Link roundup

1. Sale this month at Tenacious Toys.

2. Ann Althouse on Obama's state of the union speech:

This is our generation's Sputnik moment. What is? Are we playing let's pretend? Nothing is scaring us and lighting a fire under us. In fact, it's hard for us now, with our long perspective, even to understand why Sputnik was such a huge motivation. Ask some under-50 Americans today: Why was it so important to beat the Soviets in sending men to the moon? Ask them when/if the Soviets got a man to the moon. I'll bet they can't even give plausible answers. I'll bet even the over-50s are hit-or-miss when it comes to answering the question whether the Soviets got a man to the moon.

So what on earth — or on the moon — does Obama think he will get out of the mere verbal tag "Sputnik"? If you remember how Sputnik felt — and I do — you'll probably say, but there is no equivalent of Sputnik. There are just a lot of countries, full of human beings, trying to get ahead economically, like us — not against us.

3. Relatedly, the first ten years of the 21st century were the best decade, for the world, ever. (Best ten years in my life, too.)

*Buy cosmonaut collectibles at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Great photo of a couple kissing in fog.

2. You might have recently seen OK Cupid's report about female attractiveness. Here's the real message to take away from it:

In the marriage market what you want is not so much to increase your attractiveness to the average person but rather to the one person who will cherish your unique features. Thus--conditional on attracting a decent number of suitors from a reasonable pool etc.--what you want to do is accentuate your unique features even if doing so reduces your average ranking.

3. Interesting tale of the time the Philadelphia Flyers played the Red Army team in 1976 - - the Red Army wanted to quit due to the Flyers' violent play, but agreed to continue because they wanted their payday. Via.

Link roundup

1. I don't know why anyone in the year 2010 would still choose to play Monopoly, but here's tips for how to win.

2. William Gibson on recent archaeological discoveries:

It's looking like our ancestors would jump anything vaguely hominid. Kind of great, really.

3. Gordon Ramsay reaps some karmic rewards.

*Buy board games at eBay.

Link roundup

1. From a review of an biography of Pope John Paul II, a major enemy of Communism:

And resist communism through their religion the Poles surely did, one pilgrimage and feast day and power struggle at a time. Take as emblematic the episode of the Black Madonna, a treasured national icon that the dauntless Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, another Polish hero, attempted to send on a pilgrimage throughout the country. Eventually forbidden to do so by the authorities, who obviously feared its power as a rallying point, Wyszynski did something else: He sent the icon’s frame on pilgrimage instead. Such brilliant yet constructive mischief in the face of communist oppression is the stuff of which Polish history in that era was made.

2. From a mock review of eReaders that picked newspapers as the winner:

The most obvious advantage of The Newspaper was the size of its display, which outclassed its rivals both in terms of size and elasticity. The Newspaper display could be read at full size or, when flipped open, twice its normal width. We also had no trouble reading copy when the display was flipped to half or even quarter size. One of our engineers even figured out how to make a hat...

The device's internal security system was chief among these attractions. We left one Newspaper on a park bench for six hours and, upon return, found it in the exact same place. Another we left in a bar after a thorough evening of testing. When we came back the next afternoon, The Newspaper remained untouched...

The Newspaper also has a great number of apps already downloaded onto the device, ones we have yet to see on any other e-reader. There are the previously mentioned fly-swatting, hat-making, present-wrapping, and tailing people apps. But also the "same ol' bullshit", "who's got the sports section?" and "packing material for my eBay business" apps.

3. On Wikileaks:

The Pentagon Papers revelations dealt with a discrete topic, the ever-increasing level of duplicity of our leaders over a score of years in increasing the nation's involvement in Vietnam while denying it. It revealed official wrongdoing or, at the least, a pervasive lack of candor by the government to its people.

WikiLeaks is different. It revels in the revelation of "secrets" simply because they are secret. It assaults the very notion of diplomacy that is not presented live on C-Span. It has sometimes served the public by its revelations but it also offers, at considerable potential price, a vast amount of material that discloses no abuses of power at all.

*Buy the McSweeney's newspaper at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. 60% off posters at Zazzle today with the code JINGLESALE42. I recommend Steve Thomas's store.

2. Congratulations to Noah Z. Jones on Fish Hooks' renewal:

Since its September premiere, Fish Hooks, which features 2D animation characters set against photo-real backgrounds, has unseated Disney TV Animation's other hit, Phineas and Ferb, as TV's No.1 animated series among kids 6-14.

3. "Over the past 13,500 years, humans in what is now America were subjected to dramatic climate changes: an ice age ended, rain increased, and vegetation changed completely. Now archaeologists say these peoples evolved new technologies to deal with it."

Link roundup

1. Mailbag Art Museum:

So I had this thought the other day: what if I made little pieces of art and sent them to a bunch of famous artists, along with a tiny blank canvas for them to create something and return it? Would I get anything back? Would they even read my request?

Via.

2. "Michael Vick Was On Pros Vs. Joes Just Eight Months Ago." Deadspin takes a look at the episode.

3. "The first Native American to arrive in Europe may have been a woman brought to Iceland by the Vikings more than 1,000 years ago, a study by Spanish and Icelandic researchers suggests."

*Buy Michael Vick toys at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Photo of a sunken bride, perhaps?

2. Comment and win a plush reindeer.

3. "New data demonstrate that classic examples of massive collapse such as the disintegration of Egypt's Old Kingdom, the end of the Classic Maya period, and the vanishing of pre-Columbian societies of the U.S. Southwest were neither sudden nor disastrous for all segments of their populations. Rome, for example, didn't fall in a day; recent work underscores the fact that the sack of Rome was just one step in a long and complex spiral of decline that affected peoples of the empire differently." Via.

Ten centuries of European history in five minutes

This animated map shows 10 centuries of European history in 5 minutes. Via these sites.

*Buy vintage maps at Amazon.

Historical events retold in the style of Frank Miller's Sin City

Martin Luther, Marie Curie, Rosa Parks, and more retold in the style of Frank Miller's Sin City. Via.

*Buy Sin City toys at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. If Jack Bauer had replaced Jacob as the protector of the island on Lost.

2. Scans from a journal kept by a 6-year-old girl on a three-year-long whaling voyage beginning in 1868. (She didn't draw any pictures?) Via these sites.

3. David Fincher's The Social Network is about the "rise of the terror nerd."

*Buy scrimshaw collections at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. Genocide wiped out a Native American group in the 800's.

2. For an event announcing Netflix's new service in Canada, Netflix hired actors to pretend to be members of the public and tell reporters how excited they were. "[E]xtras were asked to spill into the street and encouraged to 'play types, for example, mothers, film buffs, tech geeks, couch potatoes etc.'" Via.

3. Was the highly sophisticated cyber worm Stuxnet created to destroy Iran's nuclear plant? And was it already released? Via.

*Buy the Hackers soundtrack at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. "This is why it's notable that some little blue-green bacteria hitching a ride on the exterior of the International Space Station came out of it alive -- after a record-setting 553 days. That's a year and a half in a near-vacuum."

2. "Mao's Great Leap Forward killed 45 million in four years." The details are horrific.

3. McDonald's sponsors sports not to advertise to customers, but to excite store owners about being part of the McDonald's family. Via.

*Buy The Andromeda Strain at Amazon.

All the edits made to the Iraq War Wikipedia entry

12-volume set of the edits made to the Wikipedia entry for the Iraq War. Via these sites.

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).

Carbon Black Plant worker

Carbon black plant worker - - from this tremendous gallery of color photos from 1939-1943.

Link roundup

1. "The first 10 years of the 21st century were humanity's finest -- even for the world's bottom billion."

2. This Star Wars mod makes Sins of a Solar Empire sound great. The game is $15 at Amazon.

3. Consumer Reports lists several laundry products that are wastes of money, including Martha's Stewart's new Martha Stewart Clean Laundry Detergent which cleans about as well as plain water.

Link roundup

1. The far less than honorable details of Winston Churchill's early life.

2. Penelope Trunk: "Believe me, no one likes to read blog posts about people who are smug about how they have solved all the problems of the world. I mean, look, you either are winning a Nobel Prize or you do not have any answers."

3. The latest adorable comic strip by Chris and Curt features the history of Aquaman.

*Buy Heroclix at eBay.

Marie Antoinette hoody with beheading action

Clever Marie Antoinette hoody lets you sever her head every time you unzip. Vote at Threadless is you'd like the chance to buy it:

How to get rid of a troublesome statue

Two nights ago, "authorities in Tbilisi, under the cover darkness, decided to remove the giant statue of Josif Djugashvili (a.k.a. Stalin) from downtown Gori, the former Soviet dictator’s hometown." Georgian authorities had long wanted to remove the 48-year-old statue, but feared angering Stalin enthusiasts. In fact, "during the August 2008 war, the Georgian military suggested to their Russian counterparts that, in their shelling of the city, they might train artillery on the Stalin statue." Via these sites.

Chibi Daft Punk (link roundup)

Chibi Daft Punk with mustaches by J3 on sale as a t-shirt here. Via.

And a few more links:

1. A damning statement about the We Are Paper toys book.

2. Triumphant Roman soldiers used to return home and parade through town carrying architectural models of the forts they had destroyed.

3. North Korea hired Chinese actors to pretend to be North Korean fans at the World Cup.

*Buy Daft Punk posters at eBay.