Daily View, 7/12

• Sweet lord. I know the US is getting dumber, but this is awful: many, many girls sign petition to end women's "sufferage" [sic]. "I thought it already ended..." Sigh.


• I also find it appalling and mystifying that apparently 75% of women don't know how to use gadgets. ???


• Ok, whatever, it's not just me: the Onion rips on Beowulf & Grendel


• Smell my website, coming soon from Japan.


• While I applaud the successful targeting of niche markets, and suspect that my tune may change when I someday birth a bunch o' babies, I still find it freaky that the entire point of these Mom calling cards is to strip away all identity but that related to your child. Sure, in all fairness, you're Little Snotty's Mom to all his teachers and to other parents... but to the point where you'd make up what is essentially a business card promoting that fact?


• I'm not sure why this especially upsets me, since species are being wiped off the planet at a dizzying daily rate, but I actually cried "Oh no!" at my desk when I read that the African black rhino is extinct...


• Chavs, however, are alive and thriving, and firmly clad in their Burberry. I kinda love that they've hijacked the snooty brand, though I'm put off by what seems to be the global rise of white trash culture. If you don't bother to read the article, at least watch the animation.


• I'm becoming slightly (and unintentionally) intrigued by Donald Sutherland. Granted, I've been watching a lot of 70s films lately but damn, he's been popping up all over the place... Klute, The Great Train Robbery, Pride & Prejudice... and, yesterday, the 1978 remake of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I watched the original 50s version and the remake back to back, and I have to say, they both hold their own. They're very different films—the original is straight up 50s sci-fi, possibly a light commentary on postwar domesticity, possibly just plain popcorn. The remake is a full on 70s paranoia genre film, much more complicated, and actually surprisingly good (there is only one FX shot that rings totally false, otherwise it's held up nicely). The dialogue was particularly interesting—in one scene (emphasis mine), Donald Sutherland is trying to convince Brooke Adams to go see a shrink rather than jump to the crazy conclusion that her boyfriend is no longer really her boyfriend: "[The psychiatrist] would eliminate a lot of things... whether Jeffrey was having an affair, whether he'd become gay, whether he had a social disease, or he'd become a Republican... all the alternatives—all the things that COULD have happened to him to make you feel that he had changed." Meanwhile, young, luscious Jeff Goldblum is in it and Leonard Nimoy manages to be very un-Spock. I liked it. Donald Sutherland (and the paranoia picture genre) is growing on me.


• I kinda love that you can send your kid to summer camp with a trunk full of clothes labeled in monster movie font (or something equally ridiculous).


• Very cool: a Flickr set of groovy 1960s and 1970s pharmaceutical ads from Spain.


• Apparently Slate thinks that none of its readers realized that Bombay became Mumbai in 1995. Um, seriously? I guess there are still people living under rocks, but I feel like this is really general knowledge (lol, meanwhile the Blogger spellcheck doesn't know the word!).