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.

Friday night in Albuquerque.

* Today in tasers: 72-year-old grandmother Tasered for refusing to sign a speeding ticket. New York judge allows Tasering to force compliance with DNA test. The system is working as intended; obviously these are both cases where lethal force would have been necessary in the absence of a Taser. (Via MeFi.)

* The Memory Card covers iconic moments from classic video games. Also via MeFi.

* Remembering Tiananmen.

* 'Graveyard Civiizations': The idea here is that we can explain the Fermi paradox (’Where are they?’) by assuming that exponential growth is not a sustainable development pattern for intelligent civilizations.

* Blue Eyes: The Hardest Logic Puzzle in the World.

* Empire Magazine has your spot-the-reference movie poster. Via Denise.

* Conan v. Super Mario. (Last two via Neil.)

* 40 Fantastic Sand Sculptures. Via my dad.

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.

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.

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.