Nepenthe

Twilight fans are apparently driving up sales of Wuthering Heights — Edward and Bella's favorite book. This led us to wonder what other classic books could be endorsed by contemporary bestsellers. Apparently undeterred by the creepiness and tragedy of Emily Brontë's love story between Catherine Earnshaw and the foundling Heathcliff (who at one point hangs another girl's dog), Twilight author Stephenie Meyer even has Bella quote Brontë at one point to describe her feelings for Edward. Taking Wuthering Heights as a model for your love is a little like walking down the aisle, to, say, "Heart-Shaped Box," but that doesn't seem to bother Twihards. They're gobbling up a new edition of the book, complete with a very Twilighty cover and the tagline "love never dies." However, some readers are annoyed with the content. One reviewer wrote on the publisher's website, I was really disappointed when reading this book, it's made to belie...

e viva o YouTube, caraças!

Titiangate : Eton old boy David Cameron admonished Gordon Brown during Prime Minister’s Questions for not knowing the date of the Renaissance painter’s death. Unfortunately the date offered by Cameron was wrong. When this became apparent an over-eager Tory apparatchik attempted to make his leader correct by amending Titian’s Wikipedia entry. This rather obvious piece of revisionism backfired and resulted in Cameron’s minor slip being more widely reported. Senator Edward Kennedy: After the venerable senator had suffered a seizure during President Obama’s inauguration, one rather over-enthusiastic contributor amended Kennedy’s status to "dead". Currently serving his eighth consecutive term in the US Senate, Mr Kennedy is still – at the time of writing – alive. Vernon Kay : It’s not just elder statesmen that are listed as dead before their time. Vernon Kay, the TV presenter, was listed as having met a watery grave in a yachting accident and was obliged to ...

He may be best known for his mellifluous tones and gentle manner, but for one group of botanists Sir David Attenborough clearly conjures up different associations. Explorers who discovered a new species of giant rodent-eating carnivorous plant have named it after the TV naturalist. Nepenthes attenboroughii , a previously unknown variety of pitcher plant discovered on a remote mountain in the Philippines, is so big that small rodents could be trapped inside and slowly dissolved by flesh-eating enzymes. It is thought that only a few hundred of the plants exist, growing only on one mountain on the island of Palawan. The species was discovered by a team of scientists who had heard reports from missionaries who got lost in the dense jungle. Stewart McPherson, Alastair Robinson and Volker Heinrich decided to name the plant after Sir David as an “expression of gratitude” for his decades of work celebrating the natural world. “He has inspired a generation into protecting ...

Although these ones are expected and cheered ;)

Who designed this poster? Who came up with the idea for this heart? Please...

LOS ANGELES ( Hollywood Reporter ) - Portuguese actor Diogo Morgado has been cast as Joseph in "Mary, Mother of Christ," an action drama about the biblical journey of young Mary and Joseph during the terrible reign of Herod the Great. He joins Camilla Belle, Al Pacino, Peter O'Toole and Julia Ormond in the indie movie, which is scheduled to begin principal photography in October. James Foley ("Glengarry Glen Ross") is directing from a script by Barbara Nicolosi and "The Passion of the Christ" co-writer Benedict Fitzgerald. Morgado turned up at the end of a global search to cast the lead. "We saw a huge amount of young actors and a couple were great," Foley said. "We thought we had finished our search when a tape appeared with this incredible guy. A major future star walked in the room, and I knew we had found the one." Morgado has been one of the most recognizable actors in Portugal since his debut as a t...

PLINKY It has never been easier to express yourself in public. Whatever you might want to say, the online tools to let you say it to a (theoretically) worldwide audience are innumerable. Say it long, say it short, say what you want, when you want and how often you want. As the title of a forthcoming book about blog culture puts it: “Say Everything.” You have the technology. The only thing the technology cannot do is solve this problem: What if you don’t really have anything to express? Ah, but technology can solve that problem for you. Plinky.com , which officially went online in January, exists specifically to offer what it calls prompts, meant to inspire interesting thoughts to share with the world. Users respond on Plinky.com and can feed their answers to their own blogs, or to their Twitter or Facebook accounts. Its chief executive and founder, Jason Shellen, worked for the company Pyra Labs, which created the pioneering software Blogger, and stuck around when Google bought...

The first time I used Urban Dictionary , the online open-source dictionary of slang, I was looking for “timbos.” I thought I knew what the word meant — Timberland boots — but I hoped to discover whether timbos were still part of hip-hop style or had reverted back to being the farmwear I’d known as a kid. (The usage example put to rest my query: “Man when we was runnin from the cops my timbos felt like air nikes on me . ”) At the time, my larger question was whether timbos, or anything else, could ever go back to the farm once they were anointed in song by the Wu-Tang Clan . Maybe the dictionary would also give my childhood’s unprintable but banal barnyard slang for the same boots. It didn’t. I found a related entry that defined “tools” as people who wear Timberlands stylelessly and “think that they are ghetto when they are actually quite white.” After only a few minutes and some minimal triangulation of entries, I felt pretty confident about where the boots stood between farm and g...

Once the standing ovation died down, anticipation among the 6,500 people packed into a Comic-Con convention hall in San Diego was almost electric as they waited for the first words from the silver-haired alchemist of animation, Hayao Miyazaki. To the opening question from Pixar leading light John Lasseter about how he develops his stories, the white-jacketed, 68-year-old director replied, "My process is thinking, thinking and thinking -- thinking about my stories for a long time." Then with an impish smile, he added, "If you have a better way, please let me know." His answer sparked laughter and affectionate applause, if little revelation, and foreshadowed much of what was to come in Miyazaki's ensuing West Coast tour before thousands of fans in the last week of July, a visit that provided rare U.S. exposure for the reclusive Japanese creator of "My Neighbor Totoro," "Princess Mononoke" and the Oscar-winning "Spirited Away." Before ...

The enormous 100ft Lego tower thought to have broken the world record for the tallest tower was made from 500,000 bricks at Legoland, Windsor in 2008. A 5,922-piece Lego replica of the Taj Mahal, considered to be so tricky that only those over the age of 14 are recommended to tackle it. It's Salvador Dalí and his Lobster Phone by The Little Artists, who've also created other miniature artists like Damien Hirst and Gilbert and George. Great moments in Lego history Transformers sparked Hollywood's love affair with toy-based action movies two years ago, followed by current box-office hit GI Joe. Now another playtime favourite is to get the big-screen treatment – yes, it's Lego: the Movie. The film is being put together by Warner Bros in association with the Danish toy manufacturer, Variety reports . Lego has famously been fiercely protective of its property in the face of regular Hollywood overtures, but warmed to the idea of a family-oriented flick embracing its key value...

We belong to a remarkably quirky species. Despite our best efforts, some of our strangest foibles still defy explanation But as science probes deeper into these eccentricities, it is becoming clear that behaviours and attributes that seem frivolous at first glance often go to the heart of what it means to be human. 1. Blushing Even Darwin struggled to explain why we would evolve a response that lets others know that we have cheated or lied 2. Laughter The discovery that laughter is more often produced at banal comments than jokes prompts the question, why did it evolve? 3. Pubic Hair Scent radiator, warmth provider, or chafe protection? The answer to why humans have clumps of hair in private places is still open for debate 4. Teenagers Even our closest relatives, the great apes, move smoothly from their juvenile to adult life phases – so why do humans spend an agonising decade skulking around in hoodies? 5. Dreams Today, most researchers reject Freud's belief that dreams are expres...

Since clearly I am not Lost in Translation(s), why not? A is for ARGOT Nothing makes you feel more like a tourist than not understanding the locals, and fashionland has a language all of its own. Viz: anti-fit (definition: clothes that don’t fit); “channelling” (copying); “investment bag” (expensive bag); “pieces” (clothes); “product” (clothes and accessories); “editing” your wardrobe (throwing away old clothes); “pricepoint” (price); ferosh and/or fierce (rather nice). Some terms are beyond translation — “directional”, for example. Nobody seems to be entirely sure what that means. See also PRONUNCIATION. B is for BLACK “The new black” became the new shorthand for “the next big thing” in the early 1980s, when minimalism and Kraftwerk ruled, and lots of people wore black. The phrase stuck, even when only undertakers wore black. Soon, though, “the new black” will once more be literally accurate: 2010 promises to be a very black year, hue-wise. So right now, “black is the...

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below is an example, not functional on this page, click on TRANSLATION PARTY to start partying ;) Start with an English phrase: let's go! Screw you, guys, I'm going home into Japanese ねじは、みんな、私は家に行くよ back into English Screw, Everyone, I'm going to go home back into Japanese ねじは、誰も、私は家に帰るつもりだ back into English Screw, Everyone, I will go home back into Japanese ねじは、誰も、私は家に帰る予定 back into English Screw, Everyone, I'm going home back into Japanese ネジは、すべて人は、私は家に行くよ back into English Screw, Everyone, I'm going home Equilibrium found! Shame on you, by the way. Found thanx to JC via Twitter

Go to Mawalien Invasion Or to Já Cheiro o Samádhi I just stole this:

Primeiro episódio já online: A RTP-1 decidiu mesmo antecipar a transmissão integral da nossa série As Divinas Comédias , o último trabalho do Raul Solnado, que apresenta os episódios com o Bruno Nogueira. Ontem foi transmitido o primeiro episódio, que fazia um breve historial da comédia na televisão portuguesa; hoje fala-se de personagens e bordões que ficaram para a História; o episódio de amanhã, 2ª feira, fala de autores e actores e, finalmente, no episódio final, na 3ª feira, fazemos uma lista, construída com base em opiniões de pessoas ligadas ao humor, de elementos do público e da própria equipa do programa, contendo os melhores e mais emblemáticos sketches de 50 anos de comédia televisiva nacional. Estes sketches do último episódio passam quase todos na totalidade, o que, vistas bem as coisas, faz do episódio 4... o programa de humor definitivo da História da TV! Parece-me que é inédito ver uma corrente imparável de sketches reunindo numa hora, e em grande forma, os talentos ...

Methinks this is my first post about a videogame, but it is, in and of itself, different ;) (and it proves my Poetry and Technotronic labels are not conflicting...) The developer that brought you the award-winning PLAYSTATION Network title flOw is back with another concept that challenges traditional gaming conventions. Flower expands the team's tradition of delivering simple gameplay, accessible controls and a medium to explore emotional chords uncommon in video games. In Flower, the surrounding environment, most often pushed to the background in games, is pulled to the forefront and becomes the primary "character." The player will journey through a beautifully vivid and changing landscape in this fresh and genuine game only on PS3. The game exploits the tension between urban bustle and natural serenity. Players accumulate flower petals as the onscreen world swings between the pastoral and the chaotic. Like in the real world, everything you pick up causes the environmen...

All Creatures

A farmer in Utting in Germany has turned a field of hemp into a giant maze that looks just like comic book characters Asterix and Obelix

What a delightful logo! And, yes, it's a brilliant idea ;)

Don't forget to click on Watch Footage :)

The essential American soul," wrote D.H. Lawrence in a celebrated description, "is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer." Of course, he was talking about Natty Bumppo and similar rough-and-tumble frontier spirits. By contrast, the amoral Tom Ripley—novelist Patricia Highsmith's most famous character—is easygoing, devoted to his wife and friends, epicurean, and a killer only by necessity. By my count, necessity leads this polite aesthete to bludgeon or strangle eight people and watch with satisfaction while two others drown. He also sets in motion the successful suicides of three friends he actually, in his way, cares about. Yet aside from an occasional twinge about his first murder, Ripley feels no long-term guilt over these deaths. (Tellingly, he can never quite remember the actual number of his victims.) He was simply protecting himself, his friends and business partners, his home. Any man would, or at least might, do the same. Tom, as his indulgent creator tends t...