On the 8 Spot

Promise, I wouldn’t watch it just for the liplock. ehehe.

Natalie Portman was “terrified” when she had to kiss Mila Kunis in her new movie “Black Swan.”

The actress has a steamy same-sex scene with the “Max Payne” star in the supernatural thriller and admits she struggled to overcome her nerves before locking lips with another lady.

She said: “I was terrified. At the moment I lived in a state of inner terror.”

Portman – who previously shot a nude scene for short film 'Hotel Chevalier' – is also worried the lesbian sex sequence is overshadowing the plot of the film and worries it will make her be taken less seriously as an actress.

She added: “Nudity is something absolutely natural and I'm not prudish – but in a film it can be distracting. Doing 'Black Swan' I couldn't say no. The project is a huge opportunity for me to show a new me. I can't always play the nice mothers. My other problem is that single pictures are being taken out of context and put on the internet.”

via Natalie Portman’s lesbian terror | ABS-CBN News Online Beta.

I loved reading this, thanks to Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen for the pointer!!! (Trying his best to impersonate famous blogger’s tone)

Still, at the current pace my blog is gradually swallowing my life. Soon I won’t be able to get anything else done. And I really don’t get any support from Bentley, as far as I know the higher ups don’t even know I have a blog. So I just did 2500 hours of uncompensated labor. I hope someone got some value out of it. Right now I just want my life back.

via TheMoneyIllusion » Seeing the world in a different way (one year later).

Find out at the linked blog!!!!

QUESTION: What is the difference among these three photographs?

via Thought Experiment #2 – Opinionator Blog – NYTimes.com.

Then the title goes to Volcan Point in the Philippines. Treehugger has a great series of zoom-in photos that show you how that complicated geological title was won.

via Philippine island qualifies its way to a “World’s Largest” title Boing Boing.

Hope this takes of would love to spray this on my shoes.  But think what would happen to a lot of the for CSI type of evidence that is gathered?

Liquid glass will change your life, eliminate detergent profits

A Turko-German consortium has announced a liquid glass product “that will revolutionize everything” (it's a “new kind of glass,” as Mr Wolfram might put it). Seriously, it sounds like the applications for this stuff are endless, and yes, that's what everyone said about aerogel and the Segway, but maybe this time… They're shipping to the UK soon, but “many supermarkets, may be unwilling to stock the products because they make enormous profits from cleaning products that need to be replaced regularly, and liquid glass would make virtually all of them obsolete.”

Goddammit, Big Detergent is screwing up my future again!

Spray-on liquid glass is transparent, non-toxic, and can protect virtually any surface against almost any damage from hazards such as water, UV radiation, dirt, heat, and bacterial infections. The coating is also flexible and breathable, which makes it suitable for use on an enormous array of products.

via Liquid glass will change your life, eliminate detergent profits Boing Boing.

We need something like this in the Philippines. I think this should start with trying to organize all recorded interviews we have of candidates. These interviews we tag with their positions and the context. We could do this for everything a politician/journalist/business people/celebrity  etc. says. Then whenever a new video is entered into our database we can automatically query flip-flopping, bad policy advice etc! This can be done by us the citizens of the Philippines. I hope someone does this.

PS: The cynic in me keeps remembering Miriam Defensor-Santiago’s “I lied!!!”

PS1: Listen to the npr audio in the linked post.

Ps2: One of the things I’d miss from my current job is the US IP address. No more full episodes of The Daily Show. Colbert Report and

For decades, young reporters would ask themselves, “What would Walter think?” Nowadays, it’s not the memory of Walter Cronkite or even Edward R. Murrow that motivates some reporters — it’s more often the fear that the stories they put out today might get picked apart by Jon Stewart tomorrow.

Prominent among the wary: NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, who recently explained in a magazine essay that The Daily Show host “has gone from optional to indispensable” in just a few short years.

And Williams tells NPR’s Guy Raz that on occasion, when he feels his broadcast tap-dancing toward the precipice — tossing around a story idea for “what I call Margaret Mead journalism — where we ‘discover Twitter,’ ” for instance, or entertaining some other unfortunate editorial possibility — “I will, and have, said that, ‘You know, maybe we can just give a heads-up to Jon to set aside some time for that tonight.’

“I should quickly add, we have another set of standards we put our stories through,” Williams cautions. “But Jon’s always in the back of my mind. … When you make The Daily Show, it’s usually not for a laurel, it’s for a dart.”

None of this, the NBC anchor says, is to claim that Stewart and his crew have had some wholesale transformative effect on the news media.

But “a lot of the work that Jon and his staff do is serious,” Williams says. “They hold people to account, for errors and sloppiness. … It’s usually delivered with a smile — sometimes not. It’s not who we do it for, it’s not our only check and balance, but it’s healthy — and it helps us that he’s out there.”

via Brian Williams: Why Jon Stewart Is Good For News : NPR.

Download the pdf in the linked blog post!!!

I’ve always been puzzled by the strong opposition to same-sex marriage. I just don’t see what’s so bad about it. I have no idea what the harm is. I’ve talked to many supporters of CA Prop 8 but they haven’t been able to tell me either.

Last night I was reading an October 14 transcript from Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the case that’s deciding the constitutionality of CA Prop 8. I was surprised to discover that apparently *nobody* knows what the problem is with same-sex marriage. Not the plaintiffs, not the defendants, and not the judge, who seems more than a little surprised by this.

via Same-sex marriage is bad, but Prop 8 lawyers don’t know why Boing Boing.