1. A street corner in Baltimore. Young men of various ages run to and fro, taking money from and drugs to buyers who drive up in big SUVs. As they work they sing:

[Chorus]
Pandemic! It’s the stuff that makes your juices flow,
Pandemic! It gives a golden glow to Baltimo’,
When you need a little something to brighten up your day
Just grab a spike and a spoon and a tourniquet
Pandemic!

[Bodie]
Watch out, it’s the fuzz!

Most of them scatter, leaving Bodie sitting nonchalantly on a stoop. Enter Officer McNulty.

[McNulty]
I’m Officer McNulty, how do you do?
If you’re recently deceased I got an appointment with you
I’m the smartest damn cop Homicide ever had
They say Jimmy Be Good, but I just wanna be bad!

[to Bodie]
All you drug dealing mopes, you just make me laugh
Dealing all kinds of dope, it seems like a faff

Don’t you know the risks, you’d be better off retiring
Just get your kicks from Nintendo and drink-driving

Then again, if you did, it wouldn’t be so fun,
And I mightn’t get to run around town with a gun,

Stuck behind a desk, it wouldn’t be the same,
Because you know what they say …

[Both]
The game is the game.

[Bodie]
Officer McNulty, it’s not my fault you see
My course was set from education primary
I’m a victim of poverty plus emotional privation
My peer group and neighbourhood have acute deprivation
We got racism, crime and municipal distress
Gee officer McNulty, no wonder I’m a mess!

2.
Bassoon solo, swish of leather overcoat, a figure flits from stage prop to stage prop, always out of reach of the moving spotlight

[chorus of cornerboys]
pack up your product, let’s move
something here just don’ feel right
the biggest punk on the street’s in town
and i think he might strike tonight

[1st cornerboy]
what was that?

[2nd cornerboy]
just a cat

[3rd cornerboy]
do i hear trouble?

[4th cornerboy]
nah that’s just bubbles

[1st cornerboy]
man i got fear …

The music stops. Omar walks in to the spotlight.

[Omar (basso contralto)]
Omar here.

3.
Stringer is counting money in the backroom of the funeral parlour

[Stringer]
Supply and demand, supply and demand
I like markets where I’m the invisible hand

Business is business, but what a trade to be in!
No need for micro-management or stimulus Keynesian

The customers never stop stuffing product down their gullets
And the velocity of money’s the same as a bullet’s

4.
Prop Joe struts across the stage, twirling a cane, to the sound of ’smooth jazz’

[Prop Joe]
They call me Proposition Joe
I’m the king of Baltimo’
I squeezed out the Barksdale crew
Easy does it, no to-do!

Their style, it was all just show,
Just not how it’s done, comme il faut
They’re such obvious criminal (I’m more subliminal)
So now I run this town - or didn’t you know?

This has gone extremely viral already but anyway, nuclear explosions 1945-1998. Hard to believe there’s any Arizona desert left.

Stephen Walter’s amazingly detailed London Island.

Using flickr tags to derive subjective neighbourhood boundaries.

Lovely map of London bike hire availability.

Bing Mapping

Must say that with Microsoft buying up Seadragon, they’re taking a lead in GIS.

This all stems from their buyout of Seadragon. Mr. Aguera y Arcas showed this off a couple of years ago:
Photosynth

Microsoft are calling one of the spin-offs of Photosynth “Deep Zoom”: Not a great overview of Deep Zoom

Hitched.co.uk - a UK wedding planning site - have started using it: pretty good use of Deep Zoom

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcgpdI_2cko

But wait a minute, just last year weren’t you selling…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8vijCM5_SA&feature=related

and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2ceCSb39NA&feature=related

(Funny, I can’t seem to find an English version of the Dettol hazardous liquid soap ad on YouTube. Well I guess that means they were only prepared to sell their hazardous germy soap dispensers to poor countries like Pakistan and… whatever that other country is)

I, for one, will be going down to the cash and carry to load up on some Cleanlinol - it’s next to Godlinol!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UjGwW9FN_4

To steal from their biggest fan, whom I know personally, “But they’re both so talented, it’s so hard to decide”

Carfull now!

Discovery decided to show the film with introductory and break segments, featuring an anonymous, young, doctor of space, telling us about times he spoke to a mission commander, or that the astronauts were spacemen, and you can see the moon if you go outside and look up. Banal stuff, especially in contrast to the film it surrounded.

Worse, though, was watching something really great, unlike the normal television documentary, only to have a presenter tell you what’s coming up, what you just saw, and what’s on now. Formula television, drab, pointless, half of its time spent pointing to the other half. In a way, it’s surprising, with more and more channels out there, more and more people making films, more freedom for people on the fringes or without a standard film education to take up their cameras and produce works interesting, works unusual, works defective or even imaginative, that we delve deeper into the world of structurally and formally monotonous television. Teenagers and their love triangles, cops and their murders, spies and their double agents, families and their comedic mishaps. All of them walking side-by-side, stopping, turning to face one another, and continuing their conversation in over-the-shoulder-shot-reverse-shot.