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Possibly the best advertising campaign ever? A car dealership is declaring “a jihad on the automotive market”. Sales reps will wear burkas. But let’s have the ad speak for itself:
“Our prices are lower than the evil-doers’ every day. Just ask the Pope!” the ad says. “Friday is fatwa Friday, with free rubber swords for the kiddies.”
All in the best possible taste!
Back in June Uwe Boll, the German director of some of the worst films known to man, invited film critics to come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough.
The first fight was on September 6th, when Boll won his fight with Carlos Palencia Jimenez-Arguello of Spanish website CineCutre. He’s now moved on to Vancouver, where he punched out critics including Jeff Sneider of Ain’t It Cool News and Something Awful’s Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka. Boll is apparently a decent boxer, and the fights will appear in his latest film, Postal. Which, let’s face it, can’t be any worse than Alone in the Dark.
New Scientist is a British-based publication where many thousands of lay people get their information on scientific matters, and (IMHO) it does an excellent job about 70% of the time. But the combination of a sensationalist bent and a lack of basic knowledge by its writers (most obviously in physics) is rendering it unreliable often enough to constitute a real threat to the public understanding of science.
Producer Andy Wilman on the fate of Top Gear:
A new series of Top Gear was due to begin next month, but Wilman said it should remain on hold unless and until Hammond can rejoin Clarkson and fellow presenter James May. ‘The only Top Gear I’m ever interested in making is the one with those three in it, and it has to be those three,’ Wilman told The Observer. ‘I wouldn’t, I couldn’t do it [without Richard]. Those three have the best relationship on television, like Last of the Summer Wine with cars.’
What happens when someone is born both boy and girl?
“I grew up a girl. I was always a tomboy, I wrestled, I played softball. I had bladder problems when I was a kid, and when I went in to have my urethra fixed” — at age 3 — “they decided to give me a vaginoplasty and also a clitoridectomy,” that is, surgically reshape the vagina and reduce the size of her clitoris. “When I finally learned all this, I spent a lot of time staring in the mirror” — she pressed her hands flat against her cheeks and stretched her skin of her face back toward her ears — “going: ‘Do I look like a boy? Do I look like a boy?’ Now I think being intersex is pretty weird but kind of sweet. I just wish someone had given me the tools to be able to talk about it.”
I want to be clear: I don’t think Ed Champion is an idiot. I’ve read some of the other, non–Lev Grossman-related posts on his blog (which is mostly about books), and have found them to be highly opinionated but otherwise cogent and well-informed, and sometimes even charming. Ed Champion is not insane. He’s just unswervingly committed to the position that I am a complete tool.
Elsewhere, asked how he would like to see book pages change, he says
At the risk — nay, certainty — of sounding kind of snobbish, I wish book sections in general would leave book-reviewing to the pros. There’s a pervasive notion that anybody who can read can write a book review. Not so. Good god, there is nothing so boring, so dank and unappealing on the page, as a bad book review.
With predictable results. (Particularly given the flurry of reactions in the sf community to Gabe Chouinard’s recent broadside about the quality of online sf reviews.)
- is 16-22 October, apparently, if you’re in the UK. Unfortunately, the website is a bit half-arsed (or maybe the events are, I can’t tell): the diary there doesn’t seem to be that much of a range of events, and searching them creates a list which heads off into unreadability in the bottom margin. Still, chocolate.
