Subscribe to Sideout as a feed: (xml/rss2)
My Phone Call to Arnold Newman: "There was a long pause. Finally: 'Er...yes, I do portraits.'" Oh man. The Getty link at the bottom of post is an excellent overview of Newman's work. (via Queso)
"Tekeli-li, or Hollow Earth Lives": A huge (comprehensive?) annotated bibliography of Antarctic and hollow earth fiction. Wow. (Thanks, Jonah!)
Image of Virgin Mary found in backyard: The Loudres of Ohio, defining miracles down.
Mosquito ringtones and the extremes of human hearing: Years of going to punk rock shows have wrecked my hearing; above 17,000 Hz, I can't -hear- anything, but it starts giving me a headache.
Double Articulation: Deconstructing Brett Ratner’s X3: This is spot on, except a) it's too nice to Halle Berry, b) it's too nice to the ham-handed Angel plot, and c) the Hellfire Club clearly should have been in the fourth movie, because that's how I would have done it. (Spoilers abound.)
A staggeringy un-self-aware entry in the Post's "Being a Black Man" series: "I just think he's risen way above rap music and never agreed with those contentious and rebellious lines of rap music." Remember, being a black Republican who doesn't like Curtis Mayfield is being an "independent thinker"!
Wind-Power Projects Halted: The DoD stops wind farm construction throughout the Midwest to study radar issues. Good job, Ted Kennedy!
A rundown of math jokes on "The Simpsons": The episode with the fake counterexample to Fermat's Last Theorem also had a giant "P = NP" floating in the background. (via Daring Fireball)
Fun and games with flood control in Des Moines: Upping the ante on Google Maps gags -- are you going to let a bunch of city boys beat you, farmers of the world?
Electronic voting machines fail to ruin Iowa election: We're rapidly near the point where any government official who advocates buying an electronic voting machine that doesn't support a paper trail should be recalled or fired. This is no way to run a government.
Ronaldinho vs Zidane: Insane. I wish I were as good at Ronaldinho at -anything-. (There's a move at 3:21 which literally made my jaw drop.)
Fafblog returns: Stupid Chris, going to his college reunion and denying us the world's only source of Fafblog!
Fast DOM Queries in Today’s Browsers: Alex of the Dojo framework suggests a ridiculously ugly hack for speeding up your JavaScript. Heavens.
Chinese mathematicians announce proof of Poincaré conjecture: The problem, about the nature of three-dimensional spheres, is one of the Clay Millennium Problems; if the proof stands, someone (probably Grisha Perelman, whose work on the problem the Chinese mathematicians belief they've confirmed) wins a million bucks
RIP Bernard Loomis, the king of toys: He worked on Chatty Cathy, Barbie, Strawberry Shortcake, and Star Wars action figures, and invented the Saturday morning product-based cartoon.
Tales from the Longbox on All-Star Batman and Robin: "Perhaps this is all part of some brilliant DC marketing scheme. People are having so much fun laughing at how bad the book is they're willing to keep buying it just to see how much worse the next issue will be."
Gallery - Tales From The Vault!: Canadian Pulp Fiction, 1940-1952: I love the French Canadian covers!
Some of the work of Michael O'Donoghue: A sampler from the National Lampoon and early Saturday Night Live writer, including "The Churchill Wit" and "The Slowest Gun in the West"
Sugarplum, the spambot poisoner: I've seen references to spammers using the nonsense text Sugarplum creates to help seed their messages and sneak them past Bayesian filters. I blame Dixie Flatline.
TypicalGirls: An interesting-sounding mailing list, devoted to the women of classic punk and New Wave bands. Keepin' it real with Poly Styrene and Faye Fife.
Fun and games with Google Maps: When farmers get up to not-safe-for-network-television hijinks.
Engineers Help to Save and Reconstruct the Past: The University of Arizona's awesome-sounding Heritage Conservation project, in which lost technologies are resuccitated.
How to draw Kirby Dots: A signature effect of the great comics artist Jack Kirby -- illustrating a supernatural glow through negative space.
Vital flesh: the mysterious world of Pink Eiga: A Midnight Eye writer on a Japanese bad-girl sexploitation genre that I'd only vaguely heard of. (NSFW!)
Fantazy Land, Alexandria, Egypt.: A Theme Park Review forumite goes to the nastiest theme park on earth.
The Wicker Goat: "You can just hear the Swedish sigh in that headline comma from the AP article, 'Vandals Burn Swedish Christmas Goat, Again.'"
Dorothy Parker in the Paris Review, 1956: "I wanted to be -cute-. That's the terrible thing. I should have had more sense." If I ever have a trans-historical dinner party, I want Dotty to show up, get smashed, and leave with Walter Rathenau.
Bird flu ready to rumble?: "All seven people infected with bird flu in a cluster of Indonesian cases can be linked to other patients, according to disease trackers investigating possible human-to-human transmission of the H5N1 virus." Human-to-human transmission, of course, is how
Steve Sailer rebuts Malcolm Gladwell: In general, sports other than individual sports (track and field events, say) and baseball (in which the vast majority of what happens is one-on-one play) are very hard to model; Steve Sailer argues that counterintuitive results are sometimes just wrong.
iDon't -- lame "guerilla" marketing for a Sandisk iPod knockoff: But hey, they like Pitchfork Media! Those -rebels-! Also, they probably know that the Shins will change your life.
The birth of Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London": From a production point of view, but loads of details. I had no idea that Mick Fleetwood was ever involved with a song that good.
"Welcome to Eltingville" failed pilot: Sarah "Action Girl" Dyer posts a Cartoon Network reject, based on the characters from her husband's long-running "Dork" comic book.
Japanese Horror Movies and more: I'm not nearly as up on contemporary Asian movies as I'd like to be. (I missed "Kamikaze Girls" when it came to town and now kind of regret it.)
The A.V. Club interviews Neko Case: The inside baseball Anti/Mint/Bloodshot stuff is interesting, and I'm always up for reading an interview with the divine Ms. C.
First Second - Vampire Loves: From French comics guy Joann Sfar, author of "The Rabbi's Cat". Super-awesome.
"Latino" v. "Hispanic" in Google Trends: Settling an argument for some of my friends about regional variation in usage -- a very nice use of Google Trends.
SFPTZL GLBSH! - The Sugar and Spike Main Website!!!: Dedicated to Sheldon "Scribbly" Mayer's widely lauded series about a pair of toddlers -- the menu items cracked me up.
"The rarity of this opportunity to purchase a Le Corbusier duplex apartment cannot be over-estimated.": But does it have a roof garden?
"Al Qaeda is the one that’s most radical, so I think they’re Sunni.": Jo Ann Davis, chair of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Terrorism/Human Intelligence. Insert your punchline, then go pour yourself a stiff drink.
Sir Thomas Browne's Hydriotaphia & The Garden of Cyrus: My education is lacking, as until a few weeks ago, I'd never heard of this overstuffed, Pynchonesque (Sternean?), melancholic slab of 17th century goodness.
Trio: The Musical: A Buffy fanfic -- the backstory to "Once More with Feeling" (if Sondheim had written it).
eG Forums Rye Reviews: Not that the liquor stores around me will have Pikesville or Rittenhouse.
Look! Up in the sky! It's... the All-Girl Hero League!: Man -- good on them for participating in Free Comics Day, but these characters look like they were lifted straight from someone's Champions campaign.
Two great bigotries that taste great together: Next up, FortWayne.com's publication of "Six Months in a Convent".
Steve Walters' Screwball Academy: I think my favorite rock-poster-guy, Jay Ryan, apprenticed with Screwball. If I lived in Chicago and had an ounce of artistic talent, I would kill to do this.
"Pragma: No-cache" Tag May Not Prevent Page from Being Cached: The solution for this 2004 Internet Explorer bug is about the funniest thing I've seen today.
On superhero comics and the objectifying gaze: The Batman cover made me laugh out loud.
Jane Jacobs, RIP: (I was going to try to make a "Death and Life of Great American Urban Theorists" joke, but she lived in Toronto for years.) A giant of her field -- if she had lived twenty years earlier than she actually did, America's great cities might be even greater.
English /R/ Us: On rhotic and non-rhotic accents, the Duke of Wellington, the wheatear bird's scandalous secret, and more (with bonus PG-rated etymology).
Vision in a Complete Achromat: By Knut Nordby -- I think I read about this in an Oliver Sacks book.