Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29

Saw a trailer for this a while back, and now it looks like it’s about to break out. I don’t know much or care much about college football, but I love a good documentary about anything, and any documentary where a guy offhandedly mentions that he was dating Meryl Streep at the time? Hell, I’ll watch that. Sounds like interesting people. Hey, there’s Tommy Lee Jones!

Round things

Times certainly have changed. Modern advertisers would never use sex to push a product!

Also, did American Motors really sell Pacers in France? That’s kind of hard to believe…
(via this isn’t happiness.™)

And so it begins

The great experiment. And if it doesn’t work, we’re all screwed.

Formula One changes

Here’s a superb animation of the changes that this year’s Formula One cars have to undergo.
(via the Denver Egotist.)

Lots of little movies

Well, this could be interesting. Up until the release of its latest album, as yet untitled, Super Furry Animals - one of my favorite bands! - is offering this fake-live feed to some amazing behind-the-scenes footage of the recording of the album.

Sea Otter Boogers

Wow, who knew boogers from cute marine mammals could be so tasty??

(Pink Tentacle, that’s who!)

Lego business card

According to this guy, it’s the real deal: work for Lego and they will make a minifig of you to serve as your business card. Best product-specific promo ever. Working at Lego sounds pretty cool.
(via ISO50.)

Time to start pulling your weight, kid

Think of the business Octomom could do! She could contract out to office parks!
(via AdFreak.)

What big eyes you have

It may be hard to see here (click for bigger), but this ad for Wonderbra swimwear does a nice job of pushing the product without actually showing massive boobage.
(via Fubiz, which has a couple more.)

Floating logos

An idea that seems both simple and obvious in retrospect, but the effect is quite powerful.
(Trendland via Design You Trust.)

Chain reaction of idiocy

As you scroll through these shots, you keep expecting the stupidity to stop, but it just compounds itself. Well, I guess it’s not outright stupidity, but you have to assume that these guys don’t know what their trucks are capable of doing. Or not doing, more to the point.
(via @Glark.)

Another great novelization

Wow, spacesick is really not finished at all. He’s got some amazing stuff up there.

Letraset™ people

(Staufenberger Repository via Ffffound!)

Frank Nelson, the “Yeeeeesss?” guy

I was looking at some old Jack Benny tonight and I re-discovered Frank Nelson. Younger viewers may have seen him parodied on The Simpsons once or twice.

NPH to the max

I’m not sure when I became a fan of Neil Patrick Harris, but I think it started when he did that show where he was the literary agent for an agoraphobic horror writer played by Tony Shalhoub. (Did I get any of that right? I’m not fact-checking here, just winging it.) That show wasn’t half bad, but it never caught an audience and got cancelled. I wonder why? Usually, shows about misanthropic horror writers are comedy gold!

Then I didn’t give the guy much more thought until Harold & Kumar, in which he was hilarious. Now suddenly he’s the best thing about How I Met Your Mother and he’s on the Internet as Dr. Horrible.

The man is a god. And now there is FUCK YEAH NEIL PATRICK HARRIS to remind us all of his awesomeness.
(Thanks, Medium Large!)

Kevin Pollak is getting sucked into the web like Jeff Bridges in Tron

Wow, Kevin Pollak has only been on Twitter for a week and he’s already got 36,000 followers. And rightly so: he’s the real Kevin Pollak and he’s pretty funny.

Tonight, at the urging of and abetted by some of his new Twitter friends, he has made and uploaded his first video to YouTube. The cinematography isn’t great, but he’s pretty funny, and the cinematography can only get better.

In a fight between a vacuum and a drill, take the drill

I honestly don’t know what else to say.
(via today and tomorrow.)

Kate Winslet’s Holocaust Oscar bid

In light of Ms. Winslet’s Sunday Oscar win, I’m surprised more folks haven’t come up with this. Of course, it’s all down to Ricky Gervais, but it still seems kind of pertinent.

Fear of David Byrne

We went to see David Byrne on Friday night and came away satisfied, to say the least.

I haven’t been a huge fan of Mr. Byrne for years, if not decades, and I probably wouldn’t have contemplated going, but a pair of tickets came available at work and who was I to turn down free tickets to a rock show? As it turns out, we were seated among folks who had paid $82 each, plus taxes and handling, for their tickets, so I felt very smug, indeed.

And it turned out to be quite an excellent show, with Byrne and the band, all dressed in white, really pounding out the hits. I had forgotten just how damn funky this skinny white man from Baltimore could be.

Here’s the second encore, Burning Down the House, in which he and everybody else donned tutus without explanation. You get a real sense of the kinetic energy that was going on throughout the show with the dancers, musicians and backup vocalists all running around and interacting with each other. It was very entertaining and the man himself was humorous and self-deprecating in his between-songs banter.



I saw Talking Heads three times back in the day (including a show at 1,000-seat venue that didn’t even sell out - there’s my early-punk cred), so it was nice to see Byrne again, after all these years. But I was a bit surprised by the crowd reaction. I didn’t know he attracted so much adoration from some of his fans. I dropped the thread sometime in the ’80s, but I guess a lot of folks didn’t.

(This video and the still photo are from his show the night before in Seattle.)
(via KEXP 90.3 blog linked from Your Monkey Called.)

Disturbing Disney/Star Wars mash-ups

John at Super Punch is deeply troubled by these figurines, particularly Minnie Mouse as slave Leia, and I agree for the most part, but I have to admit that I found this Goofy-as-Chewbacca statue worth a smile.

Regardless, 200 dollars each? That’s insane…

Poll shows broad support for Obama

…except from Alan Keyes, who continues to bring the batshit crazy:


(via Pareene at Gawker.)

World’s Shortest Escalator

Apparently everybody who wants to denigrate or make fun of this escalator must now desist, because it wasn’t serious at all, but meant as an ironic comment and/or a possible Guinness contestant for world’s shortest escalator.

It still seems pretty stupid to me.
(via Denver Egotist.)

Pranking leaflet distributors

Okay, don’t tell my wife, but I am kind of in love with this guy who lives outside of Edinburgh and creates crazy little videos. His name is Gregor, near as I can gather, and he is also responsible for Cadbury Adams, Esquire, whom I posted about last week.

Here is his delightful video about subverting those good, honest people who hand out pamphlets on the street. My opinion? "Pamphlets" is a really hard word to type fast. Oh, sure, if you slow down, you might be able to pull it off, but not fast. That M-P-H-L combo does not come naturally.

Rainn Wilson channels Mickey Rourke

(via @rainnwilson, surprisingly.)

I didn’t watch the Oscars tonight. I guess I’m just not that into them anymore. I did stumble across three or four liveblogs over the course of the evening, and, putting them together with Twitter, it’s almost like I didn’t have to watch the Oscars, anyway. I knew what was going on at all times, even though I actively didn’t care.

If you ask me, the liveblog at ScreenJunkies.com was the best: brief, to the point, and, most important, hilarious. Worth reading, even after the fact:

Ghost building

Love this shot. Things were definitely going on here before it got torn down.
(Ffff.)

Tom Sutpen’s Oscar party

Some classic photos at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger,
There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats.

Movie mania

I try to avoid linking to Yankee Pot Roast too often, because it just seems lazy to re-blog someone else’s humor pieces, which I am sure YOU, enlightened reader, have already encountered on your own. But allow me to remind you to check Y.P.R.’s superb compilation of movie posts for 2008.

Our little place in the woods

I call dibs on the top bunk in the room shaped like a cartoon dog’s head!
(via Lovely Listings.)

Sugar land

Dinosaurs and Robots has a piece about a guy who built an entire city out of sugar. Normally, I would read and move along, but I was struck by the final image: How cool would it be to live in a city where the Guggenheim was across the street from the Taj Mahal?

“Their MySpace page is in Wingdings.”

Hilarious stuff from the A.V. Club: Bad band names of 2008. It just goes on and on, and the videos are appalling.
(via the new shelton wet/dry.)

Just cross the damn road already

Well, if this isn’t the next big viral, I’ll eat my hat.

Maybe I’m a grump after traffic tonight, but my sympathy immediately goes out to the drivers, who have to endure the antics of tourists behaving strangely.

Pro tip: After you’ve viewed this video for the first time, going back to view it a couple more times in order to blog about it will cause you (or at least me) to think that it’s a pretty good song. Maybe not enough to buy the album, but good try, Blame Ringo.
(via most of my usual suspects, honestly.)

Extreme Bentley

630 horsepower. 0 to 60 in 4. Biofuel. (Wow.)
(World Car Fans via The Awesomer.)

Light Birds

Somebody needs to actually make these, so that I can buy them.

Making Gas Protection Tools

Page 12 of a Japanese manual for surviving chemical attacks. Good to know. Thanks, Pink Tentacle!

Samsung ramps up the cute

There are a lot of nice little touches in this video. I love, for example, that all the hamsters in the first segment are lying on their backs, eating popcorn and watching “The Piano.” And the evil mastermind hedgehog with the malfunctioning chair is so Dr. Evil.
(via Brand Flakes.)

We are Pork Products

Found this today while reading a story about how one of the founding members of Kraftwerk has quit the band.

Richard Jaeckel

I saw this poster on Bad Banana and I immediately thought of Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming WWII let’s-kill-some Nazis thing. Because it sure sounds like it’s going to be Tarantino’s bloodier-than-hell re-make of The Dirty Dozen, except instead of Lee Marvin, he’s got Brad Pitt. I like Brad Pitt, but he’s no Lee Marvin. Brad Pitt would be better playing the part of Richard Jaeckel:

…who was in The Dirty Dozen and who was actually a pretty iconic character actor in the ’60s and ’70s. He was one of those guys who ended up in the “Hey, it’s that guy!” role, and he was actually really good in a lot of good movies, but he never broke through to big stardom.

If you ask me, he had leading-man good looks, but I think that maybe he was considered too short to be a big star. That’s what his Wikipedia entry implies.

Jaeckel was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for Sometimes A Great Notion, a movie which many critics hated, but I loved. Maybe it was my age and I had some sort of noble idealism of youth. And I was definitely on a Kesey kick.

In the long run, I have to agree with Ebert: In spite of many great scenes, the film is kind of a mess.

But here’s the scene that got Jaeckel the nomination:


Damn. Once you’ve seen that, you can never forget it.
(Dirty Dozen Poster via Bad Banana.)

The tragedy of suddenly turning black

Wow, I would say this random clip must have been taken totally out of context, but I am struggling to imagine what that context could possibly have been in the first place.
(via Ow! My Sweet Eyes!)

Hey! You with the gun barrel in your mouth!

Make the Logo Bigger has found just the thing to pull you out of your slump!

Sanitary

Sometimes you wonder how anyone ever survived the past when you look at the Shorpy archives. Here, for example, is the factory floor and packing room of the Sanitary Ice Cream Cone Company in 1917. It’s a damn stable. Click for bigger.

And enjoy your ice cream cone.

Lego Fallingwater

I’m not a huge GeekDad, so I don’t go crazy over all the Lego recreations of various movie scenes or historical events that you can find all over the internet, although some are very cool indeed.

This is my current favorite: a Lego representation of Fallingwater.

(Soon to be destroyed by a Lego Tie-Fighter while a Lego George Bush nods off, we can presume.)
(via Coudal.)

Happy monsters in vintage photos

Relleno Demono adds crazy monsters to old pictures. They’re a hoot.
(via Wooster Collective.)

Trailer for “The Reader”

Sara Benincasa does it again!
(via Francesco.)

Peter Sellers plays the chickens

This clip is hilarious, but the interesting thing is his confession that he had his real self surgically removed, since, by all accounts, when he wasn’t in character, Peter Sellers was basically just not there. He was the ultimate tabula rasa.
(via Merlin Mann.)

The Trilogy Meter

(Solipsism Now! via Ffffound!)

Grave Digger is the best monster truck ever.

This is just wrong. I’m going to have to leave it to you fans of the Carolina Crusher to tell me whether his characterization is accurate, but I am here to tell you that Grave Digger’s human avatar would never wear purple tights! Never!
(via O!MSE!)

Bob the Stoat-Stuffer

I’m not quite sure how I lucked into the Twitter feed of Cadbury Adams, Esquire. I think he may have followed me first, and I liked what I saw so I followed back. Not sure why I got picked; subscribing to @stephenfry is the likeliest reason. With This is Herd running a close second.

I do love surreal British humor with no apparent motive.

Here, Cadbury gives a tour of his home town, Little Chortley By-the-brow, where all the action in the last two weeks of his amazingly eventful life has taken place.

It all makes a lot more sense of you go back to the start of his Twitter feed (only 217 updates), and follow along from there.

Indoor sunshine

Oh yeah, it’s juuuuust like real sunshine. In fact, I’m working on my tan as we speak…
(via Modern Mechanix.)

Google is fallible

Browsing the Life archives of Alfred Eisenstaedt on Google today, and I found this one, labelled “Frank Lloyd Wright.” What gives here? Even without the Mustang and the building in the background, I could have told you that’s Henry Ford II.

GO trains in winter

GO train is the regional commuter rail service in southern Ontario, if you care. I just like the picture.

Business, business

MTLB linked to this a couple of weeks ago and I’m only now getting around to watching it. This is what happens when you have a monster RSS feed (and mine isn’t all that large), and you let it get out of hand for a day or two. It takes weeks to catch up again. Particularly if you subscribe to Coudal Partners.

This is some nice Jim Henson work from the pre-Sesame days. Good resolution on the video. And while the skit starts out as a fairly obvious attack on capitalism, it evolves into more of an Orwellian pox-on-both-your-houses sort of thing.

People not getting shot (or stabbed)

Why do so many of these surreal Japanese shows feature little inset pictures of individual audience members reacting? Or maybe it’s just one show that does it and that’s all we ever see on the YouTube.

Besides being mildly hilarious, this video is sociologically interesting. People understand the universal gestures of firing a gun or swinging a sword, and everyone reacts accordingly.
(via BB.)

A balloon from below

No dropping sandbags, please.
(image from .evenwesttang)

How to age a kid overnight

I’m sorry to see the Crazy Hair (his term) go, but I have no doubt that it will be back, because he is the Crazy Kid.

Congressman Gary Ackerman is outraged

I actually don’t think any useful purpose is served by the representative’s outburst. But it is still kind of satisfying to watch.
(via Matthew Good.)

Does He Love You?

In celebration of Valentine’s Day, a timely piece from The Morning News on how to tell if your man loves you.

New Simpsons title sequence

Apparently, a lot of folks are outraged that they have changed the opening titles. I, for one, think the new sequence is AWESOME.

Powerful type

I am loving the Helvetica on the side of this Spanish locomotive; particularly the two different sizes. What could they mean?
(via Ace Jet 170.)

Swingline Cub Plier Green

You know you’ve been on the net too long when you discover stapler porn.

Just kidding! But Stapler of the Week is certainly topic-specific in an almost-obsessive way.

Still, I’m tempted to subscribe. He’s a clean, precise writer and his frequency appears to be more like every two or three weeks.

Jed’s $5.00 Hat Shop

Detail from a Shorpy picture. I could certainly go for a $5.00 hat right about now.

The Letter X

One thousand pounds if you’re interested. I’m interested, but not to the tune of one thousand pounds.

(via Ffffound!, and I lost the direct link.)

Times Square server error

(Captured by ApeLad.)

Music video by Steven Spielberg’s non-union Mexican equivalent

(via Joy Engine.)

Sam and the firefly

I saw this image today and I was immediately transported back to my early childhood. It’s that damn firefly. He’s instantly memorable.

But looking at it now, it has anarchy at its heart, as demonstrated by this delightful analysis.. It would never get published these days without some serious cleaning up. And what a shame, because it’s a beautiful artifact. It’s from the same guy who did Go, Dog. Go!, possibly one of the greatest books of all time!

All hail the Amish

I have Kevin Kelly in my feed, and he’s always got an interesting take on things. He wrote a nice piece a few weeks ago about how the storage of computer files should more accurately called “move-age” because if you value your archived digital content, you are obliged to upgrade it to a new format every three to five years. If you don’t, you fall behind, and then you’re screwed.

He just posted this amazing piece about the Amish and how they are far from being the anachronistic Luddites we think they are. Turns out they are masters of their technology, whereas we are but the servants of ours.

The Amish are in fact incredibly technologically advanced, compared to most of us poor schlumps, but they take a long-term approach to approving new technology for general use. They are currently considering whether to approve cellphones; many Amish are using them in a test, then the bishops will decide whether the technology suits the people.

There’s a lot to be admired in that way of thinking.
(picture source)

Tooth Fairy

We’re having a bit of an epidemic of teeth falling out around here (four in the last week!) and it’s only just the beginning. I’m tempted to order some of these gorgeous and clever Tooth Fairy kits from Office of the Tooth Fairy for the next few years of dropped dentition.
(via everyone.)

Orion’s Belt, up close

Explanation: Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka, are the bright bluish stars from east to west (left to right) along the diagonal in this gorgeous cosmic vista. Otherwise known as the Belt of Orion, these three blue supergiant stars are hotter and much more massive than the Sun. They lie about 1,500 light-years away, born of Orion's well-studied interstellar clouds. In fact, clouds of gas and dust adrift in this region have intriguing and some surprisingly familiar shapes, including the dark Horsehead Nebula and Flame Nebula near Alnitak at the lower left. The famous Orion Nebula itself lies off the bottom of this star field that covers about 4.5x3.5 degrees on the sky. This image was taken last month with a digital camera attached to a small telescope in Switzerland, and better matches human color perception than a more detailed composite taken over 15 years ago.

Look at this star field and tell me there isn’t a tiny patch of living sludge on one of the millions of planets orbiting the thousands of stars we can see in this photo.

And that is just an infinitesimal fraction of what is out there.
(Find a bunch of links in the above-quoted text here.)

Cute German Preschool Monster

These monsters for Volstok Telefunken are so good. And there are a lot of them. All good.
(via The Denver Egotist.)

Paris, a city of villages

Interesting post on Strange Maps tonight about Paris, and how, as recently as the early part of the last century, neighborhoods broke down strongly along regional lines, with folks from various areas of France drawn to live among their own. Apparently, there are still strong hints of this in local Parisian accents, trades, and pub names.

Of course, this is not unique to Paris. Like tends to attract like. The neighborhood where I live in Vancouver is now known as Little India, but when I was a kid it was the German part of town. And I’m neither southwest Asian nor German, so what the hell am I doing here?

Flight 1549 recovery

Amazing shots by Stephen Mallon of the recovery of Flight 1549.

I watched Captain Sully on TV last night, batting aside stupid questions from Katie Couric with confidence, but no arrogance. The man is almost too perfect to comprehend. Sully for president after Obama!
(via @mtlb.)

And Now It’s Zippers on Hats

These goddamn kids with their crazy ideas of putting zippers on hats! No wonder we’re all going to hell in a handbasket!
(via Modern Mechanix.)

Wicked

Here’s an ad promoting unlikely pairings who will nonetheless receive discounted movie passes for couples. There are a lot of subtle and humorous touches in here that demonstrate that they know the Wizard of Oz really well, and her laugh is just perfect.
(via AdFreak.)

Total collapse

I know it was on Boing Boing, but it's pretty mind-blowing. Something to lie awake and think about: Rep. Paul Kanjorski, chair of the congressional Capital Markets Subcommittee, admitting that nobody knows whether the $825 billion stimulus package will have any effect whatsoever. Oh, and just past the 2:00 mark, he tells us that back on September 15th, there was an electronic bank run that could have “collapsed the entire global economy” in a matter of hours, but was averted.

I’d like to know what a complete collapse of the global economy would look like. Maybe I’m a fool, but I think that, other than a few nutbars who decide to go feral, life would go on pretty much as before. Because most people are fundamentally decent and what other choice is there? (Other than going feral.) Oh, there might be some issues of payment to be resolved, but I think it might all work out. Sort of like the Spanish collectives of the 1930s.

Dang, I make a grim Pollyanna.

Tiny tilt-shift

It turns out tilt-shift photography is even more awesome when applied aggressively to stuff that is already pretty tiny!

Check out this gallery from Vincent Bousserez. (I chickened out on posting the scaling of Mount Mammary, although I think it’s kind of awesome.)

Still more Roman Signer

Here’s a German news piece about Roman Signer, whom I have already posted about twice. I must be a fan.

This latest has the longest clip yet of his 56 Kleine Helicopter project. It’s at 4:28 if you want to skip ahead, but I recommend watching it all the way through. He’s got some good stuff, including racing cattle in a kayak; blowing holes in the ground, then planting trees in the holes (which sounds sucky and earnest but isn’t), and other works I’d seen before, but hadn’t realized were his. Sadly, his brilliant flying steamroller piece is not mentioned, but you can see it here. I’m going to watch it right now.


It’s fun when you are reading about an artist and you realize that two or three works you’ve liked recently are all by the same person. That’s when you realize you might actually have some inherent taste. It might be bad taste, but still. And I’m not saying I have the room for it, but I bet I could get all the parts necessary to build a flying steamroller for a pretty good price, under our Current Economic Conditions™.
(Latest clip via today and tomorrow, as was the first.)

Classic fashion

I can’t get over how gorgeous some of these mid-century shots for Vogue by John Rawlings are. Some of them look more like paintings.
(via things.)

Heavy lifting

Here’s an iconographic shot from the last great depression, via Shorpy.
(Click for serious bigness: the richness and detail are nowhere near adequate in the little box above.)

Atheist bus sign generator

So excellent and so obvious. Go here.

Baking barkers

This is surreal. I’ve always been a fan of Wiliam Wegman and his photogenic Weimaraners, but I didn’t know they had done bits for Sesame Street.

It’s hard to tear your eyes away from the strange spectacle of dogs with human hands.
(Dog Art Today via Make the Logo Bigger.)

Winter City 3

Before I head off to sleep, I was visiting the City of Vancouver website tonight and this gorgeous view of downtown with the mountains in the background was part of its front page.

I am so lucky to live here.

David Thomas, “Waiting for Mary”

Featuring Debbie Harry and Philip Glass! It’s a shame they had to run closing credits over this, ’cause it rules!

Detroit’s salvation

You know you want it.
The Homer by Carlos Bisquertt via Ffffound!

The alphabetized Bible

This is somewhat odd, but also seriously cool.
(via Ffffound!)

Hot Rod Speedway

We went to a pre-school potluck at the world’s greatest community centre tonight, which, considering the neighborhood we live in, was kind of a multicultural blast. According to the new neighborhood rules, my family’s traditional ethnic food is now chocolate cupcakes. Sweet.

Sorting through the pics and I noticed this shirt, which sports one very cool design. And it’s a hand-me-down (possibly twice over) and the stitching is still holding up, too! So much of our kids’ clothing turns out to be mildly disappointing in quality and seriously lacking in graphic design sense. The products that do last, in my opinion, are from Nike, or from the clothing store that my wife’s uncle runs in Peebles, Scotland. Maybe they have higher standards over there, but their stuff really holds up.

And whoever made this Hot Rod Speedway shirt, which I am totally going to check tomorrow as I tackle the Weekly Mountain of Laundry in earnest.

Lies, damned lies, and lazy journalists

I’ve been enjoying my RSS feed to Stuff Journalists Like, and tonight’s entry was particularly true: many journalists are about as good at math as the average citizen (cough), so they are likely to re-publish dubious statistics from shady firms without too much forethought.

I sometimes wonder if one of the reasons we are in our current financial mess is that the business sections of most newspapers employ reporters and editors who don’t really get business, as in the crunching of numbers and noting of connections, and instead prefer to focus on the easier model of bold headlines and gossip disguised as “business” news.

I’m proud to say that the paper I work for still has a crusading columnist who goes after the shady promoters of the Vancouver Stock Exchange (who are legion), but seriously, he is the last of a dying breed. Most reporters today can barely balance a checkbook, let alone read a spreadsheet.

Digital Dollywood

Man, someone must have spent a lot of time on this. Wow.
(I am otherwise speechless.)

(via Oh! My Sweet Eyes!, obviously.)

A chick flick for guys

Here’s a not-half-bad promo for “He’s Just Not That Into You,” about which I have no opinion. But I quite like this little short that tries to persuade guys that taking their girlfriends to see it might not be so harmful to their macho quotient after all. Call me shallow, but I laughed a few times watching this.

Hip-hop mascots

I flagged this a couple of days ago, and now I don’t remember why, or from whom I got my inspiration. But it’s pretty cool!

Tube Light Wax Matches

Via Coudal, an awesome collection of matchboxes from Bangalore. It would seem the designs are inspired by virtually everything under the sun, including a couple of “western” logos (Bell, Ferrari) that have been, ahem, re-purposed, shall we say?

My favorite is Tube Light. It’s as if the designer completely ran out of ideas, so he thought, “I’ll just close my eyes, and when I open them, I’m going to name the matches after the first thing I see!”

Because I have totally done that when naming mixtapes.

It takes two people to make a virtual yellow line

I don’t really care for the NFL one way or another, but I’ve always thought the virtual 10-yard-line was pretty much the neatest and only thing that high tech could produce that would add to the viewing experience.

And here is how it’s done.

We are alive

Over and over and over again.

It’s that time of night, folks. Kwangchow by King Biscuit Time. Damn, I love this guy.

Canadian acts that deserve more love, part one zillion: The Old Soul

Lately, Canada has been noted for its large musical collectives, such as Broken Social Scene or Godspeed You! Black Emperor, but there are others who are even more awesome. My own favourites are Bran Van 3000, who invented the whole concept of a large-and-evolving supergroup about a decade before everyone else, and Do Make Say Think, who have helped re-invent the concept of rock instrumentals.

And now we have the Old Soul. They’ve been around for a few years, but people have generally failed to catch on to their awesomeness. They’re a supergroup, but one fundamentally anchored by the creative vision of leader Luca Maoloni. Which is cool, because the man is clearly a musical genius.

Movie title motherlode

An insanely large collection of movie title stills.
(via Coudal.)

We are all Swiss now

There’s some sort of Helvetica cult accreting at Anyone Can Swiss. Run for your lives.
(via Coudal.)

You ain’t no punk, you punk

Wow, sad news. Lux Interior has died at age 60 of heart disease. The world is suddenly a less wonderful and diverse place.

Adobe-inspired fridge magnets

What a clever idea: magnets based on Photoshop and Illustrator toolbar windows. A bit pricey, on sale here, along with some other cool stuff, including a Photoshop-themed skateboard deck.
(via Fubiz.)

Frank Stella BMW

I may have posted about this before, but over the years, BMW has commissioned various artists to paint on their vehicles, with spectacular results. In addition to Stella, there’s Rauschenberg, Hockney, Warhol and a bunch of others. I’m trying to find a picture of the race car sloganized by Jenny Holzer, because that sounds incredible.
(Wallpaper via Joy Engine.)

“Bakersfield pummels Wranglers on prison uniform night”

Oh, this is too much: they were playing on “Former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich Prison Uniform Night.”
(v. Coudal.)

I really should (Fridge)

Just looking through more stuff at Kelly Mark’s site, and there is some good work going on there. I wish I could read the words on this fridge.

Agent Fox Mulder

Ha-ha-ha-ha! Brilliant!
(via.)

I LEGO N.Y.

Again, everyone and their dog has linked to this one today, and I would have left it alone, but this one image made me laugh aloud.

Shotgun Infinity

This is so nice.
(Kelly Mark via Coudal.)

This is priceless

I know everybody featured this today, but just in case you missed it: seven-year-old David is wasted after a trip to the dentist. Poor little guy.

I’m now going to watch this again for about the ninth time.

Helvetica, of course

When I started out, I thought Helvetica was just about the most boring typeface imaginable. Now, I rarely use anything else. I know opinion is split, so that either makes me a boring, vanilla kind of guy, or a devotee of clean, minimal design. You make the call.
(via magnetbox.)

Geez, Royal FAIL

Good god, I have just spent 15 minutes trying to overcome the on-line payment system of Britain’s Royal Mail, and, unless I am missing out on something stupidly obvious in its terms of use, it keeps locking me out, and it won’t tell me why.

I suspect it’s because they are not equipped to deal with purchase orders from overseas, but man, they should be, because this is a sweet set of stamps that I totally want to buy for framing purposes.

“This studio has lot of history.”

“Buddy Holly stood on this spot in 1958 and said, ‘There is no way in hell that I’m gonna record in this dump.”

(Oh, I am lovin’ Eye on Springfield.)

Driving with Harvey

Amazing shot from this isn’t happiness.™

Nice work by Maira Kalman

It’s been so hyped in my small blog echo chamber that I have resisted visiting it. And also, given that it’s in the New York Times, how much do I need to plug it, after all?

But now that I have seen it with my own eyes, I will attest that Maira Kalman’s Times piece on the inauguration of Barack Obama is indeed charming and beautiful.