I know it’s been a busy week when the most substantial blog post amounts to “I wear pyjamas”.
Play Paintball with the cast of the Wire: a great fundraiser idea, or the greatest ever fundraising idea? It’s on tomorrow in New York, still time to sell all your possessions and go.
Hot nerds reading comics. If I remember right, Warren Ellis dared them to; an hour later this was a real thing.
Depressing oil spill section: China linked to this in comments earlier this week – a short video, by someone who knows how harm is prevented during oil spill events, showing clearly and obviously how this is not being done in this case. Contains bad language born of massive frustration. Also, via making light, How you get a BP: Because for decades now, wherever some herkimer-jerkimer objected that our business was coming on a little too strong for their precious “community,” we had the answer that never failed: Step aside, buddy, you’re standing in the way of the Free Market.
Via everyone, a LEGO felt-tip-matrix printer:
And finally, via Jenni, Girls in Cardigans. Photos of girls in cardigans around Wellington. Except… not.
Another machine to suck your time/amuse your workmates: Six Degrees of Black Sabbath. Jean Grae to Julee Cruise in 7 steps! (via Public Address, who got from Ol’ Dirty B’ard to NZ Christian singer Brooke Fraser in 14 steps)
And you’ll shortly be hearing about how Sex and the City 2 is actually about oppression of women in the Muslim world. Gobsmacking misjudgement of what people want out of SatC2, or gobsmacking misjudgement of what people behind SatC2 can convincingly deliver? You decide! But make sure you don’t miss Seattle’s The Stranger dishing out the scorn. Contains spoilers.
Someone cares about this an awful lot. Traumatic childhood experience? It is easy to imagine such a thing. Tights are not pants.
My buddy Julian is getting married to the lovely Sabine (they’re getting married in Lebanon and I’m gutted I can’t go – how many times in my life will I get invited to a wedding in Lebanon? Not many!) Sabine’s brother Georges is a singer-songwriter in Montreal, and has just released an EP on Canadia’s Ambrosia label: Dark Rooms Have No Corners. It’s pretty cool. Here’s the first track, Feather:
Via Jack, News In Briefs, which collects the best bits of The Sun‘s Page 3 girls – their opinions on current events.
Via Ryan Paddy, the Museum of Bad Art, which is an actual museum. It has its own acronym: MOBA.
And finally, via Dangerous Minds which is where I get most of my linky these days to be honest, the Bay City Rollers and Ann Margaret perform in front of the most amazing audience you could ever want. Warning: includes knitting.
First up, a notice – many local readers will recall the spectacular Rumpus parties of previous years. d3vo is not hosting one in 2010 (and we missed 2009 too) because he’s getting his DJ on at a gig called Speed of Sound. Friday June 4th, free entry, scratch that rumpus itch!
Now, some linky.
Bus driver gets a birthday surprise. (First seen via Hamish R, rapidly propagating across the internets because it’s lovely.)
I reinstalled Windows last week (am much gooder now) but boneheadedly lost my bookmarks, including my linky stack. So many dozens of interesting linky, lost into the chaotic maestrom of the interwebs! Oh noes!
Luckily the internets is bountiful, here are some new-gathered linky.
Yesterday, went to dentist for first checkup in 3 years. He said “all good”. A dentist saying “all good” is one of life’s nicest, most reassuring things.
Happy April Fools Holy Thursday linky. I was all keen to do an April Fools Pantheon of Plastic entry, following DavidR’s suggestion, but after far too long clicking through action figure custom galleries and flipping the pages of Tomart’s Encyclopedia & Price Guide to Action Figure Collectibles, I still hadn’t found any photos that felt like they could play. No doubt I’ll have a great idea as soon as I post this, but oh well.
Flatlander pointed at this interview and response with a young right-wing politico on the subject of Earth hour. It is hilarious, and we should all seize the rhetorical flourishes on display for future use. Everyone likes “I think my argument is so powerful that it’s not necessary to talk about it” but I am fond of “it fails on three fun-loving levels”, which must be an actual talking point for him because he repeats it in both interviews. Outstanding.
The Large Hadron Collider hasn’t destroyed the universe yet, but it did give us a Tweet that will be remembered long after Twitter has faded away.
Elyssa a.k.a. The Moon Whispers, late of Wgtn and now home in Italy, has released a bunch of free music, including a new track Tutto Intorno e Ombra. (You have to subscribe to her email list to get the download link.) From the site: “Elyssa writes enchanting dark ballads with evocative vocals and a storytelling slant. ”
From Rodger: Polka Face! Wunnerful.
Seen the Scarface School Play yet? As a hoax it was never gonna last more than five minutes, but as a piece of wacko guerilla pop-art, it’s something amazing.
Weird, the Weird Al biopic. Am I the only one who genuinely would love to see a Weird Al biopic? A doco would beeven better.
And a round-up of linky about Dylan, interviews at BoingBoing, newsarama and more. Tomorrow I’ll be going to the NZ Comics Weekend opening, and hopefully on Saturday too to see the Wgtn launch of the first NZ edition of Dylan’s classic work, Hicksville. Bookman Beattie writes about Hicksville here. Dylan is a lovely chap and a great creator, and is currently serializing new work free on his blog: hicksvillecomics.com
Sitting next to my computer for the last few months has been an issue of Cerebus, the long-running nearly indescribably series by Dave Sim. I picked up a stack of them in a ten-cent sale a decade ago and have finally been working through them. Sim was a champion of the comics form and provided a showcase for plenty of up-and-coming creators, and a back-up in this issue (#177) is by a woman named Nina Paley. She, I remembered instantly, had written and drawn some great funny strips for Dark Horse Presents back in the 90s (and indeed, Sim’s intro mentions Diana Schutz, editor at Dark Horse). What, I wondered, had become of her? Well, it turns out she made a movie: a full-length animated feature called Sita Sings the Blues. Roger Ebert gives it an extensive and glowing review here. Ebert:
“By this point, I’m hooked. I can’t stop now. I put on the DVD and start watching. I am enchanted. I am swept away. I am smiling from one end of the film to the other. It is astonishingly original. It brings together four entirely separate elements and combines them into a great whimsical chord. You might think my attention would flag while watching An animated version of the epic Indian tale of Ramayana set to the 1920’s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. Quite the opposite. It quickens.”
It’s back in the circuit because it’s just been made available, free, under a Copyleft license. An interview with Paley at CBR tells the fascinating story. And you can watch the film here. I haven’t, yet, but I will, because it looks AMAZING. And now I can put that Cerebus issue away!
So that Wikileaks post yesterday was picked up by Reddit and traffic on this blog went into the stratosphere yesterday. On Weds I had 283 unique visitors, pretty typical; on Thursday that number jumped to 92,487. Whoa. What’s especially odd is that the post in question contained nothing at all new – it just copied and pasted some tweets from the Wikileaks twitter feed. Purely a right place/right time kinda deal.
This one has been everywhere this week, and it is far weirder than I expected: Alien vs Pooh. Also related to the incompatibility of the Alien films with childhood, this from io9: Old Alien toy ads will ruin your childhood all over again. Check out the Predator who attacks with his dreadlocks!
Trace Hodgson’s legendary 80s political/social satire Shafts of Strife. I can remember being astonished that this weird comic strip was running in the staid old Listener! (via Stephen Judd; Shafts of Strife presented online by the lovely Roger Langridge, whose Muppets comics still aren’t available in NZ.)
Scott Pilgrim trailer!
Watch some B-movies on AMC’s site. Streamed without region-lock; I am afraid of how much of my time this could eat. Worth a look just to see the titles of all the movies.
Minuit’s Aotearoa, a great track with lots of images from NZ’s past, has become something of an expat classic. It was mentioned in the DomPost yesterday which reminded me I had it sitting in my Linky folder. Lovely, but beware if you are a NewZillinderAbroad, it may give you a case of the homesicks.
Also NZ-specific is this great post from Reading the Maps last September, looking at whether we NZers are right to feel so distant from the appalling acts of genocide that have occurred elsewhere in the world. Shoulda linky to this ages back but still a great read.
“When the New Zealander comes“, some post-apocalyptic fiction from 1911, complete with illustrations. (Published in the Strand magazine, what published the Sherlock Holmes stories.)
