Beans

That's it. I'm officially sick and tired of this stupid economy.

Yo Joe!

I watched GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra on Saturday night, and it was as big and stupid as I thought it would be. Movie critics have been absolutely merciless with it. Rolling Stone's review said: "I don't know what to say about the acting, writing and directing in G.I. Joe because I couldn't find any", while Premiere claimed that "This movie’s sole purpose is to make teenage boys high-five each other".



All I'm going to say is, it was loads of fun to watch. And I'll start listening to "serious movie critics" only when their "serious movies" start featuring Scarlett and The Baroness.

It did, though, get me to thinking about the Battle: Action Force comics my brother used to read (and I used to steal). And that got me snooping around the Intrawebs, where I found...



a site called Blood For The Baron, which has scans of all the old comic strips (repeat: all of them), there for my time-wasting, childhood-reliving pleasure. I'm so excited about this discovery, I'm pretty much beside myself (I'm sitting here next to me).



I mean, seriously: how cool/retro/geeky/nerdy/sad/brilliant is this?

Keeper

The incomparable Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger (and yes, I did just use the word incomparable) has a great piece up at Soccernet, where he talks about ill-informed soccer fans and their ill-informed opinions on who is and isn't the best goalkeeper in Germany right now.

You could replace "soccer" with "any given sport", "goalkeeper" with "any given position" and "Germany" with "any given country", and you'd have a perfectly good sports story for any given newspaper.

Annie

As part of their enormous Fall Fashion section, New York magazine have a feature story up on Annie Leibovitz. If you don't know who she is, pick up a copy of Vanity Fair, or Vogue, or a vintage copy of Rolling Stone, or pretty much any magazine with a reputation for iconic, beautiful, big-budget photography. Chances are, Leibovitz shot the cover photograph.



Now you'd imagine that someone so talented and so high-profile would earn top dollar. And you'd be right. Unfortunately, while she earns top dollar, she also spends top dollar. And, according to the article, she's pretty much broke.

A couple of sources weigh in on where the money went. "She wanted her life to be like a magazine spread," says one. "Everything beautiful, nothing out of place. She wanted everything to be perfect."

"She's a massive perfectionist," adds another, "and absolutely doesn't care about the impact on her own bottom line."



It's entirely her own fault. But it's still sad. And it makes her another (deserving) formerly-flush casualty of the economic crash of the late-noughties.

Sign Bin

So for some reason I was thinking this morning about the time the New Zealand Cavaliers came on tour to South Africa in 1986. It was, I believe, in one of the Test matches (which all ended in fistfights) that Springbok forward Uli Schmidt got sin-binned for some or other outrageous act of violence.

Instead of sitting on the sidelines in a plastic garden chair, seriously thinking about what he'd done, Schmidt spent his 10-minute penalty reaching into the crowd to sign autographs for eager fans.

You've got to love that.

Hard Rock

OK, so I don't usually take conspiracy theories all that seriously (although I maintain that Oswald did not act alone)... but here's a point in favour of the Fake Moon Landings crowd.

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has just determined that the moon rock given to the Dutch Prime Minister by the Apollo XI astronauts in 1969 is a total, shameless fake. That's no moon rock, baby – it's a lump of old wood!

Right To Left

It takes a while... but it's funny.

Natural

I went snooping around the New York magazine slideshow archives, and found this cool little collection: Super Models Without Make-up Or Retouching, taken from a feature for Harper's Bazaar. Of course, in their natural state Mses. Crawford, Valetta, Harlow and company look like total dogs.




Or maybe not.

Soul ≠ Soldier

Oh, happy day! I got my ticket to The Killers, live in my home town in... December.

That's three months I'm going to have to wait, which means three months of Killers on perpetual repeat.

Moments

Back in the mid-90s, when it was still a semi-respectable gentleman's magazine (and not the soon-to-be-shut-down slapper mag that it is today), Loaded magazine used to have a regular short feature called "Drop Me Bacon Sandwich!". The idea a of list Earth-shattering events: things that come as such a shock (the cancellation of the Grand National, Jarvis Cocker upstaging Michael Jackson at the Brit Awards, etc) that anybody who witnessed them would drop their proverbial bacon sandwich in stupified amazement.



Here in Internetland we don't eat bacon sandwiches. Instead, we spew out TLAs like LOL and WTF. And while nobody's compiled a definitive list of WTF moments, the good people at UGO have compiled a superb list of The Top 50 WTF Moments In Comics.



The list is amazing, and it's well worth the hour you'll spend trawling through all 50 entries. I especially liked the shoutout to Y: The Last Man. I've just finished reading the list.



And I loved it.



Hence all the comic-book pictures in this post.

(s)he?

Here's the final (yeah, right) word in the he/she Caster Semenya gender debate: Slate's latest Hang Up And Listen podcast reveals that

CASTER SEMENYA

is an anagram of

YES A SECRET MAN.

Rewind

A recommendation from Slate's Culture Gabfest sent me to the Shorpy Photo Archive, where they have an archive of thousands of high-res photos from the 1850s to 1950s. There's some amazing stuff there, and it's easy to get lost in the time warp.



The photos offer an incredible insight into what life – arb, everyday life – was like back then. The clothes, the tech, the transport... some of it seems to come from another world, let alone another time.



I love the little details in some of the photos too. Like the bicycle resting against the wall in this posed football shot. Guess the players didn't drive their own cars to practice back then...



I wonder, though, what my random Facebook pics will look like a century from now. Although I suppose they'll be lost on a broken server somewhere.

Mouse

Wired's Gadget Lab has a list up of Apple's Five Worst Products... and topping the list is the infamous hockey puck mouse. Eight years ago my old iMac had a mouse like that, and – as the story rightly claims – it was a complete nightmare to use. The wire was way too short, so I kept reaching across my desk whenever I wanted to move the mouse, and it was incredibly uncomfortable and unwieldy.

But it looked great.

Sins

Great little feature up at Wired. A team at Kansas State University has taken per-capita statistics for each of the 50 US states, and used them to create infographics showing how "sinful" each state is according to the Seven Deadly Sins.

One day, when I have the time and when it's not so obvious that I'm copying somebody else, I'd like to do something like this for South Africa.

Rolling

I had a flashback this morning to one of those moments where you fall hopelessly in love with a slice of art. (Yeah. It happens.)

It was the cloudy European summer of 1996, and I was standing on a windy, cobbled street in Leeuwarden in faraway Friesland (of all places!), waiting for... I can't remember what. And while I stood there, two stringy-haired Dutch students started playing – and then improving – a Stonesy/Dylanesque version of Like A Rolling Stone on acoustic guitars, while their sheet music blew down the street and into a canal.



It was, dare I say it, better than The Stones.

August

The Northern Hemisphere magazines are packed with Fall (Autumn) fashion features... which feels a bit weird to me, seeing as I'm busy proofreading our Summer Style Guide. New York magazine has a slideshow sample of The Best And Worst of August Fashion Magazines... and there's some very good Best, and some very bad Worst.

Life

It's been a while since I read Calvin & Hobbes. It's good to go back there.

Style

StyleCrave have a great feature up on the Worst Men's Fashion Ideas That Took Off. Anybody for a mesh shirt?

Chinglish

Tragic news from the BBC: "The authorities in the Chinese city of Shanghai are starting a campaign to try to spot and correct badly phrased English on signs in public places."

I'm outraged. I have long time made love for the strange phrasings of Engrish and its variant forms. Now the Chinese Secret Police want to shut me down.

Luckily for us all, one brave man is leading the backlash against the backlash against Chinglish.

Go check out his site.

Mighty?

I'm reading/reviewing a great new book by business boffin Jim Collins. He found that some of the companies he praised in Good To Great had gone from Great to Gone, and that some of the companies he praised in Built To Last hadn't lasted at all. Hence his new book: How The Mighty Fall.



Collins charts five stages of collapse for doomed companies. I started reading the book last night, and I'm already on Stage Three (Denial Of Risk And Peril), having already identified signs of Stage One (Hubris Born Of Success) and Stage Two (Undisciplined Pursuit Of More) in some of the companies I've worked for. As you can imagine, it makes for uneasy reading.

So far, it looks like my current employers aren't entirely doomed.

I hope.

Cynic

I wish I didn't find this so amusing.

(Sheesh. And they call it A Softer World?!?)

Five Days To Go

That's Indexed, summing up your Monday.

All The Small Things

I've been reading up on microscopy for a science article I'm writing, and I came across the amazing Eye of Science site.

Go to their Gallery page and be dazzled... or grossed out.

Tech Support

The Dark Art of IT... as explained by xkcd.

9/10

I've just watched a horrible, cammed copy of District 9, the Sarf Efrikan sci-fi movie everybody's talking about. I have four comments:

1. Cammed bootlegs are rubbish. I will be watching this movie on the big screen, and I fully intend to get my memory wiped, MIB-style, to erase my memory of the crusty picture quality and screen-obscuring silhouette of some Russian dude's head.

2. The movie is brilliant, and although – as Roger Ebert notes – the third act does become a bit run-of-the-mill, that's not a problem when you have such an impressive mill.

3. Some US reviewers are reading the movie as an allegory on Apartheid. That's fair enough (though a bit lazy). I read it more as an allegory on xenophobia... which made it pretty powerful stuff.

4. Afrikaans swearwords are very, very funny.

Cover

ESPN.com have a great gallery up of FMX riders, sans all the protective gear. As ESPN puts it: "With all the padding, neck braces and various armor needed to ride FMX, it's easy to forget what your favorite riders look like. Here's a reminder."



The pictures are loads of fun, and you really get a sense of the guys' personalities.



I remember us having the same problem at SI with cricket players, who wear face-obscuring helmets when they bat. It's not easy putting a guy on your cover when TV viewers don't know exactly what the guy looks like. (One solution, which it seems SI tried after I left, is to put Hitler on the cover. Can't say I agree with that strategy...)



SA Cricket have the same problem, which they compound by Photoshopping their cover shots into sweet oblivion.



But Sports Illustrated in the US have the same problem – and they use a lot of action photos (i.e. not shot in a studio) on their covers, so it's a huge problem when it comes to NFL stars.



F1 Racing also have to find a workaround, with drivers always wearing helmets when they're in action. Part of a sports magazine's job, then, is to make athletes recognisable enough that they can be used on a cover and help to sell the magazine.



Or not.

Sail

I'm planning my next epic holiday, and already I'm hoping the ferry I intent to catch from Italy to Greece goes sailing through the Corinth Canal.

I doubt it... but you never know. And I reckon 10 percent of the fun of going on holiday lies in the planning anyway.

Tough

SA Sports Illustrated have a wonderfully written story up by some guy (coughmecough) whose byline mysteriously didn't make the final cut. (As long as they write my name on the cheque, I ain't complainin'...)

The story was fun to write – and it was inspired in no small part by a superb gallery of photographs The Big Picture ran a few months ago on the Tough Guy Challenge.