There have been jokes for years about Michael Jackson’s plastic surgery, and how he’d never be as pretty as Diana Ross. I just found him painful to look at since he’d so drastically altered his face. Now, of course, the images are hard to escape, and I’m thinking it wasn’t Diana Ross he was imitating. It was V.

Outlook 2000 vs. 2010, courtesy of Freshview

Email design is one of the most annoying aspects of my profession because design standards implemented by most web browsers in 1996 are still not supported in email clients. In Office 2000, Outlook actually did pretty well, but in Office 2007, Microsoft used not Internet Explorer’s rendering model for Outlook email, but Word’s. Yes, really. Word. For rendering HTML. In short, they set email design back ten years. It’s outrageous and unacceptable, and now they’ve announced that they’re not fixing it in Office 2010. You can help tell Microsoft what you think of that, although Microsoft has already issued an official fuck-you to the entire industry. Sorry, William Kennedy, The Email Standards Project most certainly does represent an industry consensus; your sanction was not required to make it so. However, pulling your head out of your ass and complying with it would be most appreciated.

And then there’s the “id” part, which is the part where stuff blows up real good, and huge machines smash each other up. And every single performance is so ridiculous that it looks down on “over the top” as if from a great height. It’s the part of your brain that thinks it would be awesome to see robots with giant dangling testicles, or hot chicks turning into robot tentacle monsters, or “ghetto” robots that talk in inept hip-hop slang and smash each other playfully, or funny Jewish men who talk about their “schmear” and randomly strip to their G-strings. Is that going too far? Then let’s go 100 times farther than that and see what happens!

– Charlie Jane Anders

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

– Roger Ebert

Watching “Revenge of the Fallen,” I got the overpowering sense that Michael Bay has been reined in over the years and given some semblance of storytelling discipline by his longtime producer Jerry Bruckheimer and “Transformers 1″ producer Steven Spielberg, but that on this movie (maybe because of the WGA strike, maybe because of the success of the last movie) Bay was finally let off the leash, as it were — with results that might be Bay’s purest auteurist statement, but which are also frankly kind of ugly.

– Mike Russell

… and lots more, in which even the reviews Rotten Tomatoes marks “positive” are pretty backhanded, as in “Good when it is good, but extremely, shockingly, horrifyingly bad when it is bad.”

I’ve been making a lot of ice cream lately. Thanks to my friend Shaima, I’ve become a fan of David Lebovitz’s blog, and when the weather turned hot I finally broke down and bought his ice cream cookbook.

Holy crap, y’all. This man knows how to make ice cream.

So far we’ve made vanilla, chocolate, chocolate peanut butter, and an experimental pomegranate sorbetto based on a different recipe from the book. That last one needs work, but the ones where we actually followed the recipe? Stellar. Next up: chocolate raspberry, and then either fig or green tea, depending on what I find at the farmer’s market on Saturday.

There are recipes for tons more flavors on the blog, including absinthe, agave-sweetened chocolate, no-machine-required chocolate and banana, and candied bacon (really).

Also of interest: how to make ice cream without a machine. And a tip from the book: if your ice cream freezes too hard, add a little alcohol to the mixture.

With the afternoon highs coming close to 100°F this week, it’s been great knowing that I have homemade ice cream waiting in my freezer, and that I can make another quart for less than the cost of a scoop at Ben & Jerry’s.