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So, all over the news today were reports like this:

An Italian scientist who predicted a serious earthquake in central Italy but was dismissed as a scaremonger said: “The authorities have these deaths on their conscience.”

Seismologist Gioacchino Giuliani had warned “a big one” was on the way and even toured the region in a van with loudspeakers warning people, as late as last week.

But he was reported to the police by authorities for “needlessly spreading panic” and also dismissed by L’Aquila’s mayor and other civic officials.

All very Roy Scheider facing off against complacent local bureaucrats in Jaws. It was being tweeted all over the place and burning up the social news sites for most of today. A great, rabble-rousing story about an underdog hero whose warnings were ignored. Every story referred to Giuliani as a seismologist and a scientist.

Italy’s Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica released the following press release this morning (this is a Google Translated version of the cached press release; their website, with the original, is currently down for some reason.)

Referring to press reports about the earthquake that struck last night, the Abruzzo region, the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica states:

1. Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica’s mission and purpose of the study of phenomena that occur in space and in the universe and not from earthquakes or other phenomena related to geophysics;

2nd Mr. Gioacchino Giampaolo Giuliani is a non-graduate technical assistant at the Institute of Space Physics Interplanetario of Turin, which is one of the twenty INAF structures;

3rd Mr. Giuliani is working as technical assistant at the National Laboratory of Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) for the Gran Sasso of IFSI-INAF, within the framework of cooperation in your multipartner LVD (Large Volume Detector) for the detection of neutrinos produced by gravitational stellar collapse;

4th the activities of Mr. Giuliani compared the alleged possibility of forecasting earthquakes are not a search INAF, but are conducted by Giuliani himself for personal purposes outside of the service for the institute.

It would appear Gioacchino Giuliani is not a seismologist; he does not even, it seems, have any academic science qualifications at all. He is a lab assistant at an astrophysics institute, and he does earthquake prediction as a hobby, using the notoriously vague and unproven radon method – his prediction was actually that an earthquake would hit a town fifty miles away a week earlier (the sort of details you need to actually be right about if you’re going to start evacuating places).

This story came, as far as I can tell, not from some tabloid, but from Reuters, who were the ones who inaccurately spread the description of him as a “seismologist”; even now, in their newly updated, toned-down story, published many hours after the INAF released their statement, they still call Giuliani a “scientist”, and inaccurately say that he works at the National Insitute of Physics (not Astrophysics, which would give you more of a clue that he’s maybe not a specialist). Reuters are a trusted voice; when they write a story, it spreads around the world. This is, quite frankly, shoddy work on their part.

As is now becoming tragically traditional, here’s my pigeonhole-breaking list of the best Things In General from the past 12 months. As is also traditional, it’s late. If you’re a regular reader, and remember the 2007 and 2005 lists, you’ll know the project by now: every year, the cruel hegemony of categorisation unfairly forces stuff into neat boxes. Iron Man was “a film”. Boing Boing Gadgets was “a blog”. The moment someone did something impressive in a sport was “a sporting moment”. This blog rejects such reductivist notions, and instead celebrates the innate thinginess of things, allowing – say – Will Wright’s Spore to go head-to-head with Billie Piper for the title of Best Budget Italian Restaurant.

So, without further ado, here are the 21 best things of 2008:

21. WALL-E
Made me cry, twice, on both legs of a flight to and from New York. I wasn’t the only one who cried, either: witness this awesome, awesome story from MetaFilter, which could have made this list all by itself. And will also make you cry.

20. Mars Phoenix
“Take care of that beautiful blue marble out there in space, our home planet. I’ll be keeping an eye from here. Space exploration FTW!” was the most moving piece of writing of the year. What I said here pretty much covers it.
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So there’s been this internet brouhaha for the past few days, which isn’t of any real direct interest to you unless you have a reluctant but obsessive fondness for Blog Drama!!! (to which I plead guilty). But I think it does illuminate – or at least confuse in an interesting way – a lot of the problems that people are having adjusting to the still-newish world of mass online publishing, so I’m going to try teasing my thoughts out, as much to legitimise the many hours I wasted reading all the threads on this over the past couple of days as anything else. It’s a hugely overlong brain-dump, more about organising my own thoughts – obviously, I’d appreciate any comments you may have.

In brief, Boing Boing, one of the biggest blogs in the world, and a longstanding voice arguing for openness, honesty and user engagement in the public sphere, at some point decided to delete all their old posts that had linked to or mentioned Violet Blue, a generally tedious sexblogger of whom they had previously been rather fond. As is the way with the internet, somebody eventually noticed, it came to the attention of both Violet Blue herself, and tech gossip blog Valleywag. Things spiralled from there - a huge blog that regularly rails against censorship and secrecy had been caught ‘censoring’ their own site, and despite frequent enquiries from other bloggers and the media, they weren’t saying why. Rex from Fimoculous compared it to the deletion of post which had linked to him, which he speculated was because the BB crew found out he’d written a post slightly critical of them. It made the front page of the LA Times website. A MetaFilter discussion began, and quickly achieved some sort of insane critical mass.
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Blogging this because it doesn’t quite fit into a del.icio.us link or a tweet, and because, hey, I’ve decided I should blog more often. The Hollywood Reporter brings us news that the studio MGM has picked up a script called Hot Tub Time Machine.

The money quote:

“We’re always looking for ways to stand out from the rest of the pack in today’s crowded marketplace, and what better way than to combine hot tub debauchery and the complications of time travel,” said MGM exec vp production Cale Boyter…

This is almost certainly excellent news for humanity.

After a hiatus last year, when I forgot to do it, here’s the 2007 instalment of this blog’s ongoing project to fight the crude pigeon-holing tendencies shown by other end-of-year lists. No longer shall Neon Bible be relegated to the “best albums” parade, just because it was, in fact, an album. If Gordon Ramsay’s refurbished gastropub in Limehouse wants to compete for Best Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, rather than best restaurant, then it is free to do so. We not not bracket, compartmentalise, or divide. We celebrate unity through diversity.

So, here you go – here are the 19 best things of 2007:

19. The Arcade Fire at Glastonbury
Was it such a borderline epiphanic experience in spite of the drug-addled hippy with a poor sense of personal space who kept on trying to walk through my back during the entire set – or was it, in part at least, because of him? No. It was nothing to do with him. But thankyou anyway, kind sir.

18. Tony Blair fucked off
And for a precious, golden few days, it seemed like good sense, quiet competence and a dignified sense of principle might be restored to our government. Of course, not so much. But it was nice while it lasted. A clear winner of Vegetarian Restaurant of the Year.

17. The finger-tapping, eye-staring thing that The Rock does in Southland Tales to indicate that he’s going mad which is a bit like someone doing a Stan Laurel impersonation except they’ve never actually seen footage of Stan Laurel and have in fact just read about him on Wikipedia
Majestic.

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(Part 1 of an ongoing series, in which I attempt to tease out coherent thoughts from my now-broken brain regarding the jaw-dropping Richard Kelly sci-fi comedy drama satire musical apocalypse fiasco/masterpiece. Very minor spoilers.)

Days since watching film: 1

1. Attempting to explain the contradictions, frustrations, marvels and flat-out insanities of the film in words was, I believed, a futile endeavour. Sounds, maybe – I was toying around with a noise that can best be transcribed as “ooooohaaa- waaaiiahwaaiiahwaaiiah-eh’eh’eh! Eh! Eh?”. It seemed to sum it up well. But then I happened across a review in the Chicago Tribune by Michael Phillips, in which he gets round the problem by inventing the word “whatzahoozy”:

To be clear: The odds are in favor of you hating it. I hated a lot of it when I saw a barely dry work-in-progress print, 163 minutes long, at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s 19 minutes shorter and better now, though “better� is relative when you’re dealing with a whatzahoozy such as this.

Google confirms that the word “whatzahoozy” has only ever been used once – by Michael Phillips, to describe Southland Tales. And he’s spot on. It’s a whatzahoozy, possibly the biggest whatzahoozy in living memory.

2. In trying to write a review of the film, I found that I couldn’t use any of the traditional phrases used by critics when they know that a film was basically terrible, but have decided to be sympathetic. For example:

• “Whatever it is, at least it’s never boring” – No. It is frequently quite staggeringly tedious. Almost aggressively so.
• “It may be hard going, but Kelly’s is a unique vision” – I think the part where Kelly decides that the bowling alley musical dream sequence in The Big Lebowski was kind of cool and so he’s just going to do it again pretty much nails this one to the barn door.
• “Try as you like, you can’t ignore it” - I suspect that a significant number of people will manage to ignore it very successfully.
• “Intelligent” – Often stupid.
• “You have to admire its ambition” – It’s about the end of the world, has a large cast, and features a big shiny metal zeppelin. These can all be mistaken for ambition, but actually aren’t. The first isn’t terribly ambitious when 100% of your previous filmography was also about the end of the world, the second mostly means you’re just not very good at editing your scripts, and the third is ambitious only in the sense that he had an ambition to feature a big shiny metal zeppelin. A noble goal, certainly, but not really ambitious in the broader philosophical sense of the word.
• “It shouldn’t work, but somehow it does” - Shouldn’t work. Doesn’t.

3. I burst out laughing four times today at the mental image of The Rock doing his finger-tapping madness look. It’s a thing of pure wonder; you really have to see it for yourself. An enigma wrapped in a riddle wrapped in a whatzahoozy.

4. How the fuck long was Justin Timberlake’s opening narration/exposition dump? I swear, it felt like it must have been a good twenty minutes of JT telling us mostly irrelevant information that would then allow us to more fully comprehend the world we were watching incoherent unstories fail to take place in. Essentially, its goal was to ensure that the audience were at least baffled in context, as opposed to the more free-form, untethered befuddlement that might otherwise have ensued. Jesus. Has anybody timed it?

5. Nobody told Seann William Scott that this was a comedy, did they? Ha. Poor mite.

6. What was with all the midgets? Seriously.

To be continued…

And, we’re back for part II. No “funny” captions this time, because the captions are already funny.

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And so, just because I have mild OCD, here it is: a shot-by-almost-every-shot breakdown of the new super-wonderful internet Hot Fuzz trailer (edited by E. Wright; score by R. Rodriguez)…

Part I – Naming people:

They made it.

So did they.

And them.

Pegg running.
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This right here? Brings the funny.

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One of the greatest moments in the history of Newsnight Review (or The Late Review, as it was then) was when Tom Paulin somehow managed to find deep meaning in Speed.

Somewhere around Sandra Bullock’s line about “what did we do to this guy – did we attack his country?”, Paulin convinced himself that it was actually an insightful look at individual alienation in a fracturing world, or something.

This would not have happened with Snakes On A Plane.

Snakes On A Plane tries to do nothing other than to mine every possible nugget of fun from that old, old story – what happens when a crime lord tries to kill a key witness by putting a load of (***SPOILER***) snakes on a plane. There is no social realism. There is no analysis of political agency or the innate prejudice that lurks beneath the facade of civilisation. The snakes are not symbols for anything, except for how awesome snakes are.

It is, thank fuck, not Crash.

It knows what it is. It is a snakes on a plane movie. The director knows what it is, the cast know what it is, and Samuel L Jackson (throwing himself into it, super serious, like there’s an Oscar for Best Reptile Antagonist) sure as hell knows what it is. The studio, of course, didn’t know what it was for quite a long time, but finally they just threw their hands up and went with the flow.

It has the best snake/toilet scene I have ever witnessed

Yeah, you can tell where the re-shoots happened – the tone jumps about like a rattler on Pro-Plus on a hotplate. But that means that you get the juicy stuff – the shots, the dialogue, the impalements (there are a surprising number of impalements, sadly none of them [**SPOILER**] on frozen, sharpened snakes) that are the whole darn point of any good snakes on a plane movie. The Internet really should be credited as a co-director.

It’s funny, really funny; sometimes with an overt, campy winkiness, other times just through sheer, joyful oversnaking. And it’s also a proper gory eat ‘em up, with several guaranteed frights and plenty of gruesome herpetological face-twatting.

It has the best snake/toilet scene I have ever witnessed, to the extent that well over an hour later, you walk out of the cinema shaking your head at the realisation that you just saw a film where a dying man screams (**SPOILER**) “somebody get this fucking snake off my dick”. And it feels good.

The non-Jackson cast are also enjoyable, manfully refusing to act like they’re in Airplane! when many of them really actually are playing characters from Airplane!. It has Julianna Margulies from ER. It has Nancy from Peep Show as a vacuous bimbette with a dog. It has Champ Kind from Ron Burgundy playing the co-pilot, and playing him as Champ Kind from Ron Burgundy. Whammy!

Criticisms? Sure. Duh. The tone flaps about a bit, as I said. They actually include for real that thing from the Orange adverts, where the guy ruins movie pitches by saying (**SPOILER**) “could they save the day through picture messaging?” (Seriously, they do). And the ending is more than a touch anti-climactic, going a bit too far down the comedy flightpath, and lacking the really big scene you wanted with Jackson going mano e snako with a seriously huge bastard snake.

But really, it hardly matters. It’s an unashamed and unafraid out-and-out creature-feature, a righteous chunk of OTT snakesploitation that puts the snakes right where you want them. On a motherfucking plane. It’s not quite at the level of a classic like Tremors - but with any luck, the sequel can improve on that. Snakes on a Plain: Snakes v Graboids. You know it would work.

Rating:

Superb work from the Australian Daily Telegraph (sadly, no relation to our own paper of the same name – it’s a Murdoch rag) in the opening line of their Mel Gibson “sugar tits” rant coverage:

Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic remarks could have repercussions in a Hollywood dominated by powerful Jews.

Yeah, he’s totally fucked with the wrong international conspiracy there, hasn’t he? Good thing he didn’t talk trash about Gypsies, because, you know, those guys’ll put a curse on you at the drop of a hat…

A quick memo to anybody writing sci-fi or fantasy fiction (or, in fact, any kind of fiction) about something to avoid in your Big Important Finale:

If your Big Important Finale relies on the fact that your heroes understand “the power of Love” for its resolution, it will be shit.

It is very important that you understand this.

Yes, we realise that you want your Big Threat’s major flaw to be something meaningful, rather than a space station that blows up too easily, or an unexpected allergy to an everyday household product. And yes, there are valid reasons for wanting your heroes to save the day via some quality of their inner being, rather than their abiltity to jump over big gaps or their proficiency at electrical engineering.

But please don’t make it the power of Love thing. Please. Consider the following:

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