If entropy had a gang and ordered a hit on a guy, light would feed the victim hamburgers until he died of organ failure.

This truly inspired analogy can be found in part nine of pinknan­tucket press’s series on ‘the enemies of books’. If you’ve ever wondered why the photos on the front of travel agency brochures sometimes look uninvit­ingly drained of life, here’s where you’ll find the answer.

Mike Lynch at Nannygoat Hill on #artwiculate’s artificial intelligence

I think Douglas Adams writing [Doctor Who] to order for the BBC in 25-minute instal­ments with this many sets and that many actors is very different from Douglas Adams the radio writer, or Douglas Adams the novelist. The stage direc­tions are peppered through with things like, ‘As many explo­sions as we can manage’ or, ‘K-9 comes out at what passes for full speed’.

Gareth Roberts on his novel­isation of ‘Shada’, a 1979 Doctor Who serial penned by (then script editor) Douglas Adams. The story was abandoned mid-production because of BBC indus­trial action triggered by a demarc­ation dispute over the operation of the Play School clock (yes, really), and though the extant footage has been released on home video (with linking narration by Tom Baker), this is the first time the story has been officially adapted in print.

The two other stories Adams wrote for Who — ‘The Pirate Planet’ and the classic ‘City of Death’ — are yet to be novelised.

I happened to come across this anecdote about the Diamond Match Company, the largest manufac­turer of matches in the United States in the nineteenth century, being persuaded to release their patent on sesqui­sulfide safety matches (a non-poisonous altern­ative to white phosphorous matches), allowing compet­itors to produce safe matches using the patented method.

(T)hose involved in the manufacture of the new phosphorus matches were afflicted with phossy jaw and other bone disorders, and there was enough white phosphorus in one pack to kill a person. Deaths and suicides from eating the heads of matches became frequent. Two French chemists, Henri Savene and Emile David Cahen, developed a safe match using phosphorus sesqui­sulfide that was patented in 1898. In the United States, the Diamond Match Company obtained the patent for sesqui­sulfide manufacture in 1900 for a sum of $100,000. President William Howard Taft then wrote publicly to the Diamond Match Company asking them to release the patent for the good of mankind, which they did in 1911.

That ought to silence you hippies out there complaining about those evil, selfish corpor­a­tions destroying the world! It’s not all oil spills and overworked Chinese factory workers, you long-haired jerks!

The fiction acquis­i­tions editor at a prominent UK publishing house once casually told me that if the voice of a novel manuscript was totally convincing, he could forgive almost anything else that might be wrong with it.

Chris Flynn, author of A Tiger In Eden, writing on ‘authorial voice’ for Meanjin. Flynn is also featured, along with The Chef author Wayne Macauley, on a recent Radio National Books and Arts Daily segment examining techniques for estab­lishing voice (first person, in Flynn and Macauley’s case) in fiction.

Great profile of Armando Iannucci (known most recently for his UK political comedy The Thick Of It) ahead of the launch of Veep, his new (US-based) political comedy for HBO starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Also contained in the piece are some inter­esting obser­va­tions about comedy, not just from Iannucci but also from his writing partners Simon Blackwell and Tony Roche.

‘It’s the weird thing about comedy,’ Roche said. ‘It’s sort of like boxing. You’re constantly throwing punches, and you might have one really big punch that everyone remembers — the really funny moment — but you’re trying to soften them up the whole time: joke, joke, joke, joke.’

‘Whereas drama’s two people in a boxing ring just looking at each other,’ Iannucci said.

There’s a weird thing where a lot of the best comedies, certainly in this country, seem to come from a place of coming up with really good clever set pieces and then finding a way to join them… conversely, it’s also where a lot of the worst comedies come from, because people come up with set pieces and then find this sort of artificial way of sello­taping them together.

In the second half of this episode of the What Are You Laughing At? podcast, UK sitcom script editor Andrew Ellard (The IT Crowd, Red Dwarf), regular guest James Cary and host Dave Cohen discuss, among other things, finding the middle ground between writing gags and set pieces and motiv­ating characters in believable ways, and the value of writing for dramas and soaps as training for writing comedy.

Pete Holmes in his podcast You Made It Weird has as intrusive a laugh as Ricky Gervais, but that ain’t neces­sarily a bad thing. Episode 35 with Larry Miller is the first episode I’ve heard, but I expect I’ll be downloading more.

I already read Twitter on the toilet. But that doesn’t mean I’m not tempted to give Shitter a go.

These minim­alist, abstract LEGO® portraits of characters from pop culture show you just how iconic some of these creations are, that they can be so readily identified from such basic shapes. Incredible.

The Radio Times previews Derek, Ricky Gervais’s retirement home comedy, the pilot for which will screen on Channel 4 in the UK in April.

One father’s determ­in­ation against the odds. One gutsy yellow Austin 1100. And one twelve-year-old boy’s prepu­bescent lust for a ‘sexy air hostess’. A very special road trip to Longleat in 1983 for the Doctor Who 20th anniversary celeb­ration.

The biggest challenge is getting the word out, and that comes as a huge depressing surprise to many people.

Independent Mac software developer Daniel Jalkut (creator of the blogging app MarsEdit) inter­viewed on the Mac Power Users podcast. As well as expressing a clear-eyed view about the pros and cons of things like the Mac App Store, his comments about self-promotion are not entirely without relevance to authors and other self-employed creatives.

The East End may be crowded with inter­esting characters but writing 900,000 well-crafted words in less than three years is a towering achievement.

The Guardian inter­views the mysterious ‘Gentle Author’ who, over the past two-and-a-half years, has been recording stories and documenting life in Spitalfields in East London.

(Michael) Bay recently announced that his upcoming live-action (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) reboot will feature far more realistic, relatable ninja turtles, beginning by getting rid of the ridiculous “mutant” part and turning them into regular, everyday aliens.

Another day, another chance for Hollywood to demon­strate how plentiful are its reserves of creativity and origin­ality.

Wired UK has an infographic of the TARDIS’s journeys through time over 50 years of the Doctor’s televised history.

Fascinating post on different approaches an editing team takes with three different authors to plot and plan a new project.

Much ado about LADYES ! Ladyes ladyes LADYES !

Megan Amram’s Shakespearean spam.

League of Gentleman and Sherlock co-creator and regular Doctor Who contributor Mark Gatiss is helping to unleash some ‘pent-up camp’ in the current series of BBC Three’s flatshare telefantasy Being Human.

(It’s) difficult for us, on this side of the digital divide, to remember that there are people standing on the other side of what can seem like an impassable gorge, wondering if they’re going to be left behind. Right now, more than 20% of Americans do not have access to the internet. In case that seems like a low number, consider this: That’s one person in five. One person in five doesn’t have access to the internet. Of those who do have access, many have it via shared computers, or via public places like libraries, which allow public use of their machines. […]

Now. How many of these people do you think have access to an ebook reader?

Author Seanan McGuire asks those who would declare the death of print to bear in mind the division between techno­lo­gical haves and have-nots. Recommended. (Via @pinknantucket)