Ah, another thrilling YouTube find!
Some of you will know Suzi Quatro as the most prominent female glam rocker of the early 70s, racking up a string of hits with Chapman-Chinn numbers like “Can the Can.” Some will know her only from her soft-rock duet “Stumblin’ In” with Chris Norman, which you have to have a […]

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The Doctor Who two-part story “Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks” wrapped up this weekend on the BBC, with the Doctor and Martha battling Daleks (and their pig-headed assistants) in the newly built Empire State Building in early 1930s New York, against the backdrop of the depression. The episodes featured some great historical background, with […]

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As part of an international day of protest over the genocide in Darfur, campaigners in London displayed a giant hourglass filled with “blood” to symbolize time running out. The image at right is from a video featuring Hugh Grant tied to the campaign. More than 200,000 have died, with 2 million displaced and 4 […]

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Tom Tomorrow had a great “special edition” cartoon up on the Huffington Post last week, revisiting some of the things that pro-war pundits had to say at the start of the war. Here’s a small excerpt from the cartoon.

That’s just the first four of 12 panels — click on the cartoon excerpt to go see […]

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Earlier this year it was announced that Neil Finn was getting back together with bassist Nick Seymour and guitarist Mark Hart to reform Crowded House. The new version will of course be missing its original drummer, the late, lamented Paul Hester, whose duties will be taken over by former Beck drummer Matt Sherrod.
The band is […]

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I have three days’ worth of links accumulated and only one Friday afternoon roundup post to squeeze them into! Help me with the zipper.

As many as 6,000 hogs may have been fed melamine-tainted feed: “A USDA official said that so far states have quarantined one farm each in South Carolina, New York, North Carolina and […]

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Bill Moyer’s Buying the War documentary on PBS, about how the Washington press bought into the administration’s marketing campaign and enabled it during the runup to the Iraq War, obviously made a big splash this week. I haven’t had time to watch it all myself yet, but you can view the whole show online here. […]

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At last it comes out (so to speak): the full behind-the-scenes story on the Heroes character who was supposed to be gay, and then wasn’t anymore. Popgurls.com interviews Heroes producer Bryan Fuller, who spills more beans than have previously been spilled from this particular can of beans.
What happened:
It absolutely was a path that we were […]

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I can’t quite put it into words, but on a certain level this video reminds me of what my entire childhood was like.

 
(… for those stuck on slow connections, it’s a four-year old kid who for some reason is standing in the end zone at a football game and gets tackled full-force by one of […]

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Since I’m doing meta today: In case any of you are wondering exactly how I came up with such a cockamamie name for this blog, you can put at least part of the blame on The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero, which I’ve been carrying in my backpack for […]

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Speaking of Waterboys videos, here’s one I dearly love. It’s a fan-made clip of Mike Scott performing “Fisherman’s Blues” live with The Decemberists! The sound isn’t great but the joy comes through just fine. Here’s what the official Waterboys mailing list said about it:
Mike Scott made a guest appearance with top up and coming US […]

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Don’t worry, you don’t have to get me anything. But Ocelopotamus celebrated its one-month anniversary last week, and since I’m still figuring out the recipe for this place — what kinds of things I’m posting in what proportions, and what the readers most likely to visit a place called Ocelopotamus are actually interested in — […]

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France heads for a runoff election between right-winger Nicolas Sarkozy and left-winger Ségolène Royal. The country’s future hangs in the balance, and a lot depends on where the defeated centrist candidate steers his followers.
Right wing blogs are now trying to push the idea that there was a massive conspiracy to hide WMDs in Iraq. […]

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For a while now I’ve been reading about the mysterious wide-scale disappearance of honey bee colonies, a phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder, which has disturbing implications for a huge range of food crops. (According to Wikipedia, honey bees are responsible for pollinating about a third of all crop species in the U.S.)
Now there’s […]

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