Links

Iceberg lettuce safe (via Popgadget) Zodiac looks v promising. Here’s a 6-6-6 tribute to David Fincher via Kottke: 6 of his best commercials, 6 of his best music videos, and his 6 feature films. Still can’t believe Mitch Hedberg died so young. Here Jesse Kornbluth reviews Hedberg. Mixed race, pretty face?

Finally managed to upgrade my Blogger blogs (apparently dsng.net had too many posts to upgrade previously!) So here are some links. Why do we think good writers should have good morals? In-n-Out Burger’s Secret Menu. The hidden obscenity on Bill Ripken’s Fleer baseball card.

Grammies last night. The Eagles tribute. Lionel Ritchie. Apparently they were going to party like it was 1979. But boy, I love Smokey and “Tracks Of My Tears” is one hell of a song. Anyway, on to the links.

Just dumping all my surfing into one place for reference at another time… Anna Nicole Smith gets shunned by Mexia, her hometown. That reminds me of the joke about Mexia: Two Aggies pass through Mexia, arguing over the correct pronunciation of the city (one arguing for “muh-hay-uh” – the proper pronunciation; the other insisting on “mex-ee-uh” – the incorrect one). They stop in at a local eating establishment to settle the matter, asking, “how do you pronounce the name of this place?” The waitress responds, very slowly, “Deh-ree Kween.” The Painted Veil deserves some Oscar noms, says the NY Times. If you want to join the Mile High Club… apparently it’s not against FAA regulations 24 has a deleterious effect on soldiers. I’ve mentioned the Tesla Roadster before, but sadly according to the website it’s sold out for 2007. *marks 2008 down in calendar*. Ads for tampons, razors, pregnancy test kits etc. get a lot less squeamish. I hope that trend hits Singapore - these ads for sanitary pads with cartoon fairies that I see on buses always seem so twee. (Do fairies get periods, in any case?)

Groundhog Day! Ever had the feeling of deja vu? (Pause) Ever had the feeling of deja vu? On the difference between camera shake and poor focussing. Top 10 Flickr hacks Debbie Cai watches Singapore v Thailand Who knew Sidney Sheldon had both an Oscar and a Tony?

Man, the new version of Blogger (which I can’t switch to, apparently, because I have “too many entries”) might be up, but old Blogger was down for a while… so here’s slightly delayed links.

Grammatical peeve of the day from conversations overheard on the MRT: “fats” is plural if you’re referring to different kinds of fats - saturated, monounsaturated etc. “Fats” is not plural if you’re referring to the spare tyre around your stomach. (Non-grammatical peeve: quasi-anorexic women speaking about fat (or ‘fats’ - ugh) that don’t exist.)

In which I just put up all the random articles I’ve found interesting over the last few days: The Least Essential Albums of 2006. An article that taught me about Neil Hamburger.

I love Slate’s the Explainer column, and this week’s collection of the questions the Explainer couldn’t answer is pretty funny. (Sample: “yea i have my own 620 gang and i dont know how to run it to make not look like a little bitch gang joke it is just me and my friend how do i run it?”) Personal ads from the London Review of Books. Literate, wry, self-deprecating. Saparmurat Niyazov, old-school dictator, passes away. The NY Times’ “Fantastically well-developed personality cult” barely scratches the surface - but then it seems hard to describe someone who created a statue of himself that rotated to face the sun. In case you ever needed to buy pantaloons. Or bloomers. The most disturbing part is that they offer “split crotch bloomers”.

Some pieces on design: The roller toaster looks great. An awesome piece of Singaporean design. A rave review of the Tesla Roadster. I hope someday to get a chance to drive the car. It’s really nice to see that it replaces the internal combustion engine not just for environmental reasons but for performance.

Global ecosystems ‘face collapse’ (from the Living Planet Report) The conservative Weekly Standard places a Democrat on the cover and writes a glowing report. More on invisibility, from Popular Science. Salon’s Broadsheet blog notes the furore over a Peekaboo pole-dancing kit being inadvertently put in the children’s toys and games section at Tesco. Yep = iPhoto for PDFs (via Popagandhi). Nifty.

History Shots. What crisp presentation of information. An old one, but Fiona Apple is a sweetheart. Weird Al Yankovic, and what he owes to MTV, as well as why he’s not weird.

Gary Brolsma, the Numa Numa guy, sells out. Where the phrase “hunka hunka burning love” comes from. I particularly like the titbit that “in 2005, an Australian woman stabbed her partner in the back, thigh, and shoulder with a pair of scissors because he played the song too many times. His injuries were classified as ’non-life threatening’”. Slate has a slideshow on various kinds of balustrades - this particular one links to I.M. Pei’s work at the National Gallery of Art.

Heard Mousse T’s “Horny as a Dandy”, the mashup of Mousse T’s “Horny” and the Dandy Warhols’ “Bohemian Like You” on the radio today, and decided to look up the video. Meanwhile, some random links.

China stops the practice of having strippers at a funeral. Ah, traditional Asian values. Beautiful people are more likely to give birth to girls, apparently. Kobayashi breaks another eating record. 58 brats! Obliterating the 2nd-placed guy (45 brats) and the world record (the dimunitive Sonya Thomas had held that with 34.5 brats). The guy’s so far ahead of his competition it’s like watching Tiger Woods in his prime. Knee Defender to counter those annoying people who recline their airplane seats too much.

No soap, radio! On one of the most popular joke traditions. The New Yorker looks at the long tail The Pedant’s Revolt looks like the kind of book I’d like - all about misconceptions and myths Speaking of things that are false, the urban legend that Alabama redefined pi is false.

Book/band mashup titles. I like “The Natalie Merchant of Venice” and “The Sun Also RZA”. On the Chinese gaming business. Actually the entire issue of the Escapist on the subject is good to read.

Slate reimagines classic novels with pulp covers Or you could spell out the whole of Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus” in cookies Meat grown in a lab. On the one hand, this has a weird-science feel about it. On the other - it would solve a lot of ethical dilemmas, such as concerns for overfishing or living conditions on farms. A funny interpretation of “Sugar, We’re Going Down” and its mumbled lyrics. Meanwhile, the Iraqis love Lionel Richie. “Richie says he was told Iraqis were playing ‘All Night Long,’ on the streets the night U.S. tanks rolled into the country in 2003.”

Hawai’i re-honours the humuhumunukunukuapuaa as the state fish. I suppose the humum… humuh… rectangular triggerfish forgot to pay its state-fish-license-renewal-fee. I’ve said it before, I think, but I want a solar cellphone charger. Especially for nights in the jungle when the phone’s running out of batteries. “Hotel California”: not a song about Satanism.

Clive Thompson writes in the NY Times Magazine about Google and China. The 100 Unsexiest Men in the World A Gnarls Barkley interview in the Grauniad (okay, the Observer). Good to see them get the publicity.