
The Thing musical. SPOILERS for the 1982 movie and, let’s face it, for the 2011 movie too. (Thanks to Mr David Ritchie of Hamiltron for this one.)
Jenni and Pearce sent me this direct, and I’ve seen it elsewhere as well. If you haven’t seen it you’re obviously following the wrong Twitterbooks. Dr Seuss does Call of Cthulhu
The conceptual ecology of Tumblr is fascinating to me. Image mixing is so incredibly simple in the mature digital era; it wasn’t so long ago that images were expensive in every sense of the word. Now images are about as cheap as words. Big change, and in manifests in thousands of Tumblrs that are basically ironic jokes about celebrities, and also bits of genius like this: My Daguerrotype Boyfriend, or this collection of 8-bit computer games that don’t exist
Team-ups I did not expect: Baba Brinkman (of the rap guide to human nature) and Prof Elemental (of the ubiquitous Cup of Brown Joy). In a promo for MacMillan Dictionaries. Via Matt Cowens
Fairly mindblowing tech demo on adding things to photos. The best thing about this is the stuff they choose to put in the photos. Someone has great taste in statues.
I bookmarked this a month ago and since then it has been everywhere because it is AMAAAAZING. So if you haven’t seen it already, NOW IS THE TIME. It is: Women of the Future (as predicted in 1902)
Fascinating to see the reaction to Steve Jobs’ death. Mainstream coverage predictably hagiographical, but there’s a lot of nuance elsewhere. I’ve appreciated these bits by Joel Pitt, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and Russell Brown.
Another great series of essays by Andrew Rilstone, this time analyzing contemporary (UK) political talk through the lens of bad puns. Part one is here; the rest follow along. Very relevant here in NZ with the electoral cycle rolling closer.
Presume you’ve already seen that vid of the kid experiencing the single greatest plot twist in movie history? (Yep this counts as this week’s Star Wars content.)
Was looking forward to settling in and doing a nice solid linky but I lost a doc I’d spent hours on and need to recreate it urgently. So very minimal linky only. Sorry folks.
Yeah I know, I don’t know how I lost it either. Apparently I hadn’t clicked “Save” once in all that time. I thought I’d learned good habits there long ago. Ah well.
Ryan Pequin’s Three Word Phrase updates very irregularly, but it makes me happy every time. He has odd rhythms that come through strongly in panel and dialogue pacing, and they are funny rhythms. I recommend you read through a bunch, see if you get sucked in. (Warning: occasional instances of sex, but they’re all done with this innocent observational style so they don’t feel anything like dirty jokes. Still, if you have prudish workplace, don’t look.)
The nine best Sesame Street special guest appearances. I’ve already linked to many of these in the last few years. A few in here I hadn’t seen though. I won’t spoil the surprise. Needless to say, it’s all worth your time.
And finally, from 1975, Helen Mirren takes on and takes down sexist Michael Parkinson. Haven’t watched this yet but it’s one of those things you hear about. Presumably it lives up to the legend!
