Month: August 2006

Waxing nostalgic on “when Saturday Night Live used to be good” has been far too easy for the last couple of years. Well, it’ll probably be even easier after an alleged cast reshuffling for the upcoming 32nd season:

Longtime cast members Chris Parnell, Horatio Sanz and Kenan Thompson will likely exit the late-night comedy staple, according to a source close to the show. Still inconclusive are talks to bring back Darrell Hammond, famed for his impersonations of Donald Trump, Bill Clinton and other celebrities. Hammond joined the cast in 1995 and has had the longest tenure of any performer in the show’s history.

Meanwhile, SNL executive producer Lorne Michaels is expected to hand the reins of the signature fake-news segment “Weekend Update” – recently co-hosted by writer-performer Tina Fey and Amy Poehler – to a newer cast member, Jason Sudeikis.

Yeah, this could suck real bad…

indexed is a hard-to-categorize blog that illustrates different ideas and concepts with mathematical diagrams, e.g. Venn diagrams.

Can you spot the hidden images in these map-based ads done by the BBC? The one above is one of the easier to spot…

 
Bad Astronomy Blog was one of the first web sites to report that “The IAU has voted on a series of resolutions on what a planet is and what a planet isn’t, and the verdict is… Pluto is not a planet.”

The post also notes that “This is a big turnaround from the initial resolution, which would have given our solar system at least 12 planets, and potentially many, many more.”

I guess this means that we’ll have to come up with a new mnemonic for remembering the nine eight planets…

Oh, and in case you’re interested, Collision Detection happened upon the somewhat surreal naming conventions for features on planets and moons in our Solar System.

“Yoda and Jar Jar Binks play out the classic Abbot and Costello routine ‘Who’s on first?’” in the YouTube video “Who’s on Force?”

Mark Jones’ Politically Incorrect Alphabet is fun…

My wife is a teacher of young children, and I’ve spent a fair time of late sitting on undersized chairs admiring the alphabet charts on classroom walls. Typically ‘A’ will stand for Apple, ‘B’ for Ball. It occurred to me that ‘I’ for Indian, one I remember from my childhood, has been replaced as it is no longer politically correct to refer to native/first/indigenous Americans as Indians.

Lacking any tact or decency, I therefore determined to create an alphabet using only subjects that, while they might have been unremarked a few decades ago, are now outside acceptable usage. But only just.

Claude Lelouch’s 1976 short film Rendezvous (YouTube video) is legendary:

On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris.

No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit.
…
Filmed in 1976, the revered short film by seminal French director Claude Lelouch is regarded as the ultimate in chase scenes – the connoisseurs’ trump card in response to Bullitt or The French Connection.

If you thought that was cool, check out the Google Maps + Google Video Mashup of Claude Lelouch’s Rendezvous that allows you to track the progress on a Google Map. Awesome…

In order to protect the bottom canines that protruded in an underbite, dentist David Steele gave his cat gold crowns. Weird yet funny…

What if the TV show Lost had been made in 1976? The ytmnd clip Lost ‘76 has the answer. Genius…

A cnet story about “people are obsessed with the topic of subways” led me to b3co.com, where you can make a custom badge showing which subway systems of the world you have ridden on. Looks like I haven’t been on too many yet…

The article also linked to Metro Bits, a site thoroughly exploring many aspects of the world’s subway systems.