On second viewing the film is no less striking and surreal, as when Rorschach breaks into the lab of an enormous, luminous Dr Manhattan, whose buttocks are proudly aglow.

My review of the Watchmen Director’s Cut has been posted over at the Eye blog.

The theatrical release was reviewed here.

Hardly anyone is going to openly defend muddled thinking or disrespect for evidence. Rather, what people do is to surround these practices with a fog of verbiage designed to conceal from their listeners – and in most cases, I would imagine, from themselves as well – the true implications of their way of thinking. George Orwell got it right when he observed that the main advantage of speaking and writing clearly is that “when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.”

Further to this, this, this and any number of things in the archive, the following may be of interest. Here’s Alan Sokal, speaking in Stockholm, May 2009, on the scientific worldview – and its opponents. Targets include practitioners of pseudo-medicine, theologians and the priestly caste of postmodernist bamboozlers. It’s a long speech and Sokal’s own leftist reflexes intrude a little too often, especially towards the end, but there are nuggets to be had. There’s an amusing schtick involving the substitution of theological fuzzwords with something more direct, and this, on religious truth claims:

The astronauts were more than excited to feel the ground, though standing on it was too hard for them after spending so many days in the state of weightlessness.

After 191 days, Soyuz TMA-11 and its three human occupants returned to Earth from the International Space Station, landing in Kazakhstan, April 19, 2008. A partial separation failure caused a ballistic re-entry that in turn caused the spacecraft to land 475 km from its intended landing site. The occupants, Yuri Malenchenko, Peggy Whitson and Yi So-Yeon, were assisted by local residents who discovered the charred spacecraft resting in their fields.

Impact craters of note. // Hidden water. // Big hair, sideburns and mainframes. (h/t, Coudal) // A compendium of temporal anomalies. // Tactile holograms inching closer. // Tentacles in New York. // Plant structures. // The root bridges of Cherrapungee. // Temporary fixes. // From terrorist to tenure. // Bacon-wrapped, cream cheese-stuffed jalapeno thingies. // The deadly buttocks of Astro Boy. // I think I see a problem with the kinetic lamp. // LED graffiti. // Remarkable motorcycles. // Electrical wire octopus. // What to do with a concrete stalker. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Mr Hoagy Carmichael.  

Pioneering adverts of the West, 1867-1918. 

The marvellous Mrs Gunn and her bust-restoring oils, 1917. “No parafine used.”