News and notes from all over
Time for me to close some browser windows, by posting some items with no particular theme.
- The Year in Newsbreaks: the New Yorker's tidbits from newspapers and magazines.
- Presidential candidates name their favorite gadgets.
- The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers have a website where they post anti-WGA stuff. A couple of writers put together a parody of the AMPTP site; unfortunately, the original parody site has gone down, so I'm linking to what appears to be a mirror of it at humortron.net. No word on whether the original writers for that parody are getting residuals for the mirroring.
- Article from the Wall Street Journal about "Sock Wars": the old game of Assassin played by mail, with the killing method being to send your target a hand-knitted pair of socks. Unfortunately, the full article's no longer available at the WSJ site, but I vaguely recall hearing that they're thinking of opening up free access, so I'm linking to it anyway (and you can at least read the first few paragraphs).
- Onion article: "Baseball Imposes Tough New 'Three-Strikes-You're-Out' Rule." One of those jokes that may be obvious in retrospect, but I haven't seen anyone do it before, and it made me laugh repeatedly. "Among the factors umpires had previously taken into account: difficulty of pitch thrown, degree of pressure from fans and teammates to get a hit, socio-economic condition of the batter, and whether or not he showed any remorse for previous failed at-bats."
- Lego Digital Designer lets you build with virtual Legos right there on your computer screen. Free download for both Windows and Mac.
- Peter Jackson will be
directingproducing (thanks, Tim!) two movies connected to The Hobbit, in case anyone hadn't heard yet. - Professor Jose Senovilla, at a university in Spain, has a theory that the phenomena associated with dark energy can be explained instead by the fact that "time itself is slowing down."
- Johnny Depp "didn't know if [he] could really sing or not" until after he'd signed up to play the lead in the new movie of Sweeney Todd. Relatedly, I like what's on Sondheim's desk: "a slab of stone; carved into it are the words 'Nothing is written in stone.'"
- Twig posted a nice bit of T.S. Eliot for the Solstice the other day.
