On deaccession: What should museums throw out?

Karl Hans Janke is your artist of the night. More here.

The last of our pictures from Michigan and Indiana are now online at Flickr. There's a lot, but keep in mind we had at least two cameras going at all times. Special shout-outs to the Labor Legacy Monument, one of the best monuments to anything I've ever seen, and Ann Lislegaard's SF-centric project "2062" at MOCAD. Oh, and zombies.

Friday night roundup.

* Why would they send Obama to Copenhagen if there was any chance it might not work? Really poor showing from the White House on this one.

* Best thing on the Internet today: Liu Bolin's extreme camouflage photography. Warning: May blow your mind.

* The Sesame Street Mad Men parody. Warning: probably will not.

* Scenes from the A-Team movie.

* Bill Simmon is rapidly losing patience with Flashforward. I agree—but as I wrote in the comments over at his place, we have to remember that Lost's first great episode was episode four, and that the show was by and large pretty terrible until at least the second half of season three. So there's still hope. It's doing well enough in the ratings that the producers should have time and leeway to develop the story however they want.

* Related: What caused the flashforwards?

* Jaimee has a review in the Indy this week.

* Presenting the gas mask bra.



* And some bad news: Supermassive Black Holes Bringing Universe Closer to Death.

Saturday!

* Early ratings for the Dollhouse premiere are not exactly promising. (What genius thought Brothers would be a good lead-in?) AICN points out that Friday ratings were down across the board, and it's not down much from last year's finale—but it certainly doesn't reflect hoped-for DVD buzz, either. The episode itself was pretty well put-together, though writing Amy Acker out due to her unavailability kills possibly the single best thing about the show. (No advancement on the 2019 thread, either, though apparently a sequence with Felicia Day was filmed and cut.) Let's hope Happy Town fails quick.

* Also re: Dollhouse: Alyssa Rosenberg interviews Joss.

Whedon: The world will expand. Oh holy boy will the world expand. And then, unless our ratings tick up a bit, it will very suddenly contract.

* All 156 Twilight Zone episodes in 9 minutes and 59 seconds. More TZ links at MetaFilter surrounding the Rod Serling Conference in Binghamton, which I wish I could have gone to.

* Polling the GOP landslide: the gubernatorial races in both NJ and VA have narrowed to the margin of error, while GOP polling continues to seek its bottom.

* Climate researchers now predict the planet will warm by 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century even if the world's leaders fulfill their most ambitious climate pledges, a much faster and broader scale of change than forecast just two years ago, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations Environment Program.

* The sad death of an uninsured twenty-three-year-old Ohio woman from H1N1 has become bound up with the fight for health care reform.

* Jackson Pollack, egomaniac.

Friday!

* Can't-miss upcoming events at Duke: a Sun Ra talk and accompanying art exhibit.

* Glenn Beck, art critic. Olbermann critiques the critic.

* This morning John Hodgman accidentally tweeted his cell phone number to all 82,000 of his Twiter followers.

* Ten sci-fi ways to change the climate.

* Turns out the White House drafting its own health-care reform bill. Steve Benen speculates as to what might be in it.

* Krugman on the causes of the Great Recession. Discussion at MetaFilter.

* MetaFilter also has your police brutality outrage of the day.

Three more:

* 25 Twitter projects for the college classroom.

* Are you a decidophobe?

* Behold The King of Crayons.

Still another Saturday morning linkdump.

* This is my favorite MetaFilter post in a while, with tons of links all about the history of stick-figure icons, non-literacy information signs, and Helvetica Man.

* Also at MeFi: all about Herb & Dorothy Vogel, art collectors.

* Favorite last lines from science fiction novels. Hard, I think, to top "Poo-tee-weet?"

* Know your meme.

Tuesday afternoon!

* The conspiracy goes deeper than we ever suspected: the state of Hawaii claims to have a copy of Obama's original birth certificate.

* Behold Christoph Niemann's Periodic Table of Metaphors. More inside scuttlebutt from the illustration world at his site. Via Drawn!

* North Carolina in the news: everyone is talking about the terror arrest here last night.

* The Tennessee Valley Authority failed for more than 20 years to heed warnings that might have prevented a massive coal ash spill in Tennessee, then allowed its lawyers to stifle a $3 million study into the disaster's cause to limit its legal liability, an inspector general's report said Tuesday.

* DFW on footnotes.

Another Tuesday night linkdump.

* Anthony Karen photographs the KKK for Life Magazine.

* A public records request to the offices of Mark Sanford has revealed actually existing media bias: conservatives outlets promising the governor a safe place to spin his story. Even Colbert got into the act, writing Sanford in character. (Via Steve Benen.)

* Neil sends along this video of four artists painting the same (digital) canvas at once, though both he and I agree it's somehow not quite as cool as it seems like it should be.

* Happy birthday, MetaFilter!

Thursday night links.

* Artists and the recession.

* Tough day for celebrity: Farrah Fawcett has died, and Michael Jackson has been rushed to the hospital with cardiac arrest.

* Superhero roast from 1979, starring Adam West and Ed McMahon. Surreal. Via @filmjunk. (No Superman?)

* Towards the personhood of whales: 'Whales Might Be as Much Like People as Apes.'

* 'Twitter Creator On Iran: "I Never Intended For Twitter To Be Useful." '

* In Tehran, state television's Channel Two is putting on a "Lord of the Rings" marathon, part of a bigger push to keep us busy. Movie mad and immunized from international copyright laws, Iranians are normally treated to one or two Hollywood or European movie nights a week. Now it's two or three films a day. The message is "Don't Worry, Be Happy." Let's watch, forget about what's happened, never mind. Stop dwelling in the past. Look ahead.

A student did her final presentation today on Marc Johns. I must confess: I'm an instant fan. Don't neglect the sticky notes.

Ground Zero 1945: Pictures by Atomic Bomb Survivors, part of the Children of the Atomic Bomb archive. Via Cynical-C.

Speaking my language: LEGO zombies. Via Boing Boing.

Seconding @billsimmon: 'NC artist arrested for being awesome.'

Saturday!

* The headline reads, "Boy Hit By Meteorite."

* Some comics about mental illness.

* Banksy has an official show in Bristol.

* And you know Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is really gone when its creator explains how the cliffhanger would have been resolved.

[I]n the actual footage of the show, we see that Derek doesn't recognize [John.] So, by jumping into this future, he has erased his existence in a certain way, and we see that. We see that nobody recognizes him... If we had gotten a third season, I should say, we definitely would have explored what it all meant, but I think there's a great moment where we see Allison [Summer Glau], and John's look to her is very meaningful. I think that also would have been a great thing in terms of dramatic potential. Like I said, the show has ended, and it would all be speculation, and I really don't want to raise anybody's expectations.

Via io9.

More!

* The World Future Council eyes the possibility of punishing crimes against the future, but news on climate change and ocean acidification suggests we should be more concerned about crimes against the present.

* Here comes your Grant Morrison documentary.

* Early Ditko.

* How to bring the party.

* Are graduate creative writing programs worth it? Only if they're free, and frankly maybe not even then. This, however, is quite true:

A friend and classmate of mine recently said that our program was a place where people who ordinarily never would have met in their entire lives could become best friends.

It's the best reason to do it. Via Jezebel via @sposnik.

* Alain de Botton says "it's time for an ambitious new literature of the office."

* And an art historian thinks Duchamp's readymades weren't really readymades.

This is Ms. Shearer's case against the readymades so far.

Duchamp's readymade glass ampoule, which he named ''50 cc of Paris Air,'' is larger than any that would have been readily available to pharmacists. (And she has a tape of a man from Corning Glass saying so.)

''Beautiful Breath,'' the readymade perfume bottle with Man Ray's photograph of Duchamp on it (now owned by Yves Saint Laurent) is green, she says; the real bottles of ''Un Air Embaume,'' from Rigaud, are peach-colored (like the empty but still-fragrant one that Ms. Shearer bought for $650).

The readymade snow shovel, which now exists only in photographs and replicas, ''would hurt your hand'' if you tried to use it, Ms. Shearer says, because it has a square shaft. And it doesn't have the normal reinforcements to keep it from breaking. (She has hired people to make her a snow shovel like Duchamp's and use it until it breaks.)

There is more: the bird cage is too squat for a real bird, the iron hooks in the photograph of the coat rack appear to bend in an impossible position, the French window opens the wrong way, the bottle rack has an asymmetrical arrangement of hooks and the urinal is too curvaceous to have come from the Mott Iron Works, where Duchamp said he bought it.

Lots of open tabs from the last few days. Here's a first crack at it.

* 'Parasitic flies turn fire ants into zombies.' You heard it here first, get ready for zompocalypse.

* By request (hey, Tim) my last two Star Trek posts for a good long while.

* Star Trek: a military analysis.
* Star Trek vs. Star Wars.

* See also, God help me: The Duck Tales theme song gone horribly wrong.

* First pages from DC's Elseworlds 80-Page Giant. Via MeFi.

* Famous movie misquotes. I defy anyone to quote the line from The Graduate accurately. Also via MeFi.

* Oldest piece of art determined to be porn. Via Cyn-C.

* Top PhD programs shrinking. Still trying to figure out whether this is good news or bad. See also: 'The Universities in Trouble.'

Tuesday night.

* Early review of The Fantastic Mr. Fox at the Rushmore Academy.

* Van Gogh's ear actually cut off by Gauguin? Now I don't believe in nothing.

* Carbon taxes vs. cap and trade. More at Kevin Drum.

* Advocate torture? That's a disbarrin'.

* Mexican legislature votes to legalize small quantities of narcotics.

* Maine legislature votes to legalize marriage equality. DC: ditto.

* And this map at Wikipedia claims the entire energy output of the world could be provided by six very large solar energy facilities operating at just 8% efficiency. Via MeFi.

It's true what Drawn! says: there's some very good stuff in this Flickr stream.