Wednesday Odds & Ends: Apollo 11, Strunk and White-reading monkeys, Futurama and Bridget Jones

+ This is very cool. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum has created a website that allows visitors to relive the flight of Apollo 11 and the Moon landing. Called We Choose the Moon, you can follow the mission from pre-launch to blast-off to the actual Moon landing on Monday. Quite nifty.

+ Speaking of nifty, did you know that today is the 210th anniversary of the Rosetta Stone discovery? I've always loved the Rosetta Stone. It was the first thing I scampered off to see when I visited the British Museum. I gawked at it for about 20 minutes. Nerd. Thanks to David Manly for the tip.

+ I'm not shocked by this at all: monkeys can recognize poor grammar. It's probably why they don't read my blog.

+ One of this girl nerd's favorite guilty pleasures will be returning to the big screen soon: yes, there's another Bridget Jones movie in the works. More Hugh Grant and Colin Firth, please, thank you.

+ Ooh, even more good news on the "Futurama" front. Not only will it be returning to our small screens, now you can get "Futurama" toys!

+ And finally, apropos of nothing except the fact that I watched a lot of YouTube videos yesterday, here's a funny Comic Relieft skit involving British comedienne and Doctor Who alumna Catherine Tate and James Bond himself, Daniel Craig. It cracked me up.

Odds and Ends

+ Score one for our boy, Neil Gaiman. His "Graveyard Book" won this year's prestigious Newbery Medal. You can watch him read the book here.

+ Speaking of books, Britian's Guardian newspaper has taken a stab at creating a science fiction literary canon, compiling their list of must-read sci-fi and fantasy novels. If you're headed for a desert island, it's probably a good idea to check this one out before departure.

+ The New York Times had an interesting article on the upcoming Guy Ritchie version of Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law as Watson. Really, though, it's just an excuse for me to repost this picture:


+ I'm practically purring at this news -- Daniel Craig will be playing the villain in the new Tintin movie with "Billy Elliot's Jamie Bell as the title character. With Nick Frost and Simon Pegg already on board and a screenplay co-written by "Doctor Who"'s Steven Moffat and "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz" co-writer Edgar Wright, well, I pretty much can't wait.

+ Very sad news for avid X-Files fan. Longtime X-Files director Kim Manners passed away Sunday night after a battle with cancer. He directed 54 episodes of The X-Files including the classics "Home," "Humbug," "Leonard Betts" and the underappreciated classic "Monday." He also directed more episodes of the CW series, "Supernatural."

A golden age of hot British actors?

Ladies, it's time to slap on the water wings and adjust the snorkel because we're diving into the shallow end of the pool today. Gentlemen, you may wish to avert your eyes or pick up your Maxim because there's going to be talk of sexy men shortly...and it's not going to be pretty.

Data has been piling up lately. You've seen it on your televisions and in your movie theaters and tucked away in the pages of your People magazines and US Weeklies. The question is out there, just waiting to be answered. And I believe we're the ones best qualified to tackle this difficult subject:

Are British male actors getting hotter or is my eyesight just getting better?

Let's look at the evidence chronologically. In the 1930s and 1940s, we had Cary Grant, the standard bearer of British male pulchritude:

In the 1960s, we had Sean Connery and Michael Caine -- and let's face it, the standards got a little bit lower:


In the 1980s, we started doing a bit better with Julian Sands:

Things started rolling nicely in the 1990s with the likes of Hugh Grant and Liam Neeson:


And then, holy hell, the new millennium dawns, the dam of British hotness breaks and suddenly they're everywhere! There's Daniel Craig...

and Orlando Bloom...

and Gerard Butler...

and Henry Ian Cusick...

and David Tennent...

And dozens more. Besides the actors, even that old "unattractive inbred royalty" thing has been busted:

In fact, hot British men have become so ubiquitous, we even have them filling in as hot American men. To wit, there's him:

...and him

...and him

Ladies, this is but a small sampling -- and I'm not even bringing Australians into the equation!* I'm no kind of scientist, but I'd say the facts -- and the photographic evidence -- speak for themselves.

What do you think? Are we in the Golden Age of Hot British Actors? And if so, what did we do to deserve this and can we do it again, please?

* ETA: Except I did, just there, with Simon Baker who I totally didn't realize was Australian. Oops. He's too cute to dock from the list though....