Yo momma jokes are funnier when they're told by planets

A few gems from Reddit:


Pluto responds to NASA.



Ice cream joke.



Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama.



The Black_eyed Peas' Wikipedia entry after their half-time show.


Can't Prince just perform every year?

Link roundup

1. Vice Magazine sneaks into the world's largest trade show for selling military-grade weapons.

2. You might want to remove your personal information from Spokeo.

3. Photo of the sun tracing an analemma through the sky over the course of a year. Via.

*Buy News, Nudity & Nonsense: The Best of Vice Magazine Vol. II 2003-2008 at Amazon.

Europe at night

Europe at night and the Aurora Borealis from this great collection of photos taken from space.

*Buy Earth at night maps at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. In case you missed it, this is the best photograph of an astronaut in recent memory. Via these sites.

2. I absolutely loved Matt Kindt's Revolver. You're better off knowing as little as possible about the story. Basically, imagine an event tv miniseries that had a coherent plot and a satisfying ending. $17 at Amazon. (It's also not as relentlessly depressing as his (very good) 3 Story: The Secret History of the Giant Man.)

3. By comparison, I thought Matt's Super Spy was just ok. The World War II-era spy stories were enjoyable, but the comic suffered the same problem as most non-super hero comics with large casts - - it's impossible to tell the characters apart.

*Previously: The Escapist by Matt Kindt.

Link roundup

1. Mark Slater is selling $20 sketch cards this month.

2. Why are we likely to find life on other Earth-like planets?:

I'm not an expert in biology but when you read about the conditions under which life took hold on this planet – it was a terrible place 4 billion years ago, with no oxygen. Yet life came on the scene quickly. Something hit Earth so hard it broke off a chunk that created the Moon. And yet life kept coming back over and over again. You learn from that that it's hard to stop life.

3. I'd love to see David E. Kelley's version of Wonder Woman. And Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Venom sounds good, too.

*Buy Wonder Woman costumes at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. The most recent meeting of The Drawing Club featured a model dressed like Pris from Blade Runner.

2. I previously mentioned Horrible Logos on sale $5 each. Well, Pip commissioned one.

3. In 2004, the European Space Agency launched the Rosetta spacecraft, with the plan that it'll land on a comment in 2014. To help contextualize the plan, one scientist built a Lego model. Soon, everyone wanted one.

*Buy Lego minifigs 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.

Link roundup

1. The gloves astronauts wear during spacewalks make their fingernails fall off. Via these sites.

2. "Routine prostate cancer screening does not appear to help men live longer, according to a new study that pooled the best available data on the controversial topic." Via.

3. The new Martha Stewart show is pulling in dramatically less viewers than the Golden Girls reruns that used air in the same time slot. Via.

*Buy NASA patches at Amazon.

Lost World Fairs

Microsoft has a new site called Lost World Fairs to show off fancy fonts available in its latest version of Explorer. Right now, there are three fairs: El Dorado by Naz Hamid, Atlantis by Frank Chimero, and the Moon by Jason Santa Maria.

Atlantis is particularly fun to explore, and I took the liberty of cropping it into several widescreen desktop wallpapers (what you see below is probably roughly half of Atlantis):









*Buy World's Fair posters at eBay.

Nike Zvezdochka and more by Marc Newson

All text is courtesy of the Gagosian Gallery. I've added the links and appropriate images.

Marc Newson is one of the most accomplished and influential designers of our time. He has worked across a wide range of disciplines designing everything from furniture, household objects, watches, clocks, and clothing, to interior designs for restaurants and shops and interiors for private and commercial aircraft, to a concept car and a space plane.

To coincide with Newson's exhibition "Transport," which opens at Gagosian West 21st Street on September 14, Gagosian Shop will present several recent limited edition products that he has created for Nike and luxury brands such as Jaeger-LeCoultre and Ikepod. All limited editions are for sale.

In 2004, Newson designed the ingenious Zvezdochka trainer for Nike, inspired by his observation of Russian cosmonauts in training. To mark the exhibition, a limited number of pairs will be released in new colors Aegean Blue and Mahogany.

Newson’s recent timepieces include the editioned Atmos 561, a clock powered by temperature change and encased in Baccarat crystal that he designed for the prestigious watchmaker Jaeger-LeCoultre; and the Ikepod Hourglass, a borosilicate-glass chronometer containing millions of stainless-steel nanoballs, which he launched at this year’s edition of Baselworld, the world’s leading clock and watch fair. Newson has reconceived the traditional hourglass using twenty-first-century materials, producing a futuristic version of one of history’s earliest timepieces.

Lunar Rock Edition is a limited edition produced by Taschen Publishers of Norman Mailer's historic reportage "Moon Fire" of 1969 with a special case designed by Newson. Inspired by the Apollo 11 Lunar Excursion Model, the surface of the case is an actual 3D topography of the moon, fashioned from a single piece of aluminum. Each of the twelve cased editions is accompanied by a separately packaged, authentic and documented piece of lunar rock ranging in weight, size and color.

Posters from the “Transport” exhibition, signed by Newson will be available, as well as recent publications on his work.

Here's the Gagosian webstore. Via.

*Buy books featuring Marc Newson's designs at Amazon.

Motorcycle helmet (link roundup)

Motorcycle helmet with lightning bolt. Via.

And a few more links:

1. Low-res Cloud Strife cosplay. Via.

2. Three Ewok Moon t-shirt. Via.

3. Astronaut in space takes a self-portrait. Via.

*Previously: Car with 8-Bit flames.

*Buy Final Fantasy toys at eBay.

Red Bull has a science team and here's what they made

"The Red Bull Stratos science team has unveiled the first space suit ever to be produced by David Clark Company for a non-governmental space program. The team has also revealed the pressure helmet, which with the suit will serve as Felix Baumgartner's sole life-support system when he steps off his capsule at 120,000 feet to attempt a record-breaking freefall from the edge of space."

Here's a shot of the suit being tested:




And here's a great shot of Felix making a less ambitious jump:



The David Clark Company's motto is "We don't make sno-cone machines. We make full pressure suits."

*Previously: Red Bull-themed plasmid for Bioshock.

*Buy Red Bull collectibles at eBay.

Mummy Tornado (link roundup)

Paintings by Scott Campbell and Tim Biskup for an upcoming show at Grass Hut. Via.

And a few more links:

1. One of the world's greatest mathematicians is allegedly a lousy neighbor and kinda weird.

2. Great illustration for the news of water being found on the moon.

3. Hula girl with tentacles. (This should be made into a dashboard toy pronto.)

*Previously: Scrabble Hula.

*Buy dashboard hula girls at eBay.

Alien Queen prop (link roundup)

Alien Queen prop by Mandala Studios. Via.

And a few more links:

1. Ana Marie Cox calls Gawker "a soul-sucking, pleasureless attitude factory (maybe even a sweatshop)." Via.

2. ABC news essentially paid $200,000 for the legal defense of an accused child killer (and tried to keep it a secret). Via.

3. There's 158 billion gallons of water on the moon.

*Previously: Aliens/Space Invaders mashup.

*Buy Alien toys at the Big Bad Toy Store.

Under the Milky Way

Neptune and Pluto from Ross Beren's Under the Milky Way series (which will apparently soon be on sale). Now all we need is versions for famous Star Wars planets. Via.

*Previously: Parts of our moon are believed to be colder than Pluto.

*Buy telescopes at Amazon.

Found item mad scientist robot (link roundup)

Found item robot sculptures by Travis Pitts, who has art on sale here.

And a few more links:

1. Very high-res photo of Saturn. Via.

2. The Top 10 Adventure Stories of the Decade.

3. "The Sleepers -- Curtis, Deborah and their children, Kian, Perry and baby Theodore Wesley -- live in a cave, a 17,000-square-foot gouge in the earth left by a 1930s sandstone mine." Click through the photo gallery. (It's a gorgeous cave.) Via.

*Previously: Chinese elementary school in a cave.

*Buy star maps at Amazon.

Observatory above the clouds (link roundup)

Observatory, stars, and clouds available as a desktop wallpaper here, and part of a set of observatory photos.

And a few more links:

1. Cupcakes that look like breasts.

2. Lego trophy.

3. The Robot 6 mascot celebrates that blog's anniversary. And here's an outstanding version of the mascot by Guy Davis and Dave Stewart.

*Previously: Moonrise over Lick Observatory.

*Buy trophies at eBay.