Mortheim

Crazy ass Mordheim board someone made. The amount of detail is remarkable.

Chuck Berry Remembers Call From Cousin About White Kid Playing 'Johnny B. Goode' | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Chuck Berry Remembers Call From Cousin About White Kid Playing Johnny B. Goode

Calculate the carbon impact of your travels with Dopplr

Really cool: Dopplr has partnered with AMEE to show you how much carbon your travel uses.

Video of Transformers costumes

Video of Transformers costumes that actually transform.

Lego Dawn of Man

The 40th anniversary of 2001: A Space Odyssey happened when I was in California. Here’s a Lego rendition of The Dawn of Man.

20 Minutes Too Long

Working at a movie theater in high school, I learned a few rules of thumb about movie lengths: kids movies are 90 minutes long. Most comedies are 90 minutes or a little longer. Most other movies are two hours, summer blockbusters and war epics tend to be 2 ½. A new rule would be that Judd Apatow comedies are all 20 minutes too long1. Entertainment Weekly published a short piece a few weeks ago arguing just this. Here are the running times of select movies:

• The 40 Year Old Virgin: 114 minutes
• Knocked Up: 129 minutes
• Superbad: 118 minutes (produced)

It’s a funny thing to criticize. I can certainly see how you want those extra scenes to develop characters and play out comedy beats. One of the things I like most about going to the movies is getting lost in the picture. The lights go down and the story whisks you away. A challenge for filmmakers is to make me forget I’m sitting in an auditorium for as long as possible. Eventually, during almost every movie, there will be a moment where the story’s hold on me lapses and I wonder what time it is, or what I have to do later that week, or something. During these moments, you don’t want your audience thinking, “wow, I’ve been sitting here for a long time.” That happened to me during both The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up. I liked them both, but wouldn’t have missed them if a scene here or there were cut/shortened.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall, out today, runs 112 minutes. Will it be too long, too?

1. In college I also learned that all Russian movies are one hour too long. They made some great movies over there, but clearly there was no shortage of film stock.

80th Aniversary of Action Comics

Today is the 80th anniversary of the publication of Action Comics 1, which introduced the character of Superman and started the genre of superhero comics as we know it. You can read the entire first issue online here. A federal ruling last month restored copyright to Jerry Siegel’s heirs. Siegel and co-creator Joe Shuster initially received very little compensation for the character who is now one of the most recognizable fictional creations on the planet. There’s lots of speculation as to what this means for future publication of the character, but it’s good to see the creators get compensation. And now, 80 years later, the best story ever written for the character is currently in publication in All Star Superman.

Clinton-Obama Debate: ABC Decides Top Issues Facing Americans Are Gaffes, Flag Pins and '60s Radicals

I’m losing interest in the Democratic race at this point. I’ve already cast my vote in my primary, and I’m about ready to just wait it out until something real happens. So I’m glad I didn’t watch last night’s debate: ABC Decides Top Issues Facing Americans Are Gaffes, Flag Pins and ’60s Radicals.

PvPonline My Parents are Dead

I had forgotten about this until I saw it linked on a board recently. It’s one of the best things Scott Kurtz has done: My Parents are Dead, the definitive Batman story of our age.

Overheard on the Metro this morning

Two guys are riding the Metro. Guy One remarks about how crowded it is.

Guy Two: It’s because the Pope’s here.

Guy One: What?

Guy Two points to today’s Express, with Pope Benedict XVI on the cover. That guy.

Guy One: Oh, The Pope.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

Relates to All Star Superman 10

Sixes and Eights

Last week’s Battlestar Galactica left me confused about which Cylon is which. I think my memory of last season is correct:

• The Six (Tricia Helfer) presently onboard the Cylon ship is “Caprica Six”. She’s the one who seduced Gaius Baltar at the beginning of the series. She has developed more sympathy and understanding of the humans than other Cylons.
• The Six that Baltar hallucinates is based on his experiences with Caprica Six but exists only in his mind.
• The Six in Galactica’s brig is the Cylon who was captured and tortured by the crew of Battlestar Pegasus. She’s likely similar to every other Six and a wholly different character than Caprica Six. Here’s Wikipedia’s article on Six.
• The Eight (Grace Park) aboard the Cylon ship is Sharon “Boomer” Valerii. She’s the Cylon who was aboard Galatica at the beginning of the series who didn’t know she was a Cylon until her programming made her start setting bombs and eventually shoot Adama.
• The Eight aboard Galactica is “Athena”. After the attack on the colonies she and Helo were stranded together, and they eventually conceived a child, Hera. Wikipedia has an article about Eight.
• The rest of the Cylons don’t seem to have separate personalities. A Two calling himself Leoben held Starbuck hostage, but we haven’t seen that version of him to be different than any other. Likewise with the Threes.

Research Monkeys

You may recall an article I linked to years ago on Slate about whether or not human DNA is compatible with any other animals. Stalin had the same questions (and who doesn’t‽), and in fact had a small program where they tried to mate humans with monkeys. Apparently those monkeys’ decedents are still hanging around the Research Institute of Experimental Pathology and Therapy in Abkhazia!

Few townspeople use the fancy name anymore; they just point toward the building on the hill and speak of the “monkey sanctuary”. The 286 surviving animals are descended from the thousands that populated the laboratories of the Soviet Union’s preeminent primate research institute.

[…]

Many of the monkeys escaped into snowy winters and harsh wilderness, or were freed by sympathetic bystanders who realized they were starving, unwittingly dooming many to death from exposure. In the wildest days of bloodletting, with primates running loose, some of the soldiers took to keeping baby monkeys perched on their shoulders as surreal mascots. Only a few of the animals survived in their cages, kept alive by a few stalwart staff members and tenderhearted locals.

Clone Wars

Here’s the leaked trailer for the new Star Wars Clone Wars TV series, which will have a big screen debut in August. I’m still not a fan of the style of the artwork, and I think I’d prefer it to be about a new set of characters rather than Obi-Wan and Anikin. I’d rather see cool new Jedis and have Anikin just make occasional appearances as a hero, since we already know his story.

The McLovin Fund

The Mclovin’ Fund with Kristen Bell and Christopher Mintz

John Rawls on Baseball

John Rawls and Harry Kalven: Six Reasons Why Baseball Is the Best of All Games. I’ve been thinking as I’ve watched some televised baseball recently about number five, the remarkable effect of concentrating the excitement of plays at different points of the field at the same time. Will the runner cross the plate before the fielder gets to the ball and throws it to home plate, and so on. TV doesn’t do this very well. The camera often has to focus either on the runner or the fielder.

Mispronouncing Words on Purpose

Neat little article on the common practice of mispronouncing words on purpose (internets, liberry). Everyone in my family says “dish licker” instead of “dish washer”, from when my big brother told us that the dish washer has a giant tongue that licks all the dishes clean.