[Mad] magazine once received a letter from Lucasfilm’s legal department after their Empire Strikes Back parody, demanding that they recall all printed copies of the issue and destroy them. MAD replied by sending a copy of another letter they had received the previous month—from George Lucas, offering to buy the original artwork for the Empire parody and comparing Mort Drucker to Leonardo Da Vinci and the parody’s writer, Dick De Bartolo, to Mark Twain. They never heard from Lucasfilm’s legal department again.
From Cahiers du cinémad by Grady Hendrix.
Google got the design ethos exactly right. It’s a device that is designed for everyday use, but also an adornment that is designed to look good when worn as an accessory. [...] I think it looks good in the same way a merino wool Zegna sweater looks good. That in itself is a key narrative: Google has taken the ultimate in geekery and made it feel cool.
Yeah … not really.
Not much shocks you on the gay scene, but seeing Helen Mirren dressed as the queen cussing and swearing and making you stop your parade — that’s a new one.
That certainly would’ve been something to see.
With all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.
Margaret Thatcher – yes, the very same - wrote about her concerns about climate change from carbon dioxide emissions in 1988, like some common treehugger. This may wrinkle some brains on both sides of the aisle, and Gizmodo UK’s feature on Thatcher, the scientist, is well worth a read.
With any luck, Lord Bell and Dr Bong can team up and fight for the environment.
When I look back at the activities I’ve done over the years, they’ll always been solitary: martial arts, athletics (javelin), angling, using computers, drawing and painting. Now, I ride a road bike. Mostly on my own. When I step outside of my preference – which I do all the time – it takes extraordinary amounts of energy. I’m physically and mentally drained, even if I’m having an amazing time. Simply being outside of my preference has that effect.
Mark Boulton on introversion and working. Chris Coyier adds:
knowing the true nature of introverts was incredibly liberating for me. Most of my life I thought there was something a little bit broken about me. That I wasn’t quite right. That if I could just snuff out this part of myself everything would be a lot better.
Both these essays hit very close to home.
That first night we also announced that Shock ‘n’ Awe had, not certainly, but almost positively probably killed Saddam Hussein in his golden bed. A tell like that costs you your pants elsewhere.
Then, for no fucking military reason whatsoever, we managed to outrun our supply lines on Day Two, but, fortunately, PFC Jessica Lynch, the Pat Tillman of Iraq*, single-handedly wiped out a battalion, or something.
Then we took Baghdad, and realized we’d only brought enough MPs to guard the Oil Ministry. Fortunately, Don Rumsfeld was there to explain to us that that’s how it goes.
Doghouse Riley looks back on Gulf War: Part the Second.
Bruce Schneier writing about Internet privacy for CNN:
Welcome to the end of private conversations, because increasingly your conversations are conducted by e-mail, text, or social networking sites. And welcome to a world where all of this, and everything else that you do or is done on a computer, is saved, correlated, studied, passed around from company to company without your knowledge or consent; and where the government accesses it at will without a warrant. Welcome to an Internet without privacy, and we’ve ended up here with hardly a fight.
Not only that, the people who saw it coming were ridiculed as paranoid luddites.