One small misstep

This Nasa photo shows an astronaut working on the exterior of a new laboratory at the International Space Station - a symbol of triumphant, intricate human exactitude.

Can it really be true, as I'm told by a friend with sharper eyes than mine, that the astronaut has his boots on the wrong feet?

Click on the pic to examine the high-res version.

The man who stole Alistair Cooke

A grisly saga of modern-day body-snatching.

Faking fingerprints

… is easy.

Mayor of Stiffkey?

As someone with more time for Red Ken than is now fashionable, I don't want to turn this blog into a Boris-fest, but this frank write-up by Max Hastings is too good to miss.

Need to know

Next Thursday, following the fifth anniversary of the death of Jeremiah Duggan (whom I wrote about two months back), a petition will be presented at 10 Downing Street, urging the PM to intervene to ensure a proper inquiry into the whole disturbing business. Please consider adding your signature.

Old hoofer

Seventy-eight this year, Ann Emery, sister of Dick, is still belting it out in the West End.

Falstaff with a thousand Prince Hals

"Never a diplomat", "somewhat Rabelaisian" - a portrait of Michael Croft, founder of the National Youth Theatre.

Remember optimism?

Joan Bakewell revisits the Macmillan years.

A Philadelphia story

Someone burgles your home and the cops are no help. So you find a pawn shop where he's been trying to pawn your stuff and they supply three security-camera images of him that you stick on your blog. Then someone sends you an offensive voicemail offering to sell your belongings back to you, so you stick that on your blog too. Then your commenters locate his MySpace page, and his YouTube profile featuring his pathetic attempts to rap, and within 24 hours the entire web has united behind you and you can find out everything you need to know just by Googling. Turns out there are two guys rather than one, but one of them calls personally at your home to return your laptop, and someone else leaves your XBox on your doorstep! Ah, this is what the blogosphere is for…

You with the eyebrows, OUT!

A scheme to ban Alistair Darling from every pub in the UK. (More here, here and here.)

Love one another or die

An Easter message from anticant:

Such renewal was never more sorely needed than in this diabolical first decade of the 21st century. With a memory stretching back to the 1930s, I cannot remember any other decade which has so filled me with fury, loathing, and dread of the purblind pigmies who are leading the world recklessly to political, economic, and ecological destruction in the name of their false creeds and dogmas.

Cosmic upheaval

God marks the passing of Arthur C Clarke.

Humming along nicely

The purpose of FUH2.com is to encourage its readers to make disrespectful gestures towards any Hummer H2 they may come across, to photograph themselves doing so, and to send the resulting pictures to be published on the site, alongside (at the last count) 4,566 others.

Who says the internet has no sense of social responsibility?

Sudden ruin

This five-minute film edits together silent footage of two tramcar journeys along San Francisco's Market Street, the first in 1905 (the year before the earthquake), the second in 1906:

Wiltshire's foremost visitor attraction

Roll up, roll up, to view the former home of Sir Edward Heath.

Two gentlemen in Missouri

Scholarly new editions of neglected works by Ann Radcliffe, Shelley, Conan Doyle and Forrest Reid…reprints of the rarest Gothic fiction, among them all the "horrid novels" read by Isabella Thorpe and Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey…a limited new hardback of Peter Middleton Darling's The Forest of Valancourt, a book so rare that only the Bodleian is known to possess a copy…a shot in the arm for the likes of Rider Haggard, Frederick Rolfe and Marie Corelli…and even a reissue of An Air That Kills (1948) by Francis King, who's happily still with us and still writing.

All in all, I like the sound of Valancourt Books.

Glimpses of greatness

Willie Lupin once met Harry
H Corbett:

As we gazed out the window, the illuminated sign of his name suddenly switched off. "The fame doesn't last long, does it?" he said. I'd love to be able to record my witty reply, worthy of Dorothy Parker in her prime. But I think I just said "No, it doesn't" and took another slug of wine.

Daddy

Sylvia Plath reads her own poem:

Wanna get kicked off a plane?

Here's how.

Preserved ephemera

Rummage among the magazine covers and commercial art of bygone days at the Ad Art Gallery.

Hat tip: Ben Locker.