It's not brain surgery....

A classic for this morning...

More Brilliance from xkcd.

Two Awesome Adverts

Here's one about being welcoming (or otherwise): (hat tip)

And here's probably the best advert of the year. Acts 20:35.

Tech Humor for the Tech Challenged

I caught a bit of The One Ronnie over Christmas. If I'd seen this bit, I might have kept watching...

HT Thabiti Anyabwile.

Yes Minister on Bishops and the C of E...

The Apprentice

I've got to admit, I do quite enjoy watching The Apprentice. It's amusing in particular how no-one ever suggests that each team should work as a team, and put their success as a team ahead of their individual success. It's a much better strategy than the one most of them adopt. But then I suspect there's more than a grain of truth in Mitchell & Webb's assessment...

Stephen Hawking

from the excellent xkcd:

If My Nose Was Running Money...

Another funny video...

Extra-Geeky Comic

Dinosaur Comics is frequently just weird, but this is magnificent...

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Daleks

It's my day off. And this is wonderful.

HT to Stephen Pereira.

Absolutely Brilliant Photo

From here - worth thinking up captions. Mind you, most of them would probably involve around puns on "bear", so maybe not.

Stupid Signs XVII

This one is from the London Underground. Needless to say, everyone I saw was disobeying at least one of these... But if they're going to have rules like that, they need dog dispensers at the entrances to stations...

Omnipotence

Some wisdom on the old "Can God make a rock so big he can't lift it?" question from Dinosaur Comics. Quick stuff about Dinosaur Comics - the pictures are always the same; only the text varies. And they're very weird. But this one made me laugh...

Secularists Cartoon

Dave Walker's amusing cartoon satirising the ad campaigns of the New Atheists and co has been published on the Guardian website!

Amazon and Odd Choice of Recommended Books....

This e-mail was sent to me today...

Greetings from Amazon.co.uk,

We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated books by C. S. Lewis have also purchased Kragos and Kildor the Two-headed Demon (Beast Quest) by Adam Blade. For this reason, you might like to know that Kragos and Kildor the Two-headed Demon (Beast Quest) is now available.

Not quite what I had in mind...

The Phantom of the Opera

Here's some of the TV info blurb for the film of the Phantom of the Opera, as shown on Film4:

Joel Schumacher directs this darkly Gothic interpretation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's stage musical

Andrew Lloyd Webber's famous musical is, as the name suggests, about a phantom who lives in an opera house. The script requires a few murders and attempted murders and has several significant scenes set in a graveyard and abandoned caves under the opera house.

It contains lines like "Down once more to the dungeon of my dark despair / Down we plunge to the prison of my mind!"

And yet, somehow, the blurb suggests that it might be possible to produce an interpretation of Phantom that isn't darkly gothic!

Don't get me wrong, I think Phantom is ALW's best musical. It's probably my second favourite musical (after Les Mis). It's clever, and has some real feel-good moments. But it is dark, and it is gothic. Oh, and I enjoyed the stage version more than the film.

A Socially Responsible Government

It's great knowing that the government is really responsible, uses taxpayers' money well and always thinks through the consequences of its actions.

For example, they've released a new game, which encourages road safety.

"Teach 'em a lesson - hit the kids who aren't wearing helmets!" - that's exactly the right message to send to people, isn't it? I wonder how many focus groups it took to come up with that one?

Notice anything wrong? Anything that might possibly be contrary to government policy or anything like that? If not, have you ever considered a career as a politician?

The one encouraging thing about this is that it helps me realise that the government aren't really nasty and malicious, just really really incompetent...

Hat tip to Greg.

Rebranding

On last week's episode of The Apprentice, they had to try to rebrand Margate, a run down English seaside town. Some of the efforts were ok, some were atrocious.

This, however, is magnificent...

Star Trek (11)

The 11th Star Trek film finally manages to break one of the long-running rules in Hollywood - that odd-numbered Star Trek films are rubbish. Many would say the even-numbered ones were too...

This is partly an attempt to do a film that comes just before the first series in the 1960s, and partly a reinvention of the whole franchise. And I have to say it's very well done. All the major characters from the first series are there, all well played by different actors but in such a way that it's believable that they're the same people. There are lots of nods to stuff in the original series - like a sense of fashion that could explain how on earth they ended up with the uniforms from the first series, and a scenario that explains how someone like Kirk ended up as captain. And it brings in some of the science from later series without the whole "particle of the week" solutions that dogged the later series of TNG.

The special effects are of course much, much better, even than the later series. And it's fun! (significantly helped by Simon Pegg as Scotty.) And the start of the film is incredibly good.

As a bit of a physics geek, I have to say I like what they did with the philosophy of time travel here. Not just having a consistent theory of it, but also playing with some characters having alternate theories of it...

It's worth adding that a friend of mine pointed me to this amusing video review...

Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'

Horrible Slogans

I'm on camp at the moment, and have only just managed to get internet access. We're borrowing a school building, and there's one of those horrible motivational posters on a wall I walk past fairly often, that says the following:

If you can imagine it, you can create it. If you dream it you can become it.

Some of those motivational posters are actually quite good, but I have an intense dislike for ones which express that sort of rubbish sentiment in an attempt to motivate kids who have started to realise the futility of life without Jesus.

I'm tempted to go round and graffiti some of the posters. For example, I might add to that one that I dreamed about a flying horse. Does that mean I can become one?

It all makes me want to link to those wonderful posters at Despair, Inc..