Tim Danner

A collection of animals found by taking subsets of the London subway map.

Super Mario Brothers, the tragic opera. In Flash. Part I, Part II, Part III.

Watch this Flash video and tell me if it makes you want to donate money. I don’t get it, but the Rice fundraising people sent an email pointing us to it. I think it’s kind of cute (especially the references to owls eating squirrels) but it didn’t make me feel the need to give Rice money. Maybe I’m missing something.

The classic “Smelly Monkey” video clip, and several others.

This is a bizarre little Flash game where you get a bunch of objects and you drag them to the middle of a planet, one by one. As you add more items, the existing ones grow and change (”level up”) and your score increases. The order you drag the items controls how close you get to the maximum score, which BoingBoing tells us is 20,000.

Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, Master of Kung-Fu.

Some cool videos of a guy who took water balloons on the Vomit Comet (a DC-9 jetliner that flies in a pattern which allows for several seconds of free-fall/weightlessness) and popped them.

On Super Bowl weekend in Houston, Detroit, host of the 40th Super Bowl (”XL”) in 2006, had a presentation at the GRB convention center. This included a “mock downtown loft” (like a set for a TV show). The “windows” showed a view of downtown Detroit from the north.

Problem: the neighborhood just north of Detroit is mostly abandoned buildings, many of them burnt out. Solution: PhotoShop.

The Detroit Free Press has revealed that lights and roofs were added to buildings that lacked them. Heh.

In my opinion, this pretty much has to be a spoof of outrageous legalese. It seems to have been taken seriously by Yale Law’s LawMeme website though.

For starters, it’s incredibly long (21,000 words), and it goes completely overboard on listing synonyms - like this:

All other access, use, disclosure, reproduction, delayed use, reduction to human-perceivable form, printing, copying or saving of digital image files or other content, reformatting, file sharing, downloading, uploading, storing, posting, mirroring, archiving, recording, distributing, redistribution, repurposing, modification, rewriting, manipulation, creation of derivative works, translations, or products, licensing, sale, transfer, display, public performance, publicity, broadcast, televising, reporting, publication (in whole or part) or transmission whether by http, ftp, electronic mail or any other file transfer protocol, and whether by electronic means or otherwise, or use by other than individual scholars, or commercial use requires prior written permission of the rights owner(s) and payment of a fee, and severe penalties apply for theft and unauthorized publication, which is also a crime.

But I think my favorite paragraph (I didn’t read the whole thing - this was highlighted on the LawMeme story) is this one:

Please read this Legal Notice of Infringement which applies to you only if you have violated this User Agreement, or made any use of this website in any way not specifically authorized and permitted herein, in which case you acknowledge timely receipt hereof, which you agree is sufficient notice, at such time as you commenced violation of this User Agreement.

To save time, they included the notice of infringement in the agreement! As soon as you violate the agreement, you are to consider yourself served. And you hereby agree that this constitutes “timely receipt”! Hah!

Apple’s iTunes Music Store sells tracks for 99 cents. It doesn’t matter how many songs are on the album or how long they are. All tracks are 99 cents each. Even the silent ones.

Button by button. This is a timeline showing what button to press at what moment to complete the game, level by level. If that’s not enough, there are also videos showing nothing but the Nintendo controller and the thumbs pushing those buttons. Bizarro.

A brief exploration of a little-discussed aspect of cartography: the personalities expressed by the shape of states.

The war on terror will have to be fought on all fronts. The State Department is not going to neglect the typographic front. They have just banned Courier New 12 point from all US diplomatic documents in favor of Times New Roman 14 point. A step in the right direction, but why so big? Ben Hammersley says that the next logical step is to use Comic Sans. Naturally.

The I Don’t Like Hard Things in Soft Things Manifesto