Friday Ephemera

The Red Russian Army Choir and the Leningrad Cowboys are happy together. (h/t, Dr Westerhaus.) // Dr Strangelove transcript. (h/t, Coudal.) // Stanley Kubrick: The Invisible Man. (1996) Excellent documentary. Part 2. (h/t, The Thin Man.) // Film directors, directing. // Tarkovsky bloopers. Oh, how we laughed. // The passage of time may not be what it was. // Hinode telescope footage of the Sun’s chromosphere. More. // Volcanic plume on Io. // Bearded men of the 21st century. (1939) “The man of the next century will revolt against shaving.” // Mark Steyn on the wrongs of Canada’s Human Rights Commission. // And on the right kind of imperialism. // Mr Eugenides on Seumas Milne. // Norman Geras on double standards. // Why Martin Luther King was a Republican. Discuss. // The H-Bomb and You. (1954) // BSG season 4 preview. // Everything you need to know about Lost in 8 minutes 15 seconds. // Dante’s Cove. What Torchwood wishes it was. (h/t, The Thin Man.) // Jerry O’Connell does Tom Cruise. Wait for the laugh. // Scientology documents. “Between 38 trillion years ago and present time a lot of off-beat implants can be found.” // Reconstructing shredded Stasi documents. “We all knew they could know everything. But we didn't understand what that meant until that moment. Suddenly it was palpable.” // How to peel potatoes. (h/t, Grow-a-brain.) // A toilet seat for cats. $109.95 // And, via The Thin Man, it’s all about appearance.

Comments

[amb]

Dante's cove - lol
"Gay America's favourite guilty pleasure…"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfwEuK70tsY

[David]

Stunning, isn’t it? It’s a conceptual nightmare, I know, yet strangely compelling. And it has to be the undisputed Gayest Show Of All Time. It’s even gayer than Smallville, which scarcely seemed possible.

[AntiCitizenOne]

Thanks for BSG s4 previews.

I'm sure you've seen this at Instapundit, but just in case...

http://www.lostinspacerobot.com/index.html

[David]

Yes, an army of those would come in handy for Operation Overlord. Heavily modified, of course. And speaking of robots, Popular Mechanics rates the Terminators…

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/robotics/4245140.html?page=1

[The Thin Man]

"It’s even gayer than Smallville..."

Yes, but only because it shows actual gay men actually gay kissing. If you re-normalise Dante's Cove to exclude the overt sexual activity and calibrate your gaydar to detect only implied homoeroticism, then Smallville is 10 to the power 9 times more gay.

As Bender might say "I think it's from a dimension that's big on Musical Theatre".

[Matt M]

"The group bases its idea on one particular variant of superstring theory, a so called theory of everything, in which our universe is confined to the surface of a membrane, or brane, floating in a higher-dimensional space, known as the "bulk"."

The bulk?

They should get proper SF writers in to come up with better names for this stuff. Let the likes of Iain M. Banks loose on it.

[Matt M]

"gay kissing"

The mind boggles.

[David]

“If you re-normalise Dante's Cove to exclude the overt sexual activity and calibrate your gaydar to detect only implied homoeroticism, then Smallville is 10 to the power 9 times more gay.”

Good point. Dante’s Cove is overtly gay, and sold as such, so maybe technically it doesn’t count. Smallville, on the other hand, pretends not to be, while clearly being aimed at much the same kind of audience. I suppose Smallville is the Gayest Not-Actually-Gay Show Of All Time™. I stand corrected.

[The Thin Man]

Matt,

"gay kissing" - sort of a cross between a kiss and a Masonic handshake, only gayer.

[Dutch Canuck]

RE: Scientology documents.

Looks like Lord Xenu's site has already been shut down "for violation of Xanga's terms of use." The Church's Army of T900 Litigator-bots never sleep.

Either that, or Tom Cruise is a regular lurker here.

[David]

Dutch,

Cached…

http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:Nk--b9OIRFIJ:weblog.xanga.com/lordxenu+lordxenu&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=uk

Be afraid.

[David]

Dutch,

The link has been fixed, at least for now.

If you browse these ravings it’s funny, of course, as the material is so unbelievably bad. But imagining the wilful credulity required is a tad unsettling, too.

“Now your understanding is that when you die, why somehow or another about fifteen minutes later you appear in another body. Let’s look at this thing from a time disorientation basis. That is a lie. It takes sixty-nine days plus. More than sixty-nine days. And you very often go -- see, this has upset some of our calculations. We’ve wondered what has happened to some of our people, why they didn’t show up again immediately, that sort of thing. You’ve gone as long as eight or nine years between death and birth.”

All hail Xenu.

http://lordxenu.ytmnd.com/