Sexy!

We already appreciated the immense sassiness of Udo last week, with a clip from Uwe Boll's Far Cry. And that inspired me to dig up this supremely sassy Udo webcam show.

It comes from the TV movie Ice, which aired on the Syfy Channel a couple years ago and remains my favorite Syfy Original Movie. As its name suggests, Ice is about a new age, which turns L.A. into a replica of the North Pole... and soon, only the equatorial regions of the globe will even be habitable. Nobody listens to Kier's sexy, sexy webcam warnings, until it's too late, of course.

The main character of Ice is actually a cop, who has to get his ex-wife and son out of L.A., but first he has to contend with his wife's dickish new husband, who's a stuck up architect. Here he is taking a swim in his outdoor pol, even though it's a billion degrees below outside:

Can you tell I loved this film? It was so awesomely cheesy, even besides the Kier-cam action. And here's one final clip. The cop springs a convict out of jail, rather than just letting him freeze to death there. And they stop by the convict's neighborhood, which has been totally buried in snow. Check out the telephone poles and rooftops sticking out:

Bong contributed one of three segments, along with Michel Gondry and Leos Carax, to an anthology film called Tokyo!, opening in limited release this Friday. But he's also hard at work on a crime film called Mother, and then he hopes to put out Transperceneige by 2011 or 2012.

Talking to Collider, he said the movie version of the snow post-apocalyptic comic would feature a multilingual cast and international co-production, but ultimately would still be a Korean movie. And he added that it's a dystopian vision regarding the future of humanity.

In Transperceneige, wars and glaciers have rendered the planet almost uninhabitable, and one last train carries the last survivors of the human race. The society on board the train is a microcosm of humanity, with social and class divisions still persisting in cramped quarters.

In an earlier interview with Yonhap News Service, Bong elaborated:

The story will be in a tone similar to Noah's Ark (from the Bible)... This train has enraptured me. I believe everyone has a fantasy about trains giving off chugs and puffs, and landscapes viewed from the window... What you can see from the window in this story, however, is only the world icebound, with minus 80 degrees outside. Survivors live in the train, but they can't stay in harmony even at a time of adversity... Each partition of the train represents a class. In the last partition of the train, people live wretched lives. The closer to the front they are, the more luxurious life gets... Le Transperceneige is going to be much more spectacular with all the trains and frozen scenery. But the spectacle is not what I really want to show. The mood and sentiment you can feel inside the train, the desperateness. The exterior should be only groundwork to show all that.

The Host brought amazing freshness to the monster-movie genre, and it sounds like Transperceneige could do the same for overexposed post-apocalyptic storylines.

Even if Mars has had steadily sub-freezing weather for a long time now, glaciers can provide the kind of cover needed to maintain liquid water. We know from Earthling ice sheets that as you go deeper inside them, the temperature tends to go up. Down near the bottom the crushing pressure of miles of ice piled on top can cause melting. Ponds and lakes can even form.

The researchers — headed by Jay Dickson of Brown University — think the same thing could've happened on Mars:

After examining stunning high-resolution images taken last year by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the researchers have documented for the first time that ice packs at least 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) thick and perhaps 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) thick existed along Mars' mid-latitude belt as recently as 100 million years ago. In addition, the team believes other images tell them that glaciers flowed in localized areas in the last 10 to 100 million years - akin to the day before yesterday in Mars' geological timeline.

This evidence of recent activity means the Martian climate may change again and could bolster speculation about whether the Red Planet can, or did, support life.

"We've gone from seeing Mars as a dead planet for three-plus billion years to one that has been alive in recent times," said Jay Dickson, a research analyst in the Department of Geological Sciences at Brown and lead author of the Geology paper. "[The finding] has changed our perspective from a planet that has been dry and dead to one that is icy and active."

Images from Mars orbiter.
Source: Geology via Science Blog

Here you can see pictures taken by Tony Travouillon of giant chunks of ice in Antarctica that have been sculpted by the wind to look like huge waves erupting out of the ground.

You can see more beautiful ice bubbles here and here.

Cranberry Lake photo via BLDGBLOG and New Scientist. Antarctic wave via Travouillon's website.

The dark secret of Quintet is that it's sort of a crappy game. Here Newman is, having lost his entire family to the postapocalyptic Rottweilers and stab-happy Quintet players, and he's finally killed his last opponent in the game. And it only now occurs to him to find out what the prize is. Which is, basically, bragging rights. You get to hang around the crappy parlor with the guy in the zany felt hat and talk about all the people you scragged. I would at least want a sticker, or maybe a slice of blueberry pie. With whipped cream.

The ship will be a small town, generating 55 megawatts of power and housing 120 people. Scientists on board will study the role of the polar waters in global climate change and the movement of contaminants through the water, air and ice. The Aurora also will have two "moon pools" in the bottom of its hull, giving access to the water under the ice for underwater vehicles studying the explosion of life that happens in the polar seas every spring.

The main problem is figuring out who owns this ship. The Aurora Borealis is a joint venture between the ESF, the Germans, the Russians and possibly other European countries. So where does it dock when it's at home? More importantly, who do we sue if (when) it crashes and spills tons of oil all over the North Pole? Hopefully all this uncertainty will make the organizers way more cautious about wreaking damage on the environment they're trying to study. We can only hope. The Aurora Borealis is expected to launch in 2014. [Science Daily]

That is, unless it's a crashed spaceship, and the hapless pilot is desperately trying to figure out how to get the thing upright again before he freezes his ass off. Or maybe it's something he bought 50 years in the future at IKEA, and those are the instructions which haven't become any more readable with the passage of time. At least it looks like the power is still on inside.

What we like about this image is that it could be any, or even all of the above. Who's to say it isn't a futuristic flying ice research station from IKEA that's been turned sideways? Conceptual artist James Clyne manages to marry future tech with the desolate feeling of a distant icy landscape in the middle of nowhere, and keep us guessing at the same time.

You can check out more of his concept artwork at his website, but be sure to bundle up and drink warm beverages as you browse.

Image of camera by Elisfanclub Undersea image by SCINI.