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What would classic novels be called if they were written for today’s market?

Then: The Gospel of Matthew
Now:  40 Days and a
Mule: How One Man Quit His Job and Became the Boss

I’ve just finished Dante’s Descent into Dummy Loan Felonies —With a Detour for Minimum
Security Prison— and Amazing Redemption as an Ethical Financial
Advisor in preparation for the video game version. I don’t remember the poet being so badass.

(via Boing Boing)

Image by Damien Ryan via Flickr

It’s safe to say that Tomorrow’s World was responsible for the careers of most of this generation’s scientists in the UK and Ireland.

The show was oftentimes ridiculed for being out of touch and it was joked that having your product featured there meant it would never be seen outside of a research lab, but that half-hour on Thursday evenings gave a love of science to myself and many others over the years and is sorely missed.

While rumors of its return turned out to be nothing more than a cynical branding exercise, the BBC has finally released some old episodes from its archives.  Unfortunately, the SDI simulation that I mistook for reality isn’t one of them.

The Men Who Stare at Goats, based on Jon Ronson’s account of one of the US military’s strangest black ops project, looks to be much funnier and absurd than the source material would suggest.

Based on research into the First Earth Battalion (and various other projects involving belief in magical thinking) the book is a trip down the rabbit hole of the American military-industrial complex at its weirdest.

The cast alone makes it worth checking out.

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Based on his short film, Alive in Jo’burg, Neil Blomkamp has come up with an intelligent science-fiction action movie in District 9.  Shot mostly in a mock-documentary style the movie chronicles an alternate Johannesburg twenty years after an alien ship arrived.

In a plot heavily influenced by Apartheid era South Africa, the aliens are forced into the eponymous District to keep them separate from the native Jo’bergers but this does nothing to quell unrest.  We follow newly-promoted bureaucrat Wikus Van De Merwe (in an amazing breakthrough performance by Sharlito Copely who improvised most of his dialogue) as he leads a team to move the Prawn to a new camp, two-hundred miles away from any human settlement.

Despite the science fiction plot and more obviously fantastical elements, there is a gritty realism that pervades the whole movie, especially in the more mockumentary parts.  The effects are flawless and fit into the dystopian background of the shanty town that has built up in the aliens’ ghetto and the aliens themselves are a far cry from the plastic and latex creations of Alien Nation.  Many difficult questions are asked and few answers are given – like most good science fiction the movie is more than just an excuse for spotty teenagers to see some explosions, but serves to make us think about xenophobia, racism, and how we treat each other as a society.

One of the best films of the decade.

Image via Wikipedia

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was a wonderful interpretation of the most complex and emotional book of the series. While it suffers a little from Empire Strikes Back syndrome, there’s enough there to let it stand on its own without feeling like the middle child.

Wonderfully natural performances, as can only be expected from a group of actors who have grown up together making these movies and a sense of wistfulness as they come close to the end of this part of their careers. Michael Gambon, as always, played Dumbledore so well that it’s a struggle to see how the late Richard Harris could have done the same.

While the fans are up in arms about missing scenes and changes made, the emotional impact of the ending would have been lessened too much if the book was followed too faithfully. With David Yeats set to direct the next two, the series can only end on a high note.

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The QI Elves on Twitter opened a can of worms when they mentioned that the Irish language has no words for “Yes” or “No”. Dozens of tweets later saying that there are “Tá” and “Níl” or “‘Sea” and “Ní hea”, the Elves threw their hands up in the air and decided to leave the Irish alone.

While, strictly speaking, it is true that there are no words for “Yes” and “No”, in the Irish language to answer in the affirmative or negative, one repeats the verb of the asked question. For example, if one asks “Are you going to the cinema?” (An bhfuil tú ag dul go dtí an picturlann?) the answer is either “I am” (Tá mé) or “I am not” (Níl má).

This happens even when Irish people speak in English, and is part of the charm of Hiberno-English that everyone seems to love.

Image by Damien Ryan via Flickr

While browsing Recommended Titles on Amazon UK, I came across this. Does Amazon’s recommendation engine know something we don’t?

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The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible X
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell X

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman X
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens X

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien X

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams X

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll X

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis X

34 Emma – Jane Austen

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis X

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell X

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown X

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52 Dune – Frank Herbert X

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley X

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon X

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold X

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens X

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson X

75 Ulysses – James Joyce

76 The Inferno – Dante X
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal – Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession – AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens X

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker X

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White X

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom X

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan X

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton X

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas X

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Ronald Dahl X

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

(via My Own Little Region of Space)

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With the spate of celebrity Twitter stories in the media at the moment there’s always been some debate as to whether these accounts are real, fake, or just an intern working at a publicist’s office. When Shaquille O’Neal tweeted that he was eating at a Phoenix diner, Jesse Bearden and a friend decided to see if it really was Shaq.

Returning to our hushed whispers I asked Sean, “Should we go talk to him now?”
“I don’t know, should we?”

“Yes, you should” a very deep voice entered our conversation from 2 booths over.

My own twitter account is here, though I can’t promise to be in any diners.