Car Crashes

Nice song (too old to be new, but quite old enough yet to be a classic)... and you've got to love that they shot it in Cape Town!

Hidden

Talk about Easter Eggs... Here's a fun list of 25 Logos With Hidden Messages, many of which you know without knowing about the hidden message. Like the hidden bear in the Toblerone mountain...



.. or the hidden arrow between the E and the X in the FedEx logo...



... or the secret Aussie map in the Yoga Australia logo.



There are plenty more goodies on the list. Go have a look.

Spaced Out

I could watch this all day. It's the solar system, turned into a blissed-out music box. Click on the link and enjoy.

Billboards

You'll want to download some of these and send them around to your mates: It's BestDesignOptions' collection of 35 Cool Billboard Ads From Around The World.

Some real beauties here.

P@ssword

So our office mailboxes all got reset/transferred to the corporate mothership a couple of days ago, and our passwords were all reset. In my search for an uncrackable new password (because, let's face it: "p@ssword111" isn't going to stay safe for long – especially not when that's what the entire company was reset to), I came across this Lifehacker story: How I'd Hack Your Weak Password.

I'll be updating that password now, then...

And just while I'm thinking about it, I find this infographic at InformationIsBeautiful. Turns out my new password (which is my full name in binary code) was the best option after all.

Jamaica

Wow. GOOD has an absolutely breathtaking gallery (they call it a Picture Show) of photos by Caroll Taveras, taken in the crazy/beautiful surrounds of Kingston, Jamaica.



Go take a gander at Taveras's portfolios. There's plenty of good stuff there.

Colours

So I've been playing around with the idea of changing the layout/template of this blog, but I keep getting stuck on the colour scheme. (I'm loving orange as a secondary colour, and the blue's working for me too...) Smashing magazine has a great feature up on colour theory, so I'm getting some ideas from there. Let's see how this pans out...

It's Absolutely True

If ever you've had the misfortune of reading the Brit tabloid The Daily Mail*, you'll love this little ditty.


* Ordinarily I'd include a link to the Daily Mail's site, but as a service to you, I won't.

Break

I can't sing the praises of Pictory highly or loudly enough. Their latest showcase is called Spring Breakout, and they're sharing stories and photos (beautiful stories, beautiful photos) of vacations, holidays and getaways.

And as always, the stories and photos are so good, it almost hurts to look.

Road Rash

Top Gear are running a list of their Top 10 Racing Games... and I'm delighted to reveal that Road Rash 2 made the list. This game totally changed the way I looked at racing games: you had to
a) race
b) use clubs and chains and feet and fists to knock opponents off their bikes
c) avoid the police
and
d) race.

After that, whenever I played Need For Speed I kept trying to locate the rocket-launcher button.

Fountains

Years from now, we as a society will look back to these times and wonder: Why didn't we appreciate Fountains of Wayne when we had them?

The End

In my wanderings I stumbled upon this old story from Discover magazine, cheerfully titled 20 Ways The World Could End. As the title suggests, the story lists 20 possible end-of-days scenarios, from the weird (rogue black holes) to the wonderful (alien invasion) to the somebody's-been-watching-the-last-episode-of-St-Elsewhere (point 20).

Reading the piece takes me back to that carefree time around the turn of the century, where we all thought the world was going to end. I guess some folks must look back now and kind of wish it had.

Turkeys

Empire magazine is running its list of the 50 Worst Movies Ever Made, and hoo boy, are there some turkeys in this farmyard. Spider-Man 3 seems like an unfair choice (it wasn't that bad, was it?), but their Number One is a real Number Two.

I was hoping for more Uwe Boll, but I guess when you're competing against such cinematic stinkers as The Love Guru and The Avengers (which seemed so promising in its early script draft), then something's gotta give.

Skin Deep

Perfect timing, Indexed. This is the first thing I saw after filing a skincare story for Men's Health.

Privacy > $1-million

Maths genius Grigori Perelman - who's already turned down the Fields Medal - is now saying no to a $1-million prize. (This after he cracked the Poincaré Conjecture.)

"I have all I want," he said, shunning a life of fame, fortune and maths groupies in favour of a simpler, quieter life. For wannabe recluses and aspiring hermits like myself, this man is a total hero.

Eggs & Sausage

Typography. Tom Waits. A match made in heaven.

Wingtip

The simpler, the better. It's not always true (particularly when it comes to mystery novel plots or the intelligence levels of people you have to work with), but it definitely works in the Vans California Collection's Era Wingtip.



A more beautiful shoe you're unlikely to find.

Spooky

Cracked has gone into full flashlight-under-the-face mode with their latest feature: The 5 Creepiest Unsolved Crimes Nobody Can Explain. It's a real Greatest Hits of The Unexplained, featuring such classics as the Taman Shud Case, the Toynbee Tiles and The Lead Masks Case.



Taman Shud Case is a personal favourite. Gets me to thinking about those old copies of The Unexplained magazine I use to read...

The Ballad of G.I. Joe

So that's what the supersolders of GI Joe and Cobra get up to in their spare time...

The Ballad of G.I. Joe from Olivia Wilde

Super Star

The best thing about astronomy? All the weird stuff that's happening out there. In this article at National Geographic, we're introduced to two stars which are circling each other in five-minute orbits, travelling at 310 miles a second.

From the article:
"Two extremely dense stars in an intimate dance are spinning around each other in just 5.4 minutes – making them the fastest known stellar partners in the galaxy, astronomers have confirmed. To have such a speedy orbit, the stars must be moving at about 310 miles (500 kilometers) a second, the team calculates."

In/Out

The Washington Post has an interesting infographic explaining the US federal budget. You gotta love the picture of $2.57-trillion coming in and $3.83-trillion going out. Even as someone who can't balance his own wallet, I can see there's a problem here...

Paralympics

The Big Picture has another amazing gallery up, this one celebrating the Winter Paralympics.

The Facebook

Is your mom on Facebook? Don't fell bad about it. Even hard rockers have to put up with it...

Animated

The Animaniacs. The Simpsons. GI Joe. Ducktails. It can only be IGN's list of the Top 100 Animated Series of All Time.

Cars

Porsche 911. Jeep CJ. Ford Mustang. It can only be Wired/Autopia's list of 10 Damn-Near Perfect Cars.

Reception

I can't wait for my holiday.

Cartman

For people who have a crass, puerile and childish sense of humour (that'll be me then), Eric Cartman has to be one of the greatest comic creations of our time. Don't agree? Then take a gander at this story at Paste magazine, which lists 10 parallels between the South Park character and the classic Devil's Dictionary.

Neighbourhood

I can't get enough of Pictory's latest showcase. They're celebrating neighbourhood treasures, and the collection includes experiences, memories and (best of all) stories – real stories - about local bookshops, coffee shops, bars, landmarks, parks, bus stops.... you name it.

Direct

Paste magazine have a special feature up where they celebrate the 50 Greatest Living Film Directors. The order of the list is up for debate (James Cameron all the way down at No 41?!?)... but I can totally get behind their pick for Number One.

Amazing Worlds

Is that a Rover's eye view of the surface of Mars? Nope, it's close-up photograph of some spilled paprika, cinnamon, nutmeg, chili powder and charcoal. Photographer Matthew Albanese creates worlds like this using unexpected ingredients, and The Daily Beast has a slideshow up of some of his greatest hits.

His lunar surface – made out of fireplace ash – has to be seen to be believed.

Unbeaten

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the German Bundesliga is the most exciting soccer league in Europe. Where else could you have a team still unbeaten with just 10 games to go, yet only in second place. It's quite possible that Bayer Leverkusen could finish the season without losing a game, yet still not win the championship.

Big Bird

There's a great story (especially in these lean times) up at Cheap Healthy Good, where the blogger creates 17 meals out of a single chicken. And not 1 great meal and 16 lousy ones... I'm talking 17 you'd-eat-that-for-dinner meals. Bon Appetit!

Optical Delusions

Cracked are running the sixth in their epic series of Images You Won't Believe Aren't Photoshopped. First they mess with your eyes... then they mess with your mind.

Holi Days

Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs across the world are celebrating Holi, the Festival of Colours. The Big Picture is, of course, there with the pictures.

Celebs

Go take a look at New York magazine's slideshow of the Best and Worst of March's Celebrity Photographs in US magazines. There's good stuff there from Vanity Fair, GQ, Esquire, Vogue... all the places you'd expect to find great portraits.



It is a Best and Worst, though, so be warned: the pics range from the sublime to whatever the opposite of sublime is.

Hindsight

Slate have a great story up on How To Suss Out Bad Tech Predictions.

The piece was inspired by an old Newsweek article (from the carefree days of 1995), which included this pearl: " The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works."

Back in '95, that made perfect sense. Today? Not so much.

Credit

Here, in case you've ever wondered, is a story explaining what the 16 digits on your credit card really stand for. (Apparently it has nothing to do with the Number of the Beast. I'm still not so sure about that...)

Global

Somewhere between Jared Diamond and Jacopo della Quercia lies Dan Carlin. In his latest Hardcore History podcast (Show 32 - Globalization Unto Death), he looks at how a handful of nations on the western periphery of the Eurasian landmass managed to take over and – for a while – totally control the world.

Any podcast that gets me thinking about race, history, economics and an old Animaniacs song has got to be worth listening to.

Bebunked

Cracked has yet another instant classic by Jacopo della Quercia (easily their best writer – I'll eventually link to all of his stories), this time revising some revisionist history. The piece is about The Five Most Widely Believed World War II Facts That Are... erm... not strictly factual.

It's utterly fascinating – and one of the few stories ever to debunk the myths of Churchill (who was a total nutter), and the twin notions of US and German military might (if anybody was going to win, it was the Soviets).
Tear up your high school history textbooks, and read Cracked. At least there you'll get the truth (or something like it).

Diamond

Stumbled across this Financial Times interview with Jared Diamond, the genius scientist who wrote Guns, Germs And Steel. He talks here about his more recent book, Collapse... and whips up a mean lunch.

In Character

At the beginning of the year (seems like such a long time ago...), Rotten Tomatoes ran a list of 100 Greatest Movie Characters of the Decade. Go take a look.



I reckon time's going to tell on Colonel Hans Landa (who should've been higher up), on Juno (who should've been lower down), and on Edward Cullen (who, unfortunately, is going to be one of the great characters of this decade). But any list that includes Ron Burgundy is good enough for me.

War Is Over

Foreign Policy are running a gallery they're calling The Shooting War: An exclusive collection of work by the world's most acclaimed conflict photographers. The images are enough to make you wish - more than ever - for world peace.

I Love It When A Plan Comes Together

My nerd brain just exploded.

Cash

There's an interesting graphic up at GOOD, charting the distribution of wealth among America's religious groups. It's interesting to see how many poor Jehovah's Witnesses and traditionally black Christians there are, compared to the richer percentages of Hindus and Jews. It's also interesting how evenly spread the Latter-Day Saints, mainline Christians and Orthodox faithful are.

Have to wonder what Saint Francis would say about all this though...

Snowball

As the Winter Olympics slalom away into the annals of sporting history, Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins has a proper go at the IOC, with their (I love this quote) "blue blazers, five-star accommodations, and shellfish buffets".

Here's my favourite bit from the piece: "The IOC, confronted in Vancouver with a couple of lethal issues and fresh human rights concerns at the next Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, instead reserved some of its toughest words for this late-breaking scandal: the drinking of champagne by women in public."

Ouch.