De Radio 4 Top 400 – The favourite classical pieces as voted for by Dutch radio listeners. Certainly a handsome proportion of religious works in the list. (PDF)
100 Best Last Lines from Novels – How great can a last line be? I’ve read some of the works on the list and can’t say any are particularly memorable, but here’s an arbitrary list of the top 100 anyway. (PDF)
The World’s Spookiest Weapons – Starting with the A-bomb and working through mind control, crowd control and animal manipulation, this little list illustrates some of the craziest weapons designed or researched in the years since the last war.
Boxhead 2play – While away some moments (hours!) with this mad flash-based zombie fest. Can also be played cooperatively or in deathmatch mode from the same machine.
This new weapon developed jointly by the Israelis and Americans purports to be a revolutionary new idea, but firearms afficianados will no doubt remember the “Krummer Lauf” modification to the German Sturmgewehr 44of some sixty years previous. With seemingly questionable construction, the weapon would suit only the most specialised of tasks, and without decent training and experienced handling could easily result in costly errors, which the weapon is designed to avoid.
Perhaps the most controversial point surrounding this weapon’s development, however, has to be the video released to promote it. Reminiscent of the parodic advertisements of a Paul Verhoeven science fiction film, the choice of music for the video suggests farce not future. Indeed many of the features of the film highlight the weapon’s unsuitability to certain situations: one can imagine its utility in the street level fighting which prompted the development of the Wehrmacht’s “Krummer Lauf” system, but the video highlights the clumsiness of rotating the weapon through angled and forward-firing modes. Indeed this important drawback to the Cornershot system is even more blatant if one considers its use in an environment such as the hotel seen in the video. These buildings are notorious for their paper-thin walls, easily penetrable by most calibre weapons; if one were to study the execution of such building sweeping maneouvres, from the London Iranian embassy siege of 1980, to the Nord-Ost Moscow opera house siege in 2002, one is more likely to find that speed is of much more importance, and the forces would always prefer the use of gas to disorientate hostile targets.
Furthermore did anyone spot the deliberate mistake illustrated in the weapon’s closing “paintball” scene? Two accurate splats from a paintball gun onto the wood directly in front of the carrier’s arm; you might be around the corner, but that doesn’t make you unreachable.
