Lavonardo

Seems that the newest installment of the McClane vs. the world saga gets a Really Stupid Name [tm] in Finland.

Whoever cooked the idea of calling this baby Die Hard 4.0 is due an extra clue. Or two. They’re pretty small, and easy to swallow.

Randomly selected surfing destinations for the selective traveller.

• An amazing collection of geographically alternate earths. A lot of science, very little fiction, pretty maps. Worth a peep.
• If nothing else, Joel Kotkin launches half a dozen new words in his article on superstar cities.
• A nice selection of textbook disclaimers (yes, this is an anti-intelligent design page).
• Kickassclassical, for those awkward moments when you cannot recognize a piece if classical music featured in media (odds are 2.21 to 1 that it’s Carmina Burana anyway).
• JPG magazine, looks like best-of-flickr on paper. Which is not a bad thing at all.
• Angry Alien produly presents: 30 second editions of popular movies, as acted by animated bunnies. The hotel room wrestling scene of Borat is deeply disturbing even in this format,
• Boo hoo, bad microsoft, allegedly turning e-mail back five years by replacing the HTML-renderer in Outlook. Here’s a clue: no HTML in e-mail. Have two, actually, they’re pretty small.

MPAA obviously does not practice what they preach.

Or maybe they can justify their fullscale ripoff of the ForestBlog used of their page. With any evidence of it carefully edited off.

Of course, MPAA not having played nice with anybody lately, their virtual get out of jail-card expired ages ago.

[ via srpnt. ]

So, among the last acts of the finnish parliament was the law that bottles containing more than 2.8 percent alcohol must bear warning labels.

Quite what this is expected to accomplish is not exactly clear. Labels are not going to stop anybody from having yet another sip, that’s for sure. Collateral damage consists of the fact that the smaller importers will be struck by the legislation much worse than the monopolistic Altia.

Temperance-crazed hypocritic bastards, the 104 of them voting “yea”.

The annual parade of the 101 Dumbest Moments in Business is out.

Unfortunately parcelled out at a rate of one per page. But that decision isn’t nearly dumb enough to land cnn on the list.

Note to self: while visiting a city council session, remove the baseball cap when so instructed.

The consequence of disobedience can be quite severe.

Unless, of course, you belong to the class of sartorial fundamentalists that suffers no headgear indoors.

Cheap records are a good idea. Too bad the implementation of the campaign’s website is screwed up.

The artists are lumped together in lengthy pull-down lists, and the amount of genres is laughable - rock&pop contains pretty much everything, apart from metal.

But that’s by no means the chief offense. Which is the fact that there’s no attempt to show which of the participating stores might have an album available. That’s just inexcusably lazy - having two lists without even attempting to connect them in any sensible ways has nothing but a teasing effect on prospective customers. Especially when the prices are not shown at all - there’s no indication whether this campaign comes even close to beating the likes of Anttila in their own game.

What a waste.

[ via schizoblog. ]

Comrade-envy can strike whenever it’s least expected. But with a low cost you can now have many many new bodacious friends at a cost on myspace.

Me, I don’t even have a MySpace page…

(And this does look like a joke that got out of hand - too good to pass up.)

Today’s movie on television is Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, which I quite enjoyed back in the earliest days of this very blog. More than the original entry reflects, it’s definitely a four star movie on later thought.

But that movie isn’t the topic of this entry, it’s the attached slice of Calvin & Hobbes from today’s “100″-newspaper.

In which the translator failed to translate the word “hornet”, and used the english word as-is. When there’s a common and good finnish word for the insect (”herhiläinen”), such gross ignorance ought to be punishable.

The longest night of the year will be easier with the following:

• An interview with Michael Gentry, author of one of the greatest recent IF games, Anchorhead (a special edition of the game is now in the works, with a demo already out).
• Inside dirt on the effects of the second Pirates of the Caribbean.
• Top Ten of dangerous toys (no, not the band - but actually lethal devices for kids).
• Universal Text Imitator. For the times when lengthy non-sensical, but syntactically correct phrases are called for.
• The worst loser award of 2006 goes to Michael Crichton.
• A collection of heroically geeky animals.

A recent announcement by an irish company called Steorn has raised lots of eyebrows. They claim that they have accomplished nothing less than the invention of an eternal source of energy. In their own words:

We have developed a technology that produces free, clean and constant energy. This means never having to recharge your phone, never having to refuel your car. A world with an infinite supply of clean energy for all.

Quite a bold statement, right?

To back up their invention, they have now issued a challenge to the science community at large to pick their proposed microgenerator-based idea apart. In public. The challenge was issued in this week’s economist, and it has brought in the crowds - both of scientists and lookenpeepers in general. Ought to be entertaining.

On the other hand, the finnish company claiming to have invented an universal compression algorithm has been met with appropriate disbelief. The whole exercise smells like a guerrilla marketing stunt that got out of hand.

[ Steorn-link via kasa. ]

Yes, as BBC reports, singing along to a Clash song is now a punishable offense.

It’s such a fine line between sensible precaution and abandoning rational thought…