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.