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The Kleptones bring you a discless two-disc mash-up extravaganza, downloadable in various formats and combinations from their web site.

(via BoingBoing from ages ago)

Too bad, probably. But go ahead and search FictionFinder anyway, just in case. An excellent searchable database put together by the Online Computer Library Center, FictionFinder lets you search (or browse) by character, setting, literary form, awards, and lots of other things, too. (Like author and title, for instance.) Not only that, but once you find what you’re looking for, FictionFinder lets you track it down at a library.

I’m hoping that the “practically” in this food encyclopedia’s title refers to the encyclopedia itself and not to the food, but
in any case, it’s a potentially useful resource.

Honestly, where else can you find out about the Nottingham Goose Fair, lingonberries, and spiny lobster–all in one place?

Nowhere, that’s where!  (And Wikipedia, perhaps, but then you have all that non-food information to wade through as well.  Who wants to do that?)

Think you’re fit for a mag cover? How are your cheek shadows? How about your shirt creases (any ugly shadows?)? See retouching in action, step-by-step, in this flash exhibit.

(1994) - AKA “Cemetery Man” - dir. Michele Soavi - w/ Rupert Everett as the keeper of the cemetery, Francois Hadji-Lazaro as his faithful assistant, and Anna Falchi as approximately 37 different people.

Synopsis: Rupert Everett is Francesco Dellamorte, the keeper of a cemetery in a small town in Italy. He has a steady job, a more or less faithful assistant, and a minor problem with the people he buries not staying dead. Also, he’s kind of sick of the town, though that’s understandable; the mayor doesn’t really know what he has to put up with (the contant re-killing of the dead), the townsfolk spread vicious rumors about him (which may or may not be rumors), and his faithful sidekick isn’t much for conversation. Also, he’s not too lucky at love.

Review: Though this movie is often camp at its best, it also winds up being a curiously thoughtful film. I thoroughly enjoyed Cemetery Man, not least because of its dabblings in circular time and fluid identities. Time is circular here, but not simply because of the whole zombie thing, either; I don’t think it gives anything away to say that this is a wildly circular film. (Particularly since you won’t be able to tell what I’m talking about until after you’ve viewed the whole movie.) Identity is played with in interestingly absurd ways. Another interesting component about the movie is that the zombies in it aren’t particularly dangerous, an observation I seem to recall being made in some other review. While the whole life/death thing is pretty prominent in the plot, it’s prominent in ways larger than you might expect. The movie’s tagline, via IMDB, is “Zombies, guns, and sex, OH MY!!!” But don’t let that fool you, entirely.

Rating: [••••½] out of [•••••]

A handy list of how to pronounce difficult-to-pronounce author’s names.

(via The Millions: “Hard to Pronounce Literary Names Redux.” 26 Aug 2006.)

Okay, so perhaps there’s no script yet, or cast—or anything, really—but can we at least hope the movie version of the Equalizer won’t be totally awful? Could we hope that it might even be good?

Or…?

The director lined up right now, Paul McGuigan, directed 2003’s The Reckoning, which was actually fairly decent.

Decency, that would be good.

(All info via imdb.com. Because lord knows there’s no info at The Z Review right now.)

Yotophoto is a handy-dandy photo searching site that lets you find quality free-use photos. Search by keywords, image size, image licenses or–and this is the clincher–color. (Hence the admittedly lame title.)

Online!  Flow-charts!  Boxes!  Arrows!  Lines!

Make diagrams online with Giffy, then share ‘em online or whatever.  Floor plans, generic diagrams, flow-charts, whatever you want, Giffy can help you make it.

Handy, if you’re into that sort of thing.

…this one involving AP News stories & Google maps.  Displaying, as you might expect, a map indicating the “location” of various top AP news stories in categories such as “National”, “Sports”, and the omnipresent “Strange”.

(Who doesn’t love “strange”?)

“Draw a 100-mile circle around almost any major world city — Rome, Paris, Tokyo — and there’s an extensive commuter rail network linking vibrant communities. We have antiquated commuter rail networks around Boston and New York. We’ve starved the infrastructure.”

…

Yet New England, a century ago, had a robust rail network, covering a huge percentage of its territory. Many of the rail lines — or at least their rights-of-way — still exist. But New England’s state transportation departments have made no push to coalesce, project needed passenger services, consult with the sometimes obdurate freight railroads, rebuild the missing Hudson River bridge, and employ carrots and sticks to get longer-distance freight onto trains.

(via New England Futures: “Road, Rail, Air, Water: Separate Worlds or One System?” by Neal Peirce & Curtis Johnson)

What creature some suspected of being a mystery beast is now found to be not so mysterious, though still a little bit strange, perhaps.

Fame is fickle and fleeting for some.

(BoGlo: “Residents wonder if dead animal is legendary mystery beast” [16 Aug 2006]; WMTW/AP: “DNA Tests Reveal ‘Mytery Beast’ Was Dog” [28 Aug 2006])