Seattle Sunset

Oscar Peterson and Andre Previn duet

Dear Interpol:

We will trade you one former vice-presidential traitorous vampire for Julian Assagne.
Your Friend, Hugo

A Brief History of Mathemetics

A Brief History of Mathematics is a BBC series of ten fifteen-minute podcasts by Professor Marcus du Sautoy about the history of mathematics from Newton and Leibniz to Nicolas Bourbaki, the pseudonym of a group of French 20th Century mathematicians.

Among those covered by Professor du Sautoy are Euler, Fourier and Poincaré. The podcasts also include short interviews with people such as Brian Eno and Roger Penrose.

Dan Hicks Double Shot

LOL: Boing Boing gets pwnd

Wikileaks to target a Big Bank

 Uh-oh. I hope Julian Assange has life insurance and bodyguards. It's one thing to take on the government. But to embarrass the corporate oligarchy? As in BofA? Risky business. 

Early next year, Julian Assange says, a major American bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out. Tens of thousands of its internal documents will be exposed on Wikileaks.org with no polite requests for executives’ response or other forewarnings. The data dump will lay bare the finance firm’s secrets on the Web for every customer, every competitor, every regulator to examine and pass judgment on.

When? Which bank? What documents? Cagey as always, Assange won’t say, so his claim is impossible to verify. But he has always followed through on his threats.

We have a winner!

 The 2010 'Bad Sex in Fiction' award goes to The Shape of Her by Rowan Somerville.

The books that Somerville beat at being the worst are here. More bad sex scenes from The Shape of Her can be savored at The Guardian. 

They also raise a great question over there at the Guardian: Why is there not a good sex in fiction award? Rather than just snickering at embarrassing efforts like this, sexy, literate love scenes should be rewarded, too, no?

Read a very NSFW excerpt from The Shape of Her below the fold.