I swear I have a rubber in here somewhere. (from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/anitasarkeesian/)

The 24th annual Dragon*Con event wrapped up in Atlanta this weekend, leaving some nerds wondering “did I just miss my chance to score?” Thank goodness for Craigslist Missed Connections:

Hottest guy at Dragon Con! – w4m – 27
Date: 2010-09-06, 11:01PM EDT
Captain. Jack. Sparrow. I hit on you (in front of my date) at the Hyatt bar. Please reply to this if you’d be interested in hearing what I *didn’t* get to say…

Dragon*Con; You were Wolverine, and I was Poison Ivy – w4m – 25 (Marriott, Atlanta, GA)
Date: 2010-09-07, 4:16PM EDT
I can’t figure out why I left without getting your contact information. I know your name is Dan, and you make leather jackets. You were the best Wolverine I’ve ever seen. We talked for a while, just standing in the crowd. I wish I could find a picture of us. Hopefully, I’ll see you at another convention soon. :)

Spencer, I need a hug. – w4m – 28 (Dragon*Con)
Date: 2010-09-06, 11:31PM EDT
If I had a TARDIS, I’d go back and make myself ask you to dinner. Temporal paradoxes be damned.

More after the jump.

Cassie, let me know if you’re interested – Dragon*Con – m4w (Sunday night rave)
Date: 2010-09-07, 1:10AM EDT
Hi Cassie,

I really enjoyed talking to you while we walked to the rave and getting to watch you dance was amazing. I loved how you were always smiling, as if you were somewhere safe while you were dancing. I thought I saw you outside our hotel when I checked out this morning but I couldnt tell if that was you sitting in the white car across the parking lot.

You didnt seem interested in me “that way” but I’d like to stay in touch and watch you dance again next year.

Drop me a line if you’re interested.

-Chris

Dragon Con Guy Wants Super Hero to Push Him Around – m4w – 35 (Dragon Con)
Date: 2010-09-05, 3:09PM EDT
At Dragon Con for one more day and night. Would really like somebody in a costume to knock me around a little. Can role play if want. I’m the crime and you’re the justice. Not interested in sex, keep your outfit on, just need a good costumed roughing up. Drop me a line.

Dragon Con – Alien vs Predator Interstellar Swinger Party (Dragon Con – Sheraton)
Date: 2010-09-04, 7:08PM EDT
Full Alien or Predator costume required. All single women and couples will be accepted. There will be limited spots for single men. I will send out the time and room number to all who qualify.

looking to get wife seduced at DragonCon – mw4m – 56 (Atlanta Dragon Con)
Date: 2010-08-07, 11:15PM EDT

Trying again this year. Tried this last year, but were sharing room and it never worked out. Have our own room this year. Wife gets very horny and playful at DragonCon. We were into the swinging scene before kids, but haven’t played in years. She talks every year about who she would fuck when we go. She doesn’t know I am soliciting for some cock for her. If you are interested in a formerly wild swinger, I will help you “meet” her and you can buy her a couple of drinks and use our room while I am “out.” She is 55, a few extra pounds, but decent shape.

[Creative Loafing via Boing Boing]

Safe to venture it’s a music/web/video first, of Google Earth proportions. Totally safe for work, unless there’s a chance of the boss coming by in the next four minutes or so. Alt + Tab will get you nowhere.

Check it out. Pretty cool stuff indeed.

dic·tio·nary
noun \ˈdik-shə-ˌner-ē, -ˌne-rē\
archaic: a reference book containing words alphabetically arranged along with information about their forms, pronunciations, functions, etymologies, meanings, and syntactical and idiomatic uses. Historically dictionaries were printed on paper and bound between leather covers. [see: book, library, reading, obsolete]

It’s been coming for a while now: the unbookification of the Oxford English Dictionary. The publisher told the Associated Press Sunday that the next version of the reference series might not be printed on paper, but only available to online subscribers at OED.com.

Nigel Portwood, chief executive of Oxford University Press, told The Sunday Times in an interview he didn’t think the newest edition will be printed. “The print dictionary market is just disappearing. It is falling away by tens of percent a year,” he said.

His comment related primarily to the full-length dictionary, but he said the convenience of the electronic format also is affecting demand for its shorter dictionaries.

It’s hard not to cringe at the idea of the OED, the world’s seminal authority on the English language, going out of print, but let’s be real for a minute. The full edition is 20 volumes, 22,000 pages and costs $995. Even if I had a grand to throw at a dictionary I wouldn’t have anywhere to put it. And I’m the kind of nerd who gazes fondly from across the room at her New Shorter OED like it’s a cute boy with glasses holding a puppy. Your average Joe isn’t going to consider dropping a G on a book of words.

The full volume has sold just 30,000 copies — since 1989. It was never a truly consumer product. But the website, which offers subscription-only access to the definitions of over half a million words for an annual fee of $295, gets 2 million hits a month. In an increasingly illiterate world, that’s pretty good.

Until you compare it to Twitter, which gets 100 times that. Sigh.

The clip above is from earlier this week. It’s an absolutely brilliant, terrifically funny and fundamentally terrifying bit on Fox News’s ties to the potential jihad-jockey who’s potentially involved in funding the potential “Ground Zero Mosque,” and who definitely has a financial stake in the Murdoch company. The discussion segues into a debate of Evil versus Stupid; is Fox News one or the other? I’m inclined toward the former, as the latter — as you’ll see in this clip — is just too unbelievable. But who says stupidity and evil are mutually exclusive? In any case, an utter lack of integrity is hard to argue with.

Last night Stewart hosted NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg to discuss the plans for the Muslim center in Lower Manhattan. It was an interesting and entertaining talk, and I think Bloomberg was calmly persuasive, though he glazed over the emotional aspects a little too easily. (For my part, I’m fully in support of the project as well, but that is the one point on which I have trouble holding ground in discourses about it — throw a a crying family at me and my edgy wit withers ever so slightly.)

At the very end of the segment, in a quick back and forth just before the commercial break when most viewers were likely tuning out, Stewart mentions that he and the Daily Show staff are hosting a benefit dinner for Bloomberg’s foundation. A little friendly banter, a nice way to end an interview. Or is it much more than that?

I don’t think Stewart was just shooting the shit, I think he was walking the walk. He was, in a subtle way, presenting a disclaimer of having ties to Mr. Bloomberg, his guest. He was doing exactly what he showed Fox to be too stupid or too evil to do: acknowledge a connection between the broadcast and a subject of the broadcast.

Stewart, with his team of goofy sidekicks, holds himself to a standard of a legitimate news organization, a standard that our “legitimate news organizations” often fall short of. Through parody and farce he displays a model of what our Fourth Branch should strive to be. Oh, and he does it sitting down, too.

Ug. Spare me.

TV news is getting harder and harder to watch. I’m not talking about the natural disasters, personal miseries and constant flow of global atrocities. It’s the  stations, anchors and correspondents that make me want to tune out. I long for the days when newsmen sat at a desk and told you what you needed to know.  Why is it in vogue for anchors to stand up all the time? Is it supposed to make the news more fun? It doesn’t. Sit down, please, just sit the hell down. Easy on the banter. Standing and chatting doesn’t draw me into the conversation and you’re not half as charming or witty as you think you are. Quit it with the queer sound effects and Top 40 songs. And spare me the citizen journalism; if I want to get my information from some amateur shmo with a goofy handle I’d go online.

The Internet is also where anonymous tweets and personal-opinion emails need to stay. “‘We need better healthcare reform,’ says @robbyray” is not news and I don’t care what Carol29 thinks about Tiger’s divorce. Astonishingly, Saturday Night Live pretty much hit it on the head this weekend. Spot on. Funny? Meh. But spot on:

Way to go with the astute commentary, guys. Anchors, take note.

From the directors of Two Stupid Stupid Guys, There's Something Going on with Mary.

Translation is a sticky game. I’ve long wished that I knew Russian so I could better appreciate Tolstoy. I wonder how much more I’d love Love in the Time of Cholera if my Spanish reading comprehension weren’t so dilapidated, or what greater enlightenment I’d have garnered from The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Kundera’s native Czech.

Translation is also a fun game, one that keeps me entertained for at least a stop or two every time I’m on the subway in New York comparing the sparse, pithy copy in the English language MTA ads to the meandering Spanish ones that require smaller font and tighter spacing to fit on the same poster, or pondering the rhythmic differences that make “si ves algo, di algo” sound better to me than “if you see something, say something.”

This post on the Economist’s Johnson language blog takes a look at interesting movie title translations, including “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” which is, in its original Swedish “Men Who Hate Women.” Definitely more going on there than just a little lost-in-translation-ing:

When I arrived in Mexico I wanted something easy to practice my Spanish, so I went looking for “La chica con el tatuaje del dragón”, as I assumed Stieg Larsson’s thriller might be known. It isn’t: the title here is “Los hombres que no amaban a las mujeres” (“The men who didn’t love women”).What a rubbish name, I thought: why couldn’t Mexicans be given a direct translation? In fact, it’s English-speakers who have been duped: the original, in Swedish, is simply “Men who hate women”. (“It was considered too scary for foreign audiences, while just hitting the politically-correct spot in Sweden,” reckons my neighbourhood Swede.)

Duped indeed. Or maybe “Men who hate women” just wasn’t specific enough to differentiate it from other Hollywood flicks.

By the by, I’ve got a little movie title translation of my own to offer — for “Burn After Reading.” Sorry, Coen brothers, you know I love you, but you got this one wrong. Shoulda called it “Burn Before Watching.”

[Thanks, Ter.]

Do we really need our movie ratings to be this specific? I’d like to see the label on a rerelease of Boogie Nights.

And how thoughtful, the kindly Brit included a link to a PDF of the labels that prints properly on standard American Avery sticker sheets.

Too bad we don’t have these for online publications. Of course if we did I wouldn’t be able to see my screen anymore. Too cluttered with labels like:

Warning: This post has been written by click whores riding the wave of this hour’s latest “news” story. There is nothing of value here.

Warning: Author has absolutely no credibility.

Warning: By clicking this link you are willfully contributing to the slow and inevitable degradation of human intelligence.

Warning: This video is not funny. The friend who sent it to you is wrong. I don’t care if he usually has the same keen sense of humor as you do. He’s wrong. It’s not funny. At all. Don’t waste your time.

[via Boing Boing]

Just a little weekday escapism, if you will. By the way, if you’re unfamiliar with Mary Roach, I highly suggest checking out her books, especially Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. She’s a brilliant reporter and a fantastic writer. I want to be her when I grow up.

This fall CBS will air a new show based on the popular Twitter feed Shit My Dad Says, or @shitmydadsays for those of you who are no longer comfortable with capitals and spaces. The sitcom stars William Shatner, who’s really running with this career renaissance thing, and would be the ideal vehicle for lines like…

“They’re offended? Fuck, shit, asshole, shitfuck; they’re just words…Fine. Shitfuck isn’t a word, but you get my point.”

…if only you could say things like that on CBS. To keep it family-friendly — and contrary to Shatner’s opinion — the show is called $#*! My Dad Says, where $#*! is pronounced “bleep.” (Related: Does anyone know how to say Dance Your A** Off? I’ve never had to, but what if I do?)

Unfortunately for fans of Shatner and fathers without filters, the show looks borderline atrocious. They should have gone with Tourette’s Guy.

Don’t talk shit about Total. And fuck salt.