Building on Sarah’s post about signposts to bad SF and mine about Google Map play, here’s a Google Maps satellite image of the giant signpost to bad SF. Terraserver has a closer view. Best I can guess, maybe that’s a landing strip for aliens to the southwest of the marker.

Even better than just making maps available, Google made them easy to mix with other information, and lots of folks are doing just that.

Oh, sure, their human rights record is dismal, but it’s not till he finds out they’re mean to puppies and kitties that McCartney boycotts China.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops publishes movie reviews, rating films on this scale:

• A-I — general patronage;
• A-II — adults and adolescents;
• A-III — adults;
• L — limited adult audience, films whose problematic content many adults would find troubling. L replaces the previous classification, A-IV.
• A-IV — adults, with reservations (an A-IV classification designates problematic films that, while not morally offensive in themselves, require caution and some analysis and explanation as a safeguard against wrong interpretations and false conclusions);
• O — morally offensive.

I am interested by the notion of films requiring analysis and explanation as a safeguard against wrong interpretations and false conclusions.
They gave Serenity an A-III.

There are a whole lot of tower cranes near my workplace lately, including one that had a climbing frame. I never got to see the climbing frame in operation, so I had to poke around on the web and at my local library to get an explanation. One of the first hits I got was a story of a horrible crane accident involving a malfunctioning climbing frame operated by an unqualified crew. I’m glad nothing similar happened to the 500-foot crane I used to walk past twice a week.

Joss stopped by Whedonesque a while back to talk about a Buffy/Angel comic (that will be part of the Buffyverse canon) and other stuff that may be of interest.

Starting 1 January 2006, the IMEX catalog will be available only on the web.

The last Doctor Who spin-off doesn’t seem to have made it past the pilot (though we still love Sarah Jane and K-9), but Torchwood is heading a different direction altogether, and has a 13-episode series ordered.

James Bond’s employer, the Secret Intelligence Service (a/k/a MI6) has joined other formerly unacknowledged organizations in going public on the web. Their web tree structure interests me: on the one hand, having no hierarchy to your web site does make it easier to avoid giving anything away about your organization’s hierarchy; but if you’re going to go that far, why not just have entirely random page file names instead of "PageXX"?

Australia’s Supreme Court, in a shocking show of reason, has ruled that it’s legal to play games you have legally acquired.