Mostly Brains

Fascinating article over five parts by Errol Morris about anosognosia.

Bad Astronomy has a lavatorial example of apophenia and no it isn't Jebus.

Derren Brown's blog has a link to an interesting post about 150 being an optimal number for groups/communities/businesses.

Looks like some labcoats are musing over using Ibogaine to treat addicts yet again.

Someone's put a vid up on Instructables about how to make Kitty Crack, a super potent form of catnip.

IBM have been elbows deep in monkey brains, macaque to be exact. Sterling work though in providing the most comprehensive map so far.

Israeli scientists are looking at what makes memories stick and think GABA might have a role.

Genre Collisions

No Way To Treat a Lady is a 1968 film about a serial killer who strikes up a unusual friendship with the homicide detective investigating him. Rod Steiger plays the disguise loving strangler & ramps his performance up to stratospheric levels of hammyness while George Segal smirks & eye rolls his way through his scenes with his overbearing Jewish mother and his new love interest/soon-to-be strangler fodder played by the beautiful Lee Remick. The somewhat awkward melange of violence and domestic comedy leads to a very odd atmosphere and despite a few nice scenes I wouldn't class the film as a success, especially with it's botched ending. hohum.


Not really sure what Operation Endgame was meant to be - a comedy? action thriller? well it was none of those and it's one of the weakest films I've seen in ages. Anyways a bunker full of odd secret agents is sealed off and they start killing each other for no apparent reason. It's got a decent cast including Galifianakis, Corddry, Rhames, Barkin & Tambor but the scripting & plot well, just plain awful, you hear about films that are so bad, so car crash fascinating they're hard to turn off but until now I'd never seen one.

Films for free

Pah it's no wonder the shop is going under - here's ten films in no particular order that you can legally watch online for free. UPDATE - well looks like Primer's dissappeared already but here's a link to 100 scifi films available online - courtesy of WATEOTU

Primer - thanks to Io9 for pointing out this low budget time travel classic is now online for your perusal.

Orwell's classic Animal Farm animated

One of Hitchcock's best, Rebecca, via ClassicMoviesOnline

Another from Youtube which I think I've posted before - Home

iplayer has The Incredibles

Nice WW2 film called Saints & Soldiers is at indiemoviesonline

They've also got Broomfield's eye opening documentary Fetishes

Another from iplayer is German thriller The Wave

Elia Kazan's excellent Panic in the Streets is on IMDB

Finally classic early HGWells scifi in Things To Come from Veoh

Troublesome Tories

While the rest of the 24hr news monster is chewing over Julian "I Enjoy Crushing Bastards" Assange's mega release it appears our newly revived Tory Overlords are coming a little unstuck.

First up is army toff Rory Stewart who referred to his constituents as yokels who hold their trousers up with string - how charming - he's now recanted somewhat.

Another former army idiot is Patrick Mercer, who according to Guido, is having a little problem with the wife probably due to his dalliance with another MP's secretary. Tsk Tsk

Boris Johnson seems to have problems with his zipper too.

David Davis indiscreetly referred to the marriage of the two parties as as a "Brokeback Coalition"
- apparently there's chatter about starting a Brokeback Club for those skeptical of the wedding but bad mimer John Redwood won't be joining.

And finally the Charity Comission has released it's unsurprising finding that stupid neo-con organisation Atlantic Bridge has been shown to be little more than a front for the usual tedious right-wing wrong thinking. I sure hope members Willy Hague and Liam Fox are upset.

ForeverWar spings a Leak

Assange has enlisted the New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel in exposing 92,000 documents pertaining to our little jaunt back in to Afghanistan oh how I chuckle. Someone called VioletVerq posting on Gawker was kind enough to gather the links. I wonder what else Manning coughed up?

Sean satirises & Batman mourns

Wrong is Right is a stunningly topical black comedy written and directed by Richard Brooks. A dark comedy/thriller starring Sean Connery as a salacious TV news superstar jetting around the world bringing us the very latest in wars/riots/death whatever will secures the highest ratings. He bites off more than he can chew however when an Arab ruler, recently added to the CIA's hitlist, decides to send two suitcase nukes to the United States in retaliation. There's plenty of action but not enough laughs as religious fundamentalists, journalists, mercenaries, secret agents and politicians wrestle about for two hours trying to stop/start nuclear war. Apparently it was a flop on release, with critics labelling it implausible haha, I think it deserves a bit more credit however, sure it's a right mess and they obviously found it tough to squeeze laughs out of the subject but the satire is spot on - more so now than 28 years ago when it was made.



I wonder what certificate the animated feature Batman: Under the Red Hood will get? Given the beatings, burning & multiple deaths I doubt they'll manage a 12 - not that I'm complaining though as it's easily one of the best DC/Warner productions so far. The story revolves around the fate of Robin at the hands of the Joker and Gotham's latest kingpin, called the Red Hood. With plenty of action and with a nice line on the Batman/Robin relationship this mature cartoon will hopefully become the template for future releases.

Catching up on Curtis

Apparently Adam Curtis is working on a new doco about Afghanistan which might explain the series of fascinating articles he's been posting on his excellent blog. Anyways I loved Power of Nightmares, Century of Self and The Trap so thought it might be interesting to watch some of his earlier works that I missed.

First up is The Mayfair Set , aired in 1999, it's a four parter about a group of chaps/cnuts who shaped our country during those lovely Thatcher years including David Stirling founder of the SAS turned mercenary, Jim Slater asset stripper extraordinaire and Jimmy Goldsmith douchebag. Curtis carefully exposes the roles these men played in "enhancing" our capitalist culture while simultaneously filling their pockets and the final episode shows how these men were eventually discarded by the establishment but their theories, strategies and greed continued. Peppered with his usual melange of interviews, stock footage & news clips this is a fine example of Curtis' work and it appears you can watch it on Youtube here

Fraught Families

Alice Sweet Alice is a twisted little psychological chiller from '76 about a troubled girl suspected of murdering her sister at her first communion - only her estranged parents believe she's innocent but when more bloodshed follows they have to consider their daughter is a psycho-killer. Though not particularly original I quite enjoyed it to be honest, it quickly creates a weird atmosphere before jarring us with some sporadic brutal violence and kept me guessing towards the demented finale. The cast is pretty solid but the young actress playing "Alice" steals the film with a fine ambiguous performance as the potential murderess.



The novels of Stieg Larsson have sat on my shelf for a while now but there's at least another 10 books to be read before them so I thought I'd just give up & watch The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and see what all the fuss is about. It's certainly a good film, well acted, nicely shot all in all a solid Euro thriller but in my opinion really not much else - sometimes I think we give foreign language films an easy ride because its all a bit "different" but hey what do I know. Anyways the plot is as follows: recently disgraced journo gets hired by a reclusive millionaire to investigate a old unsolved disappearance and it gets all murky murky with secret Nazis, a seriously dysfunctional family and a feisty female hacker. Hope the books are a better.