Does This Thing Go Past 11?

Right, so do we all remember how excited we were about The Expendables when we first saw that Sly, Arnie, Willis, Li, et al. were going to be in a movie together?

Now add Chuck Norris and JCVD (and probably more Arnie and Willis).

Take a moment to let that sink in.

Now watch the trailer:

Trailer Frenzy: The Avengers

So here is how my day has gone so far:

I saw this,



And then I went like this,

RDJ's snarky Tony Stark paired up with Whedonisms galore? Forget the action, I'd watch the movie just for that!

Weekend Wrap-Up: Neil And Hugh Sing A Tune, And It Was Good

Its safe to say that I come across a lot of things I think are cool in my meanderings about the internet. Here is where I get to close some tabs and share my findings!

This week we have the Tony's, lionesses trying to eat babies and the internet as a basic human right. Onward ho!

---

So Neil Patrick Harris hosted the Tony's recently. Have I ever mentioned how much I love NPH? The promise of more NPH almost - almost - convinced me that going to see the new Smurfs movie wouldn't be such a bad thing. Almost. I've gone through pretty much all the clips from the show, but this has got to be my favourite of the bunch. Also, if the Oscar people are listening, this is how you put on an award show. Tony > Oscar any day.

---

This is actually old news by now, but I cleaning out my bookmarks and came across this gem: Born fighter - The five-year-old boy who has sold 3,000 of his own monster drawings to pay for the cancer treatment that could save his life.

---

Not overly surprised to hear this, but given the increased attention the internet has been getting with its use as a tool in the unrest in the Middle East and Africa, the United Nations Human Rights Council has recently declared internet access to be a human right. Given the (mostly failed) attempts to stifle access in Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia, and given the importance of the internet as a tool for mobilization and communication, this declaration certainly will have some interesting policy implications. CBC's The Current takes a good look at the issue.

---

Six seasons of American Gods on HBO as well as a potential sequel? Be still my beating heart.

---

Apparently the line between tragedy and comedy is only a few inches of plexiglass.

+9000 Internets, AKA I'm Going To Need A Bigger Screen

By Ward Shelly

The only real way to appreciate the awesome work that went into creating this amazingly detailed "map" of science fiction is to embiggen it: go ahead, bask in its geeky wonder.

Look At Your Blog, Now Back At Mine

Hello Ladies,

Guess who's back? I'll attribute it to not really watching TV on TV any more, but somehow I managed to miss the return of Isaiah Mustafa ("Old Spice Guy") to the internets. And he has brought gifts! No, not two tickets to that thing you love, but new commercials. Oh, and they returned on my birthday. Awesome.








Obligatory: probably the best parody of the commercials, done by no less than Grover!

How To Perform Song-writing Alchemy

This is apparently how you create a hit pop song. Who knew it was this simple?

Note: There is some brief profanity at the beginning and end of the video.

An Epic of Epic Epicness

Step One: Play video

Step Two: Fall off chair

Step Three: Repeat

Oh internetz, when will you quit?

Now For Something Different

In the last little while NASA has really been ramping up its search for habitable planets outside of our solar system and, by extension, for extraterrestrial life. Today NASA held a panel which has had some serious buzz around it. Lets be honest here; you bring together some astrobiologist, an organic chemist and to talk about a major discovery that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life and people are going to get really excited. So what was it all the buzz about? A new way to view life.

Or rather, an exception to our rules regarding what makes up life. What they have discovered is a microbe which can substitute arsenic for phosphorus in its basic, molecular make-up. That may not sound like such a big deal, but when you consider that all life we know of so far uses carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur as its basic building blocks, and that phosphorus is essential in forming DNA and RNA, you can see the kind of paradigm shift which biologists are facing and the potential opportunities for the discovery of life on planets and moons which we may not have considered before.

It is still the very early days for this kind of study and there are a lot of questions which still need to be asked, but the implications of this discovery are huge.
via NASA

Also, io9 has a really nice summary of the findings and the whole event today