The Right Number
Scott McCloud’s latest webcomic The Right Number is available for free (or, at least, the first two parts). Well worth checking out, as is My Obsession with Chess.
No one watches the Watchmen
All sorts of hullabaloo about the forthcoming Watchmen film, all of which may amount to nothing if the ongoing legal case prevents the film from being released. Details of the court case are here.
While I think the trailer looks fairly good, I remain fairly sceptical about any two hour film’s ability to include all the nuances of the original material. I know that Kevin Smith has seen the film and has gone bananas over it, but his opinion is pretty much irrelevant after Jersey Girl.
And in a last piece of Watchmen related nonsense, it’s worth mentioning that Ben “Yahtzee” Crowshaw once did something halfway funny, namely placing Rorschach in a Hostess Pies ad. Well, it’s better than Zero Punctuation, anyway, which aside from its misogyny, homophobia and general incompetence, always strikes me as a second-rate Charlie Brooker knock-off.
You too can act like Keanu
From uncoolkids.com
“Point Break LIVE!, the absurdist stage adaptation of the 1992 Keanu Reeves/Patrick Swayze extreme-sports blockbuster, tells the story of former college football star Johnny Utah (Reeves in the film), as he pursues the surfing, bankrobbing, skydiving, bare-hand-fighting, adrenaline junkie cum Zen Master, Bodhi Sattva… Best of all, you could be the next Johnny Utah… the starring role of Keanu will be selected at random from the audience each night, and will read their entire script off of cue-cards. This method manages to capture the rawness of a Keanu Reeves performance, even from those who generally think themselves incapable of acting.”
Direct link:
http://www.uncoolkids.com/2007/05/12/point-break-live/
Anti-depressants for dogs
Taken from Guardian Technology section:
Just this month, Eli Lilly introduced a version of its popular Prozac pill for dogs. The new drug, called Reconcile, comes in the form of a beef-flavoured chewable treat. Aimed at the 10 million dogs that Lilly estimates suffer from anxiety and melancholia, it will compete against Novartis’s canine antidepressant, Clomicalm.
I wish I had a ‘beef-flavoured chewable treat’ that topped up my seratonin levels…
Image problems
Apologies for the disappearing images on the blog. I just started using imgred.com to cache images and they appear to have gone tits up. Soz.
Videogames better than books? Only if all you read is crappy Star Wars adaptations
High falutin’ video game magazine The Escapist features an article entitled I’d Rather Game Than Read A Book (And Here’s Why) by Vincent Kang. His example of great literature? Heir To The Empire, a Star Wars spin-off novel by Timothy Zahn (currently available for 63p on Amazon). Bravo, that man. Bravo.
Poetic Spam
Spammers are getting more creative in their attempts to fool email filters. It looks like they’re employing Ezra Pound to compose their messages. A random sample:
they sit with their wives all day in the sun,
Wheezing ravens, when
Covering the land—
The paths of childhood.
Or else, like us, sunk into some long gaze
Astonished that you have returned to go
XV. The International Circumpolar Stations: The Greely Expedition
Side of the painting, the world of that wise, white,
With sun’s warmth wasted on a stone,
In white, in paint too representative
Beyond ice floe and berg and ice-bound sea,
Seen. What you know is only manifest
and the numbed yards will go back undercover.
and chaste, lovely as lakes to the retired men
Suddenly, in a savage, dreadful bend,
XI. Franklin’s Last Voyage
I am sleeping, and dreaming, and wandering along
Away, my songs, must we go
Yes. You’d want that said, (if you
…and then a GIF advertising Viagra. Surely someone could write a book or doctoral thesis about this? I would do it, but I’ve got other fish to fry.
