Friday Linktronic

Ephelants! Ephelants in a hotel lobby! Not a Muppets sketch – actual and real! A particular wild herd had a hotel built on their patch, and decided they were gonna eat the fruit there anyway. Charming story and photos here.
Fine, okay, here’s an ephelant-related Muppets sketch too. One of the best from the post-Henson 90s Muppets Tonight reboot.
I saw this several places but at mundens first: the literal re-interpretation of Take On Me! Just wonderful.

Another talk from NYU’s Clay Shirky, who is everywhere at the moment in the wake of his book ‘Here Comes Everybody’ about new technology making it easier to work collectively. Here’s Clay talking about the role of inconvenience in social systems, and how the same fluidity of new media that makes organising easy causes problems when it comes to interacting with institutions. How can we inject inconvenience in the right places to achieve certain kinds of functionality? Great case study of the guy who got sued by his university for organising an online study group! Not a great talk, but it covers some cool stuff and essential if you’re thinking about this stuff. (Hint: I am.)
And finally… a children’s book like you’ve never seen before. “When she woke up, Ellen thought about her dream. And deep, deep down inside herself Ellen really did wish that she could marry her daddy some day. This is what happens when an entire culture starts taking Freud seriously…