Kill Bill is just gonna be a big huge sprawling mess. Hopefully in a good way. Over three hours! Tarantino goes wild! Man, the guy doesn’t have any self-restraint as it is. But I’m gonna see it. I’m even looking forward to it. His lack of self-restraint has led to some amazing things, so what the hell? I’ll think of it as his big unrestrained double album rock opera and see how it sounds.
That’s interesting. The pricing on CafePress books just dropped to 4.5 cents a page for wire-o and saddle stitch and 3 cents a page for perfect bound. The base price for wire-o stayed at five bucks, saddle stich base pricing dropped to four bucks, and perfect bound went up to seven bucks. So the hypothetical 32 page comic book now costs, um, $5.44. The 250 page paperback costs $14.50. Now we’re talking.
hypocorisma (original) is a weblog dedicated to naming. Just naming. Not names for gaming, not choosing names for your kid — those are aspects of naming, and S. V. Affolee is into the process of naming itself. There’s a domain expert for everything out there. Via Perverse Access Memory (original).
Sixteen words: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Eight words: “I did not have sex with that woman.”
Hint to Roger Clemens: nobody likes you much. Poor guy. He has a milestone season, gets his 300th win, strikes out his 4,000th man, and yet nobody wants him to get that final All-Star appearance in the final season of his career. The public didn’t vote for him, the players didn’t vote for him, the manager didn’t select him, and now Commissioner Selig doesn’t want anyone to make an exception for him. Possibly all that stuff about not showing up for the Hall of Fame induction backfired, huh?
The AltaVista saga continues: Yahoo’s buying Overture. The purchase price is 1.63 billion, which is pretty damned impressive. You gotta figure the AV and Fast purchases made the deal much more attractive to Yahoo, considering that those portions of Overture will allow Yahoo to replace Google as their search provider. Congratulations go to my compadres at AltaVista.
Sports Illustrated recently launched a new fantasy baseball game. It complements their existing fantasy baseball game, I suppose. It’s called Baseball Challenge: Salary Cap Challenge. Yep. It’s a fantasy baseball game that sells itself with the salary cap. As a Celtics fan laboring under the emotional weight of the Vin Baker trade, I find this painfully depressing. It doesn’t look like it’s really that different than any other fantasy baseball game — salary caps are nothing new in that world — but did they have to sell it as the “Cripple Your Team For Years With One Stupid Guaranteed Contract Challenge”? (Rephrasing mine.)
Supporters of the Texas redistricting effort were eager to claim that the Texas Democrats were acting illegally. Proof? Well, the Texas House rules allowed the Texas Department of Safety to hunt missing legislators down, and that must mean that the legislators were breaking the law. The difference between police acting as a favor to the legislature and police acting to enforce actual laws was apparently beyond some. Not, however, beyond a Texas judge. Judge Charles Campbell pointed out that Texas law “limits the role of D.P.S. to enforcing the laws protecting the public safety and providing for the prevention and detection of crime.” ...
WISH 55 (original) asks about names: How do you choose character names? What makes a good or bad name for a character? What are three examples of really good (or really bad) character names, and why are they so good or bad? I just kick names around until they feel right. I tend to use baby name books and sources often, thanks to Gretchen’s pernicious influence. I have an archived copy of the Onomastikon which has been very useful for culturally appropriate names. I don’t think my names are ever particularly stellar, but they work. ...
I’m overwhelmed. The Library of Congress put its Prints & Photographs Catalog online. Look, it’s turn of the century Boston!