Link roundup

1. One of Bill Simmons's readers had a great idea - - losing team in the NBA all-star game has to wear short shorts in next year's game.

2. Here's a great explanation for why Mubarak will be very reluctant to give up power - - he fears prosecution:

So, how can Mubarak protect himself if he eventually makes an escape from Cairo? He's taking the usual steps now. Start with his decision to install foreign intelligence chief and CIA confidant Omar Suleiman as vice president and constitutional successor. (Mubarak himself came to the presidency through this route; he had been Anwar Sadat's vice president.) This comes close to matching what in the Russian-speaking world is known as the "Putin option," a reference to the exit strategy adopted by a teetering Boris Yeltsin: Fearing possible retribution from opposition figures, Yeltsin opted to surrender power through a transitional period to a wily senior player in the intelligence community. In exchange, Yeltsin is said to have extracted a firm commitment from Putin that the full machinery of the Russian state would be mustered to protect him. There would be no criminal probes or inquiries, and no cooperation with foreigners who undertook the same. Yeltsin would be free to live his final days shuttling between Moscow and the French Riviera. Putin scrupulously kept his end of the bargain.

Via.

3. Here's Consumer Reports' picks for best frozen pizzas. (Presumably they'll have to reevaluate once the pizza/cookie dough combo is released.)

Link roundup

1. Mother Box iPhone wallpaper.

2. Sebastien Larroude posted a bunch of Tron Legacy concept art.

3. Thomas Barnett on Egypt:

Our military's relationship with the Egyptian military is long and deep and broad — as in, tens of billions of dollars of support since the mid-'70s. There's just no way Washington will stand by and watch all that gear fall into the Brotherhood's hands (like in '79), so rest assured that a vast network of personal relationships — as in, general to general — is being aggressively massaged right now. And remember: The Egyptian military has the ultimate veto, and the Pentagon holds the purse strings.

*Buy Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. This is one heck of an advertisement for Brooks Brothers non-iron shirts.

2. Is the price of chocolate about to shoot up due to trouble in the Ivory Coast?

3. A report that Erin Andrews bashed Nike during a telecast, and is now a pitchwoman for Reebok. Via.

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.

Nancy Pelosi and JFK (50 years ago)

Nancy Pelosi and JFK 50 years ago. Via.

*Previously: Photo of a young John and Elizabeth Edwards.

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. How Arnold Schwarzenegger ended his term:

Three Republicans who split with their party to approve tax increases backed by Schwarzenegger in 2009 were given high-paying appointments to assorted state boards. Ironically, Schwarzenegger himself tried to eliminate one of these boards after his California Performance Review determined that its functions were duplicative. Other boards and commissions deemed wasteful by the review panel were also stuffed last week with politically connected appointees, including Vicki Marti, the wife of Schwarzenegger's chief of staff, who will now serve on the California Medical Assistance Commission and the Occupational Safety and Health Appeals Board.

2. The Fifth Element cosplay.

3. Octopus hat.

*Buy The Fifth Element posters at eBay.

John and Elizabeth Edwards

Photo of a young John and Elizabeth Edwards. Via.

Link roundup

1. Olympic champion Rulon Gardner is on The Biggest Loser this season.

2. The Daily Show mocks San Francisco's Happy Meal toy ban. Via.

3. Gawker takes a look at the way Justin Bieber's manager asks young girls to promote Bieber to their friends.

*Buy Happy Meal toys at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Jay Leno continues to earn great ratings.

2. Democracy just might be flourishing in Iraq.

3. This actually makes intuitive sense to me - - a study indicates that when people think about their ancestors, they become more confident and actually perform better in intelligence and spatial tests. So, the next time you feel down or stressed, think about all the generations that came before you, and draw strength from the knowledge that they were probably a lot like you.

*Buy home DNA kits at Amazon.

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. I liked everything about Tron Legacy, except when the actors spoke and the entirely extraneous genocide discussion. Not sure why it's getting such negative reviews, especially from supposed geeky fanboys. What sort of movie were they expecting? However, it makes terrible, almost nonexistent use of 3D. James Cameron is clearly a genius. Also, I liked that when they couldn't figure out how to place Ducati logos inside the computer world, they started talking about how great Ducati was instead.

2. The Guardian:

WikiLeaks: Cuba banned Sicko for depicting 'mythical' healthcare system
Authorities feared footage of gleaming hospital in Michael Moore's Oscar-nominated film would provoke a popular backlash.

UPDATE: Or maybe that's totally wrong.

3. New Darwyn Cook auction at eBay - - he'll draw the character of your choice.

Link roundup

1. I received in the mail a copy of The Year of the Rabbit: Tales from the Chinese Zodiac by Oliver Chin and Justin Roth - - the latest high quality kid's book from Immedium Press. $10 at Amazon.

2. Gotta love a shop that offers a "Free skeleton with every purchase."

3. "'Sarah Palin’s Alaska' set a ratings record for a premiere on TLC, attracting nearly five million viewers — twice the audience of last month's season finale of the blue-state cable favorite, 'Mad Men.'" (I had no interest in watching either.)

Link roundup

1. Mark Cuban on what he'd do with a sudden windfall of money. Via.

2. "Roger Ailes is the most important political figure of the past 50 years."

3. Green Eggs and Ham paper toy. Via.

*Previously: Plush Green Eggs and Ham.

*Buy Dr. Seuss toys at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Gavin Newsom is against San Francisco's proposed ban on Happy Meal toys.

2. Laura Park draws the view from her hospital bed. Via.

3. Part of a long interview with Nigella Lawson:

In New York, there is an explicit morality associated with locavorism.

Now I get that. I understand it entirely but I don't buy into it. In the Victorian age the peasants just ate local and in season and the aristocracy spent fortunes building greenhouses and growing pineapples. It was a class issue. It was about the elite. Now suddenly because of supermarkets and air travel, the masses — if you want to talk in class terms — can get out of season produce. So what do the elite do? They say If it is not seasonal, if it is not local, it isn't good. So although there is probably in and of its self there is moral value in it, I distrust elitist attitudes in food.

*Buy Happy Meal toys at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Gizmodo's picks for the best RSS readers on iPhone and Android devices.

2. Harry Reid apparently spent dramatically more per voter than Meg Whitman.

3. Ghastly zombie Christmas ornaments on sale at Etsy.

*Buy Star Wars ornaments at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Good batch of cartoon-inspired comic strips at Cartoon Brew.

2. Relive the 80's with Mitch Loidolt's Nintendo Guys illustrations.

3. "Tensions between the White House press corps and Indian security boiled over on the third day of President Obama’s visit, prompting press secretary Robert Gibbs to threaten to pull President Obama out of his bilateral meeting with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh." "At one point, according to Wilson’s pool report, Gibbs had his foot lodged in the door to the meeting as Indian security officials pushed hard to shut it. In an angry shouting match, Gibbs asked the officials if they were going to break his foot as he repeated his threat to pull Obama."

*Buy Mega Man toys at eBay.

Link roundup

1. "The tunnel people of Las Vegas: How 1,000 live in flooded labyrinth under Sin City's shimmering strip." Via.

2. "Remember when Democratic congressman Bob Etheridge went berserk on two kids who were harassing him on the streets of Washington, D.C.? And everyone was wondering who those kids were? And the GOP denied it? Guess what? It was the GOP."

3. The LA Times says Meg Whitman spent $11.7 million on campaign consultants to Brown's $167,000, and spent 5.9 million on campaign worker salaries to Brown's $157,000.

*Buy Meg Whitman collectibles at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Interesting detail about the California governor's campaign:

[Jerry] Brown is charging media $700 a day for transportation, meals and hotels on the final days of the campaign, according to campaign spokesman Sterling Clifford. The Brown campaign plans for two charter planes, one for the media, and one for the candidate, with the possibility of interviews and media availabilities on the final swing, reporters were told.

[Meg] Whitman is charging the media a whopping $1,350 for one day, and an astronomical $2,050 for another -- hotels not included. And so far, no details of what itinerary is planned, with a week to go.

Via.

2. Video of Yao Ming keeping warm on an exercise bike in the arena and giving a fan a fist bump.

3. "Long & Winding Road" in New York.

*Buy NBA bobbleheads at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Video of a personal airbag hidden in a collar.

2. "By late 2003, even the Bush White House’s staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But for years afterward, WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins, and uncover weapons of mass destruction." (In light of how similar Obama's policies have been to Bush's, I suspect that history will be kind to Bush.)

3. Here's video of Guybrush Threepwood in Force Unleashed II and specific (very easy) directions for unlocking him.

*Previously: HD playthrough of the Force Unleashed II demo.

*Buy Force Unleashed toys at Amazon.