telescreen.org

Some good ideas:

• an MP3 player shaped like a cassette tape -- with a magnetic head so you can play it in a cassette deck;
• the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which created all sorts of nifty and innovative sound effects, but didn't live to see its fiftieth birthday;
• a description (with nice photos) of a dinner at El Bulli, the temple of molecular gastronomy;

and one shockingly bad one:  running for Congress (even though there's a picture of the Supreme Court building on your campaign website), meeting with Nazis and speaking at a birthday dinner for Hitler, and then saying you don't know enough about the tenets of National Socialism (say what you will, Dude, at least it's an ethos) to decide whether you favor or oppose it.

Illinois Nazis.  I hate Illinois Nazis.

I know I've highlighted some great newspaper corrections in this space, but I may have to retire the category after this one:

CORRECTION: This submission misstates that one Dalai Lama admitted to having sex with hundreds of men and women while knowing that he had AIDS. Additionally, the submission misstates that many monks participated in the dismemberment of female bodies. In fact, there is no factual evidence to substantiate either of these claims. Spectator regrets the error.

Incidentally, after receiving what I can only estimate to be huge amounts of crap for this article (which would seem to be entirely deserved), the Spectator pulled the entire article from their site, which is why the above link goes to a Google cache of the original.

killbots_want_peace, originally uploaded by darkpony.

From my friend darkpony, who kicks major ass.

(Look familiar? He also did this rendition of the New Yorker's Eustace Tilley character a while back.)

Some linky goodness for your Monday-morning perusal:

• amazing article on the secret life of elevators...and just how hellish it'd be to stuck in one for a long time (Milgram would be proud);
• if Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos had moderated the Lincoln/Douglas debates;
• Amy Langfield at NewYorkology points out just what a wonderfully serendipitous city New York is; and
• "Describe Marsellus Wallace to me, pray."

Because it is awesome: Numbers Station Bingo. 

I see that the Procol Harum court fight has been resolved:

LONDON, England (AP) -- The lead singer of British band Procol Harum has won an appeal court judgment awarding him full royalties for the band's iconic hit, "A Whiter Shade of Pale."

Britain's Court of Appeal ruled in rock star Gary Brooker's favor, overturning an earlier lower court decision awarding the group's former organist 40 percent of the royalties from the song.

The Court of Appeal said that Matthew Fisher, who played the song's haunting organ theme, was entitled to co-authorship. However, the court said he will receive no money from past or future royalties because he waited too long to make his claim.

...but hey, if we're doing things like determining who wrote something, shouldn't this guy get a credit, too?

It's been around teh intarweb a lot lately, but this series of photos showing the processing of the Space Shuttle between landing and launch was pretty interesting.

And that led me to this nifty article about the "shuttleski" -- the Buran, the Soviet answer to the shuttle.

Oh, this is strange.  Wonder what was going on?