Star Trek advance screening Austin Texas

WARNING: Star Trek fans ONLY should read on ! This is seriously geeky stuff here.

This is just plain cool. Leonard Nimoy makes an impromptu appearance a few hours ago at a Star Trek fan night in Austin, Texas prepped up to watch a remastered edition of ‘Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan’ and instead, via some low brow theatrics serves up a freshly minted copy of the 2009 Star Trek Movie for the stunned audience. This is in front of the widely reported release premiere in Sydney, in which Director J.J. Abrahms and a number of the films stars will be attending. Paramount Pictures appears to be thinking on its feet again from a marketing standpoint, as this coup has erupted all the Trek Blogs and fan sites across the quadrant, adding fuel to the already highly anticipated general release scheduled for 3 weeks time.

As reported in Wired: http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2009/04/nimoy-stuns-aus.html

The Ain’t it Cool guys, retell it with a great deal of excitement (WARNING: Spoilers)  http://www.aintitcool.com/node/40675

The Official Website: www.startrekmovie.com

Mercedes-Benz: F-Cell Roadster

I spotted this on Wired this morning – a new fuel cell powered Mercedes-Benz in concept stage. Harking back to the original 19th Century horseless carriage, the F-Cell Roadster is MB’s effort at wielding industrial design with cutting edge technology. Simply put – I think it’s stunning.

http://blog.wired.com/cars/2009/03/the-past-is-pre.html

BBC Book List

[Thanks to Kate M for this one, which landed on my Facebook page]

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?
Instructions: Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read – even those you’ve read more than once!
Make sure you delete my x’S! When you’ve finished, tag 10 people to do it too, and put your total at the bottom.

1 – Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen – x
2 – The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien – x
3 – Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 – Harry Potter series – JK Rowling – x (all 7….)
5 – To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee – x
6 – The Bible – x
7 – Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte – x
8 – Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell – x
9 – His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 – Great Expectations – Charles Dickens – x
11 – Little Women – Louisa M Alcott – x
12 – Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 – Catch 22 – Joseph Heller – x
14 – Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 – Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 – The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien – x
17 – Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 – Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 – The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 – Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 – Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell – x
22 – The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald – x
23 – Bleak House – Charles Dickens – x
24 – War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy – x
25 – The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams – x
26 – Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 – Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 – Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 – Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll – x
30 – The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame – x
31 – Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 – David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 – Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis – x (all 7…)
34 – Emma – Jane Austen – x
35 – Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 – The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis – x (huh isn’t this part of 33?)
37 – The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 – Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 – Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 – Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne – x
41 – Animal Farm – George Orwell – x
42 – The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown – x
43 – One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 – A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
45 – The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 – Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 – Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 – The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 – Lord of the Flies – William Golding – x
50 – Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 – Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 – Dune – Frank Herbert – x
53 – Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 – Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 – A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 – The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zifon
57 – A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens – x
58 – Brave New World – Aldous Huxley – x
59 – The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 – Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 – Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 – Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 – The Secret History – Donna Tartt – x
64 – The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 – Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 – On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 – Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 – Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 – Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 – Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 – Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens – x
72 – Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 – The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett – x
74 – Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 – Ulysses – James Joyce
76 – The Inferno – Dante
77 – Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 – Germinal – Emile Zola
79 – Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 – Possession – AS Byatt
81 – A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 – Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 – The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 – The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 – Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 – A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 – Charlotte’s Web – EB White – x
88 – The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 – Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – x
90 – The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton – x
91 – Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad – x
92 – The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery – x
93 – The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks – x
94 – Watership Down – Richard Adam – x
95 – A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 – A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 – The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas – x
98 – Hamlet – William Shakespeare – x
99 – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl – x
100 – Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

I’ve read 41 and now have a bunch of new ones to tackle. There is a particularly strong skew towards a British style of schooling with a great deal of the English “classics” in there. I’d be somewhat impressed if half these books were even heard of by anyone from outside the United Kingdom.

A quick Google of “BBC Book List” returned back a slightly different list on the BBC Website itself, posted in 2003  BBC – The Big Read – Top 100 Books with the pre text

In April 2003 the BBC’s Big Read began the search for the nation’s best-loved novel, and we asked you to nominate your favourite books. Below and on the next page are all the results from number 1 to 100 in numerical order!

Shame there isn’t more:

• Fantasy & Adventure (Eddings, Feist, McCaffrey etc),
• Sci-Fi (Banks, Gibson, Asimov, Heinlein, Scott-Card etc) &
• Espionage (Clancy, Le Carre, Ludlum etc)

The Last Supper – Battlestar Galactica

Recently the season & series finale of Battlestar Galactica aired globally. As part of the massive push to promote this much anticipated event by Sci-Fi.com geekdom and represent the interests of the general mainstream public, the series producers commisioned a photo shoot that portray’s the characters in the seminal “Last Supper” painting, as immortalised by Leonardo da Vinci. This reminded me of a number of other well known screen folk lore variants that I have seen over the years. Each brings a smile to my face for the endless religious connotations they imply.

Battlestar Galactica Last Supper

Star Wars “Last Supper”

The Brick Testament "Last Supper"

The Simpson's Last Supper

Tom Lovejack’s Blog however tops them all in terms of collating all the different approaches in his entry below, which he updates on a regular basis as entries hit the WWW.

http://blog.tom.com/tomlovejack/article/2519.html

Top Gear as portrayed by XaliaS & SIR Community

Daft Punk vs. Adam Freeland – “Aer OBAMA”