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Updated at 8:12 a.m. ET: It took a zip line to stop Boris Johnson laughing, even then it was only for a few minutes.

If every Olympic Games has a breakout star, London’s mayor is surely in contention along with Ryan Lochte and Ye Shiwen.

Johnson might not be an athlete but he would surely get gold for grabbing attention.  From mocking Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in front of a crowd of thousands to risqué comments about volleyball players, Boris Johnson has awarded himself a starring role during London 2012. While some see a larger-than-life personality, perfectly representing his city, others believe it is another big step in a marathon effort to become British prime minister.

That might sound ridiculous, but consider how far Boris has already come (Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson only needs one name). He was a journalist who found wider attention appearing on satirical quiz shows. His persona is one of an upper-class buffoon, with a messy mop of blond hair and a ready response of ‘oh cripes’ to tricky situations. But his shambolic appearance masks a shrewd and focused politician. It’s a combination that has allowed him to defy the political odds:  winning two mayoral elections as a Conservative in a left-leaning city at a time when his party is unpopular.

PhotoBlog: Boris Johnson, London mayor, stuck on a zip line

Ask a London cabbie what he thinks and here’s the response: “He’s my type of politician,”said Michael Murphy. “He’s a big personality and that’s what you need in a city like London.”

Boris doesn’t scare the voters -- he entertains them. On the Late Show he laughed along as David Letterman mocked his hair and then said his own bike-hire scheme was “Communist.” As the Olympics began he described female beach volleyball players as glistening “like wet otters.” It’s far from his worst gaffe and yet they never seem to do him any harm. In fact, many believe they add to the mayor’s eccentric, “real” persona.

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Boris Johnson’s biographer describes it as the ability to relate to the man in the pub.

“He hears the central ridiculousness of political life and can see the comic side,” Andrew Gimson told NBC News. “People love that because most people are skeptical about politicians.”

Johnson’s fellow Conservatives are taking notice. A recent poll showednearly a third would like him to take control of the party if Prime Minister David Cameron were to step aside.

The perception of rivalry between the two is exacerbated by a shared history. Both went to the elite boarding school Eton College before studying at Oxford University.

Teen held after Olympian gets Twitter death threat

“He considers himself to be a great deal more able than David Cameron,” Gimson said. “He considers Cameron his warm-up act.”

It could be quite a while before Johnson takes the main stage.

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He would first need to be elected to Parliament, then elected leader of the Conservative Party. Yet it is something being taken seriously in London.

In the Daily Telegraph newspaper, Benedict Brogan sums it up: “Westminster is divided between those who now believe him to be unstoppable, and those who can’t stop laughing at the idea that he is being taken seriously as an alternative Prime Minister.” 

There was plenty of laughter as the mayor was rescued from the zip line on Wednesday, cheerfully waving union flags as he was pulled along. It’s an indicator of how powerful Brand Boris has become, that this seemed neither strange, nor likely to detract from his growing popularity.

L5 Technology

The L5 Remote app for iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad; it costs $59.95.

Some of us don't have the remotest idea how to work today's remote controls, other than using the power, volume and channel buttons. That's testimony to how complicated remotes have become since they first landed in our hands some 60 years ago, and why products like universal remotes have become universally disliked.

This tool of convenience has turned many into frustrated flingers of said devices. But it wasn't always this way.

At Technologizer, Harry McCracken provides a fun overview of the remote's history, sharing a Zenith ad from 1951 showing its appropriately named "Lazy Bones" controller.

"No jumping up, not one knob to touch or retune!" boasts the ad. Of course, this is why we're all out buying the Wii today, because we stopped jumping up to change stations or the volume and became BarcaLounger lizards and now need to do something about that.

McCracken notes that the TiVo remote, aka" Mr. Peanut" because of its Mr. Peanut-like shape and look, was probably the "most iconic new-and improved remote control of its era," largely because  of its "user-friendly consumer-electronics interfaces in general," with the buttons being "thoughtfully arranged and well-labeled ... There’s a lesson there for everyone who’s attempted to radically rethink the remote over the years."

Now, of course, we can use our smartphones as remotes. And some of us can just use our minds — not to turn the set on, but to keep it off.

Related stories:

• Can your iPhone replace your remote controls?
• Secrets of Verizon iPhone tests revealed
• New app lets you schedule text messages

Check out Technolog, Gadgetbox, Digital Life and In-Game on Facebook, and on Twitter, follow Suzanne Choney.

Hey I just got back from Argentina. Did I miss anything?

All this Michael Jackson memorializing reminded me of a chart of sampling that's been done of his songs that was viral a little while ago. I didn't realize it at the time but the guy who made it does these "sample maps" has a whole bunch of them. Also interesting to read how it went viral.

I also liked this "Origins of the Moonwalk" video.

Less cool but I still watched it, Billie Tweets.

And I imagine this year's Thrill 2009 will be well attended.

Just reading the phrase "inkjet-printable shrink plastic" should set your brain ablaze with ideas but in cast the transition from Michael Jackson was too much for that, "Make Photo Necklaces, Earrings, Magnets and More Using Shrinkable Plastic." It's DIY Shrinky Dinks.

Speaking of DIY, my favorite new site is There, I Fixed It. A wonderful tribute to human ingenuity.

Kid builds his own roller coaster.

360 view from inside a water bottle

How language effects the way you think. Not as long or as dense as it looks. Good food for thought. How is the way you see the world guided by the language you use to describe the world?

Stop Paying Attention: Zoning Out Is a Crucial Mental State

Amazing face painting. With some of them I can't even make out the face.

Why the Terminator sounds like Arnold.

Countdown featured this last week but it's the kind of thing that's better online so you can play it a few times and figure out what the guy's doing. He appears to swing the baseball bat at least twice with every motion.

For a long-hair considering making a clean aesthetic break before I end up looking like an old metal head who didn't know when to quit, the results of the Today show's latest semi-regular emasculation exercise are not very encouraging. They look worse, right?

The state of the music review industry (some curses) - A whole lot of implications for news reporting here. Look for the "crowdsourcing kills" meme to catch fire.

This experiment of virtual homelessness in  Sims 3 is pretty compelling even if it has some wonky lines: "She's now got a negative moodlet for 'embarrassment', which almost negates the mood bonus she got for getting clean."

Insane. I wouldn't even do the gorilla stunt but the tattoo? That's just insane. (That said, at the recent International Tattoo Convention in New York City, one of the most common sights was cover-up work, so maybe this guy is giving himself a mental "out" with the idea that he might do a big sleeve to cover it one day. The part I don't get is that the phone is only $200. Surely that tattoo cost at least that much.

Steve Martin's business card

Remember those "literal video" spoof songs that make fun of music videos? The one for "Total Eclipse of the Heart" is good.

This guy is using Twitter to conduct scientific experiments on psychic phenomenon. Basically you try to guess where he is.

How does anyone plug anything in in Brazil?

Metro Dig at Tysons Stirs Underground Intrigue - This is basically the opening chapter of a spy novel. Or maybe another Men In Black sequel.

How to Learn About Everything - Might be best to first read How to Understand Everything (and Why) - This is really about science learning but I do think it has broader parallels. By coincidence I've been thinking about this kind of general learning lately as I've been watching my son learn to speak. He's at a stage where he's nailing down tenses and prepositions and it reminds me of something we saw here a while ago about how to learn a language quickly. (After poking around I figured out I was confusing two different articles but they were by the same guy: Learn any language in an hour and learn any language in three months.) The idea behind the language articles is to learn the general parameters and most common references.
From those basic parameters it's a matter of building your vocabulary.

(Metamodern's map of science is also really neat.)

Latest stunt from the Improv Everywhere folks is a surprise wedding reception for a newly married-at-city-hall couple. This seems like less of a joke than just a really nice thing to do for some people. I smiled through the whole thing. (Their last stunt, the fake funeral, totally suckered me. I didn't see it on April 1st so I didn't think of April Fool's Day when I saw it.)

If you like tennis... (Actually, in my experience, if you like tennis you won't think this is funny. If you don't like tennis, this reduces tennis to the ridiculous sport you think it is.)

Bullet Time is wicked hard but also quick to play a bunch of times so it's not much of an investment. I must have played 15 times but still never lived past 30 seconds.

Damian Walters show reel gymnastics - I never get sick of parkour videos. What does someone do with skills like this? Stunt man is the only occupation I can think of that could make use of this guy's assets. Maybe also circus.

Seriously cool balancing trick - Also explains why the fork you're eating with at that restaurant is all bent and wonky.

Google Holodeck: StreetView In 360 Degrees - I remember once playing with a Microsoft map program that gave you a street view and put you in a car or something to kind of drive around. This reminds me of that only room sized.

The backgrounds of famous Web memes - How many can you name?

Topsy is a new Twitter based search engine. There are few out there now and I'm woefully behind on researching them. The idea is that the search engine folks are really enthusiastic about the idea of "real time search" and taking advantage of the immediacy inherent in the content people are pumping into Twitter (not just what they're saying but what they're linking to and submitting to Twitpic, etc.). It reminds me of how people thought of Technorati and its ability to gather data quickly from blogs.

How Long Did It Take for the World to Identify Google as an AltaVista Killer? A pretty fascinating review of how Google came into the public consciousness.

Scribble maps - draw on a Google map.

Slate has a (relatively) new photoblog as well. I didn't know Magnum belonged to Slate.

While it's not typical for a TV show's Web support to contribute much to the actual on-air content, last week I got to participate in the production of a segment about an effort to plot as much as we know about North Korea on a Google Earth map file. The segment was based on this Wall Street Journal piece but you can download the file directly from the blog of one of the main participants in the project here.

If you aren't able to make Google Earth work for whatever reason* I plotted some of the interesting points on Google Maps as well on this page so you don't have to do quite the amount of hunting I had to do.

Tight day today so I'm not sure I'll be able to post a longer list later but a few quick must-shares right now:

RunPee allows you to look up movies to find out when is a good time to get up and pee and also describes what you'll be missing while you're up.

Read Infinite Jest this summer! I'm on page 807 so I should be done soon but I'll still probably follow this group just to see what people are saying. Holding the bulk of the book in my left hand as I read instills a feeling akin to the week before graduation day.

Sorry I'm late - Another one of those shot-from-above stop action films. Cute.

New NY Times photoblog - "The New York Times introduces Lens, a photojournalism blog that intends to present some of the most interesting visual and multimedia reporting: in photographs, videos, audio slide shows and other formats."

From the above: This scene of everyone rushing in to get their shot is familiar. The few times I've been in a photojournalistic situation with other photographers the energy has been very similar.

Tweeting too hard - I don't know how this algorythm works but the results are pretty amazingly consistently jerky.

Have you ever read "This Recording"? I lost/spent a lot of time flipping through it. I'll probably spend even more listening to the mp3s on this list.

PicFog is a TwitPic search engine. I don't really have an opinion on how well it works (yes, my searches get results) but as a stream of random images it's remarkably watchable. NOTE: Somewhere in here there's bound to be something objectionable. (If you're lucky you'll see it!)

I'm not sure I have the emotional stamina for this. I'm exhausted just from watching the trailer.

It's not hard to make your own Rumsfeld briefing cover sheet. They're offering blanks at the bottom there.

It's pretty exciting to see Google Street View being done with a smaller vehicle. Not only will they get more side streets and alleys and stuff but I bet they can start doing trails and walking paths and other non-roads.

Danger Mouse: Oh screw it, the music business part is too complicated. Just go download the music for free and buy something else to support us. Here, buy this book.

I finally read through the FDA's angry letter to Cheerios for making health claims that qualify it as a cholesterol drug (or something like that). I don't see admonition that their claim is false, just that it's not properly reported according to FDA regulations. The whole thing reminds me of those old Guinness ads that used to make all kinds of health claims. Nevermind the old cigarette ads. (Which is not to equate Cheerios, which I eat almost daily with beer and cigarettes. I just mean commercial health claims in general.) ***I'm faced with two choices here: admit my missing comma mistake or begin consuming beer and cigarettes with my Cheerios and deny any mistake was made. Hmmm...

What does your refrigerator say about you?

"What lies beneath the surface of New York Harbor? For starters, a 350-foot steamship, 1,600 bars of silver, a freight train, and four-foot-long cement-eating worms." This article mentions the erosion of dirt over the Lincoln Tunnel and the risks that poses. When MSNBC was in NJ and I took the Holland Tunnel to work every (non-inclement) day my most common mental terror vision was of collapse with resulting flood.

Launching in London today [actually a week ago], the Espresso Book Machine can print any of 500,000 titles while you wait - The wait is 5 minutes. That's pretty close to a morning's podcast/kindle downloads. Can you imagine sending your morning reading to the corner print machine where you pick it up in book form to read on the way to work?

What it's like to watch a whale go by.

Did you read the NYTimes Magazine piece by the guy facing foreclosure? I'd generally thought of bailout recipients as people who'd maybe contracted an illness and were wiped out by medical expenses or something. This guy seems to have just flat-out lived a lifestyle he couldn't afford. I admit I had a bit of a teabagger moment after reading it.

Non-link item: Last week my wife was traveling, leaving my son and I to fend for ourselves. We did well enough but I have new respect for single parents. I was fully occupied from pillow to pillow and even did some sleep-parenting I think.

Bar tending game - This game features the worst side of bar tending, when the order-in machine is suffering ticket incontinence and the customers are stacking up at the bar while your arm hair turns the consistency of sticky steel wool and the ice cubes that fell into your apron pocket are making you wonder if you peed yourself. I only played once and had a riot by the end of the week. And they didn't even add blender drinks! (Thanks Matt)

Looks like the Wall Street Journal has picked up on Boston.com's Big Picture format.

Can you find the 12 faces?

New Slate site for women is called Double X. I don't want to cast aspersions and this is probably only because I see a lot of lesbian sites while working with Maddow's fan base, but this looks like a lesbian site to me. Or maybe it just looks like After Ellen.

The first tweet from space.

The Universe in 2009 - Whoa! (and P.S. I think audio navigation is cool.)

6 Small Things You Can Do When You Lack Discipline - Who, me?

I've always been a fan of conspiracy theories - not buying into them but appreciating their creativity and the fantasy world they'd require to be true. The other day I got burned by my own hobby when I tried to share the latest AF1 Photo-Op conspiracy theory with a 9/11 Truther sitting next to me at the coffee place. Uh jeeze. He was miles ahead of me, already convinced the fly-over was part of a mass distraction campaign on the day a major automaker declared bankruptcy. Anyway, A Grand Conspiracy Theory From Pakistan.

The new Times Wire feature from the NYTimes had everyone talking yesterday. It's basically a feed of everything on the site as its publish, updating every minute. This is one of those ideas I would usually write off to media narcissism (like sit-coms about the TV shows). Just because news producers use a news wire doesn't necessarily mean turning a news wire on to the end user is a good idea. At least, that would been my opinion pre-Twitter, which is essentially a user-assembled personal news wire. I wouldn't be surprised if some people had already turned the feeds from the NYTimes into a Twitter Times Wire.

Twitter porn name game was a trap - In case you missed it, you didn't miss much. It was one of those things where you pair your pet's name and your teacher's name and get your "porn name." Looking at the results yesterday I wondered what would make people want to bother sharing that. What I should have been wondering is how many people were being hacked as a result of sharing that. (I ranted on a similar point to my wife after seeing her complete one of those Facebook "20 things about me" quizzes that came dangerously close to mixing in those kinds of "mother's maiden name" security questions you're not supposed to share with strangers on the computer.)

Amazon reviews of milk

Everyone is linking to this report on happiness. Four pages plus video... maybe for the weekend.

Adding one more: Wilco is streaming their new record on their site.

Today's links felt a little dry so I held out until something cool came up. Here it is. The only thing I'm trying to figure is how this guy learned to do this the very first time.

This emergency prop plane landing is pretty cool too.

NYTimes guide to TV season finales

Lots of links today pointing to Stweet, a mash-up of Twitter
and Google Street View. Put in your city and see Tweets superimposed on the
street view of the tweet's location.

What those bicycle racing crashes that make you shrug your
shoulders and cover your face look like from the inside.

Ten Twitter Mythconceptions - First of all, if you're not making a "tw-" Twitter pun fake
word, why on earth would you randomly make up a word like mythconceptions?
Anyway, good list. Regarding #7, Twitter is not a time suck when it comes to
posting but can be very distracting when you get to following enough good
people.

10 Online Photography Magazines We Love - Another winner from the folks at Photojojo

I'm not sure what to make of the fact that TweetBook got
clobbered with traffic today. Do that many people want their old tweets turned into
e-books? I think I'm missing something.

This person is selling everything they own before a major
life change. That's fine and we've seen variations of that before. What's cool
is that the "everything" is cataloged on one long page of thumbnail images. What would everything you own look like spread out down a
page item by item? I can't tell if this is a lot of stuff for someone to own. I
think it's actually not very much.

Holy moly this is amazing! Death Star destroys the Enterprise. That's kind of a spoiler but even if you don't care about either of those things, this is pretty amazing.

Meanwhile, I don't know what Disney is doing with Star Wars but the posters are really funny.

I didn't think I cared about photos of famous folk musicians from the '60s but I ended up clicking almost every one of these individually.

Web growth peaked in 2007 but might be back with a vengeance in 2009 - or it might not be back with a vengeance indicating that this whole Web fad is ending and we can all go back outside to play.

Whoa, I totally forgot about the "There are four lights!" episode. The torture of Jean-Luc Picard was one of the most powerful of the whole series.

Obama is Spock: It's quite logical - Do NOT miss that photo.

The latest wildfire Web meme is a keyboard playing cat. The idea is to attach the cat video to the end of another video so the cat plays the clip's characters off the stage. Here's a tool that will attach the playing cat for you. And here's a collection of them so you can see what I'm talking about. The third one is a pretty good use of the cat I think, but the whole thing is a little hard for me to understand.

In B flat - All the clips feature people playing in the key of B flat.

Feels like I've been clicking on more slow-motion/time-lapse video lately. This guy does a really helpful job explaining what he did including all of the camera settings. The bottom line is that with storage being so cheap and digital cameras being so accepting of automation and batch photo processing, it's easy to essentially shoot video one frame at a time.

Speaking of video one frame at a time, check out YooouuuTuuube. I count 36 frames all the way across. I don't know if this corresponds to the actual frames in the video but it does work well in presenting a model for how many frames go into a video scene.

This is the second "death of RSS" piece I've read this week. It's not so much about RSS itself as it is about using RSS aggregators as a primary way to surf the Web. Early adopters who touted RSS readers as the future have found a new future in Twitter. I admit, I use Twitter more than I use my Google reader and if you're looking for a lesson to draw, it's that the best feature of Twitter is the following, not the tweeting. If you think of your follow list the way you think of your RSS subscriptions list, the whole thing makes a lot more sense than if you think of your Twitter follow list in the same way you think of your Facebook friends list. (It also makes me realize that whoever suggested earlier that I send a tweet when Clicked is updated. Maybe I should make an @Clicked.)

If you followed the top 100 people on Twitter, this is what it'd look like.

Rachel tweeted that photo of the kid licking the pig snout that was going around last week. Random story this photo makes think of: NBC is always organizing charity events and other helpful programs and that includes regular blood drives. One year I went outside to the RV "blood mobile" to do my part. The first step is to fill out a brief questionnaire; questions about where you've lived, your general health and whether you had sex with a monkey in the Dominican Republican between 1977 and 1979. I nodded to colleagues who were already being drained into plastic bags or who had moved on to recharging themselves with orange juice and cookies, and stepped into the small office to review my answers with the nurse. What I didn't know was that living in England from 1993 to 1994 put me in some kind of quarantine population for Mad Cow Disease so I was disqualified from giving blood. But now I had to walk past all the colleagues I'd just acknowledged without sitting down next to them. I disembarked from the blood mobile burning with the humiliation that they were surely all thinking I'd given the wrong answer to the Dominican monkey sex question. One day I imagine there will be a blood donor questionnaire asking, "Did you French kiss the snout of a pig in 2009" and that poor kid will be disqualified from blood donation and everyone in the blood mobile will suspect why.

Horizonless projection maps

What's the matter with Kansas? trailer - I thought Alex Pelosi's documentary for HBO was well done. Hopefully this is more like that and less like a Michael Moore film.

Seven Must-Listen This American Life Episodes

Too much Photoshop? Judge for yourself - This is an interesting variation on the Photoshopped model before/after pictures we often see. In case you're not familiar, RAW format is essentially the original file from your camera. I'm actually torn over these pictures. I agree that the photographers went overboard in how they rendered the images. To me they look like HDR or something. They almost cross the line into photo illustration. That said, I sympathize with the photographers in that what the camera sees is not necessarily what reality looked like when the picture was taken. Furthermore, the power of working with RAW format is that you can deliberately shoot a bad picture knowing that you have a lot more room in post production to make correction. So you might deliberately shoot a dark foreground in order to preserve the colors in the sky, knowing you can later add some fill light to the dark areas. So comparing the final with the RAW file is not really fair.

My company-issue Dell Latitude conked out on Friday leaving me mostly high and dry all weekend long. Got a lot of reading done anyway. I mention it because in the past I've had mostly positive things to say about this computer so I wanted to keep the record complete. I think it was the motherboard that gave up. Mike the ass-kicking IT fellow popped my hard drive into another company-issue Dell and I was good to go. I worked that machine pretty hard, I'll admit, but I'll also point out that the HP Satellite laptop I got in 2001 (Christmas-issue) was worked equally hard, if not harder and still works even though the screen hinges have gone floppy and the space bar doesn't register most of the time. The computing parts have held up.

The weird thing about putting the old brain in a new computer body is how much it feels like some kind of mad scientist zombie movie. It's still my machine; even the icons on the desktop are in the same places.  But the keys all have letters instead of warn spots. The smooth patches where the heel of my hands rest and that scuff on the touch pad where my thumbnail had passed a million times is healed. I'm not complaining, of course, but I do feel a little like the suspicious but clueless victim right before his brains are eaten by the familiar but ultimately sinister zombie.

Speaking of name brands of tech stuff, I've been pretty excited to follow the rumors of release dates for the Palm Pre phone. Early reviews are good (it made a lot of noise at CES this year) and as a Sprint customer (actually the second number on my wife's account) an iPhone is not in my likely future. In case you pay attention to such things, I currently have a Treo 700wx. I read the Web on it for about an hour every day and use the Google maps app and a lot of texting. The bigger screen is what I'm most looking forward to.

Speaking of bigger screened gadgets, did you see the big screen Kindle? Doesn't look quite as portable but it definitely looks nicer to read and it even looks a little more plausible as a replacement for the shaggy cornered tabloids down at the end of the bar where I get my coffee every morning.

Not only is The Khronos Projector fun to play with, it's fun to get your head around. That's time you're playing with. The sunset one is cool too. (Requires Java)

300 Ritz/Wolf Camera stores closing across the US. 30-60% off everything. I never manage to take advantage of stuff like this but maybe you can.

WikiPaths is a hyperlink scavenger hunt game played on Wikipedia.org in which players try to find the shortest path between two, seemingly unconnected articles. Like the Kevin Bacon game only Wikipedia entries.

Have you ever seen those surveys that show a certain (significant) percentage of people getting all of their news from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert? I'm always skeptical about those polls. How could anyone feel confident reverse-engineering the news from a joke about the news. Today I realized I had done something similar with the Jonas Brothers. The only thing I know about that band is from the South Park episode making fun of their chastity rings and general boy-band-ness. Then, reading this bit of rage about the not-very-subtle sexuality of Disney's "tween" targeting I shared the writer's shock that the Jonas Brothers really do spray their fans down with phallic foam. The exaggeration coefficient I was using to reverse engineer the joke into reality made the whole phenomenon more normal than it really is.

This is probably all over the place online for a quick easy search but today I ran across what appears to be the complete "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman" for free.

When you think about it, The Apples is a pretty cool name for a band - particularly if they're Israeli so you can reasonably conclude the name refers to the downfall of humanity. I'd never heard of them until I clicked this fun cover.

Grooveshark has only a few of their songs.

Fashion flu masks - Not just a Web joke.

India's air bike? (Cue flatulent whoopie cushion exhaust note.)

Journalist loses job, but wins journalism award. At the award ceremony, the employer who fired her tries to accept the award on her behalf even though she's there trying to accept her award herself. Contemptuous digital chortles ripple across the journo-sphere.

The name in this story made me sure it was a hoax but it doesn't appear to be. But then when I saw this one well, that was just too much.

Did you see the story of the kid who punched the racist bully in the nose and the whole school supported him in opposition to the school administration's inclination to punish him? I'm wondering how much the Internet helps something like that get organized. We read all the time about online bullying but there's something to be said for the Web's ability to undermine the tyranny of RL bullies.

Online resources for tracking swine flu

Pretty much useless as a URL shortener for, like, Twitter, Dickens URL is at least a much cooler way to link to something.

Create your own Air Force 1 flyover photo

Reading a list of slang words from the '20s does an amazing job of changing your mental perspective and inner dialogue.

On Kickstarter, you pitch an idea and people give you money to help make it happen. It's not an investment though, which means you have to find other ways to tempt investors. Also: "They're pledges because money is collected only if a project reaches or exceeds its funding goal before time expires. If a project's funding goal is $5,000 and only $4,999 is pledged when time expires, no money is collected."

Remember a while ago we looked at those crowdsource loan sites? (Ah! Found it. "Crowdfunding.") I'm surprised we haven't heard more about them with the recession. The idea was that you present your story and why you need a loan and people say how much they're willing to loan you and at what rate. Anyway, that's what Kickstarter reminds me of.

Julie & Julia trailer - I know I was grump the other day about concept blogs scoring book deals but seeing the success of Julie & Julia is genuinely heartwarming - though this may be because I remember when it was just a new blog and Julie sent me a thank you note for linking to her when I was writing the Blogspotting blog (such was the ettiquette in those days). Then I drove my dinosaur home.

(Doctor appointment (non-emergency) yesterday afternoon. Planned to catch up after Maddow show but then the Souter thing broke and I spent the night wrangling with breaking news. [Kind of gross how close transparency and excuse making are. Not sure I'm keen on it.].)

I feel like I've been waiting my whole life to see a headline like this: Cincinnati Superhero Patrols Streets Fighting Crime; 'Shadowhare' Among Nationwide Group Of Superheroes UPDATE: OK, not quite as exciting with the video version.

Slate presents a Facebook-style visualization of the Senate. It's meant to show how the senators vote with each other (or don't) with an eye toward Specter's lack of real connection to either party. (Nothing very Facebook about it though. Not sure that headline writer knows what Facebook looks like.) UPDATE: Ah! This is a Facebook-style visualization.

Rap Chop - Auto-tune the infomercial! (the edits around 1:52 are hysterical)

Visualizing the U.S. power grid (via FlowingData)

100 Amazing Futuristic Design Concepts We Wish Were Real - Oh... number 4...

Does having the White House photos in a Flickr stream make them feel kind of chintzy?

Does every animal have a flu? I was just remarking that these animal flus are like the Chinese zodiac or something. What's your flu animal?

Do you think TextsFromLastNight is real? Since hearing that "F My Life" got a book deal and Why You're Fat got a book deal I'm cynical about these Post Secret (also book deal) descendant sites. Does Cake Wrecks have a book deal yet?

Losing a couple hours this afternoon to being part of the interview loop for new interns. I haven't done this in years. I know there's no better way but the whole situation feels so awkward. I'm generally averse to being "judgey" but that's essential what's required of the process. I've read that the best interview question to ask is, "What do you do in your spare time" to get a sense of whether the person has a genuine interest in the subject matter and will therefore go beyond the job's basic requirements. But what kind of answer should I really expect from someone with a class load, no money and no experience? Free time?

Anyway, Clicked post will be late today. Running into another interview now...

ADDING: What's funny and kind of maddening about doing a series of interviews is that I suddenly became very aware of my own reactions and inconsistencies in how I treated the interviewees. Was I being discouraging to the one I suspected of being over qualified? Was I acting paternal to the one who seemed so young and naive?

I cannot even find the words to express how angry I am about this plane photo-op stunt. The fear in these people's voices and the sound of that plane. That is 35 seconds of time machine in that clip.Livid.

1976 Swine Flu public service ad

Wait a minute. Venezuela owned an island in the Delaware River??

"An intriguing implication of this study is that male judges rule differently when they're sharing the bench with a woman." Women keep men honest just by being around?

Do you mean to tell me that these are real actual human lungs breathing under a giant bell jar?

I am fully cognizant of the fact that beatboxing isn't much more than rhythmic spitting and sputtering and yet I can never resist watching.

Spider resurrections may have surprised scientists but I personally have performed a fly resurrection and I learned the trick from a magazine so I'm sure it's no mystery. In fact, the trick is meant to allow you to put a fly on a leash. You catch the fly in your hand and hold it under water, effectively drowning it (although maybe just making it too mushy to move or fly). Then tie a string around the fly and cover it in salt. The salt sucks the water from the fly and it revives. I managed the revival part but the fly slipped my leash so I didn't get the full fly-on-a-string thing to work. (Having typed this out I have a nagging suspicion that I learned it from an Encyclopedia Brown book. Does this ring a bell to anyone?)

Site to go back to when I have more time of-the-day: Half Bakery. Is this a site for people with neat ideas?

What adopting a white girl taught a black family about race in the Obama era. An almost related but not quite story: I have white friends I hadn't seen in a while who recently adopted a black baby. Where is the baby from, I wondered. Atlantic City, New Jersey. I had assumed white couple + black baby = international adoption. Duh. I think that makes me both a racist and stupid.

Is facemining the future of IMDB? (And is that the silliest underestimation of a technology ever?)

What do I do when I'm not posting to Clicked? Today it involved this 70's drum machine from this cool list. Also this one and wishing I knew how to play with this one. If it worked I'll share the results and other links later.
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UPDATE: 4/27
So on Friday I learned a few lessons worth sharing. The back story is that I pitched that auto-tune the news item to the Maddow show and they decided to do a segment about it as a light Friday night item. Like a fool, I suggested there might be some kind of Audacity plugin that would "auto-tune-ize" an audio file automatically. It turns out there really isn't, but I didn't know that at the time and put myself on the hook to produce something. Part of what threw me was this actually wrong but very right-sounding answer on Yahoo answers.

I went to Audacity first and picked up tons of free plugins and also the vst enabler. (VST = Virtual Studio Technology. There are other formats for virtual studio plugins but VST was the path I was on because of that Yahoo answer.)

I looked for the Antares Autotune plugin but it cost money so I tried the free version called Gsnap.

Gsnap didn't work but that wasn't Gsnap's fault, that was just because it didn't work with Audacity. I thought it was Gsnap's fault and downloaded the trial version of the Antares software.

Of course, that didn't work either and eventually I found a list of compatible hosts and realized I'd gone wrong with Audacity.

So now I needed expensive virtual audio mixing software in order to run an auto-tune plugin. Luckily many of them offer free trial versions. Working down the list on the Antares site, I took the 30-Day trial of Adobe's Audition 3.

Funnily, the trial version of Antares Autotune didn't work with the trial version of Adobe Audition but the free Gsnap I downloaded back in the beginning did. Then it was just a matter of learning how to use (and abuse) the effect.

The one thing I never really worked out was how to make it all more melodious. Some auto-tune software allows you to drag notes or draw a line on a screen that represents the key that the piece is supposed to follow. I probably could have chopped it into clips and assigned each clip a key like chord progressions but time was running out and what really ended up being an insurmountable obstacle was that the audio (taken from a clip of the show) had to match the video. So if I did anything to draw out syllables or change the pace of the audio, I'd have to do the same with the video. I'd already spent the day learning audio, there was no time to play with video software, so I just sent the pieces I'd made upstairs to the video editor and he made the final product.

This is the segment that aired.

This is my scratch pad project for which I used the free Movie Maker on my PC to pair the video with the audio.

Lastly, the basic way this amazing drum machine set-up works is that you set the bpm in the bottom toolbar. That triangle play button is what makes the whole thing go. The way to string it all together is kind of like the Yahoo Pipes interface. You drag from an output to an input and the software automatically draws a connector cable. So just make the noise maker boxes connect to the volume knob boxes and you're good to go.

Amusement of the day: I'm very aware of the risk of appearing smug or arrogant by mocking someone else, particularly when they're trying to make a political point that is tantamount to a tenet of faith, but Rep. Joe Barton thinking this exchange demonstrates him stumping Secretary Chu is just so ridiculous I took some pleasure in seeing the Twitter community bark at him.

This is probably going to be in all of today's news in one form or other but it's worth reading the actual piece. It's a powerful essay from the guy in charge of interrogating Abu Zubaydah before we decided to torture him.

I've been wanting to set news soundbites to a techno beat for the longest time. The obstacle has always been collecting the soundbites. These people do a really fun job with the addition of an auto-tuner. Here's the first one, a little catchier.

To my son who can't yet ride a bike but who will, if he's at all like his father, one day want one of these bikes: No.

Why there will never be a cure for cancer.

Whoa! Amazing! It's like a still-photo movie. Looks like you can choose your size here and pretend you're watching it on a fancy TV.

The panorama of the Detroit block, it was from this blog.

Woman sends stripper impersonator to highschool reunion as a prank- That is, the stripper was impersonating her at the reunion so she didn't have to go.

"The mystery why cybercriminals want a discontinued Nokia phone isn't getting any clearer." A good one to follow the books and magazines with secret messages in them - obsolete phones with secretly valuable alternative technology in them.

Face recognition comes to Flickr.- How soon before you can take a photo of a stranger's face, plug it into the Web and get matching photos along with the name and personal pages like Facebook? Relatedly, I was just reading about Google launching a "similar images" search.

Canon in D with Korean Break Dance

China is trying to bring some order to its language - particularly the characters used to name people. I don't have a strong opinion on whether Chinese needs to be more efficient but the idea that you can suddenly not have a name because the characters you use to spell it are declared obsolete and no longer part of the language kind of blows my mind.

Torture memos set to music might actually be better than the Paul Krugman song. I bet someone could do a nice cover of this.

"The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world." I understand that you're meant to use the timeline to narrow the range of offerings. I couldn't find an intelligent use for it so I just poked around and got lost for a while looking and maps and photos.

Jones' Good Ass BBQ & Foot Massage

This Rep. Harmon story is a classic case of something I might not have bothered with before working for the Maddow show but now I feel obligated to know what the heck it's about so I don't end up making a fool of myself. I'm glad I did though, the story reads like a creative writing exercise. Some of what I clicked: The Harman-AIPAC Story: A Timeline and Dem Rep Harman Did Urge Times Not To Publish Wiretapping Expose!

America's Newest Profession: Bloggers for Hire (by Mark Penn, who seems an odd person to write a story like this.) Later: And here's the response we knew was coming: Mark Penn's fuzzy pro-blogging stats

A good one for the trivia question list. Who is the the first domestic terror suspect named to the FBI's list of "Most Wanted" terrorists? Not someone I would have guessed.

"In fact, the xkcd story previews the much more likely future of books in which they are prized as artifacts, not as mechanisms for delivering written material to readers. This is print book as vinyl record — admired for its look and feel, its cover art, and relative permanence — but not so much for convenience."

Composite photos of people on NYC street corners. I wonder if this is as easy as it looks.

Pinned Down, a Sprint to Escape Taliban Zone - This is a great story but the accompanying slide show takes on a different level of immediacy once you read this sentence: "Specialist Soto could not wait. After mortar rounds began landing, he and a photographer for The New York Times dashed down the bank, splashed into the chest-deep brown river, lunged across the current and crawled out on the opposite side."

What I like about services like Muck Rack is that you can see how worthwhile the content is more easily.

This story of the Wired magazine with the puzzle inside reminds me of the time David Blaine wrote a book that supposedly had a treasure map in it. (Which I'm learning from teh Google right now someone actually did solve.)

Sign Says IHOP, but Syrup Says Vermont - IHOP in Vermont has to use real maple syrup instead of brown sugar water.

All the ways the newspaper industry blew it.

1000 frames-per-second HD slow motion. Don't miss the bouncing jello at the end.

When we last checked in, our over-extended blogger had been reassigned to the NBC News Web Team, mostly dedicated to the Rachel Maddow Show. As such, personal surfing slowed to a crawl and overall surfing changed in tenor from trend chasing to harder news research and much more Twitter use.

I assume this blog has a readership of zero at this point, lacking any links on msnbc.com proper and having allowed any existing traffic momentum to run slack. And yet, maybe that's not such a bad thing for starting over.

There was a movie in the 80s that was shown on network TV and instead of bleeping the swears they dubbed in similar sounding non-curse words that had my friends and I calling each other "fuzzy nerds" for weeks. That principle applied to the most famous line in Snakes on a Plane sets a new standard for ridiculousness.

Famous philosophers arguing on a message board - NOTE: This is done in 4chan style, which is to say obscene, vulgar f-bomb dropping language.

In case you needed help admiring the skills of the snipers who took out the pirates and saved that kidnapped sea captain, this sniper game, nothing like reality, elucidates the challenges. (Thanks Matt.)

I recently noticed that the Google search results for Ana Marie Cox puts her Twitter feed above her blog and thought it might be an easy one-example sign of the times. A Wordpress blogware guy says no, blogging isn't slowing down.

An interactive map of vanishing employment across the country.

This sleeping bag suit makes more intellectual sense to me than a Snuggie but looks even more ridiculous.

Wicked long panorama of a block in Detroit.

Who's keeping track of all of the April Fool's sites? TechCrunch.