Wall Street failure, rainbow pantsuits, Nintendo
Sunday, October 5, 2008
I don’t really have a coherent theme for the dump of random content below, except it all amuses me. 
I’ll start by saying there’s really no better media venue to consume the latest political “news” than through The Daily Show, and the opening skits of Saturday Night Live. They’ve both been especially good lately.
This New York Times headline from last week gave me a kind of perverse enjoyment: “Wall Street, R.I.P.: The End of an Era, Even at Goldman.” Reality can be so absurd. This is the sort of historical happening you don’t think about experiencing in your lifetime. It’s the stuff your grandparents tell you stories about, from back in the Great Depression.
I guess this is a few weeks old, but I don’t read these kinds of magazines. A coworker shared this “Hillary, we loved your pantsuits!” photo spread with me, from Glamour magazine. It’s a salute to Hillary Clinton’s Rainbow Coalition of Pantsuits. It’s the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuit. It’s the colorful spectrum of Hillary Clinton’s favorite outfit. It’s the . . . you know what, I’ve been thinking . . . if Hillary Clinton looked like Sarah Palin, she’d probably be the Democratic presidential nominee. How sad is that.
I like this use of graphs and charts: Le Grand Content, a short film that examines the omnipresent PowerPoint-culture in search for its philosophical potential, by Clemens Kogler and Karo Szmit.
I love this video, illustrating the community contribution aspects of Wikipedia: Professor Wikipedia. Also, I may have posted one or more of these funny cat videos before, but that’s OK: Cat vs. Cake (cat cannot defeat plastic cake cover), Laser Cat (crackhead cat chases laser pen), Nora: Practice Makes Purr-fect (cat plays piano) and Kitten Surprise (how to break up a cat fight).
On a Nintendo theme, if you want to see the baddies from the Super Mario Bros. series grumble about Bowser’s leadership, watch Bowser’s Minions. And here’s a Working Nintendo Coffee Table. The whole table is an NES controller. Very clever.
Another coworker showed the following game to me and I thought it was pretty cool, even though I don’t have a Nintendo DS. You can get new Bangai-O Spirits game levels onto Nintendo DS systems by playing WAV files through your computer’s speakers. The level data is encoded and transmitted via audio (that sounds much like a fax transmission or dial-up connection), since I guess there’s no easy way to connect the DS to a computer, or to another DS. Read more: Bangai-O Spirits Elite Design Contest. Game over!