links for 2008-07-28

From the Arts Council mailing list.
Do you look like Michel Gondry? Do you know someone who is often mistaken for him? For more info contact 020 7849 4493 or send pictures to gallery@bfi.org.uk

Make Friends With Celebrities
"The more you know about the star you want to meet, the better your chances of anticipating where they are likely to be. If your heart's desire is to meet Angelina Jolie, start hanging around African refugee camps. Eventually she will show up, and when she does, the two of you can commiserate about the world's inequities and what a loser Jennifer Aniston is."

Views of Jupiter
My God, it's full of stuff

The end of the pier show
Michael White on the destruction of the pier at Weston-super-Mare which I watched in real time this morning on Sky News. Just horrible, though it looks like the actual bases is still intact so hopefully it can be rebuilt.

NZ judge orders 'odd' name change
I once shared a student hall with a girl called Clare Hamburger. Which was sort of the father's fault.

On Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen
For Darren: "I guess the Reagan era was that scary. I was a kid at the time — I’d have been thirteen when Dark Knight Returns was published — and I remember feeling at times that the world could end any day. It probably didn’t help that my father reviewed books for a military publisher, and sometimes he would leave books around, and I’d be curious and I’d read them. I really did expect nuclear war when I was ten or twelve, and a book like Watchmen (which, to be fair, I didn’t read until my twenties, a good decade after its publication) tapped into that social fear."

Wine In A Tube
That's just about enough to get me drunk.

Magical library may vanish
"The Harry Price Library of Magical Literature, based at the University of London, is the UK's largest of its kind and contains letters between Price and the legendary illusionist Houdini. It also has detailed correspondence between Price and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a believer in the paranormal. Titles such as The Hammer of Witches, a 1486 treatise on witchcraft, are among its 13,000 items, which include pamphlets and hand-pressed books as well as photographs."

Say So Long to an Old Companion: Cassette Tapes
"Cassette tapes’ tendency to hiss — and to melt in the summer and snap in the winter — turns off audiophiles. But for audio books, the cassette is an oddly elegant medium: you can eject it from your car, carry it home and stick it in a boombox, and it will pick up in the same place, an analog feat beyond the ability of the CD."

100 Tube staff strike over staff assault
This does seem to be a mixed message. We won't tolerate assault on our staff but we'll sack them if they defend themselves.

Review from the stalls of David Tennant's Hamlet
"His facial muscles are constantly exercised - at one point he crosses his eyes to great comic effect. All of Hamlet's characteristics are beautifully portrayed. His loneliness and sense of loss, his feelings of betrayal, his defensiveness when he thinks Ophelia has rejected him, his insight into the machinations of the court. To the brilliantly contrived sword fight and death scene, it really was hard to take your eyes off this remarkable actor."

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