Month: July 2013

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Like The Word As A Bang, You Have To Think Again

Suzi Eszterhas/Minden/SolentFrom the Guardian’s Photo Blog:

Wouldn’t you just love this job? An Orangutan caretaker bathes an infant at the Orangutan Care Centre, Borneo, Indonesia. This one-year-old is one of 330 orphans at the centre. They spend every waking moment with their caretaker and develop special bonds. Photograph: Suzi Eszterhas/Minden/Solent/Solent News

Comic-Con starts in two days. With the amount of stuff I have to do between now and then, I feel more than a little bit like this monkey right now: Washed out, and maybe a little defeated.

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Oompa, Oompa, Stick It Up Your Jumpa

frenchhornFrom the Guardian’s Photo Blog:

Musician Carly Lake plays her french horn during a performance of an eight-minute piece called Live Music Sculpture 3: St Paul’s Cathedral. The work has been composed by Samuel Bordoli specifically for the cathedral’s acoustic properties and features 27 musicians in six groupings spread throughout the vertical and horizontal points of the building. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

Let us all agree that the French Horn is the great democratizer of instruments. There isn’t anyone in the world who doesn’t look ridiculous playing it.

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You Got A New Fool/Ha I Like Him Like That

firetownFrom the Guardian’s Photo Blog:

A resident tries to put out a fire after a blaze engulfed a shanty town in Manila. Photograph: Ted Aljibe/AFP/Getty Images

Just look at how close that fire actually is, and how terrifyingly flammable everything around the person seems to be. It’s all you can do to stop yourself wanting to reach into the picture and grab the person with the bucket to shake them and yell get out now.

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Hey Now In The Shade

jumpFrom the Guardian’s Photo Blog:

A boy jumps from a pier of bridge against the sunset across Han River in Wuhan, China. Photograph: Barcroft Media

There’s something so ridiculously summery about this image to me, and so serene, too. Everything is weightless, waiting for the splash.

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The Ballad of Dark Clouds

smokeFrom the Guardian’s Photo Blog:

Smoke from the Carpenter 1 fire in the Spring Mountains range is illuminated by the setting sun as it billows behind hotel-casinos on the Las Vegas Strip. Photograph: Ethan Miller/Getty Images

I’m pretty sure that’s the very definition of foreboding, that photo.

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WAM! BAM! POW! KRONTCH!

manhunterCOMICS, EVERYONE.

Seriously, Jack Kirby (with inker, D. Bruce Berry, in this case): This is just amazing. Manhunter is something that Kirby did for one issue, an edition of a series called First Series Special, in the 1970s, and it’s this entirely unfinished story filled with melodrama and potential and everything that I love about superhero comics. There’s so much there there.

Plus, that costume design is so, so great.

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Busy Doing Nothing (Note: Not Actually Nothing)

So, I may have accidentally disappeared from this site a little last week. It wasn’t intentional, I promise; I just found myself entirely snowed under with work as I started writing for the Hollywood Reporter’s Heat Vision blog and realized worryingly quickly that I had underestimated just how much additional work that would actually be in reality (I gave up two other gigs in order to free up enough time, but the workload didn’t translate as I’d initially thought). That it was also a holiday weekend – Huzzah for July 4, which came at the right time to stop me feeling completely overloaded – both helped and didn’t help everything, as it frontloaded things onto the start of a week that was already busy but also gave me some breathing room that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. Anyway, I’m sorry for disappearing without notice, and will try not to do it again in future. Well, except for next week, which is Comic-Con which I’m working for Wired.com, and therefore will be crazy and quiet and AIEEEEEE.

(That I am now writing for Wired, Time and the Hollywood Reporter, by the way, is both surreal and slightly scary to me. This has to be the peak, right? It’s all downhill from here on, as I flame out in spectacular fashion.)