Incredible Creative Cake Sculptures

By Daniel Nahabedian, MatadorNetwork.com

Forget the Black Forest cake your mom bought you for your birthday, or the simple white multi-layered wedding cake on your special day. These cakes are so awesome you don’t even want to eat them.

Cake sculpting first began as a hobby and is now a full-fledged career option with artists competing for creativity and cake prices climbing a never ending ladder.

Here are 20 examples of some of the most creative cake sculptures you’d never want to cut...

 Octapus Cake

 Incredibly detailed giant octopus by Highland Bakery. Photo used with permission by: Karen Portaleo.

Sumo wrestler cake

An angry giant sumo wrestler cake by Highland Bakery. Photo used with permission by: Karen Portaleo.

Rhino cake

Beautiful rhino cake by Highland Bakery. Photo used with permission by: Karen Portaleo.

Pegasus cake

A Pegasus cake happy to have won the first place in a cake contest. Photo by snarkygurl.

Punk Zombie cake

Probably the goriest and scariest cake I've ever seen. Photo used with permission by: Barbarann Garrard.

Tangled cake

Just make sure you fork doesn't get all tangled in this one by Debbie Does Cakes. Photo used with permission by: Debbiedoescakes.

Diet Coke cake

Not sure about the zero-calories but it sure looks like a real can, by Debbie Does Cakes. Photo used with permission by: Debbiedoescakes.

Computer desktop cake

Don't focus on the little white cake, it's just a distraction. The whole desktop computer is actually a cake. Photo used with permission by: Debbiedoescakes.

R2-D2 cake

Perfect for the Star Wars fans. Photo by: The Uncommon Cakery.

Steampunk cake

If you're a Steampunk junkie like I am, you'll probably love this one. Photo by: Kelsay Photography.

Pirate ship cake

Put on your eye-patch and loot this pirate cake. Photo by: mdimmic.

Building cake

A cake replica of the Bodleian library. Photo by: sally_monster.

Briefcase cake

Celebrate your birthday in a cubicle with this awesome briefcase cake. Photo by: dahliascakes.

Mario cake

Older gamers will feel nostalgic with this Mario cake by Su-Yin. Photo used with her permission.

Dragon cake

Probably the most impressive cake I've ever seen. Perfect for Role-playing geeks. Photo by: Astro-Lopithecus.

Angry Birds cake

The popular Angry Birds game now brought to you in the edible world. Photo by: snarkygurl

15th anniversary cake

The 15th anniversary cake of Fluid Design, an interactive design and branding agency. Photo by: Fluid Design.

Digital SLR camera cake

I'd love to get this cake for my birthday. Now if I only got the real lens too, it would be perfect. Photo by: Barron.

Sewing kit cake

An amazing real-looking sewing kit made of cake. Photo by: bunchofpants.

Wall-E cake

Very impressed by the amount of detail in this Wall-E cake. Photo by: Donbuciak.

Poetry Wednesday: If Only We Had Taller Been

If Only We Had Taller Been

By Ray Bradbury, who died last week.

In November, 1971, the Mariner 9 space orbiter was about to make history. It was rapidly approaching Mars, making it the first spacecraft to orbit another planet.  ... Just days before the Mariner 9 reached Mars, two of our greatest sci-fi writers, the dearly departed Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke, shared the stage with two eminent scientists, Carl Sagan and Bruce Murray, at a symposium held at Caltech. At one point, Bradbury captivated the audience when he read his poem, “If Only We Had Taller Been,” and gave an almost spiritual inflection to the Mariner 9 mission, reminding us of something that Neil deGrasse Tyson once said: the line separating religious epiphany and feelings created by space exploration is awfully, awfully thin.

“The fence we walked between the years

Did balance us serene;

It was a place half in the sky where

In the green of leaf and promising of peach

We’d reach our hands to touch and almost thouch that lie,

That blue that was not really blue.

If we could reach and touch, we said,

‘Twould teach us, somehow, never to be dead.

We ached, we almost touched that stuff;
Our reach was never quite enough.
So, Thomas, we are doomed to die.
O, Tom, as I have often said,
How said we’re both so short in bed.
If only we had taller been,
And touched God’s cuff, His hem,
We would not have to sleep away and go with them
Who’ve gone before,
A billion give or take a million boys or more
Who, short as we, stood tall as they could stand
And hoped by stretching thus to keep their land,
Their home, their hearth, their flesh and soul.
But they, like us, were standing in a hole.

O, Thomas, will a Race one day stand really tall
Across the Void, across the Universe and all?
And, measured out with rocket fire,
At last put Adam’s finger forth
As on the Sistine Ceiling,
And God’s great hand come down the other way
To measure Man and find him Good,
And Gift him with Forever’s Day?
I work for that.

Short man, Large dream. I send my rockets forth between my ears,

Hoping an inch of Will is worth a pound of years.

Aching to hear a voice cry back along the universal Mall:

We’ve reached Alpha Centauri!

We’re tall, O God, we’re tall!”

The Myth of Sisyphus

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus We present here the translation of Camus great short story about the human struggle: The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor. If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets. Egina, the daughter of Esopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by that disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction, offered to tell about it on condition that Esopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunderbolts he preferred the benediction of water. He was punished for this in the underworld. Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror. It is said that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife's love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him. You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward tlower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain. It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock. If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn. If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy arises in man's heart: this is the rock's victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus, Edipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: "Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well." Sophocles' Edipus, like Dostoevsky's Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism. One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. "What!---by such narrow ways--?" There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd. Discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is well," says Edipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men. All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling. I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Snail Astronaut Survived with an Algae-based Life Support System

By TEREZA PULTAROVA, Space Safety Magazine

The following video explains the principles of bioregenerative life support systems and why the world space life science community sees them as the way forward.

As China plans to build the Chinese Space Station in Low Earth Orbit around 2020, Chinese researchers are busy developing a new generation of technologies to support long term human survival in space. A small but important step forward was made during the 17 days long November flight of Shenzhou VIII spacecraft. The results were recently made public.

Among the payload was an unusual container carrying a special microgravity experiment. Inside a vessel filled with nutrient solution and two types of algae was a trio of snail astronauts belonging to the Bulinus australianus genus. This small tropical freshwater snail weighs only 0.1 grams and has very modest needs when it comes to oxygen consumption. That’s the reason why it was chosen to travel to space and prove whether it can survive with a miniature Closed Loop Life Support System.  Unfortunately after the landing only one of the “snailtronauts” was found alive.

According to Liu Yongding, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and designer of the experiment, in the miniature ecosystem algae were the producers providing oxygen and food, snails were the consumers and microbes carried by the snails were helping the decomposing process. Fish were initially considered for the experiment but as professor Liu Yongding explains, snails present a more suitable option: “Snails are better equipped to survive in the harsh environment and they take up only a small area,” he said.

One of the types of algae used in the experiment was provided by German scientists. Immediately after the landing the Chinese researchers killed the surviving “snailtronaut” in order to preserve its tissues in a state directly affected by microgravity.

The Chinese scientists believe that algae are the way for providing oxygen and food in future manned space missions to Mars and beyond. According to Chinese media, in the laboratories of Chinese Academy of Sciences they managed to develop a system that makes 1.5 cubic meters of algae produce enough oxygen for a man weighing 70 kilograms for one day. In the future the experiments should determine how much the microgravity can influence the whole system.

R. Scott Describes Scene from the “Blade Runner” Sequel

By Terri Schwartz,  IFC.com

With the “Alien” prequel “Prometheus” hitting theaters this Friday, it’s time for director Ridley Scott to start discussing following up on another one of his famous properties.

The esteemed director has been working on a sequel to “Blade Runner”, and talked about some of the film’s specifics in a recent interview with Collider. It sounds markedly different from any “Blade Runner” scene we’ve seen before.

“There’ll be a vast farmland where there are no hedges or anything in sight, and it’s flat like the plains of—where’s the Great Plains in America? Kansas, where you can see for miles. And it’s dirt, but it’s being raked. On the horizon is a combine harvester which is futuristic with klieg lights, ‘cause it’s dawn. The harvester is as big as six houses. In the foreground is a small white clapboard hut with a porch as if it was from ‘Grapes of Wrath.’ From the right comes a car, coming in about six feet off the ground being chased by a dog,” Scott described. “And that’s the end of it, I’m not gonna tell you anything else.”

Scott has always been a very visual filmmaker, and no one can say “Prometheus” is anything short of beautiful, especially with his use of 3D. But the world of “Blade Runner” is so clearly defined that we wonder if fans will rebel against this sudden shift in location. There’s no guarantee that this scene will actually make it into the final cut, but we’re intrigued to find out what direction the sequel is going in. It sounds like it’s going to be a shift from what we knew in the original.

Now just please, please promise us that we aren’t going to get a sequel/prequel/reboot of “Gladiator” any time soon ever.

The Pros and Cons of Living Together

From the great Oatmeal comic

A very original way to visualize the Republican Presidential Race...

Light Hearted Kites

There are two extraordinarily beautiful things happening in this iPhone video by Patrick Colpron. The first is a spectacular six-sail kite designed and flown by Steve Polansky, and second is a heart-achingly wonderful song called Lighthouse by Patrick Watson. What a perfect moment in time, sort of an impromptu video poem.

Poetry Wednesday: In Praise Of Limestone

In Praise Of Limestone

by WH Auden

If it form the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones,
Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly
Because it dissolves in water. Mark these rounded slopes
With their surface fragrance of thyme and, beneath,
A secret system of caves and conduits; hear the springs
That spurt out everywhere with a chuckle,
Each filling a private pool for its fish and carving
Its own little ravine whose cliffs entertain
The butterfly and the lizard; examine this region
Of short distances and definite places:
What could be more like Mother or a fitter background
For her son, the flirtatious male who lounges
Against a rock in the sunlight, never doubting
That for all his faults he is loved; whose works are but
Extensions of his power to charm? From weathered outcrop
To hill-top temple, from appearing waters to
Conspicuous fountains, from a wild to a formal vineyard,
Are ingenious but short steps that a child's wish
To receive more attention than his brothers, whether
By pleasing or teasing, can easily take.

Watch, then, the band of rivals as they climb up and down
Their steep stone gennels in twos and threes, at times
Arm in arm, but never, thank God, in step; or engaged
On the shady side of a square at midday in
Voluble discourse, knowing each other too well to think
There are any important secrets, unable
To conceive a god whose temper-tantrums are moral
And not to be pacified by a clever line
Or a good lay: for accustomed to a stone that responds,
They have never had to veil their faces in awe
Of a crater whose blazing fury could not be fixed;
Adjusted to the local needs of valleys
Where everything can be touched or reached by walking,
Their eyes have never looked into infinite space
Through the lattice-work of a nomad's comb; born lucky,
Their legs have never encountered the fungi
And insects of the jungle, the monstrous forms and lives
With which we have nothing, we like to hope, in common.
So, when one of them goes to the bad, the way his mind works
Remains incomprehensible: to become a pimp
Or deal in fake jewellery or ruin a fine tenor voice
For effects that bring down the house, could happen to all
But the best and the worst of us...
That is why, I suppose,
The best and worst never stayed here long but sought
Immoderate soils where the beauty was not so external,
The light less public and the meaning of life
Something more than a mad camp. `Come!' cried the granite wastes,
`How evasive is your humour, how accidental
Your kindest kiss, how permanent is death.' (Saints-to-be
Slipped away sighing.) `Come!' purred the clays and gravels,
`On our plains there is room for armies to drill; rivers
Wait to be tamed and slaves to construct you a tomb
In the grand manner: soft as the earth is mankind and both
Need to be altered.' (Intendant Caesars rose and
Left, slamming the door.) But the really reckless were fetched
By an older colder voice, the oceanic whisper:
`I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing;
That is how I shall set you free. There is no love;
There are only the various envies, all of them sad.'

They were right, my dear, all those voices were right
And still are; this land is not the sweet home that it looks,
Nor its peace the historical calm of a site
Where something was settled once and for all: A back ward
And dilapidated province, connected
To the big busy world by a tunnel, with a certain
Seedy appeal, is that all it is now? Not quite:
It has a worldy duty which in spite of itself
It does not neglect, but calls into question
All the Great Powers assume; it disturbs our rights. The poet,
Admired for his earnest habit of calling
The sun the sun, his mind Puzzle, is made uneasy
By these marble statues which so obviously doubt
His antimythological myth; and these gamins,
Pursuing the scientist down the tiled colonnade
With such lively offers, rebuke his concern for Nature's
Remotest aspects: I, too, am reproached, for what
And how much you know. Not to lose time, not to get caught,
Not to be left behind, not, please! to resemble
The beasts who repeat themselves, or a thing like water
Or stone whose conduct can be predicted, these
Are our common prayer, whose greatest comfort is music
Which can be made anywhere, is invisible,
And does not smell. In so far as we have to look forward
To death as a fact, no doubt we are right: But if
Sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from the dead,
These modifications of matter into
Innocent athletes and gesticulating fountains,
Made solely for pleasure, make a further point:
The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from,
Having nothing to hide. Dear, I know nothing of
Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape. 

Stop Motion Animation from Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea"

A very interesting Stop-Motion animation inspired from the Ernest Hemingway classic, "The Old Man and the Sea".

Dot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker's 1903 lulz

By Paul Marks, New Scientist

A century ago, one of the world’s first hackers used Morse code insults to disrupt a public demo of Marconi's wireless telegraph.

LATE one June afternoon in 1903 a hush fell across an expectant audience in the Royal Institution's celebrated lecture theatre in London. Before the crowd, the physicist John Ambrose Fleming was adjusting arcane apparatus as he prepared to demonstrate an emerging technological wonder: a long-range wireless communication system developed by his boss, the Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi. The aim was to showcase publicly for the first time that Morse code messages could be sent wirelessly over long distances. Around 300 miles away, Marconi was preparing to send a signal to London from a clifftop station in Poldhu, Cornwall, UK.

Yet before the demonstration could begin, the apparatus in the lecture theatre began to tap out a message. At first, it spelled out just one word repeated over and over. Then it changed into a facetious poem accusing Marconi of "diddling the public". Their demonstration had been hacked - and this was more than 100 years before the mischief playing out on the internet today. Who was the Royal Institution hacker? How did the cheeky messages get there? And why?

It had all started in 1887 when Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of the electromagnetic waves predicted by James Clerk Maxwell in 1865. Discharging a capacitor into two separated electrodes, Hertz ionised the air in the gap between them, creating a spark. Miraculously, another spark zipped between two electrodes a few metres away: an electromagnetic wave from the first spark had induced a current between the second electrode pair. It meant long and short bursts of energy - "Hertzian waves" - could be broadcast to represent the dots and dashes of Morse code. Wireless telegraphy was born, and Marconi and his company were at the vanguard. Marconi claimed that his wireless messages could be sent privately over great distances. "I can tune my instruments so that no other instrument that is not similarly tuned can tap my messages," Marconi boasted to London's St James Gazette in February 1903.

That things would not go smoothly for Marconi and Fleming at the Royal Institution that day in June was soon apparent. Minutes before Fleming was due to receive Marconi's Morse messages from Cornwall, the hush was broken by a rhythmic ticking noise sputtering from the theatre's brass projection lantern, used to display the lecturer's slides. To the untrained ear, it sounded like a projector on the blink. But Arthur Blok, Fleming's assistant, quickly recognised the tippity-tap of a human hand keying a message in Morse. Someone, Blok reasoned, was beaming powerful wireless pulses into the theatre and they were strong enough to interfere with the projector's electric arc discharge lamp.

Mentally decoding the missive, Blok realised it was spelling one facetious word, over and over: "Rats". A glance at the output of the nearby Morse printer confirmed this. The incoming Morse then got more personal, mocking Marconi: "There was a young fellow of Italy, who diddled the public quite prettily," it trilled. Further rude epithets - apposite lines from Shakespeare - followed.

The stream of invective ceased moments before Marconi's signals from Poldhu arrived. The demo continued, but the damage was done: if somebody could intrude on the wireless frequency in such a way, it was clearly nowhere near as secure as Marconi claimed. And it was likely that they could eavesdrop on supposedly private messages too.

Marconi would have been peeved, to say the least, but he did not respond directly to the insults in public. He had no truck with sceptics and naysayers: "I will not demonstrate to any man who throws doubt upon the system," he said at the time. Fleming, however, fired off a fuming letter to The Times of London. He dubbed the hack "scientific hooliganism", and "an outrage against the traditions of the Royal Institution". He asked the newspaper's readers to help him find the culprit.

He didn't have to wait long. Four days later a gleeful letter confessing to the hack was printed by The Times. The writer justified his actions on the grounds of the security holes it revealed for the public good. Its author was Nevil Maskelyne, a mustachioed 39-year-old British music hall magician. Maskelyne came from an inventive family - his father came up with the coin-activated "spend-a-penny" locks in pay toilets. Maskelyne, however, was more interested in wireless technology, so taught himself the principles. He would use Morse code in "mind-reading" magic tricks to secretly communicate with a stooge. He worked out how to use a spark-gap transmitter to remotely ignite gunpowder. And in 1900, Maskelyne sent wireless messages between a ground station and a balloon 10 miles away. But, as author Sungook Hong relates in the book Wireless, his ambitions were frustrated by Marconi's broad patents, leaving him embittered towards the Italian. Maskelyne would soon find a way to vent his spleen.

One of the big losers from Marconi's technology looked likely to be the wired telegraphy industry. Telegraphy companies owned expensive land and sea cable networks, and operated flotillas of ships with expert crews to lay and service their submarine cables. Marconi presented a wireless threat to their wired hegemony, and they were in no mood to roll over.

The Eastern Telegraph Company ran the communications hub of the British Empire from the seaside hamlet of Porthcurno, west Cornwall, where its submarine cables led to Indonesia, India, Africa, South America and Australia. Following Marconi's feat of transatlantic wireless messaging on 12 December 1901, ETC hired Maskelyne to undertake extended spying operations.

Maskelyne built a 50-metre radio mast (the remnants of which still exist) on the cliffs west of Porthcurno to see if he could eavesdrop on messages the Marconi Company was beaming to vessels as part of its highly successful ship-to-shore messaging business. Writing in the journal The Electrician on 7 November 1902, Maskelyne gleefully revealed the lack of security. "I received Marconi messages with a 25-foot collecting circuit [aerial] raised on a scaffold pole. When eventually the mast was erected the problem was not interception but how to deal with the enormous excess of energy."

It wasn't supposed to be this easy. Marconi had patented a technology for tuning a wireless transmitter to broadcast on a precise wavelength. This tuning, Marconi claimed, meant confidential channels could be set up. Anyone who tunes in to a radio station will know that's not true, but it wasn't nearly so obvious back then. Maskelyne showed that by using an untuned broadband receiver he could listen in.

Having established interception was possible, Maskelyne wanted to draw more attention to the technology's flaws, as well as showing interference could happen. So he staged his Royal Institution hack by setting up a simple transmitter and Morse key at his father's nearby West End music hall.

The facetious messages he sent could easily have been jumbled with those Marconi himself sent from Cornwall, ruining both had they arrived simultaneously. Instead, they drew attention to a legitimate flaw in the technology - and the only damage done was to the egos of Marconi and Fleming.

Fleming continued to bluster for weeks in the newspapers about Maskelyne's assault being an insult to science. Maskelyne countered that Fleming should focus on the facts. "I would remind Professor Fleming that abuse is no argument," he replied.

In the present day, many hackers end up highlighting flawed technologies and security lapses just like Maskelyne. A little mischief has always had its virtues.

What ‘The Dictator’ Gets Right

By Paul Berman, The New Republic

True story: I’m on the sunny sidewalk outside Sacha Baron Cohen’s The Dictator, and out of the theater saunters one of my fellow audience members, dressed in slacks and Islamic headscarf of a sort that is pretty conventional in south Brooklyn, and she doesn’t mind a casual exchange of views. “I have to tell you,” she says, “it was offensive to a lot of people.” She reflects a little more. “It was funny, though.” Her gaze falls on Court Street. “I laughed.” She laughs. “I loved it!”—and she breaks into a gloriously sheepish smile. I tell her, “I liked the part where he falls in love.” She looks at me like, what are you, stupid?—then adds in self-exculpation, “The movies are supposed to be fun!” And off she goes, nearly skipping down the afternoon street.

The part where he falls in love comes when the Baron Cohen character, General Aladeen, dictator of Wadiya, having made his way to New York to address the United Nations, ends up working at a lefty feminist grocery co-op in Brooklyn. The co-op manager turns out to be an ultra-authoritarian of political correctness, a sort of fascist. And the dictator melts. He melts still more when the co-op manager liberates him sexually by teaching him to masturbate. The Dictator is a gross-out movie. And the meltdown reaches completion when, in the course of orating against the evils of democracy, he notices her cute little perky face in the audience, and his speech veers into a defense of democracy. Under democracy, he observes, a woman might fall for a man even if her father were not being tortured in the next room; and he is in love.

My fellow audience-member may have been right about me. Still, the essential realism of the scene becomes clear at the end of the movie when the dictator, having proclaimed democracy in Wadiya, has been elected president with 98 percent of the vote and marries the Brooklyn co-op manager—only to discover that she is Jewish, which leads him to order her execution.

Then the credits roll and you watch a series of pointless outtakes that must have struck the director as too amusing to omit from the movie. And it is right to watch, not because anything worth seeing appears on screen but because, with a movie of this nature, you try to get your money’s worth.

Do I have to take The Dictator seriously? I am sitting in the backyard of an oyster bar across from the theater with a plate of oysters and a glass of wine in front of me, and honestly the film has put me into too genial a mood to quarrel with failed jokes and occasional doldrums. Suddenly I recognize the movie’s appeal. The movie is about Brooklyn—the real-life Brooklyn of annoying P.C. nitwits, embittered émigrés from desert tyrannies, echoes of the crisis in the Muslim world, people from far-away who reinvent themselves, yellow taxis, lingering memories of 9/11, and the varieties of bad taste. Art is gusto or nothing, and The Dictator displays, on these local themes, sufficient gusto to while away an afternoon.

Maybe there’s not a whole lot of hydrogen in this balloon. And yet! In the matter of dictator movies, I prefer Baron Cohen to, say, Walter Salles, the director of a movie about Che Guevara. The Dictator is anti-dictator. The film even makes a semi-profound point near the end by observing that, as of our own moment, the dreadful dictators of modern times have fallen—Qaddafi, Saddam, Cheney—and goes on to observe that, even so, dreadful dictatorships may not, in fact, be at an end: a subtle contradiction, a footnote to the End of History thesis. Then, too, the dictator observes that democracy is not much different from dictatorship, except for the parts that are better, and maybe democracy is a great thing, after all, even if it’s not perfect. This particular display of political nuance is not offered with any equivalent filmmaking nuance. Baron Cohen’s technique is to stand up and lecture at us. Here is a film that is not about filmmaking. It’s a good lecture, though. I would even say that, politically speaking, Sacha Baron Cohen is—I hate to use this word, it ought to mean death to any artist—sound.

The misogyny and shock-jokes seem to me mostly a fig leaf which, in the modern style, consists of genitalia instead of covering them. You will see this for yourself if you sit through the childbirth scene with its trans-vaginal cell phone and its moment of amorous intra-uterine hand-holding—though maybe, now that I reflect more deeply, parts of The Dictator were, in truth, a bit much. But look what has happened: My glass is empty, the oysters have disappeared, the sun is setting, an hour has gone by, and I have begun to speak about the movie in the past tense. 

Increasingly Threatening Taglines by Beauty Products

By Kendra Eash, McSweenys.net

“Capture your beauty with both hands.”

“Beauty—it’s yours. No matter WHAT.”

“Hoard your beauty like you’ve never hoarded before.”

“Take advantage of your beauty—and then convince it to stay the night, just this once.”

“Who’s that in the mirror? Is it your beauty that escaped from its basement cage?”

“Run your beauty off the road—and onto your face.”

“Your beauty runs deep. Six feet underground to be exact.”

“Don’t let your beauty get away. Gun it down.”

“Looking for someone? You just found her—rifling through your beauty. It’s time to cut a bitch.”

“Bring your beauty to its knees. Pistol whip it until it tells you why it’s been avoiding you all these years.”

“If your beauty isn’t in your hands—then you killed for nothing.”

“Maybe she’s born with it. Or maybe she killed her sister for it. Either way, she’s really beautiful.”

“It’s high noon—and beauty just drew its gun. But you’re faster and you riddled it with bullets. Good job, because even with the gaping holes you’re still kind of beautiful now that you put the carcass of beauty all over you.”

The geopolitics of the Eurovision Song Contest

By Fareed Zakaria, CNN

What caught my eye this week was a dispute between two members of a grand old European alliance. The alliance isn't NATO; it's not the Arctic Council nor the Euro Zone, nor the EU. I'm talking about the annual Eurovision Song Contest.

It's camp; it's cheesy; but it's a huge hit across the pond. Every year, dozens of countries send their top performers to an American Idol-style music competition. More than a 100 million viewers tune in to vote for their favorites. The one rule: you can't vote for your own country.

And so the tradition has continued since the 1950s. Abba won for "Waterloo" in 1974. Celine Dion made a splash in 1988 representing Switzerland. But somewhere along the way the contest became known less for big names, and more for kitsch: Sequined costumes, outlandish productions, the works. Now, despite its name, Eurovision is not just a European competition. Algeria participates and so does Israel. This year's host is Azerbaijan. And that's why Eurovision is in the news this week.

First some background: Azerbaijan has long clashed with Armenia. In 1994, the two countries ended a years-long war over the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh. But tensions flared up again recently when an Armenian soldier was shot to death at the border.
So with Azerbaijan as the host, Armenia is  pulling out of the Eurovision party. The intrusion of politics into these kinds of events is not new. Music competitions, like big sporting events, are often proxies for larger disputes or trends. When Moscow hosted Eurovision in 2009, Georgia was reluctant to take part because it had just fought a war with Russia.  But music can unify, too. That same year, Israel's entry featured a duet with an Arab and Israeli Jew.

For me, the fascinating thing about Eurovision is not the performances or the music. It's the politics and public psychology. Here at GPS, we plotted the capital cities of the winning countries from the past two decades on a longitudinal graph - yeah, that's the kind of thing we do in our spare time. We found that in the 1990s, the winners tended to be from Western Europe - Dublin or London. But by the late 2000s, the winners mostly came from the East - Moscow and Kiev. Europe's center of gravity is clearly moving East.

And these voters have interesting tendencies. In 2003, Britain got exactly zero votes - that was the year the Blair government supported the war in Iraq. Votes aren't always conscious political choices. But we saw trends. Greeks always vote for Cypriots. The Cypriots return the favor. Viewers from former Warsaw-Pact countries often vote as a bloc. So do members of the former Yugoslavia. In 2007, Serbia won after picking up maximum points from Bosnia-Herzigovina, Croatia, Macedona, Montenegro, and Slovenia. All in all, this is an interesting window into Europe.

So it got me thinking. We have American Idol here in the U.S., and we have "The Voice". But perhaps what we really need is our own Eurovision - an "Americavision".  Will people from red states strategically vote for each other? Will the two coasts create an alliance? Will there be a North-South divide?

I hope a TV executive somewhere is watching. Remember to credit us with the idea - and maybe send a few royalties our way.

Ferreum, Ferroux, Ferrienne

VIMEO videos by Afiq Omar 

1.Ferreum
I combined exotic ferrofluid along with metallic objects around the house to craft various footage that demonstrate the properties of ferromagnetism. Shot on a 5D with the amazing 100mm f2.8 L Macro and cut on Adobe Premiere Pro.


2. Ferroux
Second installation of my ongoing series focused on analog visual effects, understanding fluid dynamics, magnetism & natural invisible forces. This time around I experimented with mixing tiny portions of ferrofluid & other chemicals, soap, alcohol, milk etc. Not for the trypophobic for sure.


3. Ferrienne
Ferienne is the third installment of an ongoing experimental study on fluid dynamics, magnetism and cymatics. These invisible forces of nature are then made visible through various liquids and mixtures, and they form patterns that are otherwise invisible to the naked eye. I then manipulated these patterns to compose analog visual effects & using simple editing techniques, create motion graphics that are natural and organic. The basis of it remains simple; to create visually engaging images that are unique and can never be repeated.

I focused more on achieving clean and precise images this time around using a massive amount of material collected over the past 8 weeks. The colour palette was kept similar to that of the human skin, and the textures were manipulated using different backgrounds, further pushing the limits of trypophobia; the fear of holes.

Poetry Wednesday:I'm So Busy

I'm So Busy 
by P G Wodehouse

I always said
That the man I would wed
Must be one who would work all the time.
One with ambition,
Who'd make it his mission
To win a position sublime.
One whose chief pleasure would be
Making a fortune for me;
One who would toil all the day
Down in the market and say:

Lizzie, Lizzie,
I'm so busy,
Don't know what to do.
Goodbye dear, I'm off to the street.
Can't stop now,
I'm cornering wheat.
I shall keep on till I'm dizzy,
Till the deal goes through.
Lizzie, I'm so busy,
I'm making a pile for you.
- - - -  - - - - - - - - --
Don't be deceived,
If you've ever believed
That my taste for hard labor is small.
Stifle the lurking
Idea that I'm shirking,
I never stop working at all.
I may have loafed in the past,
But I am busy at last,
I've found employment and I'm
Working away all the time.

Lizzie, Lizzie,
I'm so busy,
Busy loving you.
That's the job that suits me the best,
Though I never get any rest.
I shall keep on till I'm dizzy
But I shan't get through.
Lizzie, I'm so busy,
So won't you get busy too?
- - - - - - - - - - - -

A Brief History of Four Letter Words

From io9.com

"Scumbag," sounds like the kind of hokey insult that would get you laughed at if you used it. When it was used in a New York Times, it got protests from some older readers, because once upon a time it meant "a used condom." Think about every time you've seen Batman refer, in children's cartoon, to criminals as scum, and you'll begin to understand how obscenity evolves.

There are people who say that animals swear when they, for example, growl or gesture aggressively at people. Although no one could mistake such things for friendly gestures, showing anger isn't the same thing as swearing. Swearing is more complicated than just aggression. Swearing can be a form of affectionate teasing among friends, it can be a way of insulting someone, it can be a way of letting off steam or frustration, or a way of showing unbridled enthusiasm. The only thing all verbal obscenity has in common is the deliberate crossing of social norms. And this is why swear words are always changing.

The Newly Innocent Obscenities

Golly! Zounds! Gadzooks! These are the kind of things Captain Marvel would say. Almost any other superhero would be too mature for such, childish silly words. And yet, during Shakespeare's time, they made him one of the more edgy writers out there. They're not just random sounds, but contractions, meant to make absolutely shocking sentiments less outright obscene. Golly, zounds, and gadzooks were, in order, god's body, god's wounds, and god's hocks. While thinking about the Almighty's ham hock region might offend a few people, each of these words are the kind of things now deemed perfectly innocent. This shows a huge shift in social mores since the time of the Shakespeare.

Religious obscenities, when half of Europe was at war with the other half over the right way to practice Christianity, were a big deal. Referring to God in the corporeal sense was a way to scandalize people. To take the Lord's name in vain was to go against explicit Biblical instructions. These were some of the more obscene concepts of the age, but today are the most mild swear words most people can think of. God, hell, damn, and, to some extent, Jesus Christ, are no big deal anymore. Most people use them.

Ironically, the reason they got a toe hold in current society is the same reason they were so scandalous a few centuries ago. They could be genuine swear words, but they could also be expressions of religious ideas. Far, far back in Simpsons history, there was a storyline about how the kids got a lesson on hell in Sunday School. When asked, afterwards, about what they learned, Bart replied, "Hell." When Marge scolded him, he told her that, no, they had learned about the literal hell, and kept saying hell over and over until Marge, tired of hearing a word she considered inappropriate when coming out of her son's mouth, said, "Bart, you're not in church anymore. Don't swear." The line between actual devotion and blasphemy is tougher to delineate than most censors, and most people, imagine. Eventually most English speakers just stopped trying to find it at all, and people saying things like, "Mother of God," just became a noncontroversial emotional outburst.

The Animals Diverge From Their Excrement

Other swear words, which managed to skate into acceptability under a protective barrier of literalism, are bitch and ass. Both of those started out as literal meanings - animals - and might have been used as insults in their own right in their time. Ass is actually two words blended together to become an obscenity. Ass, the swear word, started out as irs, which meant the back end of anything, not just animals. Over time it became arse, and eventually rounded out and emerged as an ass. The two words were so alike that it was easy to sneak some ass into everyday life. Who remembers the West Wing characters constantly calling each other "jackass," which, being a donkey, was perfectly okay. In the next few years the first part of the word was peeled away, with the understanding that an ass still meant donkey, but eventually everyone stopped kidding themselves and allowed it to be another mild swear word regularly said on TV.

Bitch started out, and remains, a female dog in breeding condition. From there its meaning expanded to anything female in breeding condition, and eventually it expanded to become promiscuous women, angry women, angry or promiscuous homosexual men, or anything "especially disagreeable." Sliding between the slightly sexual, the slightly referring to sexuality, and the literal meaning of the word got bitch into general conversation, and most television shows. It also helps that being "especially disagreeable," rather than meek and accommodating has become a point of pride for both women and male homosexuals, and so even at its most insulting, the word has lost the power to shock as society has moved on.

As for things like pissing and shitting, which is what bitches, asses, and all other animals do, they're old English words. At least one of which dates back to the King James Bible. (2 Ki 18:27 But Rabshakeh said unto them, Hath my master sent me to thy master, and to thee, to speak these words? hath he not sent me to the men which sit on the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you?) These words, though not refined back then, have gotten both more abstract and a little more outré. This is an example of the way culture can continually reach for more delicacy. In France, "toilet" used to mean a small towel, which was kept near the chamber pot. It also meant the act of cleansing oneself. Old books often use the phrase, "She spent some time making her toilet," which means grooming and preparing oneself for an event. "Toilet water" was a kind of light perfume. Since these actions happened in private, near a chamber pot, they were used as a euphemism for actually using that chamber pot. Eventually, the word came to mean the actual toilet itself, and not the things near it. After that, saying "I need to go to the toilet," became indelicate, and people had to come up with more abstracted ways of saying the same thing. Cycles like this made piss and shit, while more commonly used in society, more vulgar than they originally were.

Four Letters and Starting With F

And then there's the swear word that's held steady for half a millennium; fuck. It seemed to spring upon the landscape fully-formed, and already an obscenity. The first instance of use of the word "fuck," came from a satirical poem, written in Latin, in the year 1500. The line is referring to a group of friars, and runs like this: "Non sunt in coeli, quia gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk." If it suddenly starts looking like Kryptonian instead of Latin after the word quia, it's because it had to be written in code. Each letter of the word was swapped out for the letter following it in the alphabet. Remember that the alphabet was in a different order back then, and that Latin conjugates verbs differently, but gxddbov translates as "fuccant." The overall line states, "They are not in Heaven, since they fuck the wives of Ely." That is one racy poem!

The word was, and continued to be, the big daddy of all swear words in English for many years. It became one of the words that kept Lady Chatterley's Lover banned in plenty of places. The word was unutterable in polite company. It's still banned from most television stations and most print media.

Still, it has always been used, and its increasing popularity means that it's becoming less likely to be held back from media discourse. Lately things have been changing especially fast. The FCC lately had to change regulations about fining news stations that aired spontaneous utterings of "fuck," in their news footage. It was found that the word has come to be something people use to express their frustration, instead of solely referring to sex. Frustration is not obscene, so it's highly likely that fuck may be sliding its way into generally and even media acceptability. As soon as the word acquires tones that aren't exactly the literal and obscene meaning that it was originally used to convey, censors relax. They have to. As we've seen, it's too easy to play with language, hiding deeper meanings behind compound words, resetting context, and making words seem innocent. Is it only a matter of time before five hundred years of dirtiness becomes sanitized as a mere expression of frustration? And if so, what to do we say then?

SpaceX Dragon: The Space Capsule That Just Made History

Elon Musk's spacecraft manufacturing company SpaceX made history on 05/25/2012 at 9:56 a.m. ET, when its Dragon capsule was captured by the International Space Station's robotic arm. The vessel berthed at the ISS at 12:12 p.m. ET.

DragonX is the first privately owned space vessel to berth at the International Space Station.

Musk, a co-founder of PayPal, began the SpaceX Dragon capsule project way back in 2005 and developed the craft in four and a half years for about $300 million.

According to SpaceX's site, the Dragon capsule is 20 feet in length, weighs about 9,260 lbs and can carry up to 13,228 lbs to low-earth orbit or up to seven passengers. In December 2008, the project secured $3.1 billion in funding from NASA for a contract of 12 flight missions or more.

Dragon is a free-flying, reusable spacecraft being developed by SpaceX under NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program. Initiated internally by SpaceX in 2005, the Dragon spacecraft is made up of a pressurized capsule and unpressurized trunk used for Earth to LEO transport of pressurized cargo, unpressurized cargo, and/or crew members.

The Dragon spacecraft is comprised of 3 main elements: the Nosecone, which protects the vessel and the docking adaptor during ascent; the Spacecraft, which houses the crew and/or pressurized cargo as well as the service section containing avionics, the RCS system, parachutes, and other support infrastructure; and the Trunk, which provides for the stowage of unpressurized cargo and will support Dragon’s solar arrays and thermal radiators.

In December 2008, NASA announced the selection of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon spacecraft to resupply the International Space Station (ISS) when the Space Shuttle retires. The $1.6 billion contract represents a minimum of 12 flights, with an option to order additional missions for a cumulative total contract value of up to $3.1 billion.

Though designed to address cargo and crew requirements for the ISS, as a free-flying spacecraft Dragon also provides an excellent platform for in-space technology demonstrations and scientific instrument testing. SpaceX is currently manifesting fully commercial, non-ISS Dragon flights under the name “DragonLab”. DragonLab represents an emergent capability for in-space experimentation.

Kevin Smith Riffs on Spoilers

Kevin Smith Riffs on Spoilers, His New Show for Movie Geeks
Interview at Wired.com

Kevin Smith likes to talk. He’ll riff for hours on pretty much anything — comics, farting, hockey, Bruce Willis, the general state of the internet. But mostly he likes to talk about movies. A lot. With people. And with his new series Spoilers, that’s pretty much all he has to do.

The show, which will premiere June 4 on Hulu, will showcase Smith and 50 die-hard movie fans right after they’ve seen a big blockbuster movie on opening night, creating a monster gab-fest full of opinions, fights and — because it’s a Smith endeavor — plenty of gags and a bit of Jason Mewes (the Jay to Smith’s Silent Bob).

“Who doesn’t have something to say in this day and age? Everybody wants a platform — social media is all about, ‘I have an opinion and here it is!’”

The Spoilers audience will consist of fans who sign up through a website, launching Monday, and request the movie they want to see. Filming will take place at Smith’s new SModCo Studios on the Universal Studios CityWalk in Hollywood, where the attendees will watch the movies.

Putting butts in seats is the least of Smith’s worries about the show. “It’s going be easy to fill those slots, but the trick, of course, is filling them with people who have something to say,” the Clerks director said in a phone interview with Wired. “But who doesn’t have something to say in this day and age? Everybody wants a platform — social media is all about, ‘I have an opinion and here it is!’”

Harder than finding an audience for the show and getting them talking, though, will be keeping the ever-verbose Smith and his similarly passionate fans from going on too long and keeping their language in the realm of what can be said on network television (the standard that Hulu shows follow). Zak Knutson, the Chop Shop production company co-founder who will be editing the show, already warned Smith to keep it brief.

“He was like, ‘Look motherfucker. This is not one of those shows you can do for three hours and expect me to cut down to half an hour and deliver it to Hulu in the schedule we’ve got,’” Smith said.

Wired got on the phone with Smith to get the spoilers on Spoilers, which will begin with a 10-episode season and go up each Monday on Hulu and Hulu Plus. In the process, naturally, we got much more than that. Read on to get the geek auteur’s thoughts on Star Wars pen pals, having sway on the internet, and his aspirations for sucking Bill Murray’s dick. (Metaphorically speaking, of course).

Kevin Smith: Thank you! That, to me, was such a big win because as much as I love watching those dudes — you gotta realize Bryan and Walter are two of my dearest friends in the world, and I’ve always thought they were hysterically funny — so to be able to fucking turn on not just TV but AMC and see those dudes on TV? For six times I kept telling myself, like, “If they only do it six times, count your blessings, don’t bitch. Even if you don’t go to Season 2, you struck gold.” This never happens — people don’t turn to you and say, “Let’s do a TV show about your friends.” Then when they said, “Hey, we’re going to do Season 2,” I was just like, “Oh my god legitimacy! True legitimacy!” It was really neat, so I appreciate that.

“I got one of those long stick mics from the ’70s, like a Donahue-type mic, and I’m getting in everyone’s face like, ‘What did you think?’ When you turn the mic on the audience it’s pure gold.”

Wired: You’re becoming something of a force in TV now.

Smith: That led to this show [Spoilers]. Because, here’s what I learned doing Comic Book Men: When I pitched it, it was like, “It’s Pawn Stars in a comic book store.” And the spine was always going to be transactions — people coming in with stuff and Walter deciding whether to buy it or not. And what was learned when we aired the shows was the will-he-won’t-he-buy-it? — people didn’t care about that. It didn’t matter. What they loved was just seeing the thing come in and seeing the conversation that it kickstarted. So with Spoilers I was like, “OK, man, let’s take the notion of what we, those of us who really love movies, do online afterward — we go and we chitchat about it on an internet forum. Let’s take it and do it live.”

Being on Talking Dead, man, is a real eye-opener because it was like, “This counts? This TV show just happened and this TV show is about the TV show that just happened? This is amazing!” So, let’s take all this that we’ve learned, or what I did with the Red State tour, or what I’ve been doing for years, which is showing a movie and then having a Q&A afterward — let’s take all that stuff and put it into Spoilers. The notion is: Watch the movie with everybody, we take them out and pay for them to go see the movie, kick back — on opening day, none of this early bullshit, ain’t doing it like those critics, doing it legit — and then just go down the street, sit down and have a gabfest, man.

I got one of those long stick mics from the ’70s, like a Donahue-type mic, and I’m getting in everyone’s face like, “What did you think?” Instead of co-hosts in a movie-reviews show where you’ve got a fat guy and a skinny guy saying “yes” or “no,” it’s a fat guy and 50 other people. It’s not the normal constant. I was forced to watch Donahue as a kid. My grandmother would be like, “Oh, my Donahue is on.” The first half of it was painful because it was like pundits and windbags talking to each other. But what I loved when I tuned in was when he turned the mic on the audience. Because the whole time he’s up there, you see people in the audience shaking their heads and they’ve gotta get something off their chests, they don’t agree. And when you turn the mic on the audience it’s pure gold.

Wired: Especially movie geeks.

“I’ll have on my friend Malcolm Ingram, who hates everything. He’s one of these nihilists. If it’s popular he can’t stand it. He represents the internet.”
Smith: I figure, if I’m sitting down with movie fans who just watched a movie? These cats are going to be electric. I don’t need a co-host — I’m going to have 50 different co-hosts every week. That’s just for the first half of the show. Then we’ll get into the segments and stuff we do.

Wired: What’s the format? What kind of segments can fans expect from Spoilers?

Smith: We’re going to do a beat called Movie Goon where like I’ll have on my friend Malcolm Ingram, who hates everything. He’s one of these nihilists. If it’s popular, he can’t stand it. He represents the internet. So we’ll bring him on and let him have his say and then we’ll beat him up verbally and tell him why he’s wrong — have a good old-fashioned debate.

We’re going to do a bit called Criterion Corner, where we sit around and geek out over the library and talk about flicks that maybe people don’t know about. There’s so many titles in the Criterion Collection now that people don’t even know them all. We’re doing cartoons as well. We’ll be doing a Hollywood Babble-On cartoon.

Segment four is Icon Interviews, where we sit somebody down in the chair and gush over them. Grab a Stan Lee, or if we’re lucky, get man-of-the-moment Joss Whedon. Plop them down in what we call the “high chair” — it’s like a throne. We modeled it off the Conan throne. We just sit there and I Q&A with them, and then I turn it over to the audience and let them Q&A as well.

Then we’ll end with a little Jason Mewes bit as well. He’s excited to be the bit guy. We’ve got this bit we do in the live show called “Let Us Act,” where we pull people from the audience and they do scenes from movies with Mewes, so we’re going to do some of that.

Wired: You’ve done movies, podcasts, a TV show and countless other things. Why do a web show on Hulu?

Smith: To me it’s like, go where you got the juice. And where do I have the most juice in this world? It ain’t multiplexes — it’s online. Online I’ve got some sway. I’m like Lawnmower Man in that movie, I’m god here! You take me offline and in the real world I’m a fat, schlubby idiot. There it makes more sense for me, rather than be like, “Hey everybody! Close your computer and turn on your television!” It’s way easier for me to go on Twitter and drop a link and say, “Here’s the latest episode of Spoilers — go watch it at your convenience.”

Wired: It seems like more directors and actors are headed to web series these days, right?

“When I first got in the movie business people were like, ‘Ew, TV.’ Right now the internet is in the same place TV was when I started in film.”

Smith: When I first got in the movie business people were like, “Ew, TV.” Like, they ghetto-ized it. Now TV is this dominant medium and film people look at it and go, “Man, I want to do a TV show.” Right now the internet is in the same place TV was when I started in film. Everybody’s got a laptop. The fluidity between online and networks, it exists. Hulu is owned by a couple networks, so obviously the networks are very much alive and well. I watch my 30 Rock episodes on Hulu anyway and I know there are a lot of people like me. If I’m one of those cats and open up my Hulu and there’s 30 Rock and right next to it is Spoilers? What do I fucking know? It could be on some channel I’m unaware of. I’m just watching the show and then I’m like, “Oh it’s a Hulu original. Go figure.” There’s fluidity now. Nobody cares. There’s no difference now between what is a TV show and what is not.

Comic Book Men, when it ran on AMC, only ran in the U.S., but meanwhile on Twitter I would say 25 percent of my reaction came from people who were overseas who can’t possibly watch it except to BitTorrent or grab it on Usenet. So if they’re already doing that? Shit man, why am I wasting my time going over here, converting it, and then hoping that they catch up with it online when I can simply give them a link and say, “I’ll be over here on Hulu waiting for you any time you’re ready for me.” Create content, leave it there. No more of this, “Let’s spend a shit-ton of money to make sure they come on opening weekend!” That’s a fool’s errand unless you have The Avengers in your back pocket.

Wired: Speaking of Avengers, is Spoilers just going to focus on geek and genre pictures, or will you also throw in the random rom-com or indie film?

“I think you might be able to pull it off with [thought-provoking] movies like, ‘Oh my god, The King’s Speechwho knew?!’ Even like, ‘Oh my god the movie with Fassbender, his dick saves it!’”

Smith: We’re going to launch in the summer blockbuster season, so that gives us our pick of the litter of big, fun movies. But I’m a comedy guy, so we’ll mix those in there, and I’m an indie guy, so we’re going to try to mix those in there as well. But we know for a fact, god willing, if we’re lucky enough to go for a second season, if we launch a second season it would be Oscar season so we would have to do a different kind of Spoilers, where we’re looking at these thought-provoking pictures and stuff. Movies are movies, at the end of the day. Even Ordinary People is fun to talk about in a room, if you get enough different personalities talking about it. I think it’s possible to pull it off even with movies that aren’t like, “Oh my god The Avengers, wasn’t that cool?!” or “Oh my god The Dark Knight Rises, wasn’t that amazing?!” or “Oh my god Prometheus!” I think you might be able to pull it off with movies like, “Oh my god, The King’s Speech, who knew?!” Even like, “Oh my god the movie with Fassbender, his dick saves it!” You’ll get content out of it.

That’s the beauty of sitting down with 50 different personalities. While you’re shooting it, anything goes, man. One of them could knife me, you know what I’m saying? We’re sitting there getting so passionate about the back and forth — they don’t like the movie and I do and suddenly it’s like, “Aaahhh!” Hopefully we’ll have a metal detector and that won’t happen.

Wired: It’s not a good argument unless it comes to blows.

Smith: I’ll take a punch in the name of movies. Some people say I owe movies a punch or two based on Cop Out and Jersey Girl. I’ll take those punches.

Wired: So is this your chance to be a movie critic after being subjected to them for so long?

Smith: Film criticism became very, you know, yes-or-no, black-and-white, thumbs-up-thumbs-down kind of affair. You don’t really see movies handled by “professionals” on TV the way they’re handled on the internet. That’s where you see people just love on a movie. So, I’m like, “Let’s do that version.”

“I’ll never be a guy who’s just like, ‘It’s bullshit! It sucks! It’s the worst!’ I know what goes in to making a movie.”

Before I was a moviemaker, I was a movie lover. And I would sit around and watch At the Movies and Sneak Previews because A) I was a kid and I wanted to see clips of the movies that were coming, but B) These were the only two people in the world who talked about movies like they were important. They were the proto-geeks, the proto-internet — Siskel and Ebert — who talked about movies with such enthusiasm that it made you feel like, “Oh my god, this is as important as watching the evening news.” And it is. Movies are as important as watching the evening news because the evening news is so fucking depressing. You need a movie to escape.

For years I was just a movie lover and then for this weird, wonderful period of time I was a moviemaker. So that gives you this different insight into the process where, I’ll never be a guy who’s just like, “It’s bullshit! It sucks! It’s the worst!” I know what goes into making a movie. I know nobody sets out to make a bad movie. At least I’ll be able to bring some sensibility to it, having done it. For years, you were always able to throw at a critic, “Yeah? What does your movie look like?” So now, I’ve got a bunch of movies under my belt, so I can go out there and talk about movies in a judicious way. Plus, you stick around long enough, they give you chairman emeritus status on anything. I’ve been in the movie business 20 years, and even if I suck at the job, they’re like, “He’s been around, he’s an expert.”

“I would love to suck Bill Murray’s dick in that way that I do — not the actual dick-in-mouth version, but the verbal, ‘Oh my god, without you I wouldn’t be who I am!’ way.”
Wired: Do you have any dream guests for the show?

Smith: I can talk to absolutely anybody. But in the world of people that I would just love to sit there and be like, “Let me ask you this! Let me ask you this! Let me love you about this and let this audience do the same.” I think an ultimate get for me — and we’ll never get him — Bill Murray. This is going to sound weird, but I would love to suck Bill Murray’s dick in that way that I do — not the actual dick-in-mouth version, but the verbal, “Oh my god, without you I wouldn’t be who I am!” way. That’s the people I gravitate toward, who without their art I don’t think I would have gravitated toward mine.

It’s much easier to go to people I know I can get. I know I can turn to Edgar Wright and say, “Dude, let’s sit down and talk about Scott Pilgrim. Because this audience will still love talking about Scott Pilgrim. Let’s talk about Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.” With Stan [Lee], it’s obviously easy because you have a lifetime to talk about. But I look forward to talking to cats that I don’t know that well, but I know their work and kind of dig it, like Gerard Way. I want to sit down Gerard Way and be like, “Dude, you could get so much pussy, why do you bother writing comic books?

Smith: When Clerks came out — and I’m not saying “I did this fucking first!” — but when Clerks came out nobody was talking about Star Wars anymore. Star Wars were three movies that happened and they were done and we had moved on as culture. George Lucas hadn’t started talking about, “I’m going to do this again!” So when I talked about Star Wars in Clerks, it was this weird moment because that’s what me and my friends would do. So Clerks plays at Sundance — but that’s in America and when the movie plays there, people talk about Star Wars, people are like, “Yeah, yeah, I remember Star Wars.”

When I went to Cannes and I sat down with a French journalist, and this was the first time I’d went overseas with the movie. I’m sitting down with a dude who doesn’t speak very good English, but I don’t speak any French whatsoever so it doesn’t matter, and he’s measuring his words so carefully so as to not sound like he doesn’t know English and this is what he says, “Uh, Jay and, uh, Bob ….” I say, “Silent Bob.” He says, “Yes.” Then, “They are R2-D2 and C-3PO, no?” And suddenly I was like, “What?! How do you know Star Wars?” And I realized that’s what we share. Everywhere people wanted to talk about it.

This generation, that would be The Avengers or the Harry Potter series or something like that. But the birth of pop culture was right at that moment. But the sad thing is it will eventually go away. Now it’s hard because everybody does it. It was easier for me, back in the day. Even in Clerks 2 I had to transition from talking about Star Wars to talking about Lord of the Rings. If I talked about Lord of the Rings now people would be like, “What is this, 2000? Move on!” Now if you want to pop culture riff you’ve gotta do Avengers, Hunger Games, stuff like that.

“I joined the Star Wars Fan Club and got me a pen pal. I had this dude up in Alberta, Canada, who I would write back and forth to about Star Wars.”

Wired: Do you think the rise of Star Wars fandom as it is, and the plethora of pop-culture references to it, coincides with the rise of the internet?

Smith: When I was a kid there was no fuckin’ internet, so if you wanted to talk to somebody about Star Wars you had to write a letter to Starlog and hope it got published. Or, like I did, I joined the Star Wars Fan Club and got me a pen pal. I had this dude up in Alberta, Canada, who I would write back and forth to about Star Wars. I always compare it to what I guess it’s like for gay dudes when they had to go into a public restroom back in the day — tap the foot on the floor to try and see who is interested. Back then, man, you would write to a guy — a stranger in another country — and be like, “Do you like Boba Fett’s jetpack?” and hope he’d write back.

Now, man, you can commune with people without communing with them. We can talk to strangers about the things we’re passionate about. And things that would never have fan bases can build fan bases. If there was no internet, my career would’ve been over years ago. But what I can do is put people in touch with one another. Here’s a dude over in Alaska who likes me, and a chick in Florida who likes me, and now they’ve fucking met through a website and you become a conduit. So thank god for the internet, it allows somebody like me to kind of thrive. Otherwise, short attention spans and costly budgets would’ve kept me from getting an audience together years and years ago. I would’ve been out on my ass.