Cartoonist Jim Benton imagines what sort of children’s book Ted Geisel might write if he were alive today. [via]

Oh my god, so adorbz!  “Greatest cartoon ever? Greatest cartoon ever. I’m not kidding, if this was on TV, I would watch it every day until I began to gibber insanely… at its cuteness, of course.”

See also: io9 took the time to put together an introductory primer to H.P. Lovecraft — the man responsible for the tentacled Cthulhu creation.  He is considered, perhaps, the master of sci-fi-horror literature.

This is a much better trailer, at least now I get the gist of the story and it’s not so much “oh look at me and my fancy CGI” which was all the last trailer wanted to do.  I might be sold with this one — even if Cameron did plagiarize his story from an old pulp novel.

Not really much to go on here, but Elizabeth Mitchell was great on Lost. This premieres next Tuesday, so you won’t have to wait long to watch the entire episode.  To be honest, not much has grabbed me this television season, so I’m hoping V becomes that show.

There is no surprise anymore that fetishes have gone mainstream, or are at least accepted enough that when someone tells you they are into say, watching grandmas with chainsaws or pregnant women read books by a fireplace, neither of those scenarios are all that shocking.  And it’s not shocking because chances are there is  a website devoted to either of those fantasies.

Still, I was a bit taken aback by this magazine, Girls and Corpses, that is the amalgamation of sexy girls and dead bodies, because it acts no differently than Equire or whatever gentleman’s magazine you prefer to read.  If I were still nine years old, this magazine would have been my sweet spot.

This is why Autumn is my favorite season: “I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I’m about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it’s gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is—fucking fall. There’s a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.” 

You best damn well better believe I’ve got a cornucopia of mutant fucking squash on my table.  I’d throw up some corn stalks and scarecrows if I lived in a house, but something tells me my condo association would throw me on the curb if I turned my hallway into an apple orchard. 

But honestly?  Colin Nissan’s piece is the funniest thing I’ve read in two weeks.

CNN.com redesign. Nice evolution.  The layout is breathable, but they still manage to pack a lot into the main page, including a feature called NewsPulse and a better method for using inline video.

This is exciting news.  Redlasso, which was a site that allowed people to search and clip and embed live television and radio clips, went dark in July of 2008 due to a lawsuit from NBC/FOX.  Obviously there were copyright issues, but I found the site to always be the first place I would look, when say, searching for highlights from an awards show either while it was still on the air or immediately afterwords.  I was a bit sad when it went dark and completely put it out of my mind.

Well, the site has relaunched and though I haven’t given the new version a go, it looks like they’ve managed to license content and keep things on the up and up with the content providers.  The layout is a bit different than I remember it being, but nothing radically so.

According to a press release:

The sources within the platform are a bit different than you may remember, but we are very excited to announce that we are launching the platform with licensed content from over 100 TV and Radio sources from around the country.  There will be at least one television news source in each one of the top 50 US cities, where the majority of the sources allow you to search, clip and share their broadcast news content.We’re also excited to unveil an entirely new site design.  Picking up where we left off, we’ve brought to life many of your suggestions from the beta.  The new site will have:

• Daily featured clips
• The ability to cross search each of our sources simultaneously
• The ability to conduct local market or regional searches
• The ability to generate instant local or category based RSS feeds
• The interactive display of all clip closed caption content for easy quoting for your blog
• A new section called “As Seen On” where we will feature your Redlasso blog posts
• A brand new Redlasso blog where we will feature great content, our members sites and Redlasso updates
• New Facebook and Twitter pages, and much more coming soon!

It’s always difficult to gain traction after losing it, but hopefully Redlasso can do so once again.

I’m surprised this didn’t happen sooner:

The company said Google Editions marks its first effort to earn revenue from its ambitious Google Books scanning project, which attempts to make millions of printed books available online. Although the scanning program has faced complaints from authors and publishers over copyright, Google Editions will cover only books submitted and approved by the copyright holders.

The books bought through Google Editions will be accessible on any device that has a Web browser, including smart phones, netbooks and personal computers and laptops, putting Google in competition with Amazon.com Inc and its Kindle e-book reader.

Tom Turvey, head of Google Book Search’s publisher partnership program, said Thursday the e-book market is evolving to allow access of books from anywhere and from any device.

Consumers can buy directly from Google or from any number of retail partners using the Google Editions platform, including online stores like Barnesandnoble.com and Amazon. Google will actually host the e-books and make them searchable.

We expect the majority will go to retail partners not to Google,” Turvey said at the 61st Frankfurt Book Fair. “We are a wholesaler, a book distributor.”

The finalists for the 2009 National Book Awards have been announced and I haven’t heard of any of these books, save for Colum McCann’s (it’s supposed to be very very good, great even!) 

For fiction, they are: Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage; Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin; Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders; Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite; and Marcel Theroux, Far North. The winner will be announced at a ceremony on November 18. [via]

Oh it’s on!  Anita Dunn, the White House communications director: “We’re going to treat them [Fox News] the way we would treat an opponent. As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”

Whoa! It’s been a few weeks since I’ve checked in with Boing Boing (not sure why) but they have a very snazzy redesign that I’m totally jealous of.  Kudos to Boing Boing.  Oddly enough it’s very reminiscent of Kottke’s most recent redesign.  Font-wise, etc.

NPR profiles the musical kingmaker through the lens of their recent top 200 albums of the decade list. 

“Pitchfork’s position as indie kingmaker was cemented at the decade’s mid-point, but kings don’t always last in indie rock. The twin peaks of the Forkhype range were Arcade Fire’s Funeral, which showed up at No. 2 on the decade list, and CYHSY’s self-titled debut, which was left off entirely,” writes Jacob Ganz. ”That binary seems fitting for a Web site that’s more emblematic of music in the Internet era than any other: Pitchfork in the 2000s has been the story of how effusive praise can avalanche into a kind of canonization, even as the thrill of discovery sometimes ends in embarrassment and revisionism.” 

This is fairly nerdy musical stuff here, looking at the decade-long evolution of arguably the one music publication that still matters.