Fascinating article on offshore derricks over at bldgblog.
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You know, when you get a donkey expert (no, I’m not making this up) to comment on the Borat movie you know that the comedic jackpot has been hit: “There was a donkey at the beginning of the film with a very large person on it, but this happens all around the world. In the UK, there’s an eight-stone weight limit for anyone riding a donkey, which I’m sure he exceeded.” (story [scroll down for the donkey expert], there also is a glowing review)
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In my loose series of scientists who decided to do something else, I give you Brian May, famous for playing the guitar for the rock band “Queen” and not quite so famous for almost getting his Ph.D. in astronomy. Well, what do you know. So what do you do when you’re an aging rock star? Turns out Brian May co-wrote a book on astronomy, along with British TV astronomer Patrick Moore (or “Sir” as they say over there; turns out if you do anything in England long enough - provided it’s not utterly menial - they’ll make you a “Sir”).
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“Dove says an advertising campaign that uses real women instead of pencil-thin models is an effort to widen the stereotype of beauty and boost sales in the process. Critics, however, doubt any beauty models have been broken or recast.” (story, with links; also see two of their movies here and here [thanks, Mark!]) Somehow I think, though, that while the actual topic addressed there is very real and important, a company, which made and still makes considerable amounts of money by exploiting exactly the kind of beauty ideals they now claim to educate women about, might not be the best advocate for all of this - unless, of course, you believe that they really care about the issue.
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Back to the freak show that is the world chess federation: “He claims that he can communicate with aliens. Once, he says, he was even taken on a tour of one of their UFOs. ‘The extraterrestrials put me in a yellow astronaut suit and showed me their spaceship. I was on the bridge. I felt quite comfortable in their company.’ And who is the lucky space tourist? None other than the president of the Russian Republic of Kalmykia, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov. […] lyumzhinov has ruled one Russia’s poorest republics, a dusty strip of land bordering the Caspian Sea, home to 290,000 people, since 1993. He assumed the presidency of FIDE two years later.” (story)
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The world of professional chess has always been very entertaining because of its mix of genius (as far as chess is concerned that is) and widely spread social ineptitude. World chess championships have been particularly good venues to see the most erratic and absurd behaviour, even though since the fall of the Iron Curtain things have become a bit boring. No more Xraying of chairs, no more yoghurts of predetermined colours at predetermined times - oh, the good old days! But don’t despaire! The current championship gives you - I kid you not! - Toiletgate. See here for the complaint that started it all and here and here for updates.
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For my upcoming travels, I bought a point-and-shoot digital camera (this one if you must know). It came with a whole set of instructions and a yellow warning: Apparently, you can’t sit down on your digital camera, because it will break. Who knew?
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These are the covers of the “Asia”, “Europe”, “Latin America”, and “US” editions of Newsweek magazine. Can you guess which one is which? Visit this page to see the solution.
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In my (pretty hopeless) quest to chronicle the absolute worst the so-called entertainment industry has to offer I give you Madonna, who explained her mock crucifixion, which is part of her current tour, as follows: “It is no different than a person wearing a cross or ‘taking up the cross’ as it says in the Bible. […] Rather, it is my plea to the audience to encourage mankind to help one another and to see the world as a unified whole.” And she added to that “I believe in my heart that if Jesus were alive today he would be doing the same thing.” (source)
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I keep finding emails in my inbox with links to polls, according to which about 50 percent of the people believe that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 (see this latest one, for example). Somehow, I just can’t muster any kind of shock about this. After all, “about a third of Americans believe in ghosts (34 percent) and an equal number in UFOs (34 percent), and about a quarter accept things like astrology (29 percent), reincarnation (25 percent) and witches (24 percent).” Or, even more bizarre, “belief in the devil has increased slightly over the last few years — from 63 percent in 1997 to 71 percent today.” (these last two quotes from our friends at Fox “News”). You know, with one in four people believing there are witches, and one in three people believing in ghosts, why is anyone surprised that about one in two believes there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11? Oh, and lest you gloat, because you think you’re so smart, get this: “Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for nonsmart reasons.” (this from Scientific American, who - if you, for whatever mysterious reason, do not believe Fox’s poll - also give some numbers for UFOs (30 percent), ESP (60 percent), astrology as being scientific (40 percent), or lucky numbers (32 percent)).
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“Hundreds of Paris Hilton albums have been tampered with in the latest stunt by ‘guerrilla artist’ Banksy. Banksy has replaced Hilton’s CD with his own remixes and given them titles such as Why am I Famous?, What Have I Done? and What Am I For? He has also doctored pictures of her on the CD sleeve to show the US socialite topless and with a dog’s head. A spokeswoman for Banksy said he had doctored 500 copies of her debut album Paris in 48 record shops across the UK.” - story
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“But by the end of [World War II], a joke could get you killed [in Germany]. A Berlin munitions worker, identified only as Marianne Elise K., was convicted of undermining the war effort ‘through spiteful remarks’ and executed in 1944 for telling this one: Hitler and Göring are standing on top of Berlin’s radio tower. Hitler says he wants to do something to cheer up the people of Berlin. ‘Why don’t you just jump?’ suggests Göring. A fellow worker overheard her telling the joke and reported her to the authorities.” - story
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Given this interesting post is written in German, let me provide some sort of summary: The dark shadow on the left-hand side of the building in this photo was cast in the 1930s, and I’m not so sure it’s a very good idea to open a burger joint in such a building. It just doesn’t look very good, what with the building being part of the large Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nürnberg.
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“A survey of 32 European countries, the US and Japan has revealed that only Turkey is less willing than the US to accept evolution as fact. Religious fundamentalism, bitter partisan politics and poor science education have all contributed to this denial of evolution in the US, says Jon Miller of Michigan State University in East Lansing, who conducted the survey with his colleagues. […] Miller thinks more genetics should be on the syllabus to reinforce the idea of evolution. American adults may be harder to reach: nearly two-thirds don’t agree that more than half of human genes are common to chimpanzees. How would these people respond when told that humans and chimps share 99 per cent of their genes?” - story
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As already mentioned here, German writer and Nobel laureate Günter Grass in 1944, at the age of 15 (or 17), became a member of the Waffen SS, Nazi Germany’s shock troops that were involved in the most notorious events during the war (battles and war crimes alike). My first reaction, when I heard this, was “So what?”
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“While the television broadcast [of the first moon landing] seen by 600 million people in July 1969 is preserved for posterity, the original tapes from which the footage was taken have been mislaid in the vast archive of the United States space agency Nasa.” (story)
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OK, let’s assume someone links to an article in which you find yourself described in a somewhat unflattering manner and (kind of) gives away your identity (which is actually not obvious from the article [unlike one knows you personally]). What’s a good way to go about this? I wouldn’t know, but it seems to me that posting your name and phone number openly in the comments section of that particular entry of the blog might in fact not be the best solution (for an example go no further than here).
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Stephen Colbert (also appreciate Colbert in English) explains why the Wikipedia is bullshit. If you don’t have the time for the clip, just look at which of these Wikipedia entries I linked to contains the phrase “The neutrality of this section is disputed” and go figure.
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Let me try to understand this: It’s perfectly acceptable for Mel Gibson (who, btw, in all seriousness believes his wife will go to hell since she does not believe in the same dogma he believes in - must be lovely to be marired to the guy) to make a fundamentalist, overtly anti-semitic splatter movie about the execution of Jesus Christ, but it is not acceptable for him to get drunk and to use anti-semitic insults in front of a policeman. Interesting.
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Not to be missed: Be an Expert on Anything by Stephen Colbert.
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Just in case you were/are wondering what those “heavy metal” people could possibly be “singing” about, here is a simple explainer.
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“Is the Guggenheim today’s equivalent of Planet Hollywood?” asks Steve Rose
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Funny, I got GW Bush’s fortune cookie the other day. Must be some sort of mix-up.
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“Having just returned to America after a year’s absence, I’m pondering this question: Why is it that the United States, which has not suffered a major terrorist attack at home for more than four years, thinks it’s at war, while the United Kingdom, which was hit by a major terrorist attack just a year ago, does not? […] One of the ‘select patriotic titles’ in the Stanford University bookstore is Faith of my Fathers, a gripping memoir by John McCain, the current front-runner to be Republican presidential candidate in 2008. […] On the last page, he recalls his father passing on what he remembered most from his own father’s last message to him: ‘Son, there is no greater thing than to die for the principles - for the country and the principles that you believe in.’ […] This is a heroic conception of warrior honour which one could have encountered in most European countries before 1914, but which has been little heard in any mainstream European discourse since 1945.” - story
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I couldn’t care less about the soccer world cup, and I find the newly found love of Germans for their flag quite sad (there really is no need to copy every bad habit), but if the big result of the world cup was an end to the endless whining, bitching, and moaning I’m subjected to every time I visit my home country, that would be quite an achievement. Some people really think it’s possible.
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“Over the past six weeks a Western security force has effectively taken over the small African nation of Namibia. A beach resort in Langstrand in Western Namibia has been sealed off with security cordons, and armed security personnel have been keeping both local residents and visiting foreigners at bay. A no-fly zone has been enforced over part of the country. The Westerners have also demanded that the Namibian government severely restrict the movement of journalists into and out of Namibia. The government agreed […] This Western security force […] is the security entourage of one Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, the celebrity couple better known for living it up in LA than slumming it in Namibia. They reportedly wanted their first child to be born in Namibia because the country is ‘the cradle of human kindÂ’ and it would be a ‘specialÂ’ experience. […] It may sound shocking, but in truth Pitt and JolieÂ’s trip to Namibia is really only a more extreme version of todayÂ’s ‘celebrity colonialismÂ’, where celebs go to Africa (or some other poor part of the world) to make themselves feel ‘specialÂ’. Africa in particular has become a stage for such moralistic poseurs - and their posing can have a detrimental impact on the people who live there.” - source
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Andy Warhol once said that “all department stores will become museums, and all museums will become department stores.” I’m not sure that’s really true, but it definitely sounds cool (until you start thinking about it - which is the essence of so many things done/said by Andy Warhol). But then what if you were to look at a department store “whose doors had last admitted patrons nearly 30 years ago […] left in its original condition and regularly maintained and cleaned by its owners”? Well, have a look. For those unable to read German, images samples can be found here, and there’s some info here.
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“A political and cultural row is brewing in Germany over a decision to award the Heinrich Heine literature prize to Peter Handke, the Austrian author who courted controversy with his eulogy at the funeral of Slobodan Milosevic. […] The jury for the Heine prize said that ‘in his work, Peter Handke obstinately follows the path to an open truth. He sets his poetic gaze onto the world regardless of the public opinion and its rituals.’” (source) “By declaring themselves ready to revoke the decision of an independent literary jury, German politicians are embarrassing themselves and damaging the fundaments of democratic culture. […] Whoever gets this award next should think twice before accepting it - unless things are made clear and the prize gets its name changed to ‘Heinrich Heine Prize for Political Correctness.’ Let’s be serious. Who needs literary critics and philosophers - not to mention literature itself - if local politicos will always know better?” (source)
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For those going to Germany, maybe for the superfluous soccer world cup, there’s the German Survival Bible, written and compiled by foreigners living in Germany, journalists, and the occasional German living abroad (like this one, but I’m not going to tell you which bit I wrote, because they edited it - and not in a good way). Not to be missed: The German Certificate Fetish, Germans’ brutal honesty (really true, the last time my parents came to visit me, the first thing my dad said was “Wow, you look terrible, have you lost weight?”), Optimists are idiots, and Get naked with the Germans.
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You’d imagine the NSA would be quite busy with all those phones to tap, but apparently they found some time to slip me a message in a fortune cookie.
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You gotta leave it to Anthony Lane, one of the wittiest persons to ever review movies, to give “The Da Vinci Code” the treatment it deserves: “There has been much debate over Dan Brownﾂ痴 novel ever since it was published, in 2003, but no question has been more contentious than this: if a person of sound mind begins reading the book at ten oﾂ団lock in the morning, at what time will he or she come to the realization that it is unmitigated junk? The answer, in my case, was 10:00.03, shortly after I read the opening sentence: ‘Renowned curator Jacques Sauni鑽e staggered through the vaulted archway of the museumﾂ痴 Grand Gallery.’ […] The film is directed by Ron Howard and written by Akiva Goldsman, the master wordsmith who brought us ‘Batman & Robin.’ I assumed that such an achievement would result in Goldsmanﾂ痴 being legally banned from any of the verbal professions, but, no, here he is yet again. As far as I am qualified to judge, the film remains unswervingly loyal to the book, displaying an obedience that Silas could not hope to match. I welcome this fidelity, because it allows us to propose a syllogism. The movie is baloney; the movie is an accurate representation of the book; therefore, the book is also baloney, although it takes even longer to consume. […] The trouble with Howardﾂ痴 film is that it is far too dense and talkative to function efficiently as a thriller, while also being too credulous and childish to bear more than a secondﾂ痴 scrutiny as an exploration of religious history or spiritual strife.”
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How do you convince all the UFO nutcases that there are no UFO’s? Easy enough, you let the government do a secret study, which comes to that result. Needless to say, this isn’t going to convince the hardcore crowd, who is probably already preparing a refutation stating that it’s all a big government conspiracy.
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This will get your head spinning: “Forging seems to run in the family of the late Konrad Kujau, who gave the world the Hitler diaries and faked hundreds of oil paintings. His great-niece Petra, 47, is now under investigation for writing her famous relative’s signature on hundreds of cheap Asian-made copies of masterpieces and selling them over the Internet, sometimes for thousands of euros apiece. Police in the eastern city of Dresden said they had confiscated more than 200 ‘supposedly original fakes’ of paintings bearing the Konrad Kujau signature in the offices of his great-niece.” (story, my emphasis) So these are fake original fakes then? And also, because this way it works easily, original fake original fakes. So if I were to get a copy of one of those in China I’d have what? A fake original fake original fake and also an original fake original fake original fake.
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Some people clearly have too much time on their hands, but sometimes, a true gem emerges.
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You’re not supposed to say this, but I think the value of the internet as a tool to gather meaningful information is vastly overrated. This is particularly true if you want to find a good review of a book or a CD or something else. You might be surprised to read this, so let me explain.
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This is too good to ignore: “An Indian movie director said he hopes to persuade Paris Hilton to play the role of Nobel laureate and prospective Catholic Saint, Mother Teresa, in an upcoming film. ‘Her features resemble Mother Teresa,’ director T. Rajeevnath told AFP from the southwestern coastal state of Kerala.” I wonder what features he is referring to? Maybe the droopy eye? Or the vacant look in Ms Hilton’s face, which indicates no sign of brain activity whatsoever? But then with her impressive resume (“Hilton’s prior movie experience includes appearing in a home-made sex video made by a former boyfriend that appeared on the Internet, and parts in several Hollywood B-films.”) it really looks like Ms Hilton is a perfect match.
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“Public language today resembles an exchange of greeting cards more than a discussion. It makes me think of the punch-out Valentine’s cards I and all my elementary school classmates used to distribute. […] Everyone had to get a valentine, even the bullies who had beaten me up in fourth grade for supporting Kennedy over Nixon. And anyone who actually read the cards and took their sugary wishes for a real statement of my feelings misunderstood the whole exercise. Today’s public life is a series of greeting-card debates. What counts is that the responses sound like responses. Their effectiveness is the same even if they turn out to be meaningless.” - story
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“The proliferation of TV blondes will come as news only to the blind and those who have killed their televisions.” (story)
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In Not naked but nude, Jonathan Jones argues that those people on the cover of Vanity Fair, who happen to wear no clothes (what a coincidence it’s the women), are not naked but nude. That’s the Clinton school of art discussion. I highly recommend No nudes is good nudes. Make sure not to miss some of the hilarious comments. I especially liked the comparison of the two actresses (I actually didn’t recognize either of them…) with “grotty dead fish”. It gets somewhat silly at the bottom (no pun intended here btw), though.
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It’s somewhat interesting that US newspapers haven’t reported much about a row between European newspapers and what appears to be the larger Islamic world, concerning a set of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. I’m not an expert on world religions, but as far as I know the prophet is not to be depicted, so the outrage is quite understandable. For the latest news update about this see this page. This whole affair is quite interesting to watch, especially since there has been a lot of cheap, simplistic posturing going on about “freedom of speech” (hence my surprise US newspapers didn’t chime right in). The Guardian has just published an excellent Leader about this.
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“Since the beginning of the year, the German state of Baden-Württemberg has been testing would-be citizens on their attitudes to the constitution. The only problem? The quiz itself might be unconstitutional.” (story) So are you worthy?
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It’s oh-so inviting - especially since re-writing and/or re-defining what people used to call “the truth” or “the facts” is so popular right now: Simply edit the Wikipedia, the “Free Encyclopedia” [laughter from tape], if you don’t like what you find there. See Wikipedia Entries ‘Cleaned’ By Political Staffers; compare details about this; and if you’re able to understand German, read about it here. And now will you please excuse me, I have to add an entry to the “Free Encyclopedia” [laughter from tape] that will describe in full detail what a fantastic, nice, caring, and generally genius person I am.
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Occasionally, people put the internet to good use, like in this Prejudice Map. Apparently, the way this was compiled was to type something like “germans are known for *” into the search engine’s window and to then look through the results. If you do that for different countries you get a fine - yet incomplete! - map of stereotypes. Which only teaches us that the internet now allows us to find out in almost no time how little we’ve really learned about each other.
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Hu Yang’s Shanghai Living shows people in their living places in Shanghai, with short statements by those people. Amazing. (seen at Ashley Benigno’s blog)
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“The internet feels like a giant reliquary at times. On bad days, idling around looking for something interesting is bit like being stuck in a newsagents stocked only with men’s interest magazines, from lurid bikini specials to railway modelling journals, superficial visual snippets that are served up without any sense of discovery, backstory or depth, as if they existed solely to sate an appetite for soundbites (viral culture has a lot to answer for). Sometimes a trawl through the big sites […] is like methodically working your way through a box of good chocolates - good at first, then swiftly becoming something of a chore, and a regretful one at that. Whereas chasing links, making connections and following leads is a little like observing a saint’s relic, the reliquary’s little window revealing a tiny morsel of bone or scrap of cloth, leaving the imagination to fill in the corporeal blanks.” - thingsmagazine.net
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This article caught my attention: “In theory, Wikipedia is a beautiful thing - it has to be a beautiful thing if the Web is leading us to a higher consciousness. In reality, though, Wikipedia isn’t very good at all. Certainly, it’s useful - I regularly consult it to get a quick gloss on a subject. But at a factual level it’s unreliable, and the writing is often appalling. I wouldn’t depend on it as a source, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to a student writing a research paper.” The counter argument basically states that - to pharse it a bit cynically - the Wikipedia is crap, but it’s free.
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“I don’t hate Apple. I don’t even hate Apple-lovers. I do, however, possess deep odium for the legions of Apple polishers in the press corps who salute every shiny gadget the company parades through downtown Cupertino as if they were members of the Supreme Soviet viewing the latest ICBMs at the May Day parade.” - story In a sense, Apple’s genius isn’t so much the mp3 player itself or the design (which I myself find amazingly underwhelming). It is the way how they combined a successful object with the notion of “upgrades”. In a sense, Apple’s “ipod” is a combination of Sony’s walkman and of cell phones, which also get new (and utterly useless) features continously. Since everybody is literally buying the notion that you just have to get “upgraded” versions all the time, and since Apple manages to maintain an inexplicable extra mystique (supposedly everything they produce is “cool”; note how just years ago, the general public disliked Apple for that very reason: Only utter nerds would use their products), it’s easy to see how Apple has hit the entrepreneurial jackpot. For now.
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I was going to commend the new Du bist Deutschland (You are Germany) campaign for going beyond the trans-Atlantic equivalent “USA Number One Whoo-Hoo”, but after having watched a few of the ads I really can’t back that up. “Twenty five media enterprises, major corporations, Der Spiegel, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, the public and the major private channels are all currently waging a campaign ‘Du bist Deutschland’ to boost the mood in Germany. It is the answer of the cumulative power of the media to German misery. But unfortunately it’s also an insult to the viewers.” (story)
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Dahlia Lithwick nails it: “Intelligent Design” is really just Teen Talk Barbie “Science”.
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“The notion that the American film industry is a hotbed of leftist propaganda is a venerable one, and some determined demagogues will cling to it no matter what the studios do. But the studios themselves, especially after the stunning success of Mel Gibson’s independently financed “The Passion of the Christ,” have tried to strengthen their connection with religious and social conservatives, who represent not only a political constituency but a large and powerful segment of the market.” - story
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