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BBC Four will be running from Monday 10 September 2007 a three part series Comics Britannia, which will cover the history of the British comic book taking in everything from the Beano to the work of Alan Moore. [via]

This is pretty damn cool and clever technology. The image resizing results produced in the demo video are frankly quite amazing.

Labels: cool, YouTube

The BBC reports that North American cinemas are experiencing a record-breaking summer at the box office. Takings are expected to top the $4bn (£1.98bn) barrier for the first time.

Box office analysts Media By Numbers say the $4bn figure outclasses summer ticket sales of $3.95bn (£1.95bn) set in 2004.

Their estimates suggest that this summer's box office returns will stand at $4.15bn (£2.05bn) by the time the season officially ends on 3 September.

But they added that actual summer ticket sales are expected to be about 606m, only the sixth-best in modern times.

There's a similar picture at our cinema, we've experienced a better summer than the past few years and that's without any summer blockbusters as we tend towards the arthouse end of the market.

It seems that the death knell of the movie industry sounded by the MPAA in the US has been premature to say the least if in spite of rising numbers of people using BitTorrent to download movies that box office revenue is on the up too.

In fact MPAA research statistics would seem to indicate that it has not only been a good summer 2007 at the box office but that the figures for the year 2006 showed a rising trend across the board.

Labels: cinema, copyright

Nathan Myhrvold, former Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft, has posted a fascinating and gory photo essay of Lions he saw on a recent trip to Botswana.

The result is a very different view of Lions to that you get on typical wildlife tv shows.

Lions are not polite eaters—they grab as much as they can for themselves in a pretty direct competition with the other lions. Usually one of the pride males shows up and when he does the females give it him a very berth—he can attack or maim them at any moment. If they want to eat close to him they approach carefully and try to mollify him with some social greeting and flirting. Cubs are usually a bit more tolerated by the male, but even they risk pushing too far. Cubs are quite enthusiastic eaters and seem to love a carcrass. Some enterprising cubs actually crawl inside the carcass and eat it from the inside out, leaving them drenched in blood afterward.

An interesting companion piece to the Battle of Kruger video viewable of course on YouTube.

Labels: photography, YouTube

Money saving expert Martin Lewis has started a Number 10 Downing Street petition to call upon the Prime Minister to follow the Bank Charges Reclaiming Charter, which aims to end both the current suspension of reclaiming & the financial misery caused by unfair penalty charges.

Labels: politics

Me not discover new genre of fiction called Bizarro. It's nothing to do with the character from the Superman universe of the same name though. Although if we were still using the bizarre backward logic and manner of speaking as exhibited by the character Bizarro then it would mean that the two were linked - confusing! Anyway Bizarro sounds right up my alley so I think I'll be checking out The Bizarro Starter Kit as recommended by Bizarro Central.

Labels: books, comics

Australian farmer David George was forced to take drastic action after having stumbled into a crocodile infested swamp.

He survived for a week up a tree with only two meat sandwiches to sustain him. Sounds much like the myth of Mick 'Crocodile' Dundee that brought journalist Sue Charlton to Walkabout Creek to interview Mick in the movie Crocodile Dundee.

Labels: movies

New York Times profile of Donnie Andrews the real life inspiration for the character of Omar Little in The Wire, probably inspired the creation of Dennis 'Cutty' Wise too. [via]

Labels: The Wire, TV

It's a nice hot, sunny day today and I'm really not in the mood to work at the cinema. Instead I'd like to dig into a Vermonster whilst playing the Scrabulous Facebook app against my friends.

Labels: cool

Bruce Schneier has posted the final part of his five part interview with the TSA Administrator Kip Hawley.

Links to Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Labels: Security

Robert Graham of Errata Security has demonstrated at the Black Hat hacker conference in Las Vegas an exploit that allows attackers to login to users accounts without a password on webmail and social networking sites by stealing cookies.

Attackers would be able to real and post messages posing as the genuine user of the account, they would not however be able to make any major changes to any accounts they had hijacked as sites require users to enter a password for such activities.

Labels: Computer security