Tag Archives: Friday Links

Buckle up. Lots of stuff this week.

A brief but vivid demonstration that paper is not dead:

Longtime blog reader Anthony Lee Collins pointed me to this wonderful glimpse into Batman v. Superman – what might have been:

You’ve probably already heard, but scientists have directly detected gravity waves for the first time.

This photo of Jeb and Barbara Bush, found here, just makes me happy. It’s like she’s saying “What was that, punk? What’d you say about my kid? You wanna come up here and say it to my face?” and Jeb is all “Mom, please, you’re embarrassing me in front of the voters…”

I can’t seem to find the original link – it was somewhere on Imgur – but this is just about the funniest, coolest thing I’ve seen all week:

Post script – as I was trying and failing to rediscover my original source for those, I came across this picture of Foster on a skateboard, looking more athletic than I have ever or will ever in my entire life:

And that is all.

The new trailer for Batman v Superman is evidently not new at all – YouTube says it was published over six months ago – but it was new to me. At any rate, this film, which I had dismissed as a one-trick pony, is now looking much better than it has any right to be. If Ben Affleck can just learn any facial expressions besides grim & jaded, we’ll be good to go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uehhs1vrRXE

Meanwhile the Onion explains how caucuses work. A caucus, for those wondering, is “a system of voting for people who wish casting a ballot could be three hours longer and include being lectured to.”

And in actual (I hesitate to say “real”) politics, Cruz and Trump have made Jeb Bush seem positively sane by comparison.

At the gathering at Manchester’s Alpine Club, where Bush fielded questions from voters, he also advanced an establishment outlook: Republicans are about governing well — not just expressing anger.

Imagine that.

Have a stick-it-to-the-Man kind of weekend. You know, if you want to.

Suicide Squad is looking like a pretty sweet movie. Or at least a pretty sweet trailer.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Harley Quinn on the big screen before, but this version nails her character perfectly IMO. Also, I didn’t realize till now that Will Smith was going to be in it.

Moving on…

In the novel I’m currently editing, I came across a real historical person named Daniel Webster (1782-1852). He was a senator and a diplomat.

He was also, I’m fairly convinced, the human version of Grumpy Cat:

Or, now that I think about it, I guess Grumpy Cat is the feline version of Daniel Webster.

Have a non-grumpy weekend! (If you’re into that sort of thing.)

NPR agrees: singular “they” is cool.

I’m out!

When Don McClean sings “And the jester sang for the king and queen” in “American Pie,” what is he talking about? How, precisely, does one “pop some tags” per Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop”? What the hell is going on in “Louie, Louie” anyway?

Enter Genius.com, which not only has lyrics (without the obnoxious popups), but annotations and explanations as well.

It’s crowdsourced, which means it has the same basic strengths and weaknesses Wikipedia – and I do like me some Wikipedia. In fact, Genius is taking this a step further and launching a projects to annotate the entire Web. You can write line-by-line notes on any web page, and other people can read them, via a Chrome extension. I haven’t tried it, but it’s an intriguing thought.

Have an intriguing weekend!

I saw The Force Awakens with six of my friends last night. It’s wonderful. Not perfect – nothing is – but wonderful. If you’re not sure whether to see it, you should see it. I might have more to say later.

In unrelated news: a while back, I took twenty of my favorite snippets of poetry and added them to Buffy screenshots that fit what the poem was saying. I tried to make the typography interesting, even though I don’t know much about typography. So here’s that.

Have an exemplary weekend!

Tina Fey would like you to remember that Star Wars isn’t the only movie arriving December 18.

Sisters: The Farce Awakens.

Have an acceptable weekend!

Remember that thing about the NSA? That thing where every time you called anybody for any reason, they got a record of the call, including your phone number, the number of the person you called, the date and time you called, how long you talked, and approximately where you were located? Oh yeah, that thing.

Well, they’re not doing it anymore. (According to – ahem – the people who were doing it.) The information is still collected, but now it’s just the phone companies who have it, and if the NSA wants it, they have to go get one of those “warrant” things I keep hearing about.

So. Progress.

In other news, there’s something in Japan called a hatsuyume – the first dream you have in the New Year, traditionally on the night of January 1. If you dream about Mount Fuji, an eggplant, and a hawk, it’s supposed to be super good luck.

I’m gonna be honest, that’s never happened to me.

Have a lucky weekend!

NPR has portraits of a few of those killed in Paris. A chance to look at the people and not just the numbers. I saved that article days ago, but only now read it carefully enough to notice that the girlfriend of one of the victims shares my last name (Polina Buckley).

I don’t want to end the week on too dark a note, though.

Here’s a great photo of Einstein I just found this morning.

Have a good weekend.

Let the soothing dulcet baritones of Ben Trube wash over you like the autumn tide as he describes how Starbucks has declared a War on Fractals. Remember, keep the “act” in “fractal.”

THIS CONCLUDES OUR MESSAGE