The Null Device
2004/3/24
The latest apparatus to adapt to meet the needs of the Supersize Age is the ambulance. To cope with exploding numbers of morbidly obese patients in the US, new ambulances are being rolled out, fitted with beefed-up suspension and dual rear wheels and a winch for loading patients. Expect to see these appearing in your corner of McWorld soon. (via jwz)
Headline of the day: Zombies defeat robot Jesus. Which is actually about film ticket sales. Meanwhile, zombies have also attacked the RIAA. (via jwz)
While we're on the topic, George Romero's classic zombie film Night of the Living Dead has, by some mysterious means, gone out of copyright (funny; I thought only works made before 1924 or sometime did that), and can now be downloaded here. Download sizes range from 4.1G for MPEG2 (which, I presume, is what you'd burn to a DVD) to a svelte 248.8Mb for MPEG4/DivX.
The Untitled Project is a series of photographs of urban settings accompanied by a graphical text layout. The photographs have been digitally stripped of all traces of textual information. The text pieces show the removed text in the approximate location and font as it was found in the photograph. (via jwz)
In France, traditional comics such as Asterix and Belgian import Tintin are facing a manga invasion, which is proving a hit with French teenagers. And many French anime-otaku are getting into dressing up in elaborate anime character costumes for a spot of le cosplay.
Tikka masala, Britain's national curry dish, has been found to contain carcinogenic dyes, often at illegal levels. The additives, tartrazine (E102), Ponceau 4R (E124) and the appropriately sinister-sounding Sunset Yellow (E110), add nothing to the flavour, but give the dish its distinctive yellow colour, without which many customers wouldn't eat it. (I wonder whether the tikka masala pastes/sauces you can buy in supermarkets are similarly carcinogenic.)