Edison's blog

So … I gather this is satire, right?

(Teencast, via Gizmodo)

Barbershop quartet singing, the final frontier …

(Via Neatorama)

The Watchmen trailer is now online, at Apple and elsewhere.

WOW. Just … WOW.

Looks phenomenal … I don’t expect it to be as good as the book — I just hope it doesn’t suck.

Via Neatorama:

The Chaoscope website offers a 3D strange attractors rendering software, an ongoing project created and maintained by Nicolas Desprez. The images in the gallery are gorgeous, and you can make your own if you’re clever enough.

Logan’s hidden past finally revealed!

Now this is pretty neat: scale drawings of just about every science fiction vehicle or construct (the new Battlestar Galactica ships are notably missing, quibble quibble, but I expect they’ll be along shortly); nice to see how much a Borg cube is bigger than an Imperial Star Destroyer. I especially like the various real-world objects thrown in for comparison—i.e., CN Tower, Empire State Building, Godzilla â€¦

Truly impressive puppetry (via Neatorama).

• It’s all about accountability. It's not about being Democrat or Republican as much as it about being an American, and really caring about the Constitution of the United States and the fact that this Republican majority in Congress has literally sacrificed our Constitution on the altar of its, in my judgment, misguided partisan leanings.

• These people, the neo-conservatives, should be driven back into their holes and never permitted to reemerge to influence serious foreign policy debates in the future because they are not serious people.
• We have to win beyond the margin of cheating. These people are all about power: getting it, keeping it, and using it for their supporters, and they will cheat, lie, steal, and do everything they possibly can to avoid facing the verdict of the voters. You can see all the so-called robocalls now that are hugely deceptive, quite possibly illegal, and certainly designed to subvert our democracy, so it’s absolutely vital that people get out and vote, take your neighbors out, take your friends, talk to people in the supermarkets and where you worship, where you go to the park … whatever you do, talk to people, get them enthusiastic about voting.
• At the end of the day, in this environment, if you are conservative, you’re a Democrat. It’s the Democrats who have been fiscally responsible over the past 30 years. If you’re liberal, you’re a Democrat. It’s only if you’re a radical—only if you really want to turn this republic of ours into an empire, or if you want to replace the Constitution of the United States with literal interpretation of the Book of Revelations—then and only then should you be a supporter of this administration, because that’s what they’re trying to do.

— Ambassador Joe Wilson, The Stephanie Miller Show, 11/06/2006

US torture bill signed into law
Edward Gomez at sfgate.com blogs:

George W. Bush got what he wanted, ostensibly as a tool in his unfocused “war on terror”: By signing into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006, Bush has made it legal for the C.I.A. to continue operating torture facilities in undisclosed, foreign countries, and for the writ of habeas corpus to be suspended for individuals who are designated “enemy combatants” against the U.S. (Designated by whom? That question remains unanswered.) The law also “establishes military tribunals that would allow some use of evidence obtained by coercion [that is, torture], but would give defendants access to classified evidence being used to convict them.” (Reuters)

The provisions of Bush’s new torture law mean that Americans have lost the key, constitutional right on which Anglo-American criminal law (and criminal-law procedures in true democracies in general) is founded; that’s the basic right of an individual to know why he or she is being apprehended and detained. Now, technically, as in Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany, Mao’s China or Pol Pot’s Cambodia, anyone labeled an “enemy combatant” - again, by whom; by Bush? - can be whisked away and never heard from again. That kind of authority, in the hands of corrupt or untruthful politicians, may or may not be an effective tool in some kind of “war on terror,” but it certainly can be a useful tool when it comes to silencing their opponents.

[Emphasis mine]

Paddlestar Galactica: more Canadian than the original. Is this what they mean by “camp”?

Apparently, allegedly, the Complete Calvin & Hobbes isn’t. This strip is the only one not to have been reprinted, like evar:

Personally, I have my doubts, but I can’t be arsed to check all my various collections and compilations either.

(From Neatorama)

As if it weren’t bad enough that we’ll spend our future fighting against Skynet and the Sentinels, now the Japanese war machine is gearing back up. Here’s the startling photographic evidence:

If this is for real, I predict a sharp rise in one or more of the following: electronic locks; vicious dogs; firearms; police surveillance über alles.