We can’t dance to save our lives, but it doesn’t matter, it will save the woooorld!
All rise for Matt. If you want quality dancing, look elsewhere.
http://www.wherethehellismatt.com/ – yes, he’s still going!
So, I have both, and I know which I prefer. But to settle an online debate, I thought I would bring in the rest of the internets to find out what the masses think. I am not including the Wii here because (as normal people all know) it is a child’s toy and is not a valid gaming console. Let the internets explode!
Friend of the dogblog Sara Howard has published her second book, “Something Funy Happened On The Way To The Moon”, available now, so we thought we’d give it a shoutout.
We interviewed Sara last year about her work on the Apollo Space Program. Apollo was the greatest achievement in the history of mankind and planet Earth and its remarkable story is dramatically told by Sara, one of two women to have worked on the Saturn V as an aerospace engineer. This uplifting story documents the race to space that first sent Americans to the moon in 1969 from the viewpoint of those people actually building the dream.
So, this week’s comic is now up online, this week penned by Mart in a nostalgic mood.
Sit back and relive the halcyon days with this week’s strip right here.
So I see this comms drop-box on my way to work every day, and every day I see what is the most captivating piece of street art I have ever come across.
I wanted to take a shot of it for posterity. It’s not high art, it doesn’t have a cutting Banksy-esque message to shout out, but neither is it a mindless shitty graffito. It isn’t a wall-spanning work of spray-can mastery. What makes it so fascinating – and what makes it stick in my mind so much – is that this is the only example of it I am aware of, it has no name or tag anywhere, and seems almost meaningless. No obvious message, no obvious creator, it just is.
It’s a wonderfully and beautifully simple and evocative little piece, a perfect example of “less is more”. Why the poignantly melancholy expression? What does it mean? Who does it respresent, what is the message? Why did the artist go to the trouble of putting it on a box in the middle of humdrum suburbia? Why is it on this little box and not the big fuck-off Cable cabinet next to it (out of shot)? It bugs me that the message and meaining are so well hidden.
Think about it – if you were going to go to all the trouble of getting a piece of card, drawing this face onto it, cutting out the holes to make a spray mask and then painting it onto something you would most likely make the message or the meaning a little obvious, do it somewhere prominent, be making it of someone recogniseable, or stick your name or tag on it somewhere. But this is so seemingly inert, so random and unique and so out of the way…it bugs me. Bugs the arse off me. It’s sits in the back of my mind like a mental hangnail.
It means something, and I want to know what. It’s like an earworm of the visual cortex. If you recognise it (full size image here), or have seen it somewhere else in or around Manchester (or anywhere else) or know anything about it, I would like to know. I’m just interested. I certainly hope that whatever the Royal Mail have in this cabinet, they decide to leave the art where it is and don’t paint over it. It the simplest yet most striking piece of street art I have seen in a long time.
The dogblog has been informed by a number of readers that currently any attempt to enter the address of the Wikileaks video released yesterday (that showed leaked classified U.S. Military footage of an attack on Iraqi civilians) into Facebook is being blocked, it would seem.
Entering a URL into a status update on Facebook usually renders a link, but in the case of www.collateralmurder.org this is not the case. Many of our readers have expressed concern that given the nature of the material at that web address it would seem apparent that an attempt to censor or restrict the user’s right to disseminate the address is being carried out by Facebook.
It would be very unfortunate for Facebook – whose profile page carries the motto “Giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected” – if this turned out to be anything other than unintentional filtering or scripting glitch. We asked Facebook about this apparent restriction of free speech, and they quickly responded, advising:
“To protect our users, we have automated systems in place that block the dissemination of links to known malicious websites, including phishing and malware sites. On rare occasions, these systems wrongly identify a legitimate link as malicious. We have reinstated this one and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”
It should be noted that the URL www.collateralmurder.com was not restricted and that the .org address is posting into notes.
(Update: oops, I forgot to link to the source of that image, my bad: click here )
Wikileaks has just released video it has obtained showing the killing of fifteen unarmed civilians without provocation by two U.S. Apache helicopters in Iraq in 2007. Wikileaks further claims this exposes a military cover-up that painted the incident as a battle with armed insurgents in which civilians were killed.
The film was taken by the crew of an Apache helicopter on July 12, 2007 over New Baghdad. Two Reuters News Agency employees, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen, were out in the area, and as the film starts you can see Eldeen carrying his camera. Both were amongst the fifteen or so civilians killed, and, it seems, were the unwitting cause of the attack. More info and the film after the jump. Facebook readers, click here to see the article and the video.
Want to win free dogsounds schwag? Now you can!Hidden in this weeks Avoid Spikes comic is a massively ridiculously hyper-obscure Doctor Who reference – if you can find it and are the first to add a comment to the strip saying what it is and where it comes from, you’ll win yourself the pick of the dogsounds store!
Here’s the basic rules:
And that’s it! Closing date will be 1/5/2010, and if no one gets it we may decided to pick a winner based on most amusing comment instead. Good luck!
So, despite millions of small children and fambly descending for a lovely bank holiday visit, we still have a comic up on time! And, of course, nothing but NOTHING interrupted the first episode of the new season of Doctor Who.
All I can say is: titles and theme tune shit, everything else fucking awesome. Matt Smith is so good that I forget that he has a head the size of most normal people’s entire body. He presents a nice, eclectic mix of a number of doctors, most notably Two, Four, Nine and Ten. And young Tottie McFitPiece as Amy Pond (come on, admit it, you can’t remember her name either, and companions are only there for the teenage and maybe slightly older than teenage attention spans) played a blinder as a companion with the brass to stand up to the Doctor when needed.
It looked great – a side bonus of filming in HD is that SD looks much better – and Murray Gold’s music was spot on as always. Well, apart from the gag-reflex inducing theme, which is just shameful (it’s actually worse than the music they put on the Doctor Who Confidential programmes).
So anyway, enough bollocks, as I appear to be enacting the comic strip in real life now. Best you stop reading this and check out this week’s wibbly wobbly, timey-wimey strip right here.
So, bit of a hiatus last weekend due to being completely knackered and devoid of any ideas.
Do seem to be going through a bit of a dry creative patch at the moment. It’s not like I am distracted by anything, I think it is just tiredness. So in that vein, this week I had to fall back on simple wordplay.
Totally misinterpret this week’s strip right here!
Men are such simple creatures. We don’t expect a lot of life, and anything much more than that tends to confuse and terrify us.
So it is that we have certain self-defence mechanisms built in to protect us from situations that would tend to cripple our already limited decision-making process. The fear of chintz is a natural, instinctive male response.
Find out how Mart’s man-instincts – his manstincts - helped save him when things got beyond his control in this week’s dazed and confused strip, right here.
So, this week’s strip was half-drawn when the computer crashed and corrupted the whole file. Then my tablet decides to give up the ghost and I have to waste more time getting a new one.
What a clusterfuck.
Anyway, upshot is that now there is too little time to draw a full strip to replace it (I refuse to draw the same strip again, that’s too mind-numbing).
So tune in, calibrate yourself and check your vertical hold with the hastily-concocted replacement right here.
So, another week flies by, filled with coughs, colds, more coughs, coughs and maybe a cough or two. Oh, and a really serious cough.
As you may intone from that, I have been sick as a dog all week. But, gentle reader, not so sick that I have to miss my rendezvous with your optic nerve!
This rounds out the Henry strip arc for the moment, unless I can think of some way to bring him in occasionally.
Curl up under the duvet with this week’s strip right here!
Yes, it’s here, the first glimpse of anything significant at all from Halo: Reach. And it leaves us moist with anticipation.
Facebook readers click here for the video.
So, another week comes and goes and another strip goes up.
You know, sometimes I look at the almost child-like personality of Foxx and think, from time to time, that to actually live life through those eyes – with an eternal and perpetual sense of wonderment at everything – would be awesome. But, sadly, we don’t have the option. Ah well, never mind. On with the grind, I guess.
This week, Mart is busy doing SCIENCE! in his super-secret secret lab and has discovered a way that may just allow him to give Foxx more intelligence – maybe even as much as half a wit. Maybe.
Thoroughly analyse this week’s crenellated and slightly squidgy strip here.
So, I thought I would start a new section where each Friday I dig out films from the intertubes around a central theme, silly or serious. This will no doubt carry on until I forget to do one.
This week’s theme is dinosaurs. Yay!
Films after the jump, facebook readers click here to see the videos.
Let me know what you think next week’s theme should be, and I will see what I can find. Just remember: no obvious memes!
Enjoy!
Presented for your amusement: a wonderful little animated film by Studio H5, directed by François Alaux and Herve de Crecy. Ronald McDonald breaks loose on a violent crime spree in a world that is entirely made of corporate logos.
This 16-minute award-winning animated short film film apparently features over 2,500 different logos and brands (alongside some fantastic sound and voice work) - watch, enjoy, and see how many you can spot!
Watch the film after the jump. Facebook readers, as ever, click here to watch the video.
The Government suffered what can only be described as a humiliating defeat today after the High Court reinforced a previous judgment that seven previously redacted paragraphs contained within in CIA evidentiary documentation relating to the arrest and detention of Binyam Mohamed on suspicion of complicity in acts of terrorism should be made public. The paragraphs lend weight to the suggestion that Mohamed suffered severe physical and psychological torture whilst in U.S. custody. Many believe that this was with full knowledge of MI5. More details after the jump.
You know, when I was a kid, adverts for Old Spice usually took place in a football changing room, involved fusty old sports personalities and basically did nothing to remove the idea that Old Spice was for men who actually wanted to smell like a dodgy Robinsons’ pub vault in a Northern working town, circa 1978.
Now, it seems, Old Spice has had somewhat of a renaissance. And a funny one at that. Catch the adverts after the jump. Facebook readers, as ever, click here to see the videos.
No doubt as you have, by now, figured out, we physicists we here at dogsounds Towers pride ourselves on our crusade to bring little snippets of THE SCIENCE! and the knowledge of our universe to our readers in a way that is straightforward, plain-speaking and easy to understand.
We endeavor to cherrypick the best examples of current thinking and put them into your immense and powerful BRAIN to enhance your world view. To bring to you enlightenment without the hassle of going to a university and being all socially inadequate around girls and that.
Okay, well, let’s be honest, we don’t do that much, But when we see an article or a news story about THE SCIENCE! that is the equivalent of waking up and finding dinosaurs in your car, then we have to pass it along as best we can.
But, I am afraid, dear, sweet gentle readers, for the first time we have totally failed. We have today found an article of THE SCIENCE! that is so staggeringly obtuse, we have not been able to break it down. More after the jump.
Xenophilia Major Nelson Bungie
