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.

We must go forward, not backward. Upward, not forward. And always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom! More on today's No More Apologizing! campaign from Michael Steele, who instructs us to imagine what Ronald Reagan might have to say about all this looking backwards. The Washington Independent notes this is the seventh attempt to reboot the GOP since November.

Case study in what late capitalism does to language: The Sci-Fi Channel is changing its name to SyFy.

NBC Universal's Sci-Fi Channel is changing its name to the "SyFy channel," a name that is apparently easier for children to text to one another and will therefore increase the company's earnings dramatically.

"SyFy" sounds exactly like "Sci Fi" when you say it, but, as Richard noted in the Trade Roundup, NBC Universal will own it now. For years, NBC executives had longed to trademark the channel's own name, but legal kept telling them you can't trademark a genre of entertainment for lonely obsessives. So they spent years, and paid a branding company gobs of money, to come up with SyFy.

"SyFy" is actually a fairly appropriate neologism; it nicely captures the relationship between the Sci-Fi Channel's generally crummy output and actual SF.

The end of the Gawker piece twists the knife just right:

Accompanying the name will be the channel's new slogan, "Imagine Greater," which means nothing and is grammatically incoherent.

Today's blog icon—this week every day gets its own—comes via the good people at obamaicon.me, which makes it easier than ever to latch on to last year's branding sensation. I made an indescribably large number of these images, which I plan to roll out randomly over the course of the next four years. Prepare yourselves. Though nothing can prepare you. (via)

Republican implosion watch: TPM highlights poll results showing the GOP brand continuing to tank even in the few weeks since Election Day. Can the GOP survive Barack Obama? MetaFilter had a nice post a few days ago cataloging the fireworks, including the circular firing squad over Sarah Palin and Kathleen Parker's Canavanesque suggestion that Republicans give up the oogedy-boogedyism.

Pre-debate links.

* Those McCain/Palin rallies aren't getting any better.

In the latest instance of inflammatory outbursts at McCain-Palin rallies, a crowd member screamed "treason!" during an event on Tuesday after Sarah Palin accused Barack Obama of criticizing U.S. troops.

Whether or not McCain and Palin can hear these words being shouted at them on the stump, these stories have been in the news for two days now. This is a case where silence really is deafening: when your supporters are screaming out "Treason!" and "Kill him!" you have a moral obligation to step in and put a stop to it. Hell, even Rudy Giuliani knows that.

* Good news/bad news: Apparently Brokaw never agreed to the no followups rule, so the campaigns are expecting there to be followups after all. That's the good news. The bad news: Brokaw ♥s McCain.

* How McCain destroyed the best brand in politics, with more at Washington Monthly.

* They found Sarah Palin's doodles. Rachel Maddow had some fun with this last night. You know, I'm beginning to think this VP choice speaks poorly of McCain's judgment.

* Also at Washington Monthly: analysis of Obama's latest, very good ad.

"He's out of ideas. Out of touch. And running out of time. But with no plan to lift our economy up, John McCain wants to tear Barack Obama down, with smears that have been proven false. Why? McCain's own campaign admits that if the election is about the economy, he's going to lose. But as Americans lose their jobs, homes and savings, it's time for a President who'll change the economy. Not change the subject."

* And despite what you sometimes hear in the comments of this blog, Pennsylvania is not a swing state.

Upon seeing the top 15 "green brands", my first response was "There's no such thing as a green brand." But that's not true—there really are companies with superior products and decent practices, it's just that consumers have no ready access to reliable information about them. And the high social importance of ecology in recent years has actually made matters worse, not better, with the greenwashing that is increasingly common across all industries only further muddying the waters.

Apple, for instance, and despite its many other virtues, may be greener than it used to be but it's still not especially green. But it feels green, so it makes the list.

This is a failure of the culture, and really a failure of our government—in both cases by design. Simple labels work; they worked in Britain for nutrition, and they could work here, not only with regard to health but along any number of ecological and social-justice vectors as well.

It may be that consumers would still make bad choices even if they were well-informed, but the evidence from Britain suggests otherwise. I think you'd see a significant shift in consumption practices almost immediately.

Postmodernism embodied: The women from the now-famous Texas polygamy sect are launching a new clothing line for kids.

My personal theory to explain Wesley Clark's spectacular flameout from veepstakes contention this weekend is that Clark (a) knew he was an if not the obvious candidate for Obama's VP and (b) he nonetheless suspected, knew, or had been told outright that he wasn't going to get the slot—so in order to protect the Wesley Clark Brand he chose to quite publicly remove himself from consideration in such a way as to endear himself to the Democratic base in the process.

Just my theory.

But regardless of how it happened, Clark is almost certainly out, which I think ups the odds for some version of my prediction of a Virginia Strategem considerably (especially the Jim Webb version). Stepping in as a proxy for Clark in the Foreign Policy Ploy is apparently Joe Biden, who Walter Shapiro at Salon hypes today.

Personally I think a bolder choice is called for, but Shapiro could be right. If nothing else it will give right-wing trolls an excuse to call Obama "clean and articulate" in every comment thread on the Internet for the next eight years.

Elsewhere in Obamaland, the nation's third black president, 24's Dennis Haysbert, is taking credit for the Obama phenomenon, as well as for any other non-white-Christian-male presidents who may come along later. Is Morgan Freeman really going to stand for this?

Serious Eats presents I Can't Believe It's Not "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" butters. Via Boing Boing.