Linkfest

Michael Jackson's death has rather saturated the interwebs (and justifiably so). I was showing P some of the videos on YouTube, and found it impossible to think of the guy in the past tense: disturbing crotch-grabbing aside, the man is fluid. And see? Did it again - present tense and all that. *sigh*

The Jackson coverage also completely skewed this week's viral video chart over at unruly media, where all the top 20 places were taken by the late, self-styled King of Pop. But I'm guessing that those of you that care have already googled to your heart's content, and those of you that don't won't be interested.

So.

Wired published this article about deep-water salvage back in March (in the UK - apparently a re-run of a US article from earlier still). Still good, though (if you're into ships, wrecks and salvage and the like).

The Grauniad had a couple of stories concerning darkening skies over China: first it was pollution, and then it was lightning of epic scale.

Lightning of a slightly less epic scale can be found in TeslaDownUnder's Garden Shed, as the Telegraph discovered, gracing us with a galley of DIY lightning. Quite stunning, and quite, quite mad.

And speaking of 'mad', most of you will recall Garfield Minus Garfield, a project whereby Jim Davis' cartoons are (IMHO) hugely improved by the Stalinist airbrushing out of fat orange cats from each cell, the result being the slightly deranged monologues of the strip's remaining protagonist, Jon (don't know whether Odie features or not, haven't read too much into it). Interestingly, Jim Davis himself seems to take the modifications to his work in good spirit, at least according to The Washington Post, which makes me more inclined to like the books (as opposed to, say, Scott Adams, whose internet persona ruined Dilbert for me).

Anyway, that was by way of preamble to introducing The Simpsons Minus the Simpsons, which took inspiration from Garfield Minus Garfield, and then took it to the next level by editing out, frame by frame, each of the characters from the Simpsons' opening sequence. As a monument to dedication it works, but this time, I think the result really is that less is less...

Until I stumbled across The Times' article, I hadn't realised that Tim Burton was directing an Alice in Wonderland film. The sneak preview photos look fantastic - although mentions of white rabbits and rabbitholes will forever now be entwined with The Matrix for me :-)

Now, Google Maps, what is it good for? pictorial representations of the alphabet, obviously.

Referring to linkfests passim, it seems that The Telegraph can't stop telling us even more about crop circles. Aliens? Hoaxers? Nah, it's all down to Stoned Wallabies, Serious Journalists™ tell us.

Possibly said wallabies' indisposal may explain how none feature in this week's Guardian wildlife pictures, but not to fear, there are some stunning images even without stoned marsupials. Particular favourites are the leaping stingray and the albino turtle. The silhouetted crane by the coal plant is also pretty good.

And that sort of links (OK, it doesn't, but I'll pretend that the thematic linking is justified for the sake of flowing prose) to this story about how the Iraq oil contracts are to be allocated live on Iraqi television. Life meet art... or is it the other way around?

In art taking inspiration from life, Aaron Sorkin (he of West Wing fame) is apparently working on a Facebook film, according to this article in the Guardian. The deal's not signed yet, but should the wheels be set in motion, it could happen this year, apparently.

And finally, coolest of the cool, take a look at this web-based ASCII-art generator: you feed it a .jpg, and it produces an ASCII-art image based on same - you can fine tune the result by moving the sliders for brightness, contrast and gamma...