from the morgue

Friday Linky *cough*

Notice all the meaning signified by that cough? If I whack it at the front, like so:
*cough* Friday Linky
Then it means something completely different to when you put it at the end.
And if you put it in the middle - well, you've all seen The Movies, and if a character EVER coughs in the middle of what they're saying they have A Fatal Illness and will be tragically deaded by third reel! WOES!

Anyway, I've got that cold that I knew was coming. Suxxor. Am concentrating on getting over it in time for Rumpus!

Now, your linky for today:

100 year anniversary of the Tunguska event, complete with new scientific explanation (When you're a little kid and you think UFOs are awesome and you want to know everything you can about them, Tunguska is like the next level of knowledge above Roswell.)

Why I Write, another from the "get around to adding to your blogroll you lazy morgue" pile. This is by Sean, a stand-up gent and very clever fellow, and each post he discusses a reason why he writes/is a writer. Highly recommended for all, but particularly for those writery types among us.

This entertains me on some irrational level and I'll be quoting it for years. If whales talked like Kiwi boys, this is what it would be like. (The accent is a bit wonky in places, but the vocab is pure New Zild.)

Afrodisiac takes on Dracula in this 70s comic pastiche from the Meathaus crew. "Dracula's hold over Afrodisiac's women wavers in the presence of Big Daddy Bad Ass!"

And finally, this video: Where The Hell Is Matt - has been doing the rounds and it deserves to be seen by all. This guy Matt goes places and dances and makes short films out of it. Just lovely, guaranteed to put a smile on your face this Friday.

Have a great weekend. Don't forget to have yourself a rumpus, wherever you are!

Friday Is The Linkiest Day

I am outlinkied by my colleagues this week.

talula linked up to famous photos remade with lego - this may be the weirdest thing I've seen in ages.

Clayton Cubitt, photographer/designer, happened to be passing through NZ when Warren Ellis linked to him. He took some incredible photos. Start here, in the Air NZ lounge at LAX.

Heaps of good stuff at the brother Moose blog, like the prank collection and the 1910 farmer's manual, Farming With Dynamite.

This just released into the internetosphere: the U.S. special forces counterinsurgency manual, explaining how all that stuff in El Salvador etc. was orchestrated.

And finally, relax and enjoy this comic from 1950, Astra, Girl of the Future

Friday got your linky

The original draft of Barry Hughart's incredible novel, Bridge of Birds (warning: its a pdf file). I haven't read this yet, but I understand it is quite different from the published version (which I was given long ago by, I think, the Alligator).

And speaking of the Alligator, he gets an interview in the Seattle P-I on account of the ice-creaminess; probably only of interest to those in Seattle or those who know Aaron... (or those who just like to think about ice cream, and that's fair enough)

What newspaper cartoons used to be like. Plenty more from the same cartoonist. (Picked this one up through Journalista.)

Here's a thing of beauty: The Reality Of Running Away From Stuff. When you watch a movie and the hero out-swims a shark, or runs faster than an explosion, etc. - this is the definitive source to check to see how plausible that moment was!

And to balance the above, here's a thing of unspeakable, un-nameable horror, even worse than the Mao/Che slashfic I lured some of you into looking at two weeks ago...

(bekitty is responsible for spreading this one around)

This Friday, We Are Linky It

Art on the street:

Little People (via GrizzlyDog):

Via the knifeman, an incredible animated wall - I watched this with my mouth hanging open:

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Also:
A life in polaroids, with sad ending. (via xenogram)

And file under 'useful', the psychologist who turned ordinary folks into aggressive prison guards in the deeply unsettling Stanford Prison Experiment tells you how to resist all kinds of influence.

Fr-Fri-Friiiiiday Linky

Glenn Greenwald is reliably awesome writing on the U.S. political scene, with a particular focus on media support for the Iraq war. He's been all over the Pentagon-approved independent military experts story, and today recounts something even I find shocking for its directness: an admission, in a TV interview, that corporate execs at MSNBC deliberately and openly forced a pro-Bush, pro-War bias. It isn't the first time we've heard this, either, as Greenwald recounts, but the audacity of it still unnerves me. Manufacturing Consent doesn't even go far enough for this.

Russell Brown took note of this campaign to save 'Dollhouse' before it even starts - another case where reality follows close on the heels of satire.

Running short of ignorant and aggressive comments to news stories? Never fear, spEak You're bRanes has an automated generator that will solve that problem!

Benicio del Toro won Best Actor for his starring role in Soderbergh's enormous two-part biopic Che - but one has to wonder, do the films include this little-known incident between Che and Mao?

Friday (Linky) On My Mind

I have a whole section in my bookmarks of "people to add to my blogroll" that I will honestly get around to doing someday. In the meantime, this one's open in a tab right now so I am reminded to share: occasional commenter and all-around gent Dan has started Freshly Ground, which is mostly a blog about eating well. He muses in an entertaining way about how his young family is doing food-wise, with an eye on sustainability and nutrition and of course the NOM NOM NOM factor. And shares loads of tasty and simple recipes as he goes! Today's entry is about when to cheat...

(And on the subject of food, Giffy is flickr'ing her lunches. Check out the one she blogged today: this is a good example of lunchy awesome, in my book.)

I've talked about Purity Balls before - it's one of my posts that keeps getting traffic off of google and being passed around Facebook - and am thus inclined to share this commentary from Salon.com's Broadsheet section: "We've written before about Generations of Light Ministries' fantastically creepy "purity ball," where fathers make a pledge to protect their young daughters' hymens. But the New York Times' coverage of the 2008 ball launched the event's creepy quotient into the cosmos..." Go see. Yeesh.

And from the "holy cow" files, here's what happens when a ten-year old boy writes a letter the Charles Manson and gets a reply.

That's all I gots for ya this week. Additional linky from you folks is encouraged in comments...

A Fine Day To Linky

This has been sitting in my pile for an age - Malc pointed me at this set of videos in the GUBA library: seminal Brit sci-fi, Quatermass and the Pit and Quatermass II. I have the script books somewhere in a box but have never seen them before - very exciting, from back when TV was filmed live like a stage show.

The Cluetrain Manifesto - written in response to the dotcom boom that had yet to burst, and still brimming with value a decade later. e.g. "26. Public Relations does not relate to the public. Companies are deeply afraid of their markets."

Last linky I showed you Kate Beaton's Napoleon eating cookies. This week I show you Kate Beaton getting into an hilarious online fight battle with the Stereotypist!

And that may be all the linky we have time for. We'll see if inspiration strikes late in the game. The whistles go woo woo!

Brevity Friday Linky

Okay, a brevity linky:

Stumbled across Kate Beaton's comics for about the fifth time and this week I will linky them. They are good. Especially Napoleon eating cookies and Conversations With Younger Me.

Make your own Music television - a mashup of Last.fm and YouTube that searches YouTube for music videos that're liked by people who like the music you like, like. Is good. Hattip to the imperator DavidR for this one.

Potsie Syndrome - characters on TV shows who still show up each week because the actor's on contract, but just kinda stand around and never do anything because the writers just don't have a clue why they're there.

And did you catch the Ewok gospel, via linky in last week's comments by Dave W?

Ain't No Friday If There Ain't No Linky

Museum of the World's Worst Comics. Lots of wacky stuff from the 40s and 50s.

For fellow Wire-heads: Steve Lieber draws characters from the Wire in the style of The SImpsons. (And from the same link, Wire co-creator David Simon shows up in a blog comments section to beat on someone for the stupid. warning - blog post itself is detailed plot summary of a s4 ep so be careful if you're not that deep.)

In a spectacular display of what missing-the-point looks like, many serious-minded technical people explain how the Death Star explosion caused a holocaust on Endor. (Dudes, it's Star Wars. Your science has no place here.)

The incredible Future Perfect blog, in which a Nokia researcher talks about travelling the world to see how different people in different cultures make use of cellphones. There's a list of countries and regions down the side - click on one and marvel. In my explorations so far I liked Tehran.

Joe Dante's Gremlins feature in a BT ad in the UK.

And finally, again from the wonderful photoblog riotclitshave, I give you THE POWER OF METAL.

Thursday Linky

Friday being a public holiday here in NZ, your linky cometh early. Durty furriners might consider it a mid-week special, but they are durty furriners and there is no accounting.

Another from talula - people re-enact their childhood photos with usually-hilarious results. [EDIT: linky seems deaded! perhaps it will live again tomorrow?]

Take a moment to tap your name into this week's web petition thing, the Ape Manifesto, which calls upon governments to save the wild primates. They have almost 10% of their targeted 1 million signatures as I type.

Superlate pointed me at the delightful Growcube game which is both very simple and very complex.

Political development of the week is the Flat Earth society reaching out in solidarity to climate change sceptics. Its a brilliant wind-up, and they stumbled on a mini-scoop - almost-Prime-Minister Don Brash in the audience to hear from the latest rent-an-expert why you should keep driving your SUV.

Also is:

I R SRS ZOMBIE MOVIE ZOMG

and an incredible application that quickly cleans your screen

*jumps out Monkey-style* Linky!

Friday Linky

From the other moose, I give you seminal West Coast rappers N.W.A. with their debut album, Straight Outta Compton - Explicit Content Only. That's right, its remixed so it's only the explicit material. This brings back memories.

The site has loads of other interesting art projects. I like HipHop PopUp, an online player of Kanye West's Graduation album that pops up the websites of brands as he mentions them. Its a pretty neat critique of the bling culture at work in much of hiphop. Also Satanic Images, which searches online galleries for photos that were the 666th image recorded by that particular digital camera.

Here is World Without Oil, an alternate reality game that ran to a conclusion last year. Depicting a world responding to an oil crisis, it engaged a lot of people with vivid imagined accounts of what life would be like. I've only just found this so Im only just getting my head around it. It seems like a neat way to explore this issue, although like Zeb Cook, I wonder if this is so arcane it ends up restricted to an elite - maybe not exactly the elite Zeb is talking about, but a preaching-to-the-converted thing does seem likely. It was promo'd at SXSW, fer pete's sake. Anyway, I'm just amazed I haven't heard about it before.

I've been dabbling in a new phenomenon on YouTube lately - clips of Iranian women getting into trouble for not wearing the hejab properly. Girls wailing as they're forced into police cars, or roughly pushing aside old ladies who are trying to restrain them. It's fascinating and troubling, and best viewed with some kind of contextual knowledge - Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis will do. Beware of the comments, where neo-Nazis, American freedom bigots, Persian Muslims of both traditionalist and reformist stripe, other Persians, Arab Muslims, other Arabs, feminists, and others conduct furious five-directional wars full of invective and lacking much illumination.

And to close, here's forty-five years of Doctor Who clips played to an Eminem-Benny Hill theme mashup. Probably bewildering to the uninitiated, but fun nonetheless.

Just Another Friday Linky

Av Club interview with Lower Hutt's finest, Anna Paquin, about her new production company shared with her brother, liberal politics, and the X-Men. (Lower Hutt reprazent!)

Abi at Making Light a week ago, talking about things with deep value: "Looking at a world where the economy is probably going to be tightening up for a while, I find myself drawn to things with deep value, things a little less dependent on the state of our technology and shipping infrastructure to build and repair. Living in a small country with a history of pollution problems, I want to own things I don't have throw away after one use. And spending much of my time as a crafter, I am attracted to things that I can fix." Check out her list of things, and of course the comments on Making Light are always worth a look.

PRINT magazine has an article on how Young Adult book covers change over the years. The photo comparing four different covers of Judy Blume's 'Forever' is my favourite.

And via talula, NPR on the New York guy who responded to getting mugged by inviting the mugger to dinner.

Enjoy your Friday everyone.

Friday Linky

Home sick with a cold today, which gives me a chance to provide your Friday Linky:

Start with the Seven Fortean wonders of the world - I hadn't heard of Oak Island and its Money Pit, or the Piri Reis map.

I've already mentioned Sixteen Candles once this year - how improbable is mentioning it a second time? NPR has a feature on Long Duk Dong, the cringe-inducing Asian character from that film. It interviews actor Gedde Watanabe, and also features a one-page strip by Adrian Tomine about being an Asian American in high school when "the Donger" was famous.

In other comic-related linky, Newsarama has the special Scott Pilgrim comic released for Free Comic Book Day - if you don't know Scott Pilgrim, it's a super-fun oddity featuring young love, rock and roll, and cute dimension-hopping rollerskate couriers. It is the hipster book of the moment, and worth checking out. (Wellington Public Library has 'em, local readers!)

And Cracked has an article on when Princess Di joined a superhero team in an infamous killed storyline for X-Men spin-off X-Statix by Brit stirrer Peter Milligan and artist Mike Allred. Features the rarely-seen cover art that was solicited before the Windsors said, um, no, and the story was altered. See it to believe it.

Star Wars fans, check out the space fight from Return of the Jedi with all the non-space fight bits edited out - just nine minutes of pure space battle adrenaline (and not coincidentally the best sequence in Return of the Jedi).

Eco-stuff: Malc pointed me at this BBC report on the fate of plastics in our ecology - drifting in the sea currents so it all ends up on this remote island of 'Midway'. If you're still in doubt over whether we need to kick our plastic bag habit, this will tip you over. The ocean-crossing robot should become some kind of mascot... Also, the AVClub discusses misguided enviro-friendly entertainments such as Captain Planet, Ferngully, and Melissa Etheridge. (Hang on...)

And finally:Einstein's theory of relativity in words of four letters or less. Worth your time (so to speak). Not kidding about the four-letter limit, either - they refer to Isaac Newton as "Izzy" throughout...

Leapday Linky

This is probably my favourite video on the internets, evar. Watch it. If you've seen it before, watch it again. The cats are great.

Via some Wellybloggers, a mesmerising short film portrait of Wellington by Massey Design student Richard Sidey, his showpiece at the end-of-04 exhibition Exposure (which is always worth a look if you're in Welly in December). It's an awardwinning film, and watching it you'll see why. Timelapse reveals new rhythms in familiar spaces. It's wicked. Music by Dubtown's percussionistas Strike!, and also featuring calligraphy by Stan Chan.

Via Svend, a deeply weird true-life mystery - nine experienced skiers, out camping in the mountains, who didn't make it through the night. But what the details suggest about what happened will give you shivers.

Via Hottieperm, Stuff White People Like. It misses as often as it hits, and "white people" seems to mean "urban liberals", but its dogged commitment to that one joke is pleasing to me.

I wish you a Very Leapy Friday.

It Is Friday, So I Linky

Everybody loves Tintin, right? That intrepid ligne clair reporter with his quiff and his faithful dog who said "Whoa!" Soon to be a series of three major motion pictures directed by various luminaries and scribbled by new Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat?

Herge died with a Tintin tale in progress, Tintin And Alph-Art. Very rough pencil layouts were completed for half the book, and a few other notes survive, but that's all. This work was published recently, sitting alongside 'Land of the Soviets' and 'in the Congo' as ones for completists only.

Now, heroic/obsessive Tintin fan Yves Rodier has taken it upon himself to finish Herge's last book - transforming the sketched layouts into full-colour pages with Herge-style art and carrying on the story to a conclusion that seems appropriate.

It's an incredible piece of work. Go see.

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Issuu continues to grow by leaps and bounds, setting itself up as the YouTube of .pdf publishing. Loads of fascinating magazines to read, and when you find one you like you can blog-embed it. For example, a magazine consisting entirely of freaky-cool sculptures can be embedded like this:

Go have a nosy around. Lots of goodness.

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Finally, another must-read Rolling Stone piece on the CheneyBush disinfo administration, this time revealing the truth behind some infamous high terrorism alerts in the US over the last 5 years (This is, of course, another contribution from the other, dancing, moose. Read his blog too.)

Linky, Although Not Friday

Some linky for your pleasure. This has been haywire year so far so pretend it's lazy Friday at your work and check out the following:

From the Benny: a list of all the reasons why David Banner turned into the Incredible Hulk in the Hulk TV show. Man, this is one dude you seriously don't want to spill hot coffee on. Or get stuck in traffic with. (Fortunately, it seems he doesn't get too angry when you use prepositions to end sentences with.)

From Mr Warren Ellis: World of Meters, which has real-time updating statistics about the world. Most fascinating to me is "Miles Earth has traveled in space within our Solar System this year" - that number cranks up real quick. This big ol' dirtball goes fast.

And from the world of YouTube, Alanis covers Rage Against The Machine "Guerilla Radio"

and finally that one Sarah Silverman song about Matt Damon that is all over the internets with good reason: