Thursday, January 24, 2008

Recent Links: Getting the Joke Requires Some Background Edition

Cool stuff to read, watch, see, by categories. This time, two categories: funny, and everything else.

Funny

Explaining Art to Geeks. This is really !@#$% hilarious, although you actually need to know geeky stuff (e.g. some basic html, something about photoshop, typical internet jokes, etc) to get most of the jokes. My wife and I went through them together and between us we got just about all of them. (Come to think of it, knowing a bit about famous paintings helps too.) Basically, if you find this funny:

...then click through. If not, you still might like it, but you might not. (Link via)

Kung Fu Monkey delves into a recent mystery. (I had those of you in the know at "Kung Fu Monkey"; for the rest, click through...)

The Constitution is a Living Document. Just like you need to know a bit about geekery & painting to get the first link in this section, if the phrase "the Constitution is a living document" means nothing to you, then this might not be funny. If it does mean something to you: click through.

X-Men/Peanuts mash-up. (See above, re: necessary knowledge; in this case, Peanuts and X-Men...)

Harold Bloom's Macbeth/George W. Bush mash-up. In the unlikely event that Bloom ever sees this blog post, I may be indirectly responsible for his death, since he'd probably have a heart attack at my calling something he wrote a "mash-up". But the term fits.

Launching a paper airplane from space. Not humorous, but funny in the "it's a strange world" sense. And cool.

Not Funny

This profile of Rick Perlstein is a great introduction to one of the really important writers in the blogosphere, and among the historians of contemporary America. (You can real Perlstein's blogging here.)

Jon Evans on the future of reading. No surprises to regular readers of Cory Doctorow here, but it puts the basics all in one limpidly expressed place.

• I don't think I agree with this critique of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 -- certainly not all of it -- but it's interesting, and a good corrective to the vaguely positive memories you may have of the book.

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