Tuesday night.

* First on the Threatdown: coyotes!

* Winooski, Vermont: Great Domed City of the North.

* "How Health Care Reform Won."

* Is Metroid Prime the Citizen Kane of video games? Hard to pick Metroid Prime over, say, Ocarina of Time, just in the GameCube category alone.

* CNN, always three weeks behind the story, asks whether Obama has lost his mojo in the very moment it becomes apparent that his polls numbers are again rising.

* Also in poll news: contrary to Nate Silver's recent NJ-GOV analysis it does seem clear that Corzine is moving sharply upward in the polls.



* "Wall Street’s Near-Death Experience."

* And Life celebrates dumb inventions of the 1950s and '60s.

Friday night links.

* 45 ways of looking at the Mario Brothers. Via Kotaku.

* McSweeney's is hiring.

* Pizza Hut is now "The Hut." First response: How is that any better? Second response: somebody call Mel Brooks.

* Ze Frank is playing "That Makes Me Think Of" for Time Magazine. This week the video's about Iran.

YouTube Thursday!

* 1988 Inside Edition report on Super Mario. Don't miss the cameo appearance by a marginally less evil Bill O'Reilly.

* The Diff'rent Strokes titles recut as a horror sequence.

* Star Wars/MacGyver mashup.

Probably the greatest thing ever: The ROM for a seventeen-year-old unreleased sequel to Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!, Mike Tyson's Intergalactic Power Punch, has surfaced on the Internet.

The game was not just a demonstration of Tyson's outer space boxing prowess, but also a showcase of the amazing ineptitude of publishers to generate capable follow ups to hit games at the time. The sequel removes both Little Mac and Doc Louis, replacing them with Tyson and manager Don King.

At Kotaku, via MeFi.

Mega Man vs. everybody. This would have made a fairly good Dragon for the game, actually.

Links I am physically incapable of resisting: "One man choral group performs the Legend of Zelda theme."



Also going around: another Live-Action Super Mario. Via Boing Boing and Waxy.

This week's blog icon is a still from "The People's Mario," a Soviet-realist retelling of the first level of Super Mario Brothers.

Three from MeFi:

* "There's Something About Mary," the amazing story of Mary McFate, a nationally known anti-gun activist who turned out to really be Mary Lou Sapone, mole for the NRA.

* Don Hodges looks at the kill screens from Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, Ms. Pac Man, Dig Dug, as well as the Defender Extra Life Bug. Bonus: The Duck Hunt kill screen.



* Another set of videos that's been hanging out neglected in my bookmarks for way too long: David Harvey's twenty-six-hour lecture series on Capital, Vol. 1.

Super Mario Brothers in five minutes.

The Super Mario Bros. theme, as performed by an RC car and partially filled bottles.


http://view.break.com/487616 - Watch more free videos

Also via Boing Boing: this crazy awesome mashup of Doom and the first level of Super Mario Brothers.

The world's greatest video game, Final Fantasy, is twenty. 1up.com has the retrospective. Via Slashdot.

I'll be reinstalling Windows today after catching some sort of virus from the Duke network. (A week or so ago I accidentally left a shared folder writable while working at the library, and I've been paying for it ever since.) So there probably won't be too many posts today.

Here's a few quick links, though, to tide us all over for the next few hours:

* The writer's strike has a blog.

* Kugelmass calls Žižek and his recent LRB article an embarrassment. I'm a little bit on the fence on this question. As far as I can tell, Žižek is right insofar as the politics of failure resistance clearly have failed—but perhaps (contra Žižek) we must make them work again rather than just calling the whole thing off. Here's Kugelmass:

Each of these posts manifests a remarkable faith in Zizek, as though these questions have answers, or at least as though what is unclear now may become lucid shortly. It is as though one is speaking about a brilliant, sometimes reticent friend. In the relative desert of American politics, when connections between politics and philosophy are so difficult to find, I have also thought of Zizek that way. But enough is enough. Solidarity is wasted on egotistical delusion, and so is the gentle work of asking questions. Let us ask each other these same questions: do we support the consolidation of power in Venezuela? Do we see evidence of resignation on the Left? Do our anxieties about power leave us paralyzed? As for Slavoj Zizek, his very headlines have become unconscious, unsettling echoes of the slogans in 1984. Let us part ways with him until he once again becomes sane, and faithful to the unfinished work of philosophy, rather than to his besetting fantasies of a vanguard capable of putting a point on his arrogance.

* Via Bookninja, a judge in New York has ruled what makes a poem.

“A poem sometimes possesses rhyme or meter, though this is not necessary,” Keenan wrote. “A poem is typically free from the usual rules of grammar, punctuation and capitalization.” In a footnote, he cited testimony that before “World War Two, a poem almost always had rhyme or meter.” Now, “the popular definition of poem has become much more lenient.”

* And, finally, a brief history of the Mario Brothers. If that's not enough for you, Slate's Chris Suellentrop pays homage to the lost sequel of Super Mario Brothers.

See you in a few glorious hours.

Via MeFi, self-playing Mario levels.

Speaking of the nostalgia mode...