“From the acclaimed director of Stripes and Meatballs.”

Recut for Ghostbusters with ‘Mind Heist’, the track used for the trailer for Inception. Edited on FCP.

Via Reddit

The Betty White love fest, which continued during a TV Land opening day session Wednesday at the Television Critics Association winter press tour in Pasadena, is all well and good. But what we really want to know is: are there dead aliens in Nevada?

National Geographic producer Peter Yost offered tantalizing hints of a potential new answer to this question during a separate TCA session promoting his spring documentary Area 51 Declassified. Via Entertainment Weekly:

The program will include first-ever on-camera interviews from former Area 51 employees, exclusive video footage from inside the facility (which, you’ll recall, doesn’t even officially exist), as well as previously unseen documents and photos.

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Over the weekend, Leo Laporte, host of the nationally syndicated call-in radio show “The Tech Guy,” fielded a most memorable call. Thomas, an 11-year-old from Manhattan Beach, checked in to provided an update on the software company he launched at age nine.

A previous call by Thomas to Laporte was the spark for Carrot Corp., an endeavor anchored to the Apple-Mac software developer platform iOS. He was calling Laporte back to share news of his iPhone app creations and hopefully get some marketing pointers.

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“One world. One Earth and altogether we should celebrate this holiday.”

Yay nerds!

Aboard the International Space Station, Expedition 26 Commander Scott Kelly of NASA and Flight Engineers Cady Coleman of NASA and Paolo Nespoli of the European Space Agency offered Christmas and New Year’s greetings to all people on Earth from the orbital outpost on Dec. 21 as they flew 224 statute miles above. Kelly, Coleman and Nespoli are part of the six-person crew that includes Russian cosmonauts Dmitry Kondratyev, Alexander Kaleri and Oleg Skripochka.

Hat tip Reddit

Berkeley atheist and blogger Brody S. (pictured) returned to San Francisco’s edition of SantaCon this past weekend to repeat a most endearing 2009 stunt. Among the sea of Jolly Old St. Nick’s, hers was the only Santa costume decked out in greyscale rather than the usual red and white, so as to create the real-life effect of a Photoshop manipulation.

LA Times blogger Tiffany Hsu shares the fascinating details of “Desaturated Santa”:

Brody bought a sewing pattern and made herself a Santa suit in a dark gray fabric. She took the cloth to a Kryolan SF, a cosmetics and beauty supply store, and color-matched some makeup for her skin.

Then came the gray wig and contacts. A photographer friend taught her how to paint her face. The entire get-up took months to assemble.

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Heather Carreiro over at Matador Abroad has made a list of 20 obsolete old English words that we should take time out of our busy Twittering schedule to fully enjoy once again.

The list is awesome. Read them all here. They’re the frog’s eyebrows!

Our favorites: Sanguinolency and jollux. Strangely, we associate both with Santa.

Hat tip Jon Winokur @AdvicetoWriters

We admit we are slightly obsessed with Craigslist Ads. Yes, the gigs for writers and the jobs. We can’t go a day without reading it. Some of the ads are lame, some are scammy, some are insulting – they’re never not interesting. So we post the highlights for you, dear readers. And every time we post a Craigslist ad – we do the journalistic thing and email the poster. Almost every single time. We email them with questions and let them know we’re posting their ad. We’ve been doing this for years – YEARS. And never no once have we ever gotten a reply. Not once. Not one poster has ever written us back and said, “No comment, but thanks for posting my ‘job’ to work full-time while paying me for the privilege.” Or “Thanks for the note, there is an interesting back story to this ad…” Nothing! Ever.

So we ask you guys, the readers of this site, “What the hell?” Serious. Why has no one ever responded? Do we have email halitosis?

Update – 11/18/10: LA writing job posters may be slow off the email mark, but within just an hour of tweeting this article @FishbowlLA, we were having a back-and-forth with Craigslist founder @craignewmark. Way to lead by example, Mr. Newmarket!

Westlake Village based MacTech Magazine, which bills itself as “the only monthly magazine focused on Apple technology”, is hosting a three-day conference beginning today at the Sheraton Universal.

Along with a field trip tonight to the Griffith Park Observatory, MacTech Conference 2010 offers the sorts of panels and speakers that you would expect for a gathering of the best and brightest Southern California Apple developers. There’s also a keynote address this morning by Chicago Sun Times tech journalist Andy Ihnatko.

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Believe it or not, online registration for Comic-Con 2011 was officially scheduled to begin Monday, November 1st. That’s not a typo; apparently, pent-up demand for the annual orgy of good guys-bad guys pop culture now warrants flicking the switch a full eight months before next summer’s July 21-24 edition.

However, mirroring a bad superhero movie plot twist, evil bad guy Gremlin swooped down on the SDCCI URL sometime yesterday and sabotaged the advance ticketing app. In response, rather than posting the equivalent of a William Shatner SNL “Get a life” retort, organizers of the event addressed the glitch with a full dose of solemnity.

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In fairness, Thomas Jefferson didn’t sound like that. He had a severe lisp. Which is why he didn’t like speaking. He preferred to write and knock up his slaves.

Hat tip Dave Weigel