Link roundup

1. 13 sno-cone machines bought by the Department of Homeland Security.

2. Vandal captured because he thought "slut" was spelled "sult."

3. Grantland predicts which team will acquire Peyton Manning.

Link roundup

1. I mentioned the other day that Neal Stephenson had written an article lamenting what he saw as stagnation in scientific development. I don't believe that he mentions in the article his own association with Intellectual Ventures (which is now suing Motorola).

2. Corruption and death at a Vatican-connected hospital.

3. Video of Tom Cruise in a dance battle. It's like Zoolander in real life.

Link roundup

1. "A former police officer for the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia has admitted to stealing $2.4 million worth of 'error' coins and selling them to a coin distributor in California."

2. Dinosaur heart necklace.

3. Dog in lamb's clothing. (Really, enjoy the entire gallery.)

Link roundup

Slow news day, so here's a few links I never got around to posting:

1. Hilltop cottage in Nova Scotia.

2. "The Downfall Of Barry Halper, Baseball Collecting's Bernie Madoff."

3. "The Chinese art of elegant bribery."

4. "African Village Uses Tech to Fight Off Rape Cult."

5. "Authorities 'cleaning up' Dafen Village, world capital of cheap oil painting."

Link roundup

1. Comment and win art by JAW Cooper.



2. Apparently, to combat theft of donated food:

aid agencies at least sometimes turn to distributing food that is, well, pretty disgusting. Not rotten, not bad for you--in fact, the stuff they distribute in North Korea is vitamin fortified and very nutritious. But it doesn't taste good; it's essentially gruel on steroids. No one would voluntarily eat it if they had any alternatives. So there's not much resale value.

3. Adam Hughes is auctioning off an art commission at eBay. The bid amount is already pretty breathtaking.

Link roundup

1. This guy boasts that he hacked the communal Starbucks gift card to siphon off money. He's just begging to be hacked, right? Via.



2. Politicians:

The cash-strapped city of Carson has spent $1,200 for new signs so that the names of City Council members could be listed by seniority rather than in alphabetical order, the city confirmed Thursday.



The signs are placed on mostly vacant, city-owned lots.

3. Russian politicians:

Putin 'discovers Greek urns' on scuba dive.

*Buy propaganda posters at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Great writing about living in China at the time of the Beijing Olympics. Sample paragraph:

Our son had asthma. There was no use pretending it was the squeaky-clean, sensitive, upper-middle-class kind of asthma. He had the asthma that ghetto children come down with, because they live in the dirt. He was wheezing because at last, today, on the morning of the Olympics, the filth of the city where he was born had gotten into his tender lungs. He was sick because we had let him live in Beijing.

2. How to market to old people. For example:

Marketing to the elderly is tricky. The direct approach—say, calling your product “the soap for the over-70s”—does not work. And traditional advertising fails. “You can’t use TV adverts: they forget them,” groans the 30-something executive. “We show it again and again and again—and they still can’t recall it,” he sighs. Word-of-mouth is the only way.

3. "The governor of a prison near Moscow has lost his job after photographs emerged of his inmates holding a toga party complete with caviar and a McDonald's fast food delivery."



*Buy Olympics posters at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Here's a riddle:

“Why would a tiny woman with no criminal record, who worked 10 years on Wall Street, randomly hold up people at gunpoint at night dressed as a policewoman?”

Absolutely bizarre answer.

2. There's a new Humble Indie Bundle.

3. A claim that China is disassembling and burying the crashed bullet trains to hide evidence. Via.

Link roundup

1. Grotesque corruption at Scotland Yard:

Members of Parliament said in interviews that they were troubled by a “revolving door” between the police and News International, which included a former top editor at The News of the World at the time of the hacking who went on to work as a media strategist for Scotland Yard.

On Friday, The New York Times learned that the former editor, Neil Wallis, was reporting back to News International while he was working for the police on the hacking case.

2. The Michelin Guide (which I believe was originally created to encourage people to drive their cars around France) is just another old media property that's losing money and struggling to remain relevant in the internet age. Via.

3. "The small but energy-rich Gulf state of Qatar is the world’s biggest buyer in the art market—by value, at any rate—and is behind most of the major modern and contemporary art deals over the past six years."

Link roundup

1. Really interesting article about how hit songs are manufactured and how much it costs to do so (the amount spent on promoting the song (bribery) is by far the largest amount). Via.

2. Tron Legacy 8 bit Extended Version.

3. Tattoo with a QR code that becomes animated when viewed through a smartphone. It'll be more impressive when the tattoo is invisible unless viewed through a smartphone.

Link roundup

1. Some useful commentary about the current federal budget negotiations. (I tend to discount any commentary that presumes that Obama and his aides are stupid.)

2. It's going to be so hot in Qatar during the World Cup that they might play three 30 minute periods instead of two 45 minute halves. That's right, the games were awarded to a country where playing the game by the established rules will likely be impossible.

3. There's no self service gas stations in New Jersey? All gas has to be pumped by an attendant? In Los Angeles you almost never see full service advertised.

Link roundup

1. Devastating review of Puzzle Agent 2:

But sadly there’s not a glimmer of interest or wit in the telling, so you’re in fact drumming your fingers as people slowly jabber about nothing, waiting until it ends. I chose to play good puzzle games on my iPhone during these times.

2. Grotesque corruption in medicine.

3. The sale items for July at Things from Another World have been posted.

Link roundup

1. You didn't really buy that nonsense about how great the yakuza was for keeping order in Japan after the tsunami right? The nuclear power plants failed probably in no small part because they were dominated by the yakuza.

2. The latest incredibly raw personal story from Penelope Trunk - - the heart of the post is a really good message - - if you want a happy relationship, you have to be brave enough to tell you partner what's really bothering you.

3. The BBTS has new Marvel Universe preorders - -sets feature Tony Stark, Iceman, Absorbing Man, Astonishing Wolverine, Magneto, Ultron, Darkhawk, Sub-Mariner, X-23, Steve Rogers, and the Guardians of the Galaxy I posted earlier today.

Link roundup

1. A claim that Adobe is paying for text links. Via.

2. "A third Los Angeles building inspector has been fired in a corruption probe."

3. The Bad Deal is devoted to pointing out dumb deals at Groupon and other daily deal sites. Via.

Link roundup

1. Scan of a Conan story by Bruce Timm (NSFW).

2. Pink jellyfish. Via.

3. Watch it tree, you're being monitored.

4. The five richest pastors in Africa. Via.

Link roundup

1. A recipe for hardtack. (If you don't know what that is, you really should run out and buy a couple Patrick O'Brian novels.)

2. (New, specific) Assertions that FIFA demands massive bribes from potential host countries.

3. "Frank McCourt's motives and methods for potentially putting the Dodgers into bankruptcy."

Link roundup

1. What happens if you release 100 cats in an Ikea store? Who knows, mostly the video shows closeups of people watching the cats.

UPDATE: My mistake, there's a commercial featuring the cats in action.

2. Michael Lewis looks at Greece's disastrous economic situation, which he blames on corruption and lax oversight. His focus is on a monastery reminiscent of the the one in Neal Stephenson's Anathem:

Knowing nothing else about the Vatopaidi monastery except that, in a perfectly corrupt society, it had somehow been identified as the soul of corruption, I made my way up to the north of Greece, in search of a bunch of monks who had found new, improved ways to work the Greek economy. The first stage was fairly easy: the plane to Greece’s second city of Thessaloniki, the car being driven along narrow roads at nerve-racking speeds, and a night with a lot of Bulgarian tourists at a surprisingly delightful hotel in the middle of nowhere, called the Eagles Palace. There the single most helpful hotel employee I have ever met (ask for Olga) handed me a stack of books and said wistfully how lucky I was to be able to visit the place. The Vatopaidi monastery, along with 19 others, was built in the 10th century on a 37-mile-long-by-6-mile-wide peninsula in northeast Greece, called Mount Athos. Mount Athos now is severed from the mainland by a long fence, and so the only way onto it is by boat, which gives the peninsula the flavor of an island. And on this island no women are allowed—no female animals of any kind, in fact, except for cats. The official history ascribes the ban to the desire of the church to honor the Virgin; the unofficial one to the problem of monks hitting on female visitors. The ban has stood for 1,000 years.

This explains the high-pitched shrieks the next morning, as the ancient ferry packed with monks and pilgrims pulls away from the docks. Dozens of women gather there to holler at the tops of their lungs, but with such good cheer that it is unclear whether they are lamenting or celebrating the fact that they cannot accompany their men. Olga has told me that she was pretty sure I was going to need to hike some part of the way to Vatopaidi, and that the people she has seen off to the holy mountain don’t usually carry with them anything so redolent of the modern material world as a wheelie bag. As a result, all I have is an Eagles Palace plastic laundry bag with spare underwear, a toothbrush, and a bottle of Ambien.

3. A woman fell into a wasp nest and was stung 500 times:

Rescue crews had to deal with yellow jackets even inside the ambulance, and once the unidentified woman was taken to Sturdy Memorial Hospital, hospital staff then had to handle yellow jackets in the emergency room.

Via.

*Buy Anathem at Amazon (it's like Harry Potter, but with string theory).

Fark's rejected Christmas cards (link roundup)

From Fark's Rejected Christmas Cards theme.

And a few more links:

1. The WSJ says:

[Tiger] Woods cut an unusual deal with American Media Inc., the owner of both Men's Fitness magazine and the National Enquirer tabloid newspaper. Mr. Woods agreed to the cover shot and photo spread in Men's Fitness, whose circulation of about 700,000 per issue is less than half of Golf Digest's nearly 1.7 million, in return for the National Enquirer squelching a story and photographs purportedly showing Mr. Woods in a liaison with a woman who wasn't his wife.

2. Steps to take now to make it easier to reclaim your Google account if it ever gets hacked.

3. "The Roman Catholic Church and the police in Ireland systematically colluded in covering up decades of child sex abuse by priests in Dublin, according to a scathing report released Thursday." Via.

UPDATE: Sinhead O'Connor has strong words for the Pope. Via.

*Previously: Rejected Fallout perks.

*Buy Tiger Woods toys at eBay.

Soccer goalie does taunting cartwheels (link roundup)

Video of a soccer goalie distracting shooters with cartwheels and other gyrations. The shooters repay him in kind. Via.

And a few more links:

1. Man managed to kill a woman under police protection in Los Angeles.

2. And in other fun Southern California news, "4 of 5 San Jacinto council members indicted in corruption probe."

3. Yes, that $1 double cheeseburger deal at Burger King is incredible. So incredible, franchisees are suing the parent company to try to stop the deal. Via.

*Previously: Premier League soccer player buys lots of his own jerseys to seem more popular.

*Buy Fast Food toys at eBay.

Popular animated show in the Middle East features four grandmothers? (link roundup)

It's called Freej. You can read about it here, and watch it here. I also learned that Ramadan is not only a holy month, but also the Middle Eastern equivalent of sweeps month. Via.

And a few more links:

1. If you'd like to know what you missed, here's a summary of the first episode of Flash Forward.

2. Depressing corruption exposed in the Food and Drug Administration.

3. Firefighters piled into a fire engine and drove out of the station's garage to go rescue a bleeding man. Unfortunately he was much closer than they realized. Right outside the garage in fact. And they ran him over. Via.

*Previously: Sean Penn talks about his childhood friends, including the guy who ran someone over.

*Buy fire truck toys at eBay.