Here is an obnoxious new development in the Facebook privacy debate: Some of our friends across the pond might find themselves denied access to nightclubs in the UK — because they denied a bouncer access to their Facebook profile. No, really. The BBC reports that bouncers are asking people to log into their accounts on their phones outside of nightclubs to see if their profile names match their drivers license. Let’s talk about how little sense this makes!

“It’s not a car,” Batman deadpanned in this morning’s The Dark Knight Rises trailer, and then sped off above the streets of Gotham City in his hovercraft.

That got us to wondering what other things Batman might describe in a similar way.

So, here’s a thing that exists. There’s really no need for me to say anything else. My only complaint with this video is that it isn’t longer.

(via Topless Robot)

Gotta love those stories that you come across late in the day, and then by the time you get a moment to report on them, they’ve already sort of solved themselves. For about two months now, an app called Girls Around Me has be available on Apple’s App Store, and, for what it’s worth, it’s not that it’s explicitly intended to make it easy to pretend that you know a girl, or find a girl who may be susceptible to drunkenly going home with you…

Well, actually I take it back, it’s explicitly intended to do both of those things. As Cult of Mac expertly summarizes it: “Girls Around Me lets you identify women, find out where they are, look at pictures of them and then research their personal lives, all in pursuit of a ‘one-night stand.’” Its creators wanted to make the lives of “ballers and pick-up artists” easier, which, while not my cup of tea, doesn’t remove the fact that they’re also giving would-be stalkers and date-rapists a incredible convenience.

Take a look at this picture to the left. What does it remind you of? Anything? Or is it just a sketch of a woman with pretty hair? This piece of work by artist Kelly Howlett is actually the latter. It has no real title, except for the date “11-20-09.” If that date sounds familiar to you because you are a die-hard fan of The Twilight Saga, it’s because that is the same date that New Moon was released. You are probably still wondering what we’re writing about here, because this seems like these two things — Howlett’s sketch and Twilight — have nothing to do with each other. Well, Summit Entertainment, which owns all rights to The Twilight Saga, thinks it has enough to do with Twilight to warrant an email to Zazzle, where the sketch was being sold, claiming “infringement.” We’ll remind you: This sketch has nothing to do with Twilight.

I mean, considering some of the things anti-choice groups sometimes do out side of abortion clinics, yelling, shaming, getting in personal space, this could be worse. 40 Days of Life, the anti-choice group that is sponsoring the exorcism, has recently been accused of even filming people walking in and out of a London clinic they were picketing, which, if used in the right way, constitutes a pretty awful breach of privacy. They maintain they had the cameras on to film people who were insulting them, as they were there “to pray and to show there is love in the community out there.” A representative from the clinic said their protest was “on a scale we haven’t seen before.”

But most recently the organization has planned to exorcise an Ohio abortion clinic. On a Sunday. Which, like I said, is probably better than picketing it, because this particular clinic is closed on Sundays and no one will be there.

If you’ve been following this blog very closely, and for a very long time (nearly a year), you might remember that last April the Chinese General Bureau of Radio, Film and Television announced that it would no longer be greenlighting shows or films that involved time-travel as a plot element, and this week the saga was unexpectedly, sadly, and undeniably oddly continued. The suicide of two pre-teen girls has been blamed on their belief in the existence of time travel.

If only this were just a plot to an upcoming episode of Futurama. It’s not. Some new technology made its debut at this year’s CeBIT computer expo. Not one but two pole-dancing robots. I’m really not making this up. 

Ok, here’s the thing. Way back in last April Fox Studios told the LA Times that they’d got a director and writers to put together a Zorro reboot set in a futuristic post-apocalyptic setting, where “Zorro will be less a caped crusader for justice than a one-man vigilante force bent on revenge.” In other words, the plot of every movie featuring a vigilante with no superpowers. And we did a post on it because how often do you get to point out to people that Zorro: Generation Z, featuring a futuristic Zorro with a motorcycle named Tornado and a laser sword, was a thing?

And we fully expected the project to drop of the face of the earth and never been seen again. But it hasn’t. Instead it’s hired a Zorro.

Artist Oni Hartstein has started on interesting project in response to the mishandling of female characters in American superhero comics. And while we’re not sure that our response to the same thing would ever have included painting pictures of vulvas dressed like famous superheroines, we are amused. Also we’re just happy that they’re not hands.

(Needless to say things get very NSFW south of this line.)