Nothing and Some More

I went to see le guide du routard intergalactique and I did not like it. Too slow to start, the puppets and Sam Rockwell are way too annoying. On the good side,Alan Rickman voices Marvin quite nicely and the guide itself is quite nicely done.

Guide again, The parachute artist: Have Tony Wheeler's guidebooks travelled too far? about the Lonely Planet losing its soul

The series' authority is such that the team accompanying Jay Garner, the first American administrator of occupied Iraq, used Lonely Planet Iraq to draw up a list of historical sites that should not be bombed or looted. The writers Marianne Wiggins, Jilly Cooper, and Pico Iyer have used Lonely Planet guides to immerse themselves in the feel of a far-off locale for novels set in, respectively, Cameroon, Colombia, and Iran. And, in perhaps the greatest tribute, the Vietnamese have begun to manufacture ersatz Lonely Planet guides to complement their line of fake Rolexes.

I discovered Laurel Nakadate via a review in Village Voice: Whatever Laurel Wants

Voyeurism, exhibitionism, and hostility merge with gullibility, cunning, and folly in Nakadate's work. Not only is this creepy, it's confusing and complicated. The roles of hunter and hunted are blurred. Nakadate turns the tables on these men and also on herself. No one comes out of these Lolita-complex revenge fantasies unscathed.

In the Village Voice again, Through the Looking-Glass, on the trail of the crippled detectives about Crippled Detectives, or The War of the Red Romer, a novella in 25 chapters, published in 1978 by Lee Tandy Schwartzman, seven years old, in the magazine Stone Soup (the excellent wikipedia has of course an entry on the the fable of the Stone Soup; the first time I found the mention of that legend was in the Readme of Fractint... I dreamed of having CompuServe at that time, just to be able to contact the authors of Fractint...)

Douglas Coupland Life after God

So what is it about our essential humanity that we are expressing with our inventions ? What is it that makes us us
I thought of how odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is really quite sure of what makes people people. The only activities I could think of that humans do that have no other animal equivalent were smoking, body-building, and writing. That's not much, considering how special we seem to think we are.

The First Chapter of The Hero with a 1000 faces is available online, so is A Practical Guide to The Hero With a Thousand Faces. See also the Joseph Campbell Foundation

Moneyball quoting Bill James

When the numbers acquire the significance of language, they acquire the power to do all of the things which language can do: to becom fiction and drama and poetry... And it is not just baseball that theses numbers, through a fractured mirror, describe.It is character. It is psychology, it is history, it is power, it is grace, glory, consistency, sacrifice, courage, it is success and failure, it is frustration and bad luck, it is ambition, it is overreaching, it is discipline. And it is victory and defeat, which is all that the idiot sub-conscious really understands.

The sabermetrics manifesto: Sabermetrics is the search for objective knowledge about baseball.

Another way to do the Adulte/Chiant button, with pure CSS: CSS Inline Buttons

Le Monde: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, L'insoumise de La Haye

"J'aime la France pour la laïcité, mais je la déteste pour ce qu'elle dit de Frits Bolkestein" , lance Ayaan Hirsi Ali, avant d'ajouter, non sans humour : "Je trouve bien hypocrites ces Français qui s'indignent contre le projet de directive Bolkestein - qui établissait la libre circulation des services au sein de l'Union sur le principe du 'pays d'origine"' - alors que les mêmes ne rechignent pas à travailler en Afrique ou en Inde en percevant leurs salaires français...

Ne dites plus jamais blog mais bloc-notes (via Embruns )

Ne dites plus jamais blog ! La Commission générale de terminologie et de néologie a publié au Journal officiel du 20 mai un avis établissant une liste de termes et d'expressions destinés à supplanter les anglicismes sur Internet. Ainsi, "bloc-notes", que l'on pourra accepter sous sa forme abrégée "bloc", désignera "un site sur la Toile, souvent personnel, présentant en ordre chronologique de courts articles ou notes, généralement accompagnés de liens vers d'autres sites", soit un blog.

NTK on MSN.CO.UK's strong-IP "Thought Thieves" film competition Terms and Condition

Entries must be the "sole work and creation of the person submitting the film" (no sharing your precious intellectual property fluids with your cameraman, Mr Auteur);must not "use third party intellectual property rights" (no furniture, no architecture, only clouds as background); the entry form additionally specifies "Should I be selected as a finalist [...] I will formally licence on terms acceptable to Microsoft, all intellectual property rights in my film and agree to waive all moral rights in relation to my film if requested to do so". But what we made us wonder was: where exactly did Microsoft get this "Thought Thieves" idea from?