The first official photo from the A-Team movie is out. It actually looks decent. Liam Neeson really looks like George Peppard.

I put up pictures from my trip to London on Flickr.

Fight Club Turns 10. It\’s been 10 years already? Christ, I haven\’t done anything.

The Blu-Ray release has a prank where the menu for Never Been Kissed appears momentarily. It would be so cool if the Never Been Kissed Blu-Ray also shows the Fight Club menu momentarily.

Sherlock Holmes locations mapped on Google Maps. Interesting that all these places are still around more than 100 years after Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the stories. Can\’t say the same about LA.

All the best parts of Total Recall put into one movie clip. That\’s assuming they all died of their wounds. It looks like some could\’ve survived if they got to the futuristic hospital in time, maybe.

On a related note: all the \”dudes\” and all the \”fucks\” in The Big Lebowski.

This is cool: a map of London with everything removed except street names. No wonder cabbies are required to pass a test to get a license.
[ From Coudal Partners ]

When I was in Tokyo I visited the Tokyu Hands store in Shinjuku. It\’s a 7-story department store that carries a huge variety of goods. I was amazed at the obscurity of a lot of the stuff they have.

On the 1st floor they have umbrellas, nothing weird there. But behind the umbrellas there was an entire section of shelves dedicated to umbrella replacement parts. Need an umbrella handle? They had about 2 dozen handles in wood, plastic, metal. There were probably 30 different replacement tips for umbrella ribs.

Upstairs I found a shelf with 6 different watch winders. When\’s the last time you saw a watch winder in Wal-Mart? Then there was a display of 10 tabletop planetariums, neatly displayed in a shelf hung with a black curtain. Do enough people buy tabletop planetariums that they can carry 10 different models?

Near the top floor I found the barometer department. An entire department dedicated to barometers! And there were people browsing them! The aisle was crowded with two guys intently studying the barometers, comparing, I dunno, mercury versus aneroid models. I wouldn\’t know where the hell to buy a barometer in LA. Home Depot? Radio Shack?

I also stumbled upon the tissue box cover department. Yes, a department entirely for boxes decorated with little dioramas to make your tissue box look that little bit prettier.

Anyway, I could\’ve spent hours in that store. We\’ll never see anything like that in the States. This site has some good pictures of Tokyu Hands.

Harry Beck\’s map of the London Tube is a design classic. Most transit systems around the world have copied the look of it. All the lines are vertical, horizontal, or 45° and the resulting map is more readable and understandable in regards to the relationships between stations and where you can transfer. The problem is that it\’s not geographically accurate, as distances between stations are distorted. For example, the 2 closest Tube stations to my hotel were Bayswater and Queensway, on the Circle/District and Central lines, respectively. On Beck\’s map it looks like the stations are perpendicular to each other and kind of far apart. In reality both stations are on the same street and only 1 block apart, as you can see on this geographical Tube map. So when I was in London I mostly used Beck\’s map but I also printed the geographical map, which came in handy a few times.

I did a lot of traveling in October. First I was in Tokyo for a few days, came back to the States, then I went to London for 2 weeks. I\’m a world traveler now, that\’s like 15 timezones! Tokyo was lots of fun, but very crowded and expensive. I went with a tour group and I was only there like 3 full days so it felt sort of hectic and rushed. Although I think Tokyo is just naturally hectic and rushed.

London was amazing. I\’ve wanted to go for a long time and I finally got around to doing it. I originally wanted to go right after I finished college but I didn\’t have any money. It was just as cool as I thought it would be. I went by myself and took the tube everywhere, saw a lot of the city. I visited a lot of the major sights but even with 2 weeks I ran out of time and missed stuff. Oh well, all the more reason to go back in the future. I\’ll try to put up some pictures soon.

This site is very cool: theme park maps. I still have Disneyland and Disney World maps from the 80s and I used to spend hours looking at them.