Call Me Maybe Linky

So I’d never heard about the “Call Me Maybe” meme until it hit Cookie Monster. It’s a charming wee pop song, and the Wee Beastie and I have enjoyed watching various sports teams make goofy videos of themselves lip-syncing the song (many of which can be found at the Cookie Monster link above). But the Jimmy Fallon & the Roots performance with Carly Rae Jepsen herself is the winner:

Except then this happened

A browser extension that herpderpifies YouTube comments. I first heard this through Mike Sands. Glorious.

You probably know already that the Shell “Let’s Go” ad campaign that’s been hilariously misused by folk is actually an elaborate disinfo hit by Greenpeace & serial anti-corporate pranksters the Yes Men. That link is to the best breakdown I’ve seen. It really is marvellous in its sophistication, right through to a fake Shell twitter account clumsily ordering people to take down their anti-Shell material under threat of legal action. This is 21st century stuff, right here.

A delightful two-page comic that is as Wellington as it gets. (via Dylan)

A restored church – with a Giger alien as a gargoyle representing Leviathan. (thanks Jamie N!)

This one is all over the place, for good reason. A 6-year-old guesses what classic novels are about from their covers.

(This one is also over the place – a great, hilarious, GIF-heavy review of 50 shades of grey)

Best ever graduation gift

Boomerang vocabulary at the Oxford Dictionary blog (via Ivan T)

Visualising the origins of English words

Geek & Sundry has their new series up: stories written by kids. Just great, 100% great, and that SQUAT team member is strangely familiar too.

A website that takes you to a random website (via Amanda H)

The 50 cutest things that ever happened

Oh and there was also that time Buzzfeed pwned McSweeney’s

Long long essay on Nokia’s CEO and why he is the worst. I didn’t read all of it. (via Stephen J)

How to kill a troll

A visual map of the film Memento. Really nicely done.

Nine climate change pictures we don’t need to see again.

That time five guys stood underneath an atomic bomb. Robert Krulwich gives film & explanation. Crazy, man.

And finally, via this week’s cool stuff at Wilder Woman, a short musical performance. I’m not sure if this would be better if you knew the original version (like basically every NZer will) or if you don’t (like everyone else in the world).

6 thoughts on “Call Me Maybe Linky”

  1. Just some context for the guys standing under the nuclear warhead thing (yes I am A: interested in this sort of thing, and B: knew about it already 🙂 ). It looks crazy, but isn’t as crazy as it looks.

    There are a couple of errors/assumptions in the link. The warhead size was 1.5 KT rather than 2 (equivalent to 1500 tons on TNT), and was the bang part of this missile system which was intended to be used against incoming soviet bombers had the situation required it (this was the only time it was ever live-fired thank jebus):

    http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIR-2_Genie

    As to the crazy, 1.5 KT is barely-on-the-scale tiny as far as nuclear weapons go (there have been bigger detonations with conventional explosives), and they were more than 5 1/2 kilometers away from it; the actual danger they were exposed to from the test itself was minimal to negligible (compared to the soldiers who were marched through the ground zeros of much larger detonations immediately afterward; now that’s crazy).

    As a small airburst that never touched the ground fallout generated from this particular test would also have been minimal ( I would also be extremely wary about drawing any causal conclusions about death rates of these volunteers, given the ages they are now reaching). The sky going dark thing is more to do with adjusting exposure levels in the camera than any real physical effect I suspect; it’s a common artifact in film of nuclear tests.

    Also from a plane geek perspective, it isn’t two F-89’s in the video. It’s one F-89 Scorpion interceptor to fire the missile, and one B-57 Canberra bomber to film and observe. Always interesting to me how people can look at two things that are visibly different from each other and assume they are the same thing 🙂

  3. “A delightful two-page comic that is as Wellington as it gets.”
    That story is almost (but no quite) a modern retelling of Uenuku and the Mist Girl. Nifty! (Alas, there were no rainbows and disbelieving friends.)

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