Rare Barbastelle bat found on the Isle of Wight
White hind caught on camera in Scotland; Queens Susan, Lucy, Kings Peter, Edmund, seen rushing to site
This article can't make up its mind whether the hind (which is a female deer) should be referred to as "it" or "she". Come on, folks, language guidelines should state that if an animal's sex is known, he or she should be referred to appropriately. Possibly non-sexually-dimorphic arthropods and small fish could be exempt, but it's stupid to refer to a queen bee or ant drone as "it".
Dog lost in Afghan battle returns. Again with the "its"! What is this rudeness? To a war veteran, no less! (Oh, sorry, Sabi, I meant to say war experienced person.)
28,000 people in the UK have black and white television sets.
Nu Labour in a nutshell:
The superstitions around opening an umbrella indoors apparently date back to the Ancient Egyptians.
Nurse shark? This one's a midwife.
Smart wife launches her own entrapment operation to catch her paedophile husband in the act. Also, they live in Pantygog.
Chile says "thanks but no thanks" to statue of authoritarian paedophile-abetting misogynist with creepy Virgin Mary fixation. Sadly not on those grounds, just because of an underground car park.
This one's fascinating: Traditional African rulers should apologise for the role they played in the slave trade, a Nigerian rights group has said.
'I agreed to become a suicide bomber' – after days of beatings and being shouted at, poor kid. I admire him.
Greek Church throws a hissy fit about a ban on "the compulsory display of crucifixes" in classrooms.
Darwin foiled by ambulance service
Lion is taken on midnight safari. Disapproves of stop signs but enjoyed drive-thru.
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My job has improved my knowledge of pop culture SO much, seriously.
[Mel] Gibson... is he the Scientologist or the anti-Semite? Directed Lord of the Rings or Lord of the Flies or something too, didn't he?
Herm, today
I wouldn't have known that much before.
View the original post at Black Dog Blog
"I felt I'd test my hypothesis and I did that by getting my cat certified by a number of the most prominent lay hypnosis organisations in the United States. It was a frighteningly simple process."
Cat registered as hypnotherapist
Look at the picture of the cat, though. That's an intense expression – every bit as convincing as Derren Brown. And less trustworthy.
'Lying down' NHS staff reinstated
Honour killings given Bollywood flavour
Uruguay approves sex change bill, jubilant blogger tries desperately not to type "You mean Uragay lol lol :D"
Cut them off with a rusty butter knife.
I don't celebrate Hallowe'en, but that Methodist minister has just caused me to drink some water as a proxy libation to Bau and Anubis (which I reasoned ought to count as Satan in his book). Self-important arsenoses like Rev Jonathan Campbell make Satanism look more attractive than do 19-year-old skinhead trick-or-treaters or noisy drunk people having fun.
Yes they should – why don't they already?!
Berners-Lee 'sorry' for slashes, fanfiction writers up in arms
New flying reptile fossils found
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I wish this clip were on YouTube. I was dipping in and out of Channel 4's 9/11 documentary this morning because someone else was watching it on tape. Really nice filmmaking, incidentally – letting their good selection of clips speak for themselves. Nevertheless, one moment more than others made my blood run cold and my bloodlust run hot.
It's around 01:14:53, if you're able to watch it on 4OD from your location.
It's a soundbite/interview with a sane-looking (as far as anyone can judge) American chap in Times Square during the Twin Towers attacks – filmed before the second tower fell, while people were just standing watching it broadcast live on various screens. "My personal opinion is, we should go to Finland and all those Arab countries and just blow them up. Kill them. That's it. Honestly. Kill them."
Yes, I ran it back and I'm sure he said Finland. This fellow wasn't alone among those filmed in immediately demanding that somebody be invaded (and there were clips of women as well as men saying so), although he was the only one I saw who demonstrably thought Finland was in the Middle East.
Honestly, America, sometimes you make it hard for me to think you didn't deserve Dubya.
Don't get me wrong, though, I'd be out for someone's blood if anyone did this in my country, but I'd wait until I knew it was 'Arabs' – and perhaps even find out which particular Arabs – before invading them.
Well, I just found that an interesting and chilling insight.
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High Flight, for those new to the maze of footless twisty hallways of my head, is one of my favourite poems, about the joy of being a pilot. I'm not alone: pilots and astronauts everywhere find it touching, and according to Wikipedia "it is required to be recited by memory by first-year cadets at the United States Air Force Academy" (way to buzz-kill, USAF).
YouTube: Old US television channel sign-off: setting of High Flight to footage of PLANES! :D
The reading and music in that clip don't do anything for me; the overall effect's a bit corny (not too much, though, just to the extent that even the most dignified American things are). They're nice plane clips, though. Reading subtitles of the poem along to those would probably be quite uplifting.
I'm not old enough to remember channel sign-offs (not because I wasn't born, but because I don't have much memory). This one is from 1986, the year my little brother was born. I believe our ones in the UK had the national anthem or Big Ben or something...
My little love affair with planes has never been requited (thanks to my rubbish eyesight) or consummated, other than one short flight we took at Space Camp where I experienced weightlessness for a short time. That's discounting international flights, of course, which are to jet fighters what the number 42 is to a Formula One car.
In an amusing coinkydink, jet fighter duels are commonly called "dogfights". Hmmm...
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I found a really interesting article on 'camp' (as an adjective) linked in the comments of someone else's journal. I finally put some time aside to read it:
My reactions follow, all jotted as I read. You should read the article and form your own opinions first.
Now, I don't care for 'camp' as a whole, so don't expect any coherent thoughts and opinions from me here. I probably would fit in in some ways with a 'queer' (hate that word) way of looking at things, though, so I'm definitely interested to read on...
"The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature."
- The Decay of Lying
An offhand quote that caught my eye. It could be in a nutshell why I don't like art (or, rather, why I think of myself as someone who doesn't like art. The other reason being school art lessons), and why I am less and less likely to like any individual artwork the more it deviates from the strictly realistic, or at least the methodically representational.
(Yes, even if it portrays something that doesn't exist, it could have the courtesy to look right.)
( Read the rest of this entry » )As a taste in persons, Camp responds particularly to the markedly attenuated and to the strongly exaggerated. The androgyne is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility. [...]
Allied to the Camp taste for the androgynous is something that seems quite different but isn't: a relish for the exaggeration of sexual characteristics and personality mannerisms.
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Anyone in the UK or who can access 4OD, you have to watch Inside Nature's Giants. Dissecting megafauna. The episode just gone centred on a crocodile and oh, he was just utterly beautiful.
Crocodiles can live as long as we do, but this little 280-kg male had died at 17 years of age in his home at an animal park. The pathologists explain the anatomy while looking for the cause of death. I won't spoil it, but he was certainly an ill little tyke.
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The image is Media Response to Celebrity Death from picturesforsadchildren.com. I love it. (Also see the LJ entry if you fancy starting a flame war or being scarred by image macros.)
As for Jackson, all I'll say is that he was cleared of all child abuse charges by a court of law.
edit: All right, all I'll say is the preceding and also the first few seconds of this (0:55-1:05). It's hard to find that scene on the tubes.
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Recently, Dexter Morgan, sociopathic main character in the Dexter television series (and books, but the series is bizarrely much better).
Otherwise, any narrating male character. If it's first person or there's a wry and cynical voiceover, I identify.
And by identify, I mean... well, what I want to happen in the story is the same as whatever's best for the character (although my goals as reader/viewer remain primarily to be entertained, which can include screwing over the main character royally, of course).
I'm not sure I actually identify with characters in the sense of "feel closer to them because they have something in common with me".
For example, in Joe Abercrombie's First Law trilogy I am particularly keen on the torturer Sand dan Glokta, a former army pretty-boy until he was horribly crippled, and other than his cynicism and dark humour Glokta is not a person with whom I'd want to feel I have much in common. But I still liked him and wanted him to succeed, while with some of the other main characters, though I liked them and found them fascinatingly effed-up too, I wasn't as keyed-up for them to succeed.
I like fictional characters for what life has turned them into and what they do about it next. I don't really put myself in their shoes much, other than "yep, I'd have done the same" / "haha, what a stupid thing to do! Can't wait to see what happens now!"
Please nobody say they relate to Weft, or I'll feel a little guilty. >:}
I feel sympathy for Anke's hurt at all the crap the media would have us believe about female humans.
Without in any way implying the problem of females in the media is in any sense at all the same as that of males (yawn), it kinda puts me in mind of my Friday evening.
Which I actually spent playing pool in the bar with the guys from work. Yeah, seriously.
Well, one very rusty game and then I confined myself to cheering and heckling, because I can't remember if I'm left or right handed, but still. Fun.
I don't fit in with male people very well. I can yap about work and interesting things I read on the internet, but I don't feel like one of the guys. I'm standing with them in a shirt and slacks, not sitting with the skirt-wearers, but I'm drinking soft drinks instead of beer, and once the conversation turns to football, I start looking over my shoulder for an out. On this occasion I wandered off and got talking for a minute to a couple of other male colleagues, who remarked "Yeah, I think football is just a sort of safe topic for guys." Interesting way to think about it.
The thing is, while this was going on, the girls were passing round Heat Magazine and talking about boys — and that I consider a far worse waste of my time than listening to how Giggs is or isn't in the top ten players of all time.
No. The real thing is, I can fit in with more ease with females. I think women are just more accepting. I don't feel the same pressure to be 'one of the girls' that I do, around males, to be 'one of the lads'.
It's all in my head, anyway; if I didn't want to pretend I fit in for a little while, I wouldn't feel like a failure.
Anyway, for a while this all got me thinking a little unhappily about the whole beer and football thing that you seem to have to do if you want to be a proper bloke. Find the right males and you can substitute other things for beer and football, like Linux, Triumph Stags, bench presses or Quake, but... I don't know. I still feel the same pressure to prove myself. And ultimately, I can't. I don't care about anything normal people care about. Or are meant to care about. And my trigger finger reflex is shite, and I prefer Oblivion or Dungeon Keeper.
I guess that the media image of men is more of an exaggerated depiction, whereas the female... well, I've never been a proper woman either, so I wouldn't know. I wouldn't want to be the ideal media man. I'd just like to be the ideal media woman even less.
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Neat Star Trek gallery on Wired, featuring Kirk cuddling some Tribbles. Much as I enjoyed the new film, I approve of their commentary's acidic tone as they point out some of its silly Hollywoodisms. (The "fresh-faced rookies" thing was irritating. Only characters over... eh, 35ish, bare minimum, are entitled to be awesome.)
View the original post at HellHound.net
Maybe it really is time for an Archos. If only they didn't have a closed platform and the awful practice of charging EXTRA for codec packs, the berks.
P.S. geeklove is spotting a Vlad Taltos reference at twenty paces.
P.P.S. geeklove is also wearing this, and making your minions wear it too, to Star Trek last night. (Which was AWESOME, by the way, especially deserving of praise for treading the line between "copious fan-gratification" and "completely accessible for new viewers", Quinto surprisingly excellent, Pegg likewise, awesome cameo I wasn't expecting, and the justification for all the changes to the format was audacious yet well pulled off, and by that I mean even die-hard fans had nothing but praise for it, which is unheard of with your average canon reboot. Also, adorable aliens moar moar moar of those plz.)
On Wednesday, Peter Hearty of Platitude of the Day wrote a reaction to some of the usual waah by Andrew Brown. (On which note, Brown's selective quoting is shown up by one commenter.)
My own take can be found in the comments to Hearty's post. Since I posted, though, the conversation has continued, covering the wider issue of public atheism, public atheists and the whole idea of debating with POF. The later comments are a good read, quite representative of the frustrations of the thoughtful British atheist. Or I think so.
I like the POTD commenters. Like Hearty, basically all of them are reasoned, intelligent and generally quite witty.
View the original post at HellHound.net
'Ill' worker fired over Facebook
The death of 100% (mostly-stupid article about something that truly annoys me)
Appeal for chocolate volunteers gets - surprise! - 1,500 replies
If I have this right, the choice was between compulsory school ethics lessons (the current policy) and the option not to attend ethics lessons and to take religious lessons (already exist as voluntary, occur out of school hours, poorly attended) instead. I find the idea of opting out of normal life and taking a closed scripture study group instead slightly disturbing.
So, Berlin, even though it was actually rejected by default because none of you turned up to vote, have a sanity cookie on me.
Rare albino buffalo seen in Kenya
h4x! A /b/ user explains (and claims credit for) their flooding of the Time Magazine 100 poll.
Oh for a personal army of these guys. In before not.
Twitter your prayer says Cardinal
Post your tweet ideas in the comments. 140 characters or less, must begin @our-father (or @anubis, @suitov, @narasimha or other deity of your choice. Can't speak for the others, but I don't monitor my Twitter account).
Currently enjoying this Easter-themed radio interview [MP3] from Landover Baptist Church. PTL!
edit: Saw this advert on TV and liked it (what, an arrangement of This Little Light of Mine that I didn't hate?!), and the Vimeo page adds something special to it.
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When I was a young child, on one occasion I became afraid that Count Duckula would get me in my sleep.
(Yes. Duckula. The vegetarian vampire. Yes.)
I got myself out of this by convincing myself that my bedside lamp was the functional equivalent of sunlight and all I'd need to do was turn it on to repel a vampire. This was no less logical than the original fear, and worked.
There, that's my embarrassing childhood admission. Your turn!
Incidentally, these days I'm able to deal with vampires by dual-classing atheist-suitheist. As atheist I get an automatic huge bonus to all rolls to disbelieve, while as self-proclaimed deity, everything to do with me is holy, yea, even unto mine farts.
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Hey! Hey! Cynics of the world, what's the point in uniting! *fistpump*
So anyway. This chap, Stewart Lee, is my hero (of the stand-up comedy world). Dorian Gray jokes, murrrr.
Where he talks about the funniest moment ever on telly (beginning 7:47 here and continued here), it's... yeah. Don't look at me; I don't like Only Fools.
Oh, and it's quite funny to see him doing what looks like a Lee and Herring routine without Herring (Del Boy, Stew: David Jason!
). Miss Herring, though. He had a wonderfully grating voice and enthusiastic manner, great for the red nose partner.
Funniest moment on British telly evar, though... I honestly would have thought people would vote for Fawlty Towers or something. That one scene in The Germans pretty much says it all. Insanity, xenophobia, talking loudly and clearly to people who have accents (Bau help me, I do that and cannot stop), obsession with past glories, behaving 'simply awfully', and the butt of the joke is the awful Englishman, never the (quite normal and dignified) Germans.
Sadly, we're obsessed with past glories to the point of not making anything that good in decades.
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Progressiveness quiz (Flash, 40 questions)
"Your ideological score is 319/400. This makes you extremely progressive. The average score for Americans is 209.5."
Holy grief, I'm way above the Lib Dems there. I guess that makes me everything that's wrong with this country today.
(Screw the rabid Republican religious right, though, seriously. May they all be hoist with their own petard.)
View the original post at HellHound.net
Good stuff coming up on Beeb radio: Sci Fi Season
Particularly Iain M Banks's The State of the Art (Culture novel squee, even if it's his least well-regarded one), Robert Rankin (lunatic ♥)'s The Brightonomicon and Arthur C Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama (artificial cylinderworld).
View the original post at HellHound.net
When I watch something based on a book, I generally like to read the book first wherever possible. Because I'm not a blinkin' illiterate and I'm not very visual. However, in the case of Dexter, I was only dimly aware that there might be a book (there are four, by Jeff Lindsay, the latest released just this month in the UK); in any case, I bought and watched the first two seasons on DVD before getting hold of the first novel.
And here's the thing. In a lot of ways, the television version is better. There are small characterisation and plot differences between book and series, nothing too remarkable until the end of the book—which only covers the events of Season One, despite the Season Two credits still claiming to be based on the first book, IIRC...
One difference is, well, it's a tradeoff, neither good nor bad. The book is first-person, which means you get a lot more of dear deranged Dexter and his alliteration, while the series is centred around Dexter but not exclusively following him, and fleshes out the other characters much more. I imagine this was done to give it human interest in case television viewers are unable to handle Dexter's viewpoint for so long.
Both have amusing situations in which Dexter doesn't understand the fine points of human behaviour while the audience does. (This even includes me. They are pretty broad points of human behaviour, actually, and made pretty obvious.) Humour of that sort, where author and audience share an injoke to the exclusion of the viewpoint character, is found a lot in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
The book is less satisfactory as to how Dexter reaches some of his conclusions than is the series. But the series gives Dexter too much character development, seeming to be railroading him towards normality at a sometimes frankly silly pace. Occasionally the second season suffered from the sort of backslides and backtracks I've seen on Heroes and always took to be a sign of being written by committee. (Perhaps not coincidentally, many of the like situations on Heroes also revolved around the reformation of a dangerous character. I refer both to Buffy with a stern frown.)
The book is short. I read it at two sittings and when I looked up halfway through, it was with some disbelief that it was half finished. I read quickly, which can sometimes make things seem briefer than they are, but in this case I much preferred the relaxed, calculating pace of the series. It had more room to introduce more side points, but also expanded on the main storyline at leisure, and quite astoundingly, all the changes I've noted have been good ones.
Naturally I can't tell what I would have thought had I read the book first. It's actually possible that I wouldn't have bothered watching the series. Odd, that.
Laughs out loud: perhaps four from the series, one from the novel.
Growls of pleasure: six to two, maybe? Actually, more. Perhaps twelve to one.
TL;DR version: this bookworm says the television series is better.
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