Link roundup

1. The Beat says the Comics Code has been functioning as a zombie business for some time now - - allowing publishers to use it's seal of approval without any actual oversight.

2. When Google starts censoring results, it just ends up embarrassing itself.

3. KFC has really varied its offerings to appeal to different cultures in China:

Yum’s cultural flexibility doesn’t end with the localized menu. While fast-food restaurants in the West often host kids’ birthday parties, KFCs in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang autonomous region that’s home to the Muslim Uyghur people, advertise parties for the families of boys who have just undergone the religious ritual of circumcision.

Via.

Link roundup

1. "Love me when I least deserve it, because that’s when I really need it." Via.

2. "Military porn is China's preferred deterrence."

3. Entertainment Earth has the Mega Man model I've previously posted for $28.

Link roundup

1. This seems like a short story waiting to happen. Or maybe the start of the article is a short story all by itself:

In a small, windowless room in the bowels of the Westin St. Francis hotel on Union Square, Rob Holsen washes the hotel's money.

Every penny, nickel, dime and quarter.

Via.

2. The Chinese respect the Jews:

Last year’s Google Zeitgeist China rankings listed “why are Jews excellent?” in fourth place in the “why” questions category, just behind “why should I enter the party” and above “why should I get married?” (Google didn’t publish a "why" category in Mandarin this year.) And the apparent affection for Jewishness has led to a surprising trend in publishing over the last few years: books purporting to reveal the business secrets of the Talmud that capitalize on the widespread impression among Chinese that attributes of Judaism lead to success in the financial arts.

Via.

3. The Wall Street Journal's list of the best economics blogs.

Link roundup

1. "Even the previous estimates of 20 to 30 million dead qualify the Great Leap Forward as the biggest single case of mass murder in world history. If Dikötter’s revised figure of 45 million withstands scrutiny, Mao will have definitively surpassed Joseph Stalin’s overall record as a mass murderer."

2. The samurai Star Wars prints I've mentioned in the past are now only $7.50 each.

3. Charming bungee cord bag.

*Buy Star Wars ornaments at eBay.

Link roundup

1. I hated Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic game, but the game lead to the creation of something far more interesting:

When we created the initial fake-brochure site, we thought it'd be a fantastic laugh if the fictional shipbuilders had their own intranet. If you filled in the form on the brochure site (specifying your name, email address and favourite species of frog) we followed the occasional mail about the game. Then, one day, folks got a mail from the intranet admin, "Chris Stevedave", giving folks the link to the intranet and the current password, which was hurriedly followed by a second mail apologising for the accidental mail leakage and urging customers not to click the link, then a third email noting that Chris Stevedave had been demoted to Bilge Emptier Third-Class. It worked fantastically (so fantastically that some people really did send the emails back, reassuring us that they hadn't looked at the site) everyone poured into the Starlight Lines intranet.

The idea was to present a read-only Senior Management forum in which you'd see some of the key backstory characters getting on each others' nerves. But we figured there should probably be a writeable forum for the lower-level employees, so I spent half a day hacking up a stupidly basic forum system and forgot all about it.

Six months after the site launch, I happened to peek at the employee forum and there were ten thousand posts in there.

A brief aside: Working for Douglas Adams, you get exposed to a huge variety of Hitchhiker's fans. Somehow, these fans think that Douglas's humour is a rarely-enjoyed thing, only appreciated by a specifically-tilted mind, and so in meeting other fans they will find a kinship. It's bollocks, of course; Douglas's humour has very wide appeal and these people tend to have surprisingly little in common with each other. But the effect at the TDV end was that any online community we created with Douglas's name attached was instantly flooded with fans looking for their kinds of people and their kinds of silliness.

But what happened inside the Starlight Lines employee forum was even stranger than that. Because it was buried one password and six clicks into the site, only a few dedicated people found it, and found each other. And once they were there, they started roleplaying Starlight Lines, and didn't stop evolving a long and bizarre narrative for the next thirteen years. When TDV died I moved the forum to my own hosting; every so often one of the players will poke me because something's broken, and I'll eventually fix it and they can carry on with their adventures. It's been thirteen years of hosting an accidental community. It's somewhat like ignoring the vegetable drawer of your fridge for a year, then opening it to find a bunch of very grateful sentient tomatoes busily working on their third opera.

Via.

2. "The government has created a speculative bubble in the alpaca breeding industry." "Twenty-five years ago, there were 150 alpacas in America. Now, there are 150,000."

3. Thomas Barnett on the major challenges facing China:

Not content with recently surpassing the U. S. as the world's biggest CO2 emitter, China just snuck past America this year as the world's biggest energy consumer, too. Naturally, this was interpreted throughout the West as yet another sign of China's world-shaping dominance instead of what it truly represents: China's skyrocketing resource dependence on the most unstable regions in the world.

*Buy Chinese Posters: Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. "Cybercrime experts have found proof that China hijacked the Internet for 18 minutes last April. China absorbed 15% of the traffic from US military and civilian networks, as well as from other Western countries—a massive chunk. Nobody knows why."

2. Do octopus tentacles have minds of their own? Via.

3. Adorable new paper toy (pdf) by Shin Tanaka. Via these sites.

*Buy octopus toys at eBay.

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.

Link roundup

1. Thomas Barnett:

China does control--currently--about 95% of production [of rare Earth oxides], but only because it's cheap prices drove other mines out of competition.

But in reality, China accounts for only 30% of the world's known reserves, and existing mines can all be restarted within a couple of years. So China only "controls" because it keeps the price low.

2. Ecstasy is being used to treat soldiers with PTSD.

3. A Miami Dolphin lost a $50,000 diamond earring during practice.

*Buy diamonds at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. "Mexican marines searching a ranch in northern Mexico found the bodies of 72 people who may have been Central and South American migrants kidnapped by the Zetas drug gang."

2. Tips for creating better passwords.

3. The massive traffic jam in China "is a tale of deceit and criminality that speaks volumes about China's breakneck economic development. And behind the traffic chaos stands King Coal."

The Climax (link roundup)

Poster for The Climax, one of several amusing ads recently posted by Mitch O'Connell.

And a few more links:

1. The 62-person University of Waterloo Warriors football team will miss the entire 2010-2011 season after nine members tested positive for steroids. Via.

2. Back in 2003, China’s first astronaut, Yang Liwei, returned to Earth after orbiting the Earth in a Chinese capsule. But a flaw in the capsule exposed Liwei to excessive G-force pressure, splitting his lip and drenching his face in blood. When he landed, workers opened his capsule, cleaned him off, closed the door, and then reopened it for the news cameras.

3. Reservoir Troopers action figures.

*Previously: Climax High Point.

*Buy Chinese propaganda at eBay.

Mandrake the Magician (link roundup)

Mandrake the Magician cover via.

And a few more links:

1. Check out "the remote Chinese village of Huangyangtan which hosts what must be the strangest military installation ever spotted by the Google Earth Community." More here. Via.

2. Redesigned luckdragon.

3. Analysis of recent developments in Turkish politics. Via.

*Previously: Zatanna magician poster.

*Buy magician posters at eBay.

Robot Bear Nurse (link roundup)

Robot bear caretaker. Via.

And a few more links:

1. Apparently this anti-Shrek Tumblr blog was intended to promote MacGruber?

2. Comment and win an art print by Charlie Immer.

3. "The case is one example of the extraordinary influence senior party officials with few or no artistic credentials wield over the Chinese arts."

*Previously: Live for free - - find a place to stay in The Caretaker Gazette.

*Buy Aibos at eBay.

Super Mario Bros. in the real world (link roundup)

Street sign hacked to say, "Sorry Mario, your princess is in another castle." Via these sites.

And a few more links:

1. The "Ant Tribe" - - Chinese college graduates living in the outskirts of Beijing who can't find a job.

2. A zombie satellite adrift in orbit could interfere with cable tv coverage in the US just about the time of the Lost series finale.

3. "There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics." Via these sites.

*Previously: If Super Mario Bros. was made today.

*Buy Nintendo toys at eBay.

Famicom games that never were (link roundup)

A few highlights from the Famicase 2010 exhibition, consisting of Famicom games that never were (but should have been). Via.

And a few more links:

1. Youtube video downloader and audio stripper. Via.

2. "In a bid to preserve the purity of the its language, the Chinese government has ordered TV channels not to use any English acronyms, such as NBA for National Basketball Assn. or GDP for gross domestic product." Via.

3. Simulators say Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger could have simply turned around and landed at the airport.

*Previously: Xevoz toy designs that never were.

*Buy NBA bobbleheads at eBay.

Smoking Alien (link roundup)

Smoking alien by Jeff Simpson.

And a few more links:

1. A claim that Jewish settlers in the West Bank are perfectly willing to leave if given a satisfactory amount of money.

2. Beijing has a Hooters restaurant. Via.

3. Handpainted kitchen recipe doors.

*Previously: Mittens for smokers with built in cigarette shaped hole.

*Buy the Dave McKean-illustrated cookbook at Amazon.

Bertie Lego CubeDudes (link roundup)

One of two Lego CubeDudes by Angus MacLane based on ThreeA Toys' Bertie.

And a few more links:

1. Bobby Solomon at Kitsune Noir is looking for a coblogger, and also posted a huge number of iPad-ready desktop wallpapers.

2. The stunning pictures of sleeping insects covered in water droplets. Via.

3. Robocop poster by Travis Pitts.

4. Beijing to sweeten stench of rubbish crisis with giant deodorant guns. Via these sites.

*Previously: Little Shadow Doll by ThreeA Toys.

*Buy Ashley Wood toys at eBay.

Red Riding Hood and the wolf (link roundup)

Postapocalyptic Red Riding Hood and the wolf photo gallery by Ahef. The images make good desktop wallpapers. Via.

And a few more links:

1. Brian Moylan provides a funny, handy guide to characters on the latest edition of The Real World (DC).

2. A devastating portrayal of real life work as a lawyer.

3. The strange tale of the secret massive golf complex being built in China.

*Previously: Motive: Secret Baby.

*Buy Little Red Riding Hood toys at eBay.

Skeletor beefcake (link roundup)

Gallery 1988 posted another batch of images from the upcoming Masters of the Universe show, including this beefcake Skeletor by Johnny Sampson.

And a few more links:

1. Wooden vending machine in Tokyo.

2. Monstrous Pikachu.

3. Half black woman becomes famous/provokes racist responses after starring on a Chinese talent show.

*Previously: Steampunk vending machine.

*Buy Masters of the Universe toys at eBay.

Pirate Keds (link roundup)

Pirate Keds - - one of the custom shoe options on sale in Dan Springer's Zazzle store.

And a few more links:

1. Cthulhu Twitter icon.

2. Earlier this month, robbers in Hong Kong stole 228 bottles of vintage Chateau Lafite Rothschild, valued at 6.8 million Hong Kong dollars ($877,000).

3. Girl with big green eyes.

*Previously: Video of an anteater drinking wine.

*Buy pirate flags at eBay.

Sheep Throne (link roundup)

Sheep chair spotted at Reddit, source unknown.

And a few more links:

1. Stripper mobile with plexiglass windows and pole in Las Vegas.

2. Not news to anyone who read Next, but here's a report indicating that the reason why humans speak and chimps don't is dependent on one gene. Via.

3. Chinese government claims credit for snowfall, until the snow falls a little to heavily. Then it's blamed on the weather, and the government denies involvement.

*Previously: Thunder God's Throne.

*Buy Weather Dominators at eBay.