Month: May 2006

According to a Canadian study on coolness, friendliness is the new cool. Researchers found that personality traits that have been traditionally associated with being cool—like detachment, irony and rebelliousness—have mostly been superseded by friendlyness, fairness and thoughtfulness.

Parents will be relieved to know that the popular understanding of cool suggests a Hallmark greeting card more than a gangster orgy.

The study was motivated by the purest scientific ideals of enquiry:

The study was born as a result of a disagreement over the coolness of actor Steve Buscemi, best known for his part as Mr Pink in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. [Researcher Ian] Hansen thought he was cool because he defied the mainstream, while [other researcher] Dar Nimrod said he was too wimpy and unattractive.

Now it just remains for us to decide if we can rely on Canadians to tell us what’s cool.

Disappointing. My hopes were probably unreasonably high. Nathan Fillion is good, but all of his previous work that I’ve seen has been written by Joss Whedon. Needless to say that few other writers can reach that level of quality, especially in a B-movie horror. Much was made of how funny this movie is, but I didn’t find myself laughing at much of it. It’s entertaining, but no laugh-out-loud funny. Calling it the "best horror comedy since Shawn of the Dead" is very misleading.

Remember in science classes in school when you knew what the result of a calculation was meant to be (the acceleration due to gravity, the speed of light in a vacuum, etc.) so you just worked back from that and from the formulae to invent the "data" that your experiment "measured"? Maybe the more daring among us would eventually have given up on that charade and produced something like the paper entitled Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass.

It’s better than the last two. Not that that’s such a huge achievement. Supporting cast was uniformly excellent. Cruise was Cruise. You know he’s good, even if his crazy antics make you not want to admit it.

I’ve added a very rudimentary photo gallery over there in the navigation sidebar. The page just shows thumbnails of my recent posts to Flickr sorted with most recent first. I decided to make it live straight away rather than wait until I’ve put more polish on it because, let’s face it, how likely am I to put more than the absolute minimum work into it?

Reading blogs is my World of Warcraft

I’ve just realised that I’ve had a link sitting in my bookmarks toolbar for about a month waiting for me to post it here. It’s a video of an Audi ad done in the style of MC Escher. It’s worth checking out if you haven’t already seen it.

I know that this is all over the blog world right now but just in case you’ve missed it so far I would urge you to check out Stephen Colbert’s speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

I had never heard of Colbert or his show The Colbert Report before yesterday. The Colbert Report is apparently an American satirical current affairs progaramme along the lines of The Daily Show. His speech tears into Bush without mercy, and POTUS and his supporters, sitting only meters away, are clearly not amused.

Everybody asks for personnel changes. So the White House has personnel changes. Then you write, "Oh, they’re just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic." First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!

There’s a full transcript online at Daily Kos.

Last week I met a friend of mine who I hadn’t seen in a while. By some route we ended up talking about that Family Guy episode where Peter wishes he had his own theme music. At the time I wasn’t able to decide what my own theme music should be, but that’s been solved by the Blog Things theme song quiz:

Your Theme Song is Back in Black by AC/DC

"Back in black, I hit the sack,
I’ve been too long, I’m glad to be back"

Things sometimes get really crazy for you, and sometimes you have to get away from all the chaos. But each time you stage your comeback, it’s even better than the last!

It turns out much fun can be had by co-opting the cards that come with pictionary for your own games. After a standard game in which Gary and I frankly obliterated Karl and Laura we decided to find some other uses for those little cards that tell you what to draw.

Charades has always been one of our most hilarity-inducing games, so we set about miming as many things from a single card as we could in a minute. Each card has ten things listed on it but the closest any of us got to that was eight, when I got a particularly easy set of things to mime. The worst any of us did was when I had decided to mime the things in the order they appeared on the card rather than skipping the hard ones. It turns out 60 seconds is not long enough to mime "boy scout", so I got a big fat zero.

Having exhausted ourselves laughing at a you-had-to-be-there comment from Karl, no-one wanted to stand up to mime. So we switched to password, where you have to describe the word you’re given without using the word itself. That proved easier than miming and we all managed to get through all ten words on a card in the time limit a few times, despite some deliberate screwing around ("In the old days they used to raise the corner of the vendor’s tent in order to clutch at the sweet fruit inside" for "shop-lifter").

It’s endless, turnless, rule-less, senseless games like this that always end up keeping me up until three or four o’clock in the morning. Yawn.