Sony is in the process of rebooting the subervisve, anti-fascist 1997 film Starship Troopers – also known as the movie with a post-Doogie Howser, pre-Barney Stinson Neil Patrick Harris. The reboot follows the trend of such franchise remakes as RoboCop and Total Recall, where satire and irony get cut out and replaced with 3D and totally slick graphics.
It’s been more than a decade since the last Jurassic Park sequel, and Spielberg’s royalty checks are starting to run a little dry, so writers have been hired to develop the script for Jurassic Park 4, taking it in a ‘completely different direction.’ So long as that direction still involves cloned dinosaurs and lots of money.
After a ridiculous amount of time at liberty, George Zimmerman – the guy who shot Trayvon Martin for wearing a hoodie – has been taken into custody and charged with second-degree murder. Due to some oddment of Florida law, a charge of first-degree murder was ruled out. If convicted, Zimmerman faces life in prison.
So! The British Home Office announced yesterday that new legislation will soon allow the government to monitor the calls, emails, texts and website visits of every single person in the UK. The Home Office then had to clarify that, no, this was not some sort of elaborate April Fools prank.
6’1′ bombshell, Jenna Talackova of Vancouver was disqualified from the Donald Trump-owned Miss Universe Canada beauty pageant for “not meeting the requirements to compete despite having stated otherwise on her entry form,” according to competition officials. By which they mean she was disqualified for being born with male genitalia.
Hey, you remember the Leprechaun horror franchise? No? Well don’t worry, somebody at Lionsgate did, and they’re totally rebooting the idea that maybe the tiny green-clad people are in fact vindictive, murderous drunks. Because that’s the sort of fresh injection of ideas that Hollywood needs right after a St. Patrick’s day weekend.
Advertising agency BBH has come under fire for their turning 13 homeless men walking Wi-Fi hotspots at the recent SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. The “Homeless Hotspots” sported shirts saying, “I’m a 4G hotspot,” with an access code for the network.
English heavy metal band Motörhead has launched a line of bottled alcoholic beverages, because that’s just what you do when you’re a band of a certain age. There’s Motörhead Vodka which, sure, heavy metal, makes sense, and they’ve also released Motörhead Shiraz. Because I guess that’s heavy metal too.
25 people have been arrested for alleged ties to hacktivist movement Anonymous in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Spain in the joint ‘Operation Unmask,’ which I’m sure has nothing to do with the INTERPOL website being taken down yesterday and everything to do with attacks against websites in Columbia and Chile dating from the middle of 2011.
Hoof. The legal battle waged by the the Occupy London camp to keep their place at St Paul’s Cathedral was lost last night – and within about five minutes of the injunction being ordered, the camp was evacuated by bailiffs and officers from the City of London Police.
A bunch of emails have been leaked from the Heartland Institute, the think tank vaguely infamous for being at once massively skeptical of climate change and funded by billionaire global warming deniers, the Koch Brothers. The emails suggest that the Institute has been paying scientists and bloggers to discredit climate change research.
Chris Brown’s success at the Grammys – he won an award for the Best R&B album, and performed to a standing ovation – has been mildly overshadowed by people getting upset over his beating up Rihanna. So, like all mature and repentant individuals, he turned to his Twitter account to set things right.
Man, look, I know the successive restriction of online liberties is something we should be fighting tooth and nail, but I can’t be the only one who heard about last Saturday’s ‘Twitter Blackout,’ in protest of Twitter’s new censorship policy, and failed to care.
So! The shutdown MegaUpload and charging of founders with piracy ostensibly started with a copyright scuffle between the filesharing site and the Universal Music Group. Except the shut-down was also timed to scupper MegaBox, a venture to sell artist’s work directly to consumers while letting artists keep 90 percent of earnings. Raised eyebrows all around.
Well, it’s nice to see that the House and Senate can agree on something. Although in this case they’ve agreed to a provision snuck into the U.S. military’s 2012 funding bill that grants the military power to conduct “offensive” strikes online — including clandestine attacks. And won’t that be fun for everybody.
There’s a Red Cross committee presently debating whether or not people playing war video games should be subject to the same humanitarian laws as people involved in real wars with real people and real weapons. So far as I can tell they’re doing this entirely seriously.
Sylvester Stallone is teaming up with Ukranian heavyweight boxers, Wladimir and Vitali Klitschko, to produce a stage musical based on Rocky. Is it worth making a joke about this? I mean my feeling is that the ridiculousness of the situation sort of speaks for itself, but let me know if you need more.
Philip Hammond, Liam Fox’s replacement as the UK’s Defence Secretary, announced to MPs that ground-to-air missiles would be deployed “to protect” the 2012 Olympic Games in London if deemed operationally necessary. This follows shortly after America announced intentions to send up to 1 000 security agents to provide protection for US contestants and diplomats.
At 2am this morning the NYPD started violently clearing out Zuccoti Park, where the peaceful Occupy Wall Street protestors have been camped out. The cops are using pepper spray, they are using LRAD sound weapons, and they are actively preventing any official media from reporting on their violation of OWS members’ constitutional rights. Shit’s gotten real.
Cosmetics line, Lip Smacker has unveiled a new line of Girl Scout Cookie-themed lip balm tubes featuring balms matching five well known cookie flavours – Thin Mints, Trefoils, Tagalongs, Do-si-dos, or Samoas. So, you know, now you can have whole minutes of cookie taste on your lips without any impact on your hips.
As part of its promotional campaign for the new Chrome operating system, Google has quietly opened up its first retail store in London, called the “Chrome Zone”. The store is Google’s first venture in realspace retail, using the location to sell its Chromebook computer line.
Please notice the “allegedly” up there. Reports claim that two senior officials at the SABC have been arrested in London after refusing to pay two prostitutes for their services; the two men were in the UK for a business school initiative set up between South African and British academic boards.
Well hey, that sounds at least a little familiar. Ivan Lewis, shadow culture secretary is presently proposing a licensing scheme for journalists at the Labour party conference in Liverpool, which would have the power to prohibit people from doing any sort of journalism – which would have to include tweeting, blogging, and uploading pictures of stuff.
Really not exaggerating in that headline. Two days ago, blogger Shoshana Hebshi, a self-described “half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife,” found herself cuffed and thrown off a Frontier Airlines flight and strip-searched – because she was seated next to two Indian guys she didn’t know, and another passenger had found that suspicious.
Greenpeace! What a dumb idea. That giant recreation of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man is going to disappear as soon as that iceberg melts – OH. Oh gosh. You’re trying to put together some sort of heavy-handed metaphor about ‘mankind,’ ‘melting,’ like some sort of iceberg, because of ‘climate change.’
I know, I know; can you really steal art from somebody as dangerous and transgressive as Banksy? Two of his pieces, put together during his 2007 project on the West Bank, Bethlehem Santa’s Ghetto, have popped up in a show called Banksy: Original Street Works, at the Keszler Gallery. In the Hamptons.
You should know about this. Ali Ferzat, an immensely popular Syrian cartoonist and outspoken critic of President Bashar al-Assad’s violent crackdown on the opposition, has been beaten, burned, and had both of his hands broken by masked gunmen, as a warning to cease his anti-Assad activism.
Sure, why not. Tiny South Pacific island nation Niue will be accepting coins minted with the faces of Star Wars characters as legal tender, because if you’re a tiny South Pacific island nation there’s really only so much you can do to keep things exciting.
Aleksandr Pylyshenko, a Ukrainian artist who owns a private zoo in the city of Vasilyevka, plans on living in an enclosure with Katya and Samson, his lions, for five weeks to raise money to improve the zoo’s living conditions and to increase awareness of underfunded private Ukrainian zoos. So that makes sense.
Wonderful. A Taiwanese court ruled this week that a female food-blogger’s claim that a local restaurant’s beef noodles “were too salty” justified 30 days in detention, and two years of probation. Even better, she has to pay 200,000 Taiwenese dollars (about 50K ZAR) in compensation to the restaurant.