Activity from Halloween Jack
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Grace Cummings
So I was out yesterday and listening to the NPR show World Cafe, as I do if/when I'm out at that time, and the host starts going on and on about the voice of the featured artist that day, about how stunning it is, and I'm thinking, come on, don't oversell it. They weren't overselling it.
White House Down (and Up)
The Space Program That Fell To Earth
The failure of Luna 25 cements Putin’s role as a disastrous space leader. [Ars Technica] The destruction of the lunar probe--which would have been Russia's first lunar mission since a Soviet uncrewed probe in 1976--is the latest in a long line of failures and downgradings of the program that once accomplished the first successful satellite launch, the first man and woman in space, and the first spacewalk.
Barbenheimer
Forget DC vs. Marvel, scruffies vs. stuffies, even Pepsi vs. Coke--the real match of the century is nearly upon us. In this corner, Christopher Nolan with the dawn of the atomic age in all its nuclear-powered fury! In this corner, Greta Gerwig with umpteen squigglewatts of shocking pink hot-pink-laser girlitude! Which one will you choose? Or, you know, just do both.
Don't Fear the Reaper
“You are locked in? This is what you want? Because it sounds like you have a lot going on,” the agent said, according to the affidavit. “You’re in the military. You’ve got college. You’ve got a lot going on, as far as good things in your life to kinda’ get in this world. It is a shady world, and I just don’t want you to have regrets if you come to work for us, because it, I mean it messes with your mind, shooting people.”Applying for a job through rentahitman.com is not recommended. [WaPo/archived; NBCNews]
Cocaine Cat
You've heard about Cocaine Bear, now get ready for Cocaine Cat. Found after it escaped from a car during a traffic stop in Cincinnati, the serval (which is illegal to own in Ohio), named Amiry, was tested and found to have cocaine in its system.
Hell Yeah to the Chief
What is grief, if not love persevering?
What you learn about beauty and grief as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Bringley writes about going to the Philadelphia Museum of Art with his mother shortly after his brother’s death. They each gravitated toward a single painting. Bringley found himself before a medieval Adoration of the Christ, depicting Mary tender and peaceful with her newborn son. His mother, meanwhile, went to an early Renaissance Lamentation, in which Mary cradles her son’s tormented corpse. They each stood before their paintings, the way I had stood in the lovely May garden with my mother, and they wept."
Saving Icarus
On the 20th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, Ars Technica published two articles; the first asks if NASA has fixed its safety culture, and the second, a reprint of a 2014 article with some updates, wonders if, had the damage to the ship's wing that occurred on launch been detected before they started reentry, the crew could have been saved. (Previously on the blue; Columbia previouslies)
Be water, my friend, but don't drink it all
Who killed Bruce Lee? The hyponatraemia hypothesis [link to Clinical Kidney Journal article, should be non-paywalled]
Now I want to hear her do some Hendrix covers
Well, it's no "Faith of the Heart"
The US Space Force has an anthem, "Semper Supra" [slYT].
On the Trail of the Woozle
The Woozle Effect, named after a Winnie-the-Pooh story, "occurs when frequent citation of publications lacking evidence misleads individuals, groups, and the public, and nonfacts become urban myths and factoids." [Wikipedia]
I understood that reference. (I Avengers 55:49)
Search Movie Quotes. Does what it says on the tin, for MCU and Star Wars; cites in the manner of Bible verses.
What the Fitness Industry Doesn't Understand
A new generation of fitness instructors teaches simple skills that make a difference. Why is beginner-level exercise treated like a niche? [slAtlantic]
Meet the Liverbirds
With the recent release of Peter Jackson's documentary The Beatles: Get Back, it's a good time to look at one of the other Liverpool bands of the British Invasion era, one of the few all-female Merseybeat groups (and probably the only one that's been the subject of a musical): The Liverbirds, subject of a (fairly) recent short documentary of their own.
I close my eyes, then I drift away
Dean Stockwell, veteran actor of stage and screen whose career spanned over seventy years, died on Sunday, November 7, at the age of 85.
How to Survive a Misinformation Campaign
Peter Staley, an HIV/AIDS activist who'd been featured in the documentary How to Survive a Plague [FanFare thread], was offered a small part in the (eventually-Oscar-winning) film Dallas Buyers Club. Staley agreed, but then he read the original script... [Vanity Fair]
Don't let it be forgot
So... you're a fan of obscure, not-very-successful SF TV series, huh? Never mind your Star Treks, your Farscapes, even your Red Dwarves or Blake's Sevens, we're talking about series that are so lost to time and syndication that they sound like parodies of the space opera genre. Well, have you ever even heard of, let alone seen, Excalibur? Ran for two seasons on the BBC in the mid-seventies, ran for two seasons, combined Arthurian myth with Crowleyan mysticism, and was lost forever when the BBC, as was its custom, erased the videotapes to reuse them. Ring a bell? (Difficulty level: never actually existed.)
First official MCU/ex-X-verse crossover released for free!
Deadpool and Korg (Thor: Ragnarok and Avengers: Endgame) do a reaction video for the trailer for a movie called Free Guy, starring a couple of guys named Ryan Reynolds and Taika Waititi.
The second-most-disappointing New Mutants of the past year
Opinion: ‘These new vaccine mutants are extremely disappointing,’ by Magneto [slWaPo, "as told to" Alexandra Petri]
Doppelhaushälften
What can happen when only half a house is sold? Doppelhaushälften (Semi-detached houses), in this case houses in the Ruhr region of Germany, where former coal miners retain a lifelong right of residence to their quarters, and the sold half is renovated. Photography by Wolfgang Fröhling.
Paying the Danegeld
The Slander Industry [slNYT] Two NYT reporters investigate "the secret, symbiotic relationship between those facilitating slander and those getting paid to remove it" by having one of them submit himself to a reputation-wrecking website and seeing where else his face and name popped up, then going to the reputation-repair sites. A follow-up of sorts to this article (earlier on the blue). (Via boingboing).
How Bears Cross a Road
It gets complicated. [SLTwitter]
CueCat-Scam.com
In the run-up to the Georgia run-off election for the Senate, one man has stepped forward as a self-proclaimed "pattern recognition expert", claiming to be on "approximately about 12 billion devices globally", and erstwhile "full-blown treasure hunter" (dig it--the Ark of the Covenant is on Oak Island!), and most notoriously, the inventor of the :CueCat. Brace yourselves, America, here comes Jovan Hutton Pulitzer--again.
The Beirut Port Explosion: Forensic Architecture
"Mr Collett contended that from an engineering perspective, the arrangement of goods within the building was the spatial layout of a makeshift bomb on the scale of a warehouse, awaiting detonation." Forensic Architecture, a research group based at the University of London, investigates the Beirut Port explosion and publishes its findings. (Forensic Architecture previously on the blue)
"I was never in your--"
The Supernatural Finale Aired, And Tumblr Exploded - a longform video dissection of the long-running CW show Supernatural, its exceptional fandom, their favorite ship (Destiel), and the controversial finale, by vlogger Sarah Z. [YT, 1:45:34; video has spoilers for virtually the entirety of the fifteen-season show]
A Twenty-Year (And Counting) Mission
Amid all the terrestrial chaos, an anniversary slipped past almost unnoticed: humans have occupied space for a solid twenty years, courtesy of the International Space Station, a joint project of NASA, Roscosmos, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Canadian Space Agency (ASC or CSA, depending). Since 2000, over two hundred astronauts, cosmonauts, and space tourists from various nations have taken turns flying above our heads.
Eddie Van Halen, 1955-2020
Edward Lodewijk Van Halen, 65, has died after a long battle with throat cancer, per his son Wolf [twitter].
The Wreck of the Pere Marquette 18
Just over 110 years ago, on September 9, 1910, the Pere Marquette 18, a car ferry out of Ludington, MI, sank about 20 miles east of Sheboygan, WI, with 29 people on board; no one really knew why, and no one really knew where--until now.
(I don't think they're getting pizza)
There is screaming and babbling and someone is leaning really close and singing into their microphone and someone else keeps saying, "Who wants to see a diamond? Who wants to see a diamond? Who wants to see a diamond? Who wants to see a diamond?"#ZoomOftheFlies [twitter thread; threadreader]
Get your ass to the Mars choppah
The next Mars rover, named Perseverance, is approaching its launch window of July 30 - Aug. 15, 2020; in addition to having a full dance ticket of its own, will be carrying a passenger: Ingenuity, a helicopter, the first extraterrestrial powered aircraft (that we know of, or of human origin), set to make its first flight on the Red Planet in the spring of 2021.
Sir Ian Holm, 1931-2020
Ian Holm, British actor known for an astonishing variety of roles in film and on stage, including Ash in Alien, Bilbo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings, and Father Cornelius in The Fifth Element, has died of complications related to Parkinson's. He was 88.
Really, 2020? I mean, really?
The Myth of Johnny Appleseed
From Dr. Sarah Taber (previously on the blue): come for the hickory milk recipe, stay for the description of how John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed, co-opted Native American agricultural practices that far pre-dated his supposed seed-sowing. [twitter]
Every film about war ends up being pro-war
The 50 Greatest War Movies Ever Made [slVulture].
(Can you be a labor boss without massive forearms?)
Who Really Killed Jimmy Hoffa? (And was the frozen salmon a red herring?) Filmmaker Errol Morris (many previouslies) talks to former George W. Bush Administration official Jack Goldsmith about Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance in the context of the recent release of Martin Scorsese's The Irishman.
[FanFare link]
René Auberjonois 1940-2019
René Auberjonois, veteran of stage, screen, and voice acting for over half a century, has died of metastatic lung cancer, per his family. [WaPo] [Twitter]
He's back, and he's Bats
Several years after their epic review of Batman: Odyssey [TVTropes] (previously on the blue), Neal Adams' utterly gonzo take on the Caped Crusader, Laura Hudson and David Wolkin are back to review/analyze/goggle at Adams' latest, Batman vs. Ra's al Ghul.
Return of the Archons
Well she's a total blam-blam
Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the release of David Bowie's "Space Oddity", and assisting in the celebration is secret glamster Barbara Millicent Roberts.
no Wakefield can lie to another Wakefield
“Man,” Alice said, “brown-headed man and brown-eyed, what are you to us?”
The dark heart of Sweet Valley High: "Their Handsome Father, Ned Wakefield"
You Had It Coming, Meatbags
Mother's Day
May 14th, 2018, was the worst day of my life, when we lost Becky forever. May 13th, 2019, this little baby came two weeks early to remind me what unconditional love is, and to bring the presence of an aunt who I would love to be here, right now. - Kate Beaton (many previouslies, specifically her sister Becky)
The Secret City and the Return of Heroes
On November 30, 2012, the MMORPG City of Heroes shut down after a three-month sunset period; its owner, NCSoft, refused to sell the IP to someone else to continue the game, or even keep legacy servers up. Rumors of sale of the IP since then haven't come to anything, and there's been some work on reverse-engineering of the servers with various projects. However, all such efforts were rocked recently at the revelation that the game was only mostly dead--a private server running a bootleg copy of the server code has been in operation for six years.
"oh, rabbit"
Mind-motions: "thoughts that are hardly even thoughts at all, that don’t rise to the level of sharing with another human being. That millisecond when — again and again — a rusty pipe looks like an owl, or a newscaster’s voice reminds you of a long-gone uncle, or a daily routine sets off a small chain of involuntary associations. These things are almost nothing, and yet they are who we are." [SLNYT]
The Console Killer?
The game Anthem, a loot shooter developed by Bioware for EA, promised to be a game-changer, as it were, for a company known better for the role-playing aspects of game series such as Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Bioware had high hopes for the game, which was code-named "Dylan" while in production because they hoped that it would be as revolutionary in the game world as Bob Zimmerman was in music. The game debuted last month, to mixed reviews(PS4, XBox One), with a range of complaints (list on Kotaku); the latest one is that the game would seem to not only crash, but actually brick the PS4 console in some cases. (Although there is apparently a fix.)
So may I introduce to you/ The act you've known for all these years
So, you're a struggling musician, and you get into an accident after a mysterious power outage; when you wake up, you play "Yesterday" on your guitar, and... no one recognizes it, because no one has ever heard of the Beatles. What do you do? (Hint: rhetorical question.)
The Secret Origin of the Secret Society of Secret Santas
What to do when your children stop believing in Santa: teach them to become him. [slImgur]
They Shall Not Grow Old
The above-titled World War I documentary by Peter Jackson makes heavy use of contemporary footage which has been digitally colorized, cleaned up, and corrected for speed. Trailer; behind-the-scenes; early reviews are quite good.