Tim Danner

Jason Kottke describes his idea for a horrifying mashup of reality TV shows.

For your listening pleasure: Super Mario Brothers and The Legend of Zelda.

“The bins all have a name corresponding to their various characteristics,” said Bernd Mueller of Berlin’s municipal rubbish collection agency.

If you’re tired of having the banana you pack in your lunch getting squished, you might want to look into BananaGuard, which is like body armor for fruit. And it comes in nifty colors like “Passionate Purple”. Wow.

“Well, you see, we thought at the time that a limited engagement in Vietnam was necessary to prevent the rise of Soviet Communism.” A list of phrases for the American traveling in Europe. First in English, then translated into French, Spanish, and German. How helpful!

An old quiz from the Brunching Shuttlecocks that will test your ability to distinguish between two frequently-confused concepts.

Here’s another commercial, this one about the usual length. Again it’s behind some Flash cruft – just click on “Full version of the TV ad” then on “high speed” – the “normal” version is compressed beyond legibility. I can’t quite put my finger on what makes this ad cool. Maybe it’s just the combination of the vaguely Maxis-style animation with the “Funkytown” song. Anyway, I thought it was neat.

An Auckland bloke got a speeding ticket, but the cop apparently wasn’t paying attention to what he was doing when he filled it out. He made a few errors, and the guy’s letter (PDF) to the police explaining the situation is hilarious! Unfortunately, the police just dismissed the ticket without making any witty comments. Oh well.

If all commercials were like this, we wouldn’t need TV shows! Which is just as well, because if all commercials were this long, we wouldn’t have time for TV shows. It’s an ad for American Express with Jerry Seinfeld and Superman. It is very funny. As Cory at Boing Boing pointed out, it is also remarkable that DC Comics actually licensed Superman for something so off the wall. I approve.

Don’t mind all the Flash crap you have to wade through to get to the video – it’s worth it. Just let it load, then click on the “Uniform” film canister.

Cool! It’s like a retainer, but with blinky LEDs!

James Kunstler has an “eyesore of the month” page documenting the architectural shortcomings of modern America. Last month: MIT’s newest dorm.

Music, typography, and Flash – what more could you want?

Lyrics to the victory song from the end of Return of the Jedi in both the original Ewok and also translated to English. It’s a bit cheesy.

Super Mario Brothers 3, beaten in 11 minutes. Boing Boing says this is probably fake, but it can’t be very fake – I didn’t notice any problems with it. Very impressive, even if a little multiple-attempt-stitching was used.

In New York, the buttons on the light poles that you push to get a walk signal have been disconnected for years.

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.