guardian.co.uk

The director is set to return to his groundbreaking 1979 film that introduced moviegoers to ‘facehuggers’

It’s the news that fans of the original Alien film have longed to hear – Variety reports that Ridley Scott is to return to the franchise he launched in 1979, taking the director’s chair for a prequel.

Twentieth Century Fox’s announcement is unfortunate news for Carl Rinsch, a TV adverts director who was Scott’s original choice to take the reins on the new film. Some reports had suggested Fox was unhappy with the idea of an untried film-maker resurrecting the slasher-in-space series, and wanted Scott to step up from his original role as producer. It now looks like Fox has got its man.

The new film will be set before the events of Scott’s 1979 film, in which the crew of a commercial towing ship respond to a distress signal from the empty ship, only to discover too late that the signal was meant to warn them.

The prequel will be Scott’s first science fiction project since Blade Runner in 1982 and will be based on a script by Jon Spaihts, who seems to be Hollywood’s sci-fi writer of the moment. Apart from the Alien prequel, Spaihts is also working on Shadow 19, which has Keanu Reeves attached; Reeves in turn has hired him to write “space journey epic” Passengers. Spaihts is also reportedly scripting Children of Mars for Disney.

Scott, 62, is currently filming Robin Hood, which appears to have dropped its original name, Nottingham – it stars Russell Crowe as the outlaw, with Cate Blanchett as Maid Marian.

There have been four films in the Alien series, plus two spin-off Aliens vs Predator films, which brought Scott’s xenomorphs together with the extraterrestrial hunters spawned by John McTiernan in 1987. The prequel looks like it will be the first Alien film proper not to feature the iconic figure of Ellen Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver.

Slashdot / theodp writes:

“Back in 1942, Chicago mail-order house Spiegel’s looked to handwriting analysis to identify inconsistent, unreliable, poorly adjusted people. Ah, those were the days. TIME reports we are witnessing the death of handwriting, noting that Gen Y struggles with cursive and the group following them has even less of a need for good penmanship. And while the knee-jerk explanation is that computers are to blame for our increasingly illegible scrawl, literacy prof Steve Graham explains that kids haven’t learned to write neatly because no one has forced them to. ‘Writing is just not part of the national agenda anymore,’ he says. So much for 100 Years of Handwriting Success!“

THESE are so damned cool! That Kitchenaid is an incredible piece of work, just amazing. Kudos to the artist! Check the link for more scrumptious tattoos

Source: Metro.co.uk

A lightning quick sex session in a bush during a storm ended in a flash when a bolt of lightning struck the ground nearby making the earth move for the lovemaking couple.

Jens Gottlieb, 36 and his 28-year-old girlfriend Lisa Gruhn had pulled into a parking space on the busy A44 motorway in the state of North-Rhine Westphalia, western Germany, and after kissing and cuddling decided to get out of the car and head into the nearby bushes to make love.

Because the nearby service station near the town of Werl was relatively busy they went a short distance into the wooded area and hid themselves in a bush where they stripped naked.

They were so carried away that they didn’t stop even when thunder and lightning started to rip through the air – until a bolt of lightning struck the ground nearby.

The terrified pair ran out of the bush naked and fled in a torrential downpour that followed the lightning strike.

They lost their way and were spotted blundering around in the dark by another motorist in a parking space who called police.

Officers who arrived a short while later managed to find the naked and shivering pair and help them into dry clothes and took them home.

AlterNet

Beyond Vanilla: Spice Up Your Sex Life Without Freaking Out Your Partner

By Josey Vogels, My Messy Bedroom

Most couples that have been together for any length of time have average, predictable sex lives. Humans are creatures of habit. And hey, if it ain’t broke, why fix it?
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Earth Science Picture of the Day
Photographer: Stu Witmer
Earth Science Picture of the Day for July 16, 2009

Just after 1 p.m. on September 17, 2004 I shot this photo of a thunderstorm that had been looming all morning over Okanagan Lake, B.C.

When I was a little kid my dad used to keep a scrapbook full of photos of graffiti. His own personal pics were of art around the Vancouver area but he also had snaps of graffiti from all around the world. I think some of my political interests were possibly spawned in those days, reading graffiti left in war torn places all around the world.

I don’t like all graffiti, that’s true, but I love what I love and there is a hell of a lot to love. InstantShift has put together a collection of 80 stunning examples of graffiti. Here’s a couple that I particularly enjoyed but I’d definitely suggest checking out the link and looking at the rest.

See original here.

See original here.

AlterNet / Esté Yarmosh, The Women’s Media Center

Young readers of the popular books encounter women shoved back into traditional gender stereotypes that have taken years of effort to overcome.

Some make excuses for the immensely popular Twilight book series by saying, “well, at least kids are reading now.” I, too, think that it’s great if kids and teenagers are starting to read again, especially after the National Endowment for the Arts sobering report on reading rates in 2007, which found, for example, that less than one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers, a 14 percent decline from 20 years earlier.

Yet it is the message in Twilight that is disturbing. Young readers encounter women, embodied in narrator Bella Swan, shoved back into traditional gender stereotypes that have taken years of effort to overcome. And millions of young girls (not to mention adult women) are devouring these books.

I worry about the girls who seem, with quite a bit of personal conviction, to put one of the main characters of the Twilight “saga,” the vampire Edward Cullen, on such a high pedestal that they think he is the ultimate ideal of a boyfriend. That he is not. These girls need a wake-up call: Edward Cullen is a caricature of an emotionally, psychologically and physically abusive boyfriend — and one with supernatural powers no less. It can’t be healthy to have an attachment to a fictional character with those qualities, much less a real person.
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AP / SERGEI PONOMAREV

MALOYAROSLAVETS, Russia – Tambourine throbbing in hand, Velislav chants to gods whose cult has almost been obliterated by a millennium of Christianity in Russia.

Several hundred followers wearing linen, ancient Slavic ornaments and flower garlands circle around the high priest to celebrate the summer solstice, in an all-night festivity fought by the Russian Orthodox Church for centuries. The rugged faces of bearded gods and stern goddesses top a temple of upright logs.

These are Russia’s neo-pagans, whose ranks are estimated in the low thousands. Only a handful of pagan groups are officially registered in this predominantly Orthodox Christian country with sizable Muslim, Buddhist and Jewish minorities. The fractured pagan groups constantly argue about the authenticity of rituals, the hierarchy of priests or the pantheon of gods.
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AlterNet

By Carmen D. Siering, Ms. Magazine. Posted May 19, 2009.

Adults have an obligation to start a conversation concerning the darker themes and anti-feminist rhetoric in the extremely popular Twilight series.

In Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga, a wildly popular four-book series of young adult novels, the protagonist Bella Swan — by all accounts a very average human girl — has two suitors. One is the unimaginably beautiful vampire, Edward, the other a loyal and devoted werewolf, Jacob. Fans of the books, and now a movie version, often break into “teams,” aligning themselves with the swain they hope Bella will choose in the end: Team Edward or Team Jacob.
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