weird | puppet wrangling

Tuesday various

Two words: yarn bombing.
A cute comic: Superman in England. [via]
And I thought things were uncivil on the floor of Congress. We have nothing on the Ukraine.
I shirked my social responsibility this past weekend by not seeing Bridesmaids. I’m not really sure how I feel about this argument, although I do think it’s a sad state of affairs when the very idea of casting smart, funny women comes in a (possibly) smart, funny movie comes down to the success of one single film. [via]
And finally, Find racist robots in Transformers 3, get $25K from Michael Bay. I’d try to collect, but then I’d actually have to watch Transformers 3.

NASA proves Einstein was smart. Okay, it’s a little more complicated than that — namely, finding that there’s “a space-time vortex around Earth, and its shape precisely matches the predictions of Einstein’s theory of gravity” — but yeah, basically: Einstein? No dummy. [via]
Gelatin cubes dropped onto solid surface High Speed Video. Strangely fascinating. [via]
Time Magazine talks to the kids who were there with George W. Bush on 9/11. I’m not sure I agree with them. Maybe Bush did just want to protect the kids he was reading to from finding out, from panicking, but his focus probably should have been on the nation as a whole. Still, there’s no denying they have a unique an interesting perspective on that day. [via]
Oh, thanks a lot, monarchy! Book slump to eight-year low in Royal Wedding week.
And finally, what American accent do you have? It guessed me correctly, although your mileage — especially if it’s, y’know, outside the US, and…what’s the word for “mileage” in metric anyway? Kilometrage? [via]

I am not a Pennsylvanian barber. Just so you know.
Well, it’s no Donald Glover for Spider-Man, but I don’t see how George Takei could do any worse.
What if your favorite album was a book? A neat concept, if you ignore the sort of crappy slideshow presentation…and pretend the misspelling in Never Mind the Bollocks was intentional. [via]
Bristol Palinâ€™s Nonprofit Paid Her Seven Times What It Spent On Actual Teen Pregnancy Prevention. I wish I could say I was remotely surprised. [via]
And finally, the world’s most expensive hot dog. I probably won’t be eating this — even though this place apparently is just a 15-minute walk away from my office — and I’m naturally a little disgusted by the excess of it. But I’m at least impressed they didn’t cheat, like a lot of “most expensive” chefs seem to, with gold plates or silverware or something else to artificially inflate the price. Well of course something’s expensive if it’s coated in diamonds. The parts you can’t eat shouldn’t count. [via]
This did, of course, also make me think of Heather.

The other night, I was watching Jeopardy, as I am wont to do, and was deeply saddened when none of the three contestants knew Terry Gilliam’s film Time Bandits. Now comes the even sadder news that the film might be re-made. Seriously?
Speaking of re-makes, I never thought I’d say something like this, but this trailer for MTV’s new Teen Wolf makes me miss the Michael J. Fox version. (I was eight when I saw that film in theaters, though, so I already have way too fond feelings for it.) I was more forgiving of this version when I realized it’s meant to be an on-going television series, rather than a movie, but it seems like such tired, Twilighty territory, and surely there were better titles for it.
A helpful reminder that, when the dictionary adds new words, even slang words, it is not the end of the world. (It’s actually probably a good thing. You know, because that’s what dictionaries are for.) [via]
“Zombie” Ants Found With New Mind-Control Fungi. [via]
And finally, because I’m sure you’ve been wondering: just how does Aquaman build his own x-ray machine?