Category: Oddities

I just love the smell of Kenneth Hite’s Bad Movie Reviews in the morning:

N.B.: If you, dear viewer, are planning any sort of operation, be it a quest to destroy a Ring of Power, the theft of a silvery briefcase, a 00 spy network, a quixotic treasure hunt, or whatever, just don’t hire Sean Bean. It won’t end well for you. Some day, they should make a movie that only has Sean Bean and Gene Hackman in it, and we could watch them betray each other recursively for 110 minutes.

Larpers and Shroomers: The Language Report, by Susie Dent covers all aspects of contemporary English as an evolving and mutating language. As a gimmick, it selects a single word born in each year of the 20th century and the opening years of the 21st.
The selection for 2004 is the disappointing Chav, apparently some form of variation on חובת”ים (specifically, loutish young people exhibiting council estate chic).
For a spot of fun, the BBC is running a short story contest in which you’re supposed to use all the 101 words in the list.
And the only reason I post this, is that the book’s title describes two of the hobbies of a sizable portion of my readership…

Jamie Zawinski () blogs a Wired article about a project by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr (don’t those names sound totally Israeli?) at the Tissue Culture & Art Project to make a (mouse-sized) artificial leather jacket out of a (mouse-derived) tissue culture cell line ("victimless leather").
In the comments, talk turns naturally to "victimless meat", with links to "Animal 57", the TCA’s own "Disembodied Cuisine" and the New Scientist article that I blogged last January, titled Lab-grown steaks nearing the menu.
I can’t believe that when I blogged that I missed quoting the immortal line Herman Vandenburgh of Brown University has proposed a regime for the physical conditioning of sedentary steaks.