- Orange goo near remote Alaska village ID’d as eggs. Well that’s one question answered… [via]
- Help provide free copies of Slaughterhouse-Five to students at book-banning high school. I sent them five bucks myself last night.
- Are smart people getting smarter? (See also: Everything Bad Is Good for You.) [via]
- Stan Lee is determined to create new superheroes for every man, woman, and child on Earth, isn’t he?
- And finally, How to Build a Newsroom Time Machine. This is kind of wonderful…even if the notion that they’ll need to teach this kind of course again twenty years from now is kind of predicated on the idea that there will be newsrooms twenty years from now. [via]
journalism
Monday various
- Why is Top Gear apparently exempt from the BBC’s editorial guidelines and the duty not to fake the facts? [via]
- The science of the trailer [via]
- Dear Photograph [via]
- Keira Rathbone’s Typewriter Art. Just stunning. [via
- And finally, ‘The Wire’ meets ‘iCarly’. Warning: pretty big spoiler for The Wire. Possibly for iCarly, too, for all I know. [via]
Tuesday links
- I’m with xkcd on this: fuck cancer.
- The Prescription to Save Ailing Superheroes. I can’t say I agree with everything here, but it’s an interesting article, particularly the argument against having Thor and Captain America both do double-duty by setting their characters up for The Avengers.
That said, I enjoyed both of them just fine as summer entertainment, and while I enjoyed X-Men: First Class no small amount either, I think it’s ultimately the least successful film of the three. (I haven’t seen Green Lantern.) Matthew Vaughn’s “auteur vision” seems cribbed from a few other places (like Bryan Singer’s first X-Men movie, and like Mad Men), and there’s some pretty iffy racial and gender issues at work in the film as well. But maybe that just underlines Pappademas’ main argument: at least the movie has some distinctive stamp to it, however flawed. [via]
- NY motorcyclist dies on ride protesting helmet law [via]
- Soap operas moving online. This will bear further watching. The news, not the shows. (God no.) [via]
- And finally, Who owns the copyright on a photo taken by a monkey? [via]
Monday various
- Buy a “mega jug” (their words) of soda with your meal, and KFC will donate money to diabetes research. That’s irony coming full circle.
- The US State Department reportedly lobbied against a minimum wage increase in Haiti on behalf of textile corporations. That’s just scummy. [via]
- Fuckin’ A: profanity at the New Yorker. [via]
- China used prisoners in lucrative internet gaming work. [via]
- And finally, Jonathan Coulton on Snuggies and Business Models. The Planet Money podcast is worth listening to, if you haven’t already.
Tuesday various
- On WNYC, the Leonard Lopate Show has recently started posting picks and suggestions from any given week’s guests, asking them questions about what books they’re reading, what music they’re listening to, etc. They also ask, “What’s one thing you’re a fan of that people might not expect?” Teller, the silent half of Penn and Teller, answered, “Novel forms of pancakes and waffles.” I love that I have almost no idea what he means.
- All this time, I had been avoiding the Huffington Post mostly just because it’s a time-sink. Like io9, Metafilter, or Boing Boing, I was only visiting occasionally, and even then only when another blog redirected me there. But, it turns out, there’s a whole bevy of other reasons to avoid it, namely that, although it earns millions of dollars — and even more in its recent merger with AOL — it still doesn’t pay its writers, nor did it even pay for the blogging platform that runs it. Plus, it seems less like an interesting time-sink and more one that just re-purposes what other news blogs have written, with occasional liberal celebrity cameos, for the purpose of aggrandizing the Huffington Post. Maybe that’s unfair. As I said, I don’t spend much time with it, except when others occasionally direct it there. But it would be nice if some of that AOL money went to the people who day by day create the product AOL bought.
- A teenage burglar killed three goldfish because he didn’t want to leave any witnesses behind. In his defense, he may just have been reading The Cat in the Hat one too many times. Then again, reading might not be too high on this brainiac’s agenda. [via]
- I don’t think it will surprise anyone that Donald Rumsfeld is full of shit. This is what I think he himself would call “a known known.”
- And finally, Wolverine or two Bat Men? [via]