P-p-p-p-p-please!
Who Delayed Roger Rabbit? Rich Drees lays bare the backroom bickering and production studio drama behind one of the 1980s’ most successful comedies. For an encore, Drees reviews the unproduced script of Roger Rabbit II: Toon Platoon. Weep for what might have been.
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There we go
Was working on some issues related to long rebuild times today, stupid unicode.
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Impacts of Climate Change
Impacts of Climate Change, the Potential Impacts to 2050 of a Mid-Upper Greenhouse Gas Emissions Scenario. From Global Business Network.
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Because Britney’s lack of hair is more important.
You would think that with 4,000 women and 200 girls together, along with hundreds of NGOs and representatives of 45 governments the United Nations’ Commission on the Status of Women would be well covered by the media. Sadly, it is not: this year only 10 journalists demanded media accreditation to cover the international meeting, while pro-life groups are more than happy to send delegates arguing that "governments should protect girls from the moment of conception."
The Commission however is no small event: it provided a legal frame protecting the rights of women and girls worldwide (those rights were officially adopted in the early 90s [!]). It also provides standards to which participant countries must try live up to. This blog takes us backstage, behind the CSW’s scene.
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Carved Eggshell Art
Christel Assante carves eggshells into extraordinary pieces of art. SculptorRon Cheruka , who goes by the nickname "the egg man," also works in the medium of eggshell, but he is not quite as talented in my opinion, a Salieri to Assante’s Mozart.
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Immigration limbo
“Dear Mr. Prime minister haper, I don�t like to stay in this jail. I�m only nine years old. I want to go to my school in Canada. I�m sleeping beside the wall. Please Mr. Priminister haper give visa for my family. This place is not good for me."
Two Iranian parents and their Canadian-born son Kevin have been detained in a Texas detention centre after trying to escape their torturous and dangerous situation in Iran.
Hear the interviews.
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The ozone layer was just jealous.
There are holes in the earth’s crust! It turns out that the ozone layer was just keeping up with the Jones’s; in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, there is a patch of several thousand square kilometers where the mantle is exposed. ‘The team of scientists from Cardiff University stress there is no need for the public to panic about the giant hole even though they describe it as "a gaping open wound in the Earth’s skin".’
The scientific team departs today to investigate the hole. They will be detailing their progress on a blog. And you can ask them questions about their project, which they may answer online.
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Creepy automated photo retouching software
PortraitProfessional is a software package that claims to automate the process of retouching portraits. In part it does so by perfecting skin tone and texture, much like Kodak’s excellent Digital GEM Airbrush plugin, but it also does something it calls ‘face sculpting,’ presumably reproportioning facial elements into some sort of ideal relationship. The effect in many cases is to give the subject a creepy, bug-eyed look that seems equal parts anime, Whitley Strieber alien, and those funny warped headshots made famous by (and with) Kai’s PowerTools. The reworked photo on the home page isn’t too extreme, but some of the ones in the sample gallery are downright disturbing. (And I can’t imagine how you’d ever explain to a subject why you rebuilt his or her face as if you were a plastic surgeon in some military hospital.)
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Chad Vader
Chad Vader – Day Shift Manager. Life is hard for Chad Vader, the younger, less charismatic brother of Darth Vader, who is the day shift manager of a grocery store.
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Best Buy admits to keeping fake rip-off site
Best Buy has admitted to maintaining a fake version of its website for internal use at its stores. This is part of a scam where Best Buy lists cheap prices online and invites customers to come to the store to take advantage of them. When the customer gets there, a dirtbag salesman loads up the fake website and shows them that the price has “gone up” while the customer was driving over to the store and offers to sell the item for the new price.
State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal ordered the investigation into Best Buy’s practices on Feb. 9 after my column disclosed the website and showed how employees at two Connecticut stores used it to deny customers a $150 discount on a computer advertised on BestBuy.com.
Blumenthal said Wednesday that Best Buy has also confirmed to his office the existence of the intranet site, but has so far failed to give clear answers about its purpose and use.
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Mac VS PC
Mac VS PC And this time PC is the cool guy and Mac is the stooge! Gems like "Mac works for PC", "PC gets the girl." and "Mac may be cool but PC has the money."
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Oh my God
Darwin’s God. "A scientific exploration of how we have come to believe in God."
This article tracks the possibility that belief in a higher power is the product of evolution.
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The Beatles: Bigger than Jesus 41 years running
The Beatles are Bigger than Jesus. It was 41 years ago today, that the Evening Standard published a Maureen Cleave interview with John Lennon, in which he declared the Beatles “more popular than Jesus”. Later in July, DATEbook, an American teen mag, printed only the Jesus statement and nothing else from the interview. The firestorm of reaction in the US was immediate. Radio stations nationwide, but particularly in the South and in the Midwest, banned the playing of Beatles records [Real Audio]. Death threats against all of the Fab Four poured in. In Cleveland, a preacher threatened to excommunicate any member of his congregation who listened to the Beatles, and in the South, the Ku Klux Klan burned the Beatles in effigy and nailed Beatles albums to burning crosses. On August 11, Lennon held a press conference in Chicago, where he apologized, sort of. The press conference was on the eve of the Beatles’ last tour of their career. Many say this epsiode, as well as the riots that accompanied their tour of the Philippines (also in July), as well as the accumulated stress of being on top of the world for nearly four years at that point, precipitated the beginning of the end of the Beatles.
Is it true though? Are the Beatles bigger than Jesus? Though this was unanswerable in 1966, thanks to the magic of the web, we do know the answer today: according to Google, the answer is no. Still, other views persist.
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It will never replace a hardcover book – it makes a very poor doorstop.
Huck Finn, Heart of Darkness, A Tale of Two Cities, and others – free audio books. Text and audio on the web, or downloadable mp3s with embedded text.
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Grenade found in bag of potatoes
Olga Mauriello, 74, of Naples, Italy, washed off a potato from a sack she’d just purchased and discovered that the spud was actually an active hand grenade. A bomb squad was called in and the grenade safely detonated. From Reuters:
Police said the pine cone-shaped grenade, which had no pin and was still active, was the same type used by U.S. soldiers in Europe in World War Two. Authorities believe the mix-up happened at a farm in France, where the grenade was plucked from the ground along with potatoes…
“If I hadn’t felt its weight, I wouldn’t even have realised that it was a bomb,” she said.
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Edible chess cookie-cutters
I can’t figure out of Biggles sells these edible chess brass cookie-cutters/candy molds, or if they just exhibit them to taunt those of us who dream of eating our way to victory in the game of kings.
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Finding Nemo at the sushi bar
I’m 99.99% sure that this Finding Nemo sushi is a fake, but oh, man, if Disney had the guts to actually release this as a product, wouldn’t that be the best thing ever?
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Wasabi spill spices up the ISS
Sunita Williams, an astronaut on board the ISS, had a “wasabi spill” while preparing a special fake-sushi meal on the space station. Astronauts on the ISS get “bonus containers” filled with their favorite foods, and Williams’s included the sushi kit and its nuclear-hot mustard-paste. The astronauts have banished the wasabi to a cargo pod, and vowed to prohibit the consumption of too-spicy condiments on board.
Williams, whose father was born in India, has several Indian dishes in her bonus container, including Punjabi kadhi with pakora – vegetable fritters topped with yogurt and curry – and mutter paneer, a curry dish. The dishes are packaged to have a long shelf life in space.
Her U.S. crew mate, astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, is an even bigger “foodie.” Lopez-Alegria, who was born in Madrid but grew up in California, had Spanish muffins known as magdalenas, chorizo pork sausage and latte in his bonus container.
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Led Zelda tees
The Zelda/Led Zep mashup tees from Hot Topic allow you to express your allegiance to both metal and 8-bit video games, two of the best things about the 80s.
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Post office solves long lines by removing clocks
The US Post Office has removed clocks from 37,000 postal outlets in order to alleviate the problem of people feeling like they’re waiting in line for two long. A clockless atmosphere will apparently encourage a state of meditative interest in the workings of the postal service, without distracting with the sense of time’s fleeting passage. Consumerist’s Meghann Marco nails it:
Um, correct us if we’re wrong here but:
* People carry timepieces.
* The post office is not a casino. People aren’t going to lose themselves in the fun and mail more letters than they’d originally intended.
Is this the best they can come up with?
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Vancouver Olympics will own words like “winter,” “2010” and “Vancouver”
Canadian Industry Minister Maxime Bernier recently introduced Bill C-47, the Olympic and Paralympic Marks Act, through which the Vancouver Olympics are guaranteed exclusive public use of the following words: winter, gold, silver, bronze, sponsor, Vancouver, Whistler, 2010, tenth, medals, and games.
It’s amazing how the Olympics have come to symbolize bullying corporate greed; overreaching, violent “security measures;” drug abuse and destruction of public facilities and low-income housing.
Bernier has no time to deal with spam, spyware, privacy, or net neutrality but commits to legislation on behalf of the organizers of a sporting event? Moreover, the legislation grants the Olympic organizers enormous power to police the use of anything approaching association with the Olympics. For example, the bill contains a list of expressions to be considered by the federal court to determine whether someone has misled the public into believing that their business is endorsed or associated with the Olympics. The expressions include: winter, gold, silver, bronze, sponsor, Vancouver, Whistler, 2010, tenth, medals, and games. While this looks like a recipe for abuse, the Olympic organizers have assured the public that it “is committed to applying the proposed legislation in a disciplined, sensitive, fair and transparent manner.” Perhaps, but many Canadians may justifiably be left to ask whether anyone should be granted the right to govern the use of generic words such as winter or Vancouver.
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Sleep naked
SleepNaked.org seems to be a one-man campaign in support of a good cause: sleeping in the raw. I hadn’t realized that there were people who chose to sleep otherwise these days, but I guess the sinister forces of Big Pyjamas aren’t to be underestimated.
Not only is sleeping naked more comfortable, but it’s good for your health too. Increasing your level of comfort makes it easier for you to relax and sleep, so you get a better night’s kip. The resulting deeper, longer sleep makes it easier for your body to regenerate and repair itself, and build up your energy for the day ahead.
If you sleep with a partner, being naked heightens the level of intimacy between you and you are likely to have sex more often. You may also feel closer to your partner as a result of sleeping naked with them.
RobDurdle.com 
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