Category: Friday Linky

Glenn Greenwald is reliably awesome writing on the U.S. political scene, with a particular focus on media support for the Iraq war. He’s been all over the Pentagon-approved independent military experts story, and today recounts something even I find shocking for its directness: an admission, in a TV interview, that corporate execs at MSNBC deliberately and openly forced a pro-Bush, pro-War bias. It isn’t the first time we’ve heard this, either, as Greenwald recounts, but the audacity of it still unnerves me. Manufacturing Consent doesn’t even go far enough for this.
Russell Brown took note of this campaign to save ‘Dollhouse’ before it even starts – another case where reality follows close on the heels of satire.
Running short of ignorant and aggressive comments to news stories? Never fear, spEak You’re bRanes has an automated generator that will solve that problem!
Benicio del Toro won Best Actor for his starring role in Soderbergh’s enormous two-part biopic Che – but one has to wonder, do the films include this little-known incident between Che and Mao?

I have a whole section in my bookmarks of “people to add to my blogroll” that I will honestly get around to doing someday. In the meantime, this one’s open in a tab right now so I am reminded to share: occasional commenter and all-around gent Dan has started Freshly Ground, which is mostly a blog about eating well. He muses in an entertaining way about how his young family is doing food-wise, with an eye on sustainability and nutrition and of course the NOM NOM NOM factor. And shares loads of tasty and simple recipes as he goes! Today’s entry is about when to cheat…
(And on the subject of food, Giffy is flickr’ing her lunches. Check out the one she blogged today: this is a good example of lunchy awesome, in my book.)
I’ve talked about Purity Balls before – it’s one of my posts that keeps getting traffic off of google and being passed around Facebook – and am thus inclined to share this commentary from Salon.com’s Broadsheet section: “We’ve written before about Generations of Light Ministries’ fantastically creepy “purity ball,” where fathers make a pledge to protect their young daughters’ hymens. But the New York Times’ coverage of the 2008 ball launched the event’s creepy quotient into the cosmos…” Go see. Yeesh.
And from the “holy cow” files, here’s what happens when a ten-year old boy writes a letter the Charles Manson and gets a reply.
That’s all I gots for ya this week. Additional linky from you folks is encouraged in comments…

This has been sitting in my pile for an age – Malc pointed me at this set of videos in the GUBA library: seminal Brit sci-fi, Quatermass and the Pit and Quatermass II. I have the script books somewhere in a box but have never seen them before – very exciting, from back when TV was filmed live like a stage show.
The Cluetrain Manifesto – written in response to the dotcom boom that had yet to burst, and still brimming with value a decade later. e.g. “26. Public Relations does not relate to the public. Companies are deeply afraid of their markets.”
Last linky I showed you Kate Beaton’s Napoleon eating cookies. This week I show you Kate Beaton getting into an hilarious online fight battle with the Stereotypist!
And that may be all the linky we have time for. We’ll see if inspiration strikes late in the game. The whistles go woo woo!

Okay, a brevity linky:
Stumbled across Kate Beaton’s comics for about the fifth time and this week I will linky them. They are good. Especially Napoleon eating cookies and Conversations With Younger Me.

Make your own Music television – a mashup of Last.fm and YouTube that searches YouTube for music videos that’re liked by people who like the music you like, like. Is good. Hattip to the imperator DavidR for this one.
Potsie Syndrome – characters on TV shows who still show up each week because the actor’s on contract, but just kinda stand around and never do anything because the writers just don’t have a clue why they’re there.
And did you catch the Ewok gospel, via linky in last week’s comments by Dave W?

Museum of the World’s Worst Comics. Lots of wacky stuff from the 40s and 50s.
For fellow Wire-heads: Steve Lieber draws characters from the Wire in the style of The SImpsons. (And from the same link, Wire co-creator David Simon shows up in a blog comments section to beat on someone for the stupid. warning – blog post itself is detailed plot summary of a s4 ep so be careful if you’re not that deep.)
In a spectacular display of what missing-the-point looks like, many serious-minded technical people explain how the Death Star explosion caused a holocaust on Endor. (Dudes, it’s Star Wars. Your science has no place here.)
The incredible Future Perfect blog, in which a Nokia researcher talks about travelling the world to see how different people in different cultures make use of cellphones. There’s a list of countries and regions down the side – click on one and marvel. In my explorations so far I liked Tehran.
Joe Dante’s Gremlins feature in a BT ad in the UK.
And finally, again from the wonderful photoblog riotclitshave, I give you THE POWER OF METAL.

Friday being a public holiday here in NZ, your linky cometh early. Durty furriners might consider it a mid-week special, but they are durty furriners and there is no accounting.
Another from talula – people re-enact their childhood photos with usually-hilarious results. [EDIT: linky seems deaded! perhaps it will live again tomorrow?]
Take a moment to tap your name into this week’s web petition thing, the Ape Manifesto, which calls upon governments to save the wild primates. They have almost 10% of their targeted 1 million signatures as I type.
Superlate pointed me at the delightful Growcube game which is both very simple and very complex.
Political development of the week is the Flat Earth society reaching out in solidarity to climate change sceptics. Its a brilliant wind-up, and they stumbled on a mini-scoop – almost-Prime-Minister Don Brash in the audience to hear from the latest rent-an-expert why you should keep driving your SUV.
Also is:
I R SRS ZOMBIE MOVIE ZOMG
and an incredible application that quickly cleans your screen
*jumps out Monkey-style* Linky!

From the other moose, I give you seminal West Coast rappers N.W.A. with their debut album, Straight Outta Compton – Explicit Content Only. That’s right, its remixed so it’s only the explicit material. This brings back memories.
The site has loads of other interesting art projects. I like HipHop PopUp, an online player of Kanye West’s Graduation album that pops up the websites of brands as he mentions them. Its a pretty neat critique of the bling culture at work in much of hiphop. Also Satanic Images, which searches online galleries for photos that were the 666th image recorded by that particular digital camera.
Here is World Without Oil, an alternate reality game that ran to a conclusion last year. Depicting a world responding to an oil crisis, it engaged a lot of people with vivid imagined accounts of what life would be like. I’ve only just found this so Im only just getting my head around it. It seems like a neat way to explore this issue, although like Zeb Cook, I wonder if this is so arcane it ends up restricted to an elite – maybe not exactly the elite Zeb is talking about, but a preaching-to-the-converted thing does seem likely. It was promo’d at SXSW, fer pete’s sake. Anyway, I’m just amazed I haven’t heard about it before.
I’ve been dabbling in a new phenomenon on YouTube lately – clips of Iranian women getting into trouble for not wearing the hejab properly. Girls wailing as they’re forced into police cars, or roughly pushing aside old ladies who are trying to restrain them. It’s fascinating and troubling, and best viewed with some kind of contextual knowledge – Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis will do. Beware of the comments, where neo-Nazis, American freedom bigots, Persian Muslims of both traditionalist and reformist stripe, other Persians, Arab Muslims, other Arabs, feminists, and others conduct furious five-directional wars full of invective and lacking much illumination.
And to close, here’s forty-five years of Doctor Who clips played to an Eminem-Benny Hill theme mashup. Probably bewildering to the uninitiated, but fun nonetheless.

Av Club interview with Lower Hutt’s finest, Anna Paquin, about her new production company shared with her brother, liberal politics, and the X-Men. (Lower Hutt reprazent!)
Abi at Making Light a week ago, talking about things with deep value: “Looking at a world where the economy is probably going to be tightening up for a while, I find myself drawn to things with deep value, things a little less dependent on the state of our technology and shipping infrastructure to build and repair. Living in a small country with a history of pollution problems, I want to own things I don’t have throw away after one use. And spending much of my time as a crafter, I am attracted to things that I can fix.” Check out her list of things, and of course the comments on Making Light are always worth a look.
PRINT magazine has an article on how Young Adult book covers change over the years. The photo comparing four different covers of Judy Blume’s ‘Forever’ is my favourite.
And via talula, NPR on the New York guy who responded to getting mugged by inviting the mugger to dinner.
Enjoy your Friday everyone.

Home sick with a cold today, which gives me a chance to provide your Friday Linky:
Start with the Seven Fortean wonders of the world – I hadn’t heard of Oak Island and its Money Pit, or the Piri Reis map.
I’ve already mentioned Sixteen Candles once this year – how improbable is mentioning it a second time? NPR has a feature on Long Duk Dong, the cringe-inducing Asian character from that film. It interviews actor Gedde Watanabe, and also features a one-page strip by Adrian Tomine about being an Asian American in high school when “the Donger” was famous.
In other comic-related linky, Newsarama has the special Scott Pilgrim comic released for Free Comic Book Day – if you don’t know Scott Pilgrim, it’s a super-fun oddity featuring young love, rock and roll, and cute dimension-hopping rollerskate couriers. It is the hipster book of the moment, and worth checking out. (Wellington Public Library has ’em, local readers!)
And Cracked has an article on when Princess Di joined a superhero team in an infamous killed storyline for X-Men spin-off X-Statix by Brit stirrer Peter Milligan and artist Mike Allred. Features the rarely-seen cover art that was solicited before the Windsors said, um, no, and the story was altered. See it to believe it.
Star Wars fans, check out the space fight from Return of the Jedi with all the non-space fight bits edited out – just nine minutes of pure space battle adrenaline (and not coincidentally the best sequence in Return of the Jedi).
Eco-stuff: Malc pointed me at this BBC report on the fate of plastics in our ecology – drifting in the sea currents so it all ends up on this remote island of ‘Midway’. If you’re still in doubt over whether we need to kick our plastic bag habit, this will tip you over. The ocean-crossing robot should become some kind of mascot… Also, the AVClub discusses misguided enviro-friendly entertainments such as Captain Planet, Ferngully, and Melissa Etheridge. (Hang on…)
And finally:Einstein’s theory of relativity in words of four letters or less. Worth your time (so to speak). Not kidding about the four-letter limit, either – they refer to Isaac Newton as “Izzy” throughout…

This is probably my favourite video on the internets, evar. Watch it. If you’ve seen it before, watch it again. The cats are great.
Via some Wellybloggers, a mesmerising short film portrait of Wellington by Massey Design student Richard Sidey, his showpiece at the end-of-04 exhibition Exposure (which is always worth a look if you’re in Welly in December). It’s an awardwinning film, and watching it you’ll see why. Timelapse reveals new rhythms in familiar spaces. It’s wicked. Music by Dubtown’s percussionistas Strike!, and also featuring calligraphy by Stan Chan.
Via Svend, a deeply weird true-life mystery – nine experienced skiers, out camping in the mountains, who didn’t make it through the night. But what the details suggest about what happened will give you shivers.
Via Hottieperm, Stuff White People Like. It misses as often as it hits, and “white people” seems to mean “urban liberals”, but its dogged commitment to that one joke is pleasing to me.
I wish you a Very Leapy Friday.