Moleskine notebooks

From the excellent BBC2 rambling sitcom The Great Outdoors, Bob (Mark Heap) puts the world to rights in this outburst:

Ooh look everybody, a red kite! Yeah, they've made a real comeback, like Moleskine notebooks. Except that red kites aren't bought by idiots with too much money.

n.b. I own a Moleskine notebook.

- The Great Outdoors, s.1 e.3, broadcast 28 January 2011

Kermode on The Dilemma

The BBC's Mark Kermode reviews Ron Howard's The Dilemma, which I saw in a pre-release audience appraisal preview back in October. Unsurprisingly, he likes it even less than I did, saying that it's '...not so much filtered by as infested by Vince Vaughn'.

Morbid Curiosity Leading Many Voters To Support Palin

'Having Palin in office would be like a four-year-long white water rafting trip - it might kill us, but if it doesn't we'll end up with a lot of crazy-ass photos' - Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)


Morbid Curiosity Leading Many Voters To Support Palin

Fearne Cotton's death challenge

As imagined by Channel 4's The Morgana Show (Morgana Robinson): 'Skillz!' Embedding disabled, so you'll have to make do with a link.

Death Challenge

Butterfly chair

Folds up into a briefcase lickety split, for all your on-the-go seating needs. I want one!

Magic chair

A metaphor for commuting

A flock of sheep mill around Wellington station in a 2009 TV ad for UK train fare website Thetrainline.com, featuring a voiceover by comedian Rob Brydon.

How to drink cognac

Charles de Talleyrand-Périgord was an enduring French diplomat of the 18th and 19th centuries who once reprimanded an English visitor for gulping down a glass of cognac. "The first thing you should do," explained Talleyrand, "is take your glass in the palms of your hands and warm it. Then shake it gently, with a circular movement, so that the liquid's perfume is released. Then, raise the glass to the nose and breathe deeply." "And then, my lord?" his visitor asked. "And then, sir," continued Talleyrand, "you replace the glass on the table and talk about it." But, the visitor didn't reply, how will that get me drunk?

- Stuart Jeffries, Guardian, 3 January 2011

The least plausible science fiction movie of all time

Nasa scientists have named John Cusack's blockbuster 2012 as the most "absurd" sci-fi film of all time.

Experts at America's National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) and Science and Entertainment Exchange have put together a list of the least plausible science fiction movies ever made, and the big budget 2009 picture came top.

The film, which depicted Earth besieged by natural disasters, featured ahead of two more 'end-of-the-world' movies - 2003's The Core and 1998's Armageddon.

Donald Yeomans, head of Nasa's Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous mission, says of 2012, "It's absurd. The film-makers took advantage of public worries about the so-called end of the world as apparently predicted by the Mayans of Central America, whose calendar ends on December 21, 2012.

"The agency is getting so many questions from people terrified that the world is going to end in 2012 that we have had to put up a special website to challenge the myths. We have never had to do this before."

Staff at the organisation also compiled a list of the top 10 most realistic sci-fi films, with 1997's Gattaca, starring Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman as space agency workers, winning the highest praise from the scientists. Nasa experts also named dinosaur movie Jurassic Park and Jodie Foster's Contact among the most realistic sci-fi films.

- Imdb.com, 3 January 2011