- No more Caps Lock? FAREWELL, OLD FRIEND. [via]
- I bet you didn’t know Inception and Sex & the City 2 are essentially the same movie, did you?
- The day Niagara Falls ran dry. [via]
- One man was responsible for one-third of the world’s spam. Then again, I haven’t actually noticed a drop-off in my own spam since his arrest. [via]
- And finally, the bar for wedding proposals has been lifted:
muppets
Tuesday various
- Last Thursday, I posted this image to Capper Blog, and I planned to follow up with the original source article here. Better late than never. The pictures there actually give you a better sense of these so-called infinity pools, and moreover just how high up and close to the edge they are. I think I’d be terrified to swim in one these. [via]
- Going back even further on things I forgot to follow up on: back in June I posted about a link that was going around, suggesting that every actor reads the same newspaper. Well, Slate followed up on that link and found out the story behind the ubiquitous prop. [via]
- The world really is a poorer place without Jim Henson, isn’t it? [via]
- I can’t say I’ll miss Blockbuster all that much, but Matt Zoller Seitz makes a compelling argument that we’ve lost something with the company’s (now almost certain) passing [via]:
I’m talking about the pre-Internet experience of daily life, which was more immediate, more truly interactive: in a word, real. Bland and aloof as it was, Blockbuster was a part of that — and for certain types of people, it was a big part. There was nothing special about Blockbuster as a business, but special moments did happen there, simply by virtue of the fact that the stores were everywhere, and they stocked a lot of movies, and people who wanted to see movies went there regularly, sometimes alone but more often in the company of relatives or friends. You’d go through the front door and pass the front counter — where an employee was checking in a pile of returned videos (when opened, the boxes went whuck!) and check out the new releases wall (Seventy-five copies of “Hard Target?” Seriously?). Then you’d fan out among the aisles and try your luck.
- And finally, some video game-related links:
- If Lucasarts Had Made A Lost Game…In 1987… [via]
- I Dream in Retro [via]
- Super Mario Crossover: Play the original Super Mario Bros with characters from classic Nintendo games. [via]
- Is Our Future Going to Be Like a Video Game Designed by Big Brother?
Monday various
- How to use a semicolon [via]
- A Muppet Wicker Man [via]
- A History of Obama Feigning Interest in Mundane Things [via]
- Why DRM Doesn’t Work [via]
- And finally, how can you not like a short-short story that starts “Some time after sharks took over the skies…“?
Tuesday various
- An inspiring profile of Roger Ebert and his struggles with losing his voice (and food, drink, strength) to cancer and how his life has changed since then. [via]
- Apparently, we were once this close to Israeli President Albert Einstein.
- Oh man, why did no one tell me yesterday was International Grover Appreciation Day?
- I think there’s an argument to be made that new and valuable art can emerge from appropriation, but wholesale lifting of entire pages without acknowledgment is still plagiarism and, therefore, still wrong. That much seems pretty clear-cut to me. [via]
- And finally, if I’d know this was what the Olympics was like — “Try to imagine Pegasus mating with a unicorn and the creature that they birth….I somehow tame it and ride it into the sky in the clouds and sunshine and rainbows. That’s what it feels like.” — I’d have been watching from the beginning.