Some great panoramic photos of Britain. I like the site\’s design, with the little map in the corner showing where the photo was taken. This one looks straight out of Lord of the Rings. I think this castle was in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

The New Yorker has an article about Victor Gruen, the inventor of the mall. Malls were originally built to serve the community; Gruen envisioned the mall as the centerpiece of a community surrounded by a Ringstrasse, like his native Vienna. But in the mid-fifties Congress changed tax laws and developers started building malls everywhere just to make a profit.

Under the circumstances, who cared whether the shopping center made economic sense for the venders? Shopping centers and strip malls became what urban planners call \”catalytic,\” meaning that developers weren\’t building them to serve existing suburban communities; they were building them on the fringes of cities, beyond residential developments, where the land was cheapest.

Camera company Rollei introduced their retro MiniDigi digital camera. It looks like one of their old school twin-lens reflex cameras. The specs are rather lame though: 2 megapixels, non-zoom lens, and it uses SD cards.

Simpsons-Related Dear Abby Column Pulled

The writer says her husband, Gene, gave her a bowling ball for her birthday — complete with the holes drilled to fit his fingers and embossed with his name. Undeterred, the woman decides to learn to bowl and heads to the local lanes, where she meets another man, Franco, who is \”kind, considerate and loving.\”

Abby\’s obviously not a Simpsons fan.

$187,500 Tag for London Car Spot

A car parking space is for sale in central London for $187,500, fueling a favorite obsession of Britons — talking about property prices.

The space in an underground car park near luxury store Harrods in Knightsbridge is thought to be one of the most expensive in Britain.
…
One parking bay in the same Knightsbridge underground car park is understood to have sold last July for $177,000 while another was bought by a mother for her 3-year-old son for when he can drive.

If I were filthy rich I\’d buy the spot next to it and park on the line so he can\’t get out, just to spite him.

Saw Lost In Translation last night. I really liked it, it\’s one of the better movies I\’ve seen lately. Bill Murray gives a great performance, and I liked Scarlett Johansson in Ghost World but she\’s even better here. They perfectly captured the culture shock of visiting a foreign country

Some dude made his own iPod battery pack out of a deck of cards and a couple of batteries. He gets an extra 10 hours of playtime. Neat, but good luck trying to get it past airport security.

Battery Technology Inc. announced a 40 hour external battery pack. Not very elegant-looking though.

The Firefly movie is officially greenlighted. Titled Serenity, all the original cast will return and Joss Whedon is directing.

Whedon said the pic will be released under the title \”Serenity\” to give it some distance from the TV version. \”It was important that people understand that the movie isn\’t the series,\” he said. \”The movie is bigger, more epic than anything you can do in a series.\”

Do You Speak Metal? A metal glossary for all your, uh, metal-glossing needs. I never knew there were so many different kinds of metal.

Subtly Simpsons, a collection of subtle and witty lines from the Simpsons. Including my favorite:

\”They go to an all-night emergency waiting room run by Dr. Nick, they ask Smithers if they can go ahead of him. He replies, \”Uh no, I\’d really rather get this taken care of.\” He\’s standing up, while everyone else is sitting which I believe to be a very subtle reference to the legendary problem gay men supposedly come to emergency rooms with, namely having a foreign object in his anus he is unable to remove.\”

And this one too:

Abe: \”My car gets fourty rods to the hogshead and that\’s the way I like it\”
A rod is an arcane form of measurement, equal to 512 yards or 1612 feet; a perch or pole. A rod is also farming measurement used in spacing the furrows in ploughed fields, of 16.5 feet. A Hog is a large, often old, car or motor-cycle in old U.S. Slang, and a hogshead is an old unit of measurement for liquids equal to 63 old wine-gallons, which is 5212 imperial gallons.

I thought the writers were making up the rods and hogshead thing.
[ From Scrubbles.net ]