Plane-eating giraffe (link roundup)

"The Giraffagon" is one of two paintings recently posted by Amanda Visell.

And a few more links:

1. Next time someone claims with a straight face that modern (and legal) training techniques explain why athletes have gotten bigger and faster, ask them why free throw shooting hasn't improved in 40 years.

2. Supposedly, the median price of a home sold in Detroit in December was $7,500, and there's no major grocery chain in the city.

3. Photo of a Burger King salad illustrates the recession nicely.

4. Fascinating article by Michael Lewis about the financial collapse in Iceland. First of all, it mentions someone named "Snorri Snorrasson." Second, it includes information like this:

Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called “hidden people”—or, to put it more plainly, elves—in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it. It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free but, as he put it, “we couldn’t as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people.” The other, more serious problem was the Icelandic male: he took more safety risks than aluminum workers in other nations did. “In manufacturing,” says the spokesman, “you want people who follow the rules and fall in line. You don’t want them to be heroes. You don’t want them to try to fix something it’s not their job to fix, because they might blow up the place.” The Icelandic male had a propensity to try to fix something it wasn’t his job to fix.

Read the entire article here.

*Previously: Visell's Fallout Dragon.

*Buy Amanda Visell toys at eBay.