A briefer history of time

1336-1573 - Era of the Ashikaga Shogunate in Japan. The audiobook "Doctor Who: The Jade Pyramid" (written by Martin Day, read by Matt Smith) *seemed* like it was set during this time period. I emailed the author for a more specific date and he was nice enough to reply, giving learned reasons why he'd deliberately kept it vague.

1926 - Bulgakov's "The White Guard" partially published.

1986 - British musos/marketing exercise Sigue Sigue Sputnik deliver a piece of sample-heavy pop-rock genius entitled "Flaunt It", which retains its off-the-wall appeal to this day.

2007 - Founding of free blogging network Tumblr, used primarily for collating pics on a specific subject, as with - to pluck an example from the air - Fuck Yeah Girls With Short Hair.

2011 - New Zealand-born, Australian-based mixed martial artists James Te Huna and Mark Hunt both do the business at UFC 135.


"Take Netflix, which is used by 20 million people to rent and watch movies. Of the movies rented in the US, 60 per cent are chosen because Netflix recommended them. It does this using an algorithm called Pragmatic Chaos, which takes into account other movies you like and how many movies you rated before you rated your most recent one. The algorithm is taking ideas about human behaviour and coding them and reinforcing them.
"The danger is that such an algorithm can create a monoculture. But this is not the way culture works - it is actually much spikier, much less predictable. The movie 'Napoleon Dynamite', for example, always breaks the Netflix algorithm: people who really should love this movie hate it, and people who should hate it, love it"
- Kevin Slavin in "Welcome To The 'Algoworld'", "New Scientist" mag (August 20).

"'The Back to The Future' trilogy is perfect and contains no plot holes! Except for the plot hole inherent in nearly all time-travel films: The planet Earth is moving through space at an immense speed... So if you travel back in time, you are travelling to a time when the Earth was in a different location, and you and your time machine would appear somewhere out in deep space. For a time machine to be useful, it also needs to be able to teleport you to wherever the Earth was/is at your destination time"
- Excerpt from Amazon.com Q&A with Ernest Cline.

"If this fight were to go to the 10th round, Hannibal actually has the fuel to get there, and Genghis just may gas out"
- An amusing application of sporting terminology from Dr Armand Dorian, "Deadliest Warrior" (S03E04).

"Nature abhors a zombie"
- Grave Bramble, "M:TG - Innistrad".


Wazzock.