Category: Friday Linky

Some reasons to make your Friday a little bit hyperlinked:
This chart from a 1949 issue of Life magazine explains how you tell apart the High-Brow from the Low-Brow (and Brow levels in between) using everyday tastes.
Whoa. Use a slider to zoom in from a grain of rice to an atom. This gives me vertigo like crazy. Wildly cool.
I’ll quickly do some of my work for the illuminati by spreading some climate change linky: Climate Progress reviews Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade To Deny Global Warming. Great review of what sounds like a fascinating book. The PR activity here is endlessly fascinating. (Also covered at Hot Topic.) A good source for the science of climate change, based on the authorities I trust, is Sceptical Science. And how about the EU offering to cut carbon emissions by 95% over the next 40 years? Conversation is getting sharper out there.
40 seconds of genius at work: Herge draws Tintin and Snowy. The amount of control the man has is glorious to watch, not a single movement of the pen is wasted.

Jon Hodgson knocks out “Fantasy Art For Beginners” from IMPACT! Books. Looks great if you’re an arty sort, or want to be! He posts about it here and here.
Incredible Making Light post looking into deaths at a new-age sweat lodge ceremony – the dodgy guy behind it, his Oprah-boosted profile, the concerns of the Native Americans about their traditions being misused and mishandled… What great investigative journalism looks like when it’s conducted with Google.
Disney Princesses, deconstructed.
Dungeons & Dragons Online is now free to play.
And finally… a 1962 U.S. high school textbook on love, dating, babies and more. Take the time to go through it page by page. It’s by turns shocking, hilarious, and… well, you’ll see.

Off to Thailand in a couple days hurrah!
SO HAVE SOME LINKY ALREADY OKAY

Amusing graphs on index cards – I’ve seen this before and might have linkied before but a search can’t find it so HERE IT IS FOR THE FIRST TIME OR PERHAPS THE SECOND TIME
A great article about cities, architecture and futurism from the occasionally-genius culture mag io9: A City Is A Battlesuit For Surviving The Future. An article is doing something right when it references the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the city in Warren Ellis/Darick Robertson’sTransmetropolitan, and the extraordinarily sharp urban thinker Jane Jacobs.
Crank.net – the hub for finding out about the weird and wonderful variety of cranks on the internet!
Related: gamer icon Monte Cook talks about his weird experiences writing a mass-market book about conspiracy theories.
Related 2: audio from the NZ Sceptics Conference – “Our Approach To Paranormal Investigation” and other talks.
Beasts of New York – a children’s book for grown-ups
The only existing film images of Anne Frank
My Parents Were Awesome Photos of parents before they were parents. I love this.
And finally… Kill Bill In One Minute In One Take

(more from these guys)

From this flickr set
Get yer full-on serious proper culture, none of this internet-age garbage, this is the real deal: Bulfinch’s Mythology and friends, a collection of free literary works with a focus on mythology, everything from Paradise Lost to Flatland.
Romance novel covers re-imagined
Sokky’s singing blog has a fascinating post that helped me grok how singing feels when you’re really good at it
Diaries of the vampires
Amazing views of glaciers from space
30 Mosques in 30 days – two New York Muslims visit a different mosque every day of Ramadan and take photos. Neat fun. I’ve linked to the last one in the series.
And finally, the 100 greatest hits of YouTube in four minutes:

Karen Healey’s first column on Young Adult fiction at Strange Horizons
Play the moon – using the moon’s topography as a musical notation.
White noise a la carte.
Lucasfilms staffer tries out Jabba the Hutt costume for a day. (And some on-the-set Star Wars photos you might not have seen. The last one was new to me and a crack-up.)
OKCupid uses stats to tell you exactly what to say in your online dating messages. There’s a thesis in this.
TV critic Alan Sepinwall blogs his way through various great TV series. Try Freaks and Geeks, The Wire for Wire newbies, and The Wire for Wire veterans.
wall of cute fluffy critters! (How I found baby beavers)
And finally… All the Single Babies

but From the Morgue had the best linky of all time
Reading the Maps has the best overview of the saga of W(h)anganui’s controversial ‘h’
Sam Tsui continues the re-invigoration of Michael Jackson’s pop music with this immensely entertaining solo medley:

More photos of 19th Century Russia
A fantastic comic strip about riding the tube in London. Formally inventive and just a great laff. (via bleeding cool)
World’s smallest working model train layout
Evan Dorkin links to the first three installments of Beasts of Burden, in which a band of lovable mutts (and one cat) band together to battle supernatural threats. As a promo for the new series the original stories have been put online. It’s great stuff, especially for dog-lovers, but warning: part three is genuinely nasty and disturbing whereas the first two are just great fun.
The Gator’s perverse and often baffling blog offers up some linky including the Nigerian film industry and Turkish superman.
And finally… Hobo Darkseid

You get the feeling this isn’t the first time. Click through to watch:

Abandoned Theatres, latest in the web subgenre of “cool photos of weird abandoned places”
Andrew Rilstone (he of the fanboy linkage on my blogroll) delivers an amazing downloadable response-to-and-discussion-of Watchmen.
Michael Quinn Patton talks about how Maori creation stories illustrate his conception of social media (via email from Liz H)
Chris Sims delivers the only review you’ll ever need of Bring It On: Fight To The Finish, the fifth entry in the Bring It On cheersploitation saga!
This is how Broadway oughta be done: new song from “Legally Blonde: The Musical”, via feminist writer and coincidental Bring It On enthusiast Karen Healey

The UK’s first road map
The Economist delves into the quest for artificial stupidity (via BKD)
And finally… aaaaaaaaaaargh no i am seriously going to have nightmares over the existence of this creature (via Allen Varney, just like the cheeky seabird)

My dad retires today. It’s quite a big deal. I identify him so strongly with that dedicated commute to work each day. It’s really exciting – he gets to define a whole new way of being, now. Nice one dad. See you at the function later today!
I dedicate this assortment of dubious internet jammery to my dad. (Sorry, dad.)
Chess on rollercoasters (via the Gator)
Nate Page’s artwork outa carved-up magazines. It’s like the reverse of collage. Amazing.
Another site dedicated to how people are sometimes venal, sometimes cruel, but mostly just dumb: Item not as described
This short account of the spiders-on-drugs research includes some crazy new findings I’d never heard before (via my Cal).

Hunter S Thompson motivational posters (From everyone, but the other moose had ’em first I think)
Wrestle-heads out there: a first column on the latest WWE happenings by regular commenter and good buddy Scott Anderson, at NZPWI
Via Svend: Bauchklang – band consisting entirely of beatboxers. WOW. (Which reminds me – if you didn’t get around to watching the choir doing Toto’s Africa a month ago, you missed the best thing I’ve linked to in ages. Go see.)
The UN Unconventional Culture Commission.
Free online poetry/short fiction journal, just released: Blackmail issue 25, the Rebel issue. Includes work from Helen Rickerby of this parish’s blogroll.
And finally… inglourious wizerds

All about invented languages
Talk like Warren Ellis (NSFW, just like the real thing)
Samandal an indie comics anthology made in Lebanon, part in English and part in Arabic. Neato.
An absolutely fascinating map from 1926 of gangland Chicago
Flute beatbox guy:

From the ‘gator: Style your garage
Flipping a coin is unfair – completely obvious once they explain it.
only when I heard it did I realize how much I missed this sound
And finally… Billy found this and cannot explain it. Nor can I.

Comic a day from Evan Dorkin’s FUN archives!
Ice T presents: Mac Repair
Total domination of geektopia by Felicia Day advances one increment:

23 movie plots that coulda been solved in minutes

Robert Johnson, animated. TROUBLING.
Worlds 50 freakiest animals.
For design nerds: packaging design for products seen briefly in Harry Potter movie
A great read here: Laura Atkins writes about white privilege and publishing, describing what happened when a book about a non-white protaganist got marketed with a white person on the cover.
And finally… Tiananmen Square, made outta hair

Marie Antoinette tomorrow! Lots to do today. But still some linkytime:
Kittens inspired by kittens
via badjelly: a sweet song about when your ex wants to friend you on Facebook
GI Joe: this movie made by Hasbro uses the old action figures as actors – the animated faces are creepy though. Meanwhile, this movie about the private lives of the Joes and their Cobra enemies is amazing, not least for the cast. Seriously, the cast on this thing is INSANE. Check out who’s playing Duke fer chrissakes!
Ed advised us of a BBC radio show of music in made-up languages
Seen this in several places, most recently in Brother Moose’s linkies, and it is worthy of further sharing – Bobby McFerrin demonstrates the pentatonic scale:

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

let us now praise awesome dinosaurs
From Svend: their choice of photo models weirds me out something chronic
And finally… Harvey Keitel with some mermaids