You must only use your powers for good

'Bruce Lee' uses his super nunchuck skills at the table tennis table to smite his opponents with mighty ping pong prowess... (yes, it's an ad, but it's still neat).

A quiet swim at the baths

Public bathing was a central feature of ancient Roman society, but as this passage from Seneca the Younger's 'Letters to Lucilius' points out, the bathhouses could be hard to relax in:

The hubbub makes you sorry that you are not deaf. I hear the beefcake boys wheezing and panting as they lift their lead weights, and the masseur's hands slapping their shoulders. Then, the ball players arrive and start yelling out the score - that's usually all I can take. But there's also those people who plunge themselves into the water with an almighty splash, and that only gives a mild idea of what goes on. At least these people have normal voices. Apart from them there is the depilator who screeches for customers and never shuts up until he's stripping the hair from someone's armpits and making them yell even louder than he does. Then there's the drinks pedlar, and the sausage salesman, and all the other hucksters, each bawling in his own special way.

- Seneca the Younger (c.4 BC - AD 65), quoted in Philip Matyszak, 'Ancient Rome on Five Denarii a Day', London, 2007

Hooky

Former Joy Division and New Order bassist Peter ‘Hooky’ Hook, on the best advice anyone’s ever given him:

The best bit of advice anyone’s ever given me was ‘shut the f—k up’. This was back in about 1990 when I was on a panel at some new music conference in New York. I was f—king off my trolley, spouting off at the mouth about bootlegs or something else I knew nothing about and Barry White leaned into the mic and went (adopts an earth-rumblingly low voice) ‘OK, shut the f—k up!’ I thought to myself, ‘Wow, I’ve just been told to shut the f—k up by Barry White. Class.’

That was quite an eventful conference actually, because Ice-T and Ice Cube were there and it was all kicking off between their respective posses. They were running around with guns and all that, it was f—king wild. Ice Cube was actually supposed to be on our panel but he stormed off and some journalist put his hand up in the audience and said, ‘Excuse me, is Ice Cube coming back?’ Again, I was off me trolley and quick as a shot I said, ‘No mate, he’s f—king melted!’ It went down like a lead balloon…

The interview also mentions his fondness for practical jokes. If you listen to the original 12-inch version of ‘Temptation’ you can hear Bernard Sumner shouting at 0:50 when Hook and Stephen Morris shoved a snowball down his shirt during the recording.

- NME, 29 November 2008

The Popdose Top 100

Popdose has compiled a list of their favourite century of singles from the past 50 years of popular music, and it's chock full of goodness. But I'm with the dude in the comments: is The Mayor Of Simpleton really the best XTC single they could think of? Not Generals And Majors? Or Senses Working Overtime? Still, brilliant stuff.

- Source: Popdose.com

But did she have a nice hairdo?

Melanie Reid REALLY doesn't like the idea of Nicole Kidman starring opposite Hugh Jackman in Australia:

Australia the movie [...] has one huge problem. It stars Nicole Kidman. Big mistake. Big, big mistake. At a stroke, the world's female cinemagoers will say as one: “I'm not going to see it if she's in it.”

Kidman is one of those women who turns other women off. And no, not just because she's pretty and we're jealous. It is because we perceive, and men don't, that she's one of the most overrated actors in the world, a woman who has been the kiss of death in practically every movie she has starred in.

Kidman is exquisitely accomplished at being awful. Did anyone see Cold Mountain? The sweeping American epic (note: another epic) foundered on the rocks of her gormless mirror-gaze. She can't act. Instead, she drifts around films like a lost porcelain doll, looking frozen, brittle and vapid, staring at the camera with her oh-golly-look-how-I'm-looking-interesting blue eyes.

And today's (predominantly male) directors haven't quite woken up to the fact that it just isn't enough for female actors just to wander around like supermodels: they need another skill too. Like emotion.

- The Times, 20 November 2008

He'll give you the answer that you'll endorse

From a report on Czech President Vaclav Klaus, who is soon to take up the rotating presidency of the European Union:

Bohumil Dolezal, a leading commentator who once advised Mr. Klaus, said Mr. Klaus’s greatest talent was his ability to appeal to average Czechs, who imbibed his easy populism along with their beers.

“Czechs have a deep and hysterical past full of injustice, and Klaus is a master at tapping into this,” Mr. Dolezal said, adding that the office of the presidency, despite its limited powers, lends the aura of emperor-king.

“Even if a horse was president of the Czech Republic, it would have a 50 percent approval rating,” he said. “And Klaus is surely much cleverer than a horse.”

- New York Times, 24 November 2008

Giles

Libby Purves on the institution of British cartooning that was (Carl) Giles of the Daily Express:

He distrusted Churchill, who in return disliked his work even when he was a powerful morale-booster during the Blitz. Perhaps his humane cynicism about high-flown rhetoric stung the war leader: Giles was in the Home Guard and saw domestic destruction close-up, and in drawing his unheroic soldiers followed the tradition of Bruce Bairnsfather in the first war, observing that squaddie humour still worked: “mud, cussing, lorries that won't go, shells that fall too near and boots that pinch too tight...” Who can forget the soldier looking up at an approaching missile and observing: “Oh look, here comes your Easter Egg.” Or the GI bride taken home with a baby, but horrified to find that her Wally lives not in a skyscraper but a hillbilly shack?

In 1944 he was a correspondent at Arnhem; he drew pictures of cells and gallows at Breendonck transit camp, and went into Belsen with the liberators. But here he flatly refused to draw, saying that photographs alone must tell the story that 50 years later was still to “haunt and horrify” him. Yet out of this grew the warmth and gaiety of Giles's postwar work. His Britons - stumpy, impudent, longsuffering, domestic, anti-authoritarian - cluster in the Giles Family, at whose head stands the baleful circular black figure of Grandma, a mouthpiece for every bracingly incorrect view: a fan of Lenin, hanger and flogger, hedonistic gambler and drinker, keen on violence. She smells of embrocation and mothballs yet is beadily on the ball.

She links the postwar tribe with its history: her mother “helped wash up at a Fete attended by Queen Victoria”. On a Christmas album we find her playing poker with an equally grumpy Santa in her nightie, while his presents go undelivered.

I was bewitched by the mysterious yet delightfully droll ramblings of Giles when I was growing up in the 70s and happened upon my grandparents' collections of the omnibus editions. Aside from Grandma Giles, who seemed rather terrifying, I liked his attention to detail in his backgrounds, where waggish short-trousered lads, babies in silly hats, rangy scavenging dogs and wary, one-eye-open cats capered and undermined any lingering pretence of seriousness.

There's an exhibit of Giles' work on at the Cartoon Museum in London until 15 February 2009.

- Source: The Times, 24 November 2008

Enjoy your first day at work! Here, have some urine

Repairs are underway on the International Space Station, where astronauts are hurrying to patch up the station's expensive water treatment system, which has been playing up recently:

Astronauts hope they have a solution for getting a pivotal piece of equipment working so it can convert urine and sweat into drinkable water and allow the international space station to grow to six crew members.

Flight controllers asked station commander Michael Fincke on Sunday to change how a centrifuge is mounted in the $154 million water recycling system. The centrifuge is on mounts and Mission Control asked Fincke to remove them.

"Fantastic! That is something we can do," Fincke told Mission Control.

The astronauts have been working for the past three days to get the system running so that it can generate samples for testing back on Earth, but the urine processor only operates for two hours at a time before shutting down.

You don't find many workplaces in which the employees are queuing up to get to work so they can drink urine and sweat, do you?  (Although to be fair the water apparently tastes perfectly normal when the system works properly).

- Associated Press, 23 November 2008

'I met her brains out'

Transcript of a live BBC Radio 1 interview on the Chris Moyles show, 21 October 2008, following up the ridiculously overblown ‘Sachsgate’ controversy, the resignation of Russell Brand from the BBC, and the suspension without pay of Jonathan Ross:

Russell Brand (RB):
… and could I take this opportunity to apologise to British institution and Manuel actor from Fawlty Towers, Andrew Sachs, whose answerphone message I besmirched … or more importantly, Jonathan Ross who I know was problematic when he came on your show Chris … He was … I phoned up Andrew Sachs to apologise for a matter live on radio and Jonathan Ross blurted out an expletive regarding Andrew Sachs’s grand-daughter who I’d in inverted commas recently “met”.

RB:
I met her brains out.

Chris Moyles (CM):
Wow ..

RB:
Right

CM:
What a … wow.

Male:
And she’s in the hot tub?

RB:
There was a hot tub incident, but remember, that hot tub in a way is like Lourdes – people come there to be cleansed … and play cricket.

- BBC Editorial Standards Committee findings (PDF, 19 pages), November 2008

The future of religion

An extract from 'The Sleeper Awakes', the 1899 science fiction novel by H.G. Wells, in which Mr Graham, a citizen of Victorian England, falls into a coma that lasts 203 years and emerges from his slumber into a vastly altered London of the future. Here Wells enjoys himself with some social satire as Graham discovers there's been some changes in the world of religion since his own time:

...his attention was arrested by the facade of one of the Christian sects. They were travelling seated on one of the swift upper ways, the place leapt upon them at a bend and advanced rapidly towards them. It was covered with inscriptions from top to base, in vivid white and blue, save where a coarse and glaring kinematograph transparency presented a realistic New Testament scene[...] Graham had already become familiar with the phonotype writing and these inscriptions arrested him, being to his sense for the most part almost incredible blasphemy. Among the less offensive were 'Salvation on the First Floor and turn to the Right', 'Put your Money on your Maker', 'The Sharpest Conversion in London, Expert Operators! Look Slippy!', What Christ would say to the Sleeper - Join the Up-to-date Saints!', 'Be a Christian - without hindrance to your present Occupation', 'All the Brightest Bishops on the Bench tonight and Prices as Usual', 'Brisk Blessings for Busy Businessmen'.

- H.G. Wells, The Sleeper Awakes, 1899 (revised edition 1910)