Like Getting Hit By A Meteorite Made Entirely Of Winning Lottery Tickets

That's how screenwriter Jonah Nolan describes working with Steven Spielberg on a potential science fiction epic titled "Interstellar" for Paramount Pictures.

A Great First Paragraph

Some excellent writing courtesy of Dr. Jerome Groopman:

On a spring afternoon several years ago, Evan McKinley was hiking in the woods near Halifax, Nova Scotia, when he felt a sharp pain in his chest. McKinley (a pseudonym) was a forest ranger in his early forties, trim and extremely fit. He had felt discomfort in his chest for several days, but this was more severe: it hurt each time he took a breath. McKinley slowly made his way through the woods to a shed that housed his office, where he sat and waited for the pain to pass. He frequently carried heavy packs on his back and was used to muscle aches, but this pain felt different. He decided to see a doctor.

Read on to learn about why doctors misdiagnose their patients.

Link roundup

1. "No, Nicaragua Did Not Invade Costa Rica Because of Google Maps."

2. A glowing review for Lego Harry Potter for the iPhone and iPad.

3. Really great article by Mark Bowden about a private detective hired to figure out how a woman was seemingly magically removed from a hotel, severely beaten, and raped. (And remember this story the next time someone tells you that security cameras don't help solve crimes.)

*Buy iPads at eBay.

Link roundup

1. McDonald's has Megamind Happy Meal toys.

2. This guy seems pretty embarrassed about his career reselling used books, but he's a heck of a writer. Here's a good paragraph:

The old-fashionedness of my PDA echoes the marginality of the work I do. I rely on a technological castoff to search through other people's castoff merchandise. Thrift stores and even library book sales often present books jumbled in boxes on the floor. I root through these. If there's another guy scanning near me—a competitor—I go faster. (And it's almost always a guy, notwithstanding the pair of redheaded, cheerleader-type twins I see at book sales around Chicago.)

Can't you picture it?

3. Annie Leibovitz is still having money trouble:

It's not entirely that collectors find Leibovitz's portfolio too commercial or focused on shallow celebrity, Gapper writes. It's also that Leibovitz has consistently failed, throughout her career, to sufficiently kiss the asses of the sort of people who would spend $3.5 million on a bunch of photographic prints. "She had very little interest in the art world for most of her career," a gallery owner who used to rep Leibovitz told Gapper. "She suffered from not caring about it, not paying enough attention."

4. Monstrous house.

*Buy Happy Meal toys at eBay.

Captain America and Bucky vs the Nazis (link roundup)

Captain America and Bucky by Paolo Rivera - - if you buy one his black and white illustrations at Splash Page, he'll also send you a color version.

And a few more links:

1. Vivid description of working on a magazine in the 80's.

2. Want to reduce your appetite for awhile? Look at this photo of the world's biggest English breakfast. Via.

3. Tenacious Toys has the ThreeA Bramble robots available for preorder.

*Previously: Kinda stylish Captain America outfit for a girl.

*Buy ThreeA toys at eBay.

Twitter fail caterpillar? (link roundup)

The image greeting visitors to Twitter, which was down for maintenance, on Friday night.

And a few more links:

1. "By tickling young gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans, researchers say they learned that all great apes laugh." Video proof. Via.

2. You know, James Frey is a really good writer.

3. Better than any episode of Law and Order/CSI, read this true life story of the arrest of LAPD detective Stephanie Lazarus for a murder she allegedly committed in 1986.

4. Old Predator.

*Previously: Hillary Clinton Laughing Pen.

*Buy robot gorilla toys at eBay.

A young Vladimir Putin pretends to be a tourist (link roundup)

File this under too good to verify (or maybe, "fake but accurate"), but does this photograph show KGB agent Vladimir Putin posing as a tourist during one of Reagan's visits to Moscow? Apparently a common Soviet technique was to plant KGB agents as tourists and then have the tourists ask Western leaders provocative/obnoxious questions. More here and here.

And a few more links:

1. Illustrator David Cousens is currently accepting commissions. You can see some of his recent artwork here.

2. Now this is how you start an article:

The corner of Hollywood and Western is the epicenter of an underground world: a community outside the collective vision of club-hoppers and restaurant-goers rushing by, and one forgotten by public policy. Homeless youth, many cast off at 18 by the foster-care system, root out lives in a dim, moldy labyrinth of “abandos” — abandoned buildings hidden behind storefronts and the busy boulevard.

You can continue reading Daniel Heimpel's article for the LA Weekly here.

3. Obese police officer wins lawsuit requiring that he be reinstated to the police force.

4. At least one of the dvds Obama gave to the British prime minister can't be viewed in England due to DRM. Via.

*Previously: Russia's patent agency just awarded some guy the patent on the ;-) emoticon.

*Buy KGB collectibles at eBay.

Brutal Legend desktop wallpaper (link roundup)

Go here to download a new Brutal Legend desktop wallpaper.

And a few more links:

1. Excellent (and long) article by William Langewiesche about Somali pirates seizing a French ship crewed by men and women. Here's a taste of his writing, as he describes the ship's captain's earlier brush with the Asian tsunami:

Soon afterward, on December 26, 2004, the ship was anchored in deep water off an island called Curieuse, tending to a group of French passengers, most of whom had gone ashore to loll on a beach. Around noon a sailor radioed from the island reporting in confusion that the ocean had suddenly somehow withdrawn. It was the ebb before the surge of the murderous Asian tsunami that was reaching across the Indian Ocean and slamming into its shores. Marchesseau had received no warning of the event, and he had no time to make sense of the sailor’s call. The tsunami swept smoothly under the Ponant’s keel, in the form of a current, pivoting the ship 90 degrees around its anchor, and then rearing up into a steep wave which obliterated the beach from right to left before Marchesseau’s eyes.

Start here. And here's his books available at Amazon.

2. Speaking of lovers held as hostages, I highly recommend Ann Patchett's Bel Canto.

3. Chinese students sure have a lot of books on their desks. Via. By comparison, here's what schools look like in Detroit. This recession/depression has been well-earned. Via.

4. How to make animated gifs.

*Previously: Chinese elementary school in a cave.

*Buy pirate toys at eBay.

Barbarian wearing a teddy bear pelt (link roundup)

Teddy Bear Slayer t-shirt by Marcelo Braga on sale here.

And a few more links:

1. Best school essay ever, about Walt Whitman, no less. It starts, "Walt Whitman was an awful child molester who was born in ancient Hong Kong. He is over 3,000 years old and remembers the names of all of the forgotten Gods." You must read the whole thing. Via.

2. Christopher Hitchens decided to deface a sign bearing a swastika in Beirut. He and his companions were lucky to escape with their lives. Read this, it's more exciting than any action movie I've seen in ages.

3. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom hopes to be governor some day. His new wife has a movie coming out this week. In it, she participates in a threesome.

4. Tenacious Toys has the new vinyl UglyDolls figures available for preorder (by the set).

*Previously: Female barbarian wearing a Cookie Monster Pelt.

*Buy Conan toys at eBay.

Fascinating article about Teller (of Penn and Teller) and his red ball trick

In 2007 Teller, of Penn and Teller wrote an essay about "a hundred-year-old trick called the David P. Abbott ball" that he was working on. The essay was included in the program for the Penn and Teller Vegas show:

When the theater is empty I like to go out on stage. It’s lonely and beautiful. I look at your empty seat and think about you being in it. … Then I practice. I often practice stuff you’ll never see. For the past few weeks I’ve been working on a hundred-year-old trick called the David P. Abbott Ball. It is a very, very hard trick, almost like juggling. I put in an hour almost every day. I try to get the tricky moves so deeply into my muscles and brain that I can forget I’m doing a trick. Soon I’ll know whether the ideas I have for this trick are possible. But I won’t know that till I learn all the moves and invent my own. If the trick doesn’t work out, you’ll never see it, and I won’t be sad. I had fun every second I was working. I love the stuff you never see.

This is the story of that red ball trick. Yes, it's now part of the show.

I couldn't find the red ball trick, but I did find this video of Teller showing off his sleight of hand:



*Previously: NY principal hires black mage to cleanse school.

*Buy Penn and Teller dvds at Amazon.

Now that's how you review a coffee mug

Augie De Blieck Jr uses 983 words and five photos to review the Umbrella Academy coffee mug.

Here's a few more links

1. More than half the grades given to Brown students last year were A's. Link.


2. Two University of Iowa professors have killed themselves after being accused of (unrelated) sex scandals involving students. Link.


3. Absolutely hilarious animated gif featuring the worst rug burn (mat burn?) of all time. Link.


4. Buy a pack of baseball cards and you too might win a strand of Abraham Lincoln's hair. Link.


5. Over the last 30 years, GM and Ford have wasted enough money that they could have closed their own facilities and simply bought Honda, Toyota, Nissan and Volkswagen. Link. Via.

*Previously: Umbrella Academy pvc set.

*Invest your money with the very valuable baseball cards on sale at eBay.

Best two sentences I read today

Paul Boutin for Valleywag:

If you're not familiar, Adbusters is a fun, angry, Starbucks-hating publication whose credo states that we've all been brainwashed by advertising and mass media into an orgy of overconsumption that lets the American Empire destroy the rest of the world to feed our fat faces. I buy it at Whole Foods.

Well-written review of Stratford Shakespeare Festival's production of "The Trojan Women"

I'm not a big fan of live stage productions, but Noah Millman has written an excellent review of Stratford Shakespeare Festival's production of "The Trojan Women." Here's a taste:

The play is set after the fall of Troy. Hector is dead. Priam is dead. Paris is dead. The city is sacked and the women wait in tents outside the walls for their new masters to parcel them out amongst themselves as slaves. Before meeting the women, we open with Poseidon’s impotent fury at the loss of his city, and his surprise at Athena’s sudden reversal of sympathy and determination to visit revenge upon the Greeks whom she had only just led to triumph. These gods depart, and we are left with the women. Hecuba, Queen of Troy, stirs to bemoan her fate – no sons, no husband, no city – and learns soon enough that so long as she can say “this is the worst” the worst is yet to come.

It’s not the way one normally chooses to spend an evening, listening to the lamentation of women. Conan accounted it the greatest delight, but he spoke specifically of the lamentation of women whose husbands he had slain, and anyhow he was a barbarian.

Read the whole thing. Via.

Fascinating article about trip to China

P. J. O'Rourke writing about his trip to China:

The mill’s 150-pound ex-PLA guard dog, Shasha (“Killer”), was extremely glad to see Tom. So were the employees. Although there were some steel mill employees who presumably wouldn’t have been so glad, such as the two or three hundred “ghost workers” who didn’t exist at all and were on the mill’s payroll when Tom took over. Plus the thousands of workers he’d fired because they didn’t do anything. Tom also needed to get rid of the local family that had the “theft rights” to the factory. They once stole an entire railroad train from the mill and would have gotten away with it if the train didn’t have a track that led directly to them.

“Here’s where one guy threw a wrench at me,” Tom said as we climbed the tower to the blast furnace.

“What’d you do?”

“I tossed him down the stairs,” Tom said. “Rule of law is the cornerstone of capitalism.”

Tom’s worst problem with the proletariat, however, involved one of his mill hands who was having an affair with a woman who worked at the chemical factory next door. They conducted their trysts in an electrical equipment closet. Amidst the throes of passion the mill hand backed into some high voltage circuitry and fried. (His paramour, with hair a bit frizzier than is usual in China, survived.) The man’s widow then brought her entire ancestral village to block the steel mill’s gates. As compensation for her husband’s death, she demanded his salary in perpetuity, a job for their retarded daughter, a new house, the payment of her husband’s gambling debts, and that her grandmother be flown to the United States to have her glaucoma treated.

“I had to call in the Communist Party officials,” Tom said.

“Did they ship everybody off to prison camp or something?” I asked.

“They didn’t do anything. They said it was my problem.

You'll have to click through to see how he handled the problem. Via.

Funny review of Cloverfield

Tyler Cowen: the characters are supposed to be vacuous and annoying, and that the opening scene is supposed to be obnoxious and superficial . . . Most of all this is a movie about how the young'uns have no tools for moral discourse and that all they can do is utter banalities and take endless pictures of each other and record their lives for no apparent purpose. I can't recall any other movie that so completely devastates its intended demographic.

Roger Stone is a "professional lord of mischief"

AKA a political operative.

Being a skilled confidence man is both a blessing and a curse. If you truly excel at the long con, raising it to a form of art, marks will never know they've been taken. But if you become renowned for such artistry, when it is synonymous with your very name, people never believe you're off the grift, even when you're playing straight.

Such is the life of Roger Stone, political operative, Nixon-era dirty trickster, professional lord of mischief. It's hard to assume he's not up to something, because he always is. He once said of himself, "If it rains, it was Stone." For that's the view most people take of him. Three years ago, everyone from the DNC's Terry McAuliffe to the leftwing blogosphere blamed him for leaking George W. Bush's forged Air National Guard records, the ones that looked like they would damn Bush, but ultimately blew up Dan Rather's career. It's preposterous, he says, a triple bank shot that no one could ever have conceived of. "I get blamed for things I have nothing to do with," he says, somewhat wounded. But when asked about all the things he doesn't get blamed for that he does have something to do with, he thinks a bit, then shrugs. "It does balance itself out," he says.

Read more at The Weekly Standard.

You can watch some interview clips here (which for some reason I could not figure out how to embed).

Amazon customer reviews of the Bic ballpoint pen are hilarious

When the initial excitement of taking delivery of my new pen started to wear off I realised that I shouldn't just write for the fun of it, this should be a serious enterprise, so by the second day of ownership I started to take a little more care of what I wrote. I used it to sign three letters, and in each case was perfectly happy with the neatness of handwriting that I was able to achieve.

...

On the third day of ownership I went on a trip to London and took my pen carefully packed away in my brief case, but I needn't have worried, this isn't some temperamental ink pen that leaks when you store it at the wrong angle. I sat at my meeting and confidently removed the cap from my pen and it wrote flawlessly, almost immediately.

...

Upon receiving my order, I carefully opened the box and dug through the packing peanuts in order to get to the pen contained therein. 'Beautiful!', I thought, and promptly opened up my moleskine notebook to jot down to myself some notes. My previous pen had ran out of ink four weeks prior and I didn't want to splurge on expensive shipping, which meant I had a lot of notes to catch up on writing.

But, when that quality carbide ball touched the surface of the paper, it was not ink that came out. From a distance I heard the screams of men and the cackling of innumerable ravens. I stopped, cold and sweating profusely. I looked down at the Bic Crystal black medium ballpoint pen which I held in my hand, only to see darkness. I dashed it against the wall, recoiling in horror. I saw in the corner of my eye my faithful notebook, which now lay on the ground. Once unmarred, I saw now the small mark which I had made with the devil's own pen. It spread across the page like a plague, and looking at it I gazed upon true horrors. For, what I thought had been ink was in fact a portal to a dark, unforgiving dimension. A portal whose maw was now widening to engulf all hope and joy in the world.

'God, what have I done?' I exclaimed as I weeped and fell to my knees, 'What have I done?'

Link. Via.

Funniest thing I read all week

Glenn Reynolds:

BANNING HUMANS ON MARS: And how to get around it. Thanks, Congress! It reminds me of when Chinese court politics led to a ban on overseas exploration in the 15th Century, just as the Europeans were starting. That worked out well for the Chinese. The difference is that in China, the eunuchs were in favor of exploration . . . .

Blogger explains why he plays games with his young children competitively

My attitude to playing games with children is simple: I play to win. Put simply, I see no need to coddle my children in game playing. If they want that they can go elsewhere; say, to their mother. Now I have posted before on how my children play games with eachother. It is very personality driven. But how they play with me is another matter.

Read more.

Funniest disclaimer I read today

From a blog post by Jacob Sullum about the war on drugs and George Soros:

"I once sought a book grant from a Soros-funded program, but I did not get it. I did get a journalism award from the Soros-funded Drug Policy Alliance, but it did not come with any money. I guess this is really more of a complaint than a disclosure."