Link roundup

1. The Oakland A's were the talk of the sports world on Monday after signing Cuban slugger/outfielder Yoenis Cespedes, who put out a truly outlandish promotional video. If you're not convinced it's worth your time to watch, read this detailed description.

2. A lengthy analysis of why the Death Star's trash compactor makes little sense.

3. Bonsai tree houses.

4. Gyroscopically stabilized pool table for cruise ships.

Link roundup

1. The Mass Effect 3 demo is now available.

2. Mike Krahulik has some negative comments about the story in The Old Republic.

3. The 10 worst swings of the 2011 baseball season. Via.

4. The latest Paranorman newspaper.

5. The BBTS already has preorders for some of the Toy Fair 2012 toys, including Play Arts Kai Mass Effect and Lego Star Wars and Avengers.

Link roundup

1. Two great articles about baseball (I like reading about baseball infinitely much more than actually watching it) - - what its like to be a Milwaukee Brewers fan; the sad state of the Baltimore Orioles.

2. I think I posted about this guy before - - he forges famous paintings, poses as a Jesuit priest, and then donates them to various art galleries. Well, the Financial Times tracked him down and interviewed him. Via.

3. An assertion that Olympus lost a huge amount of money and tried to hide the losses with help of the Yakuza.

Link roundup

1. A Deadspin commenter on the World Series:

Nothing sums up baseball more than the outcome of the most important game of the year and on the biggest stage being decided partly by two old white guys not being able to hear each other on a landline.

2. The next game from the developers of Sword and Sworcery is Super TIME Force. More details here. Via.

3. Speaking of video games, Data Jammer looks like a cool Tron-esque racer.

4. Last Exit to Nowhere is giving away a shirt today. Also new in the store is a black version of the Usual Suspects t-shirt.

Link roundup

1. Michael Lewis's latest, outstanding article on the financial apocalypse focuses on Germany. It's 17 pages but well worth your time. Here's a sample paragraph:

This preternatural love of rules, almost for their own sake, punctuates German finance as it does German life. As it happens, a story had just broken that a division of a German insurance company called Munich Re, back in June 2007, or just before the crash, had sponsored a party for its best producers that offered not just chicken dinners and nearest-to-the-pin golf competitions but a blowout with prostitutes in a public bath. In finance, high or low, this sort of thing is of course not unusual. What was striking was how organized the German event was. The company tied white and yellow and red armbands to the prostitutes to indicate which ones were available to which men. After each sexual encounter the prostitute received a stamp on her arm, to indicate how often she had been used. The Germans didn’t want just hookers: they wanted hookers with rules.

OK, here's one more:

This is what makes the German case so peculiar. If they had been merely the only big, developed nation with decent financial morals, they would present one sort of picture, of simple rectitude. But they had done something far more peculiar: during the boom German bankers had gone out of their way to get dirty. They lent money to American subprime borrowers, to Irish real-estate barons, to Icelandic banking tycoons to do things that no German would ever do. The German losses are still being toted up, but at last count they stand at $21 billion in the Icelandic banks, $100 billion in Irish banks, $60 billion in various U.S. subprime-backed bonds, and some yet-to-be-determined amount in Greek bonds. The only financial disaster in the last decade German bankers appear to have missed was investing with Bernie Madoff. (Perhaps the only advantage to the German financial system of having no Jews.) In their own country, however, these seemingly crazed bankers behaved with restraint. The German people did not allow them to behave otherwise. It was another case of clean on the outside, dirty on the inside. The German banks that wanted to get a little dirty needed to go abroad to do it.

2. Kristin Tercek's having an art sale.



3. NPR's top 100 science fiction and fantasy novels.



4. Grantland continues to better than I had hoped. Two great articles today: Whether the Blue Jays are cheating; Whether John Cena has it within him to become a WWE villain, and how that change would impact WWE's earnings. (I'd love to see a chart showing how much traffic ESPN has lost to Grantland. I never even visit ESPN.com anymore.)

Brian Wilson of the Giants, frozen in Carbonite

At the September 4 San Francisco Giants game, you can get a Brian Wilson in Carbonite statue:

The statue is three sided, with one side featuring the iconic Han Solo in carbonite pose featured in "The Empire Strikes Back." A second side features Brian Wilson, in his trademark post-save celebration pose, frozen in carbonite similar to Han. The third side features graphics celebrating the Giants and Star Wars.

There are already several on sale at eBay.

Link roundup

1. "AOL shares closed down 26 percent today."



2. Adam Dunn continues to have a historically bad MLB season.



3. Apparently at least $31 million has already been spent on the recall elections in Wisconsin.

Link roundup

1. Sad Etsy Dogs, the blog.

2. Great article at Grantland about the collapse of Barry Zito and how Scott Boras promotes his clients.

3. If enough people like Id's Rage Facebook page, the iOS version will be free for a week.

Link roundup

1. "There have been whispers at times about possible cheating by the Brewers at home because they have been so much better at Miller Park than on the road. They are 40-14 at home, the best winning percentage in the majors, and only 21-35 on the road."

2. Long hatchet article about Martha Stewart. For example:

At the flagship magazine, Martha Stewart Living, one editor after another would come in and try to Real Simplify it, to make it more about hamburgers and chocolate-chip cookies and less about tassel-strewn, Venetian-themed dinners for twenty. A Thanksgiving story shot at Stewart’s stables in Bedford featured a long table and was so complicated that it became almost a comedy of errors. A child’s hair caught fire. Stewart sliced her thumb and was sent to the hospital. At the table, Stewart was flanked by Brooke Astor’s son, ­Anthony Marshall, and his wife, hardly avatars of the simple life. (By the time the story was published, Marshall was on trial for misappropriating his mother’s fortune, and the pictures had to be blurred out.)

Via.

3. Deeply disturbing cake.

Link roundup

1. This baseball player is apparently having the worst ever defensive year and already owns the single season strike out record.

2. Piers Morgan's involvement in the voicemail hacking scandal.

3. Analysis of Iran's role in the uprising in Bahrain.

But where's the Bash Brothers poster?

Classic 80's athlete posters get their due at Salon 94. I'm strongly considering picking up one of the L.A. Law posters at eBay.

Link roundup

1. List of notable players drafted by MLB including two paralyzed players.

2. Photos of Children of Russian Oligarchs. And weird Russian wedding photos. Via.

3. Giant TARDIS. Via.

Link roundup

1. If you live in LA, there's going to be a special signing event on Sunday to support the Emerald Knights DVD. Via.

2. If you're looking for a netbook, here's a $250 Lenovo deal for a model that got a decent review.

3. I'd love to know more about what caused "a group of 20 ministers of Baptist and Methodist churches" to write "a letter to baseball Commissioner Bud Selig urging him to give [Dodger owner Frank] McCourt a second chance."

Link roundup

1. I certainly want to believe this is true:

Baseball was an important part of American life in 1887, though the rules were very different. "Batters" got their names from the wooden sticks they used to fend off rabid dogs while standing in the "batter's box."

2. And this sounds good, too:

One in four U.S. hackers is an FBI informer

3. "Battery made up of 144 potatoes powering 12 LED lights."

Link roundup

1. $20 sketches and the money goes to charity.

2. The Milwaukee Brewers drafted super agent Scott Boras's son in the 30th round. Why yes, Boras does represent the Brewers' best player.

3. TFAW is having a 60% off select graphic novels sale this week.

Link roundup

1. Soviet Rocket Giraffe is a blast to play (think snowboarding, not flying).

2. Some fun baseball links: MLB owners ranked from best to worst (go Dodgers); Top 50 prospects of the draft era; "Who is Drew Butera, and is he hitting .122?"

3. i09 raves about The River:

The River is much more exciting, immersive, and cinematic than you'd expect from a "found footage" style show. It has a mythology that feels like it could become something for your coworkers to obsess over around the watercooler, but the mysteries aren't of the "endless hand-waving" variety. The makers of the pilot paid attention to the fundamentals: character development and great storytelling, and it's paid off.

The worst baseball cap in history

The 1969 Seattle Pilots - - ESPN's pick for the worst baseball cap in history. There's ten more here.

Link roundup

1. Mets pitcher R.A. Dickey gives his baseball bats geeky names, including Orcrist from The Hobbit and "hrunting" based on Beowulf.

2. I didn't read the article for fear of spoiling the headline:

'Mad hatters' gang of middle-aged women blamed for Detroit crime spree

Police in Detroit are hunting a gang of middle-aged women, nicknamed the "Mad Hatters", who they blame for a string of robberies, purse snatching and fraud.

Via.

3. My local theater doesn't show pre-movie commercials anymore, but the theaters that do are having trouble filling the slots:

Part of the reason for the shortfall, according to the firm's CEO, is lack of advertising from Japanese auto and electronics makers who are suffering following March's earthquake and tsunami, as well as the National Guard, which no longer needs to advertise as much because high unemployment numbers push so many candidates its way.

Link roundup

1. ESPN's 2011 all-overrated MLB team.

2. William Gibson loves the Dyson air multiplier:

Just saw/experienced the Dyson Air Multiplier. FAR more amazing than the Dyson Air Blade.

With the Air Blade, you can imagine how it works. air Multiplier is Arthur C. Clarke's definition of magic. Seriously. 22nd Century tech.

And they look like very large, utterly minimalist pieces of extremely high-end Scandinavian jewellery. And the breeze feels like one.

Love it when a moment of feeling like an immigrant to a new century is so utterly positive.

$300+ at Amazon. Here's an explanation for how they work - - they use something called "process entrainment."

3. It's fascinating reading Susannah Breslin's blog at Forbes (which is about her struggles moving from one job to another, and how to be a successful blogger in general). I don't think she's been blogging there for more than two months, and already she's written a post that is more or less about how she's making choices that will sabotage her continued employment there.

Link roundup

1. G4TV: We've been paying someone to post our articles at Reddit for ages and are really sorry we've been exposed.

2. Video shows how to throw a knuckleball.

3. The new Amazon Cloud Drive is incredibly easy to use, but uploads are very slow.