After watching King of Kong you’d doubt it, but Billy Mitchell apparently really can play, setting new World Records for Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr.:

Mitchell evidently quit his Donkey Kong game immediately after beating Chien’s mark. Asked why, Mitchell said: “Some say I’m being cocky. Some say I’m being lazy. I say, I’m being Billy Mitchell.”

Love the dodgy videos posted in the comments to the post too - all part of the mythos.

Posterising lyrics.

Annabel Crabb on the life of a journo on the election ride, and how the impact of always-on coverage might have dumbed and dulled down the campaign:

Now, thanks to the advent of wireless, BlackBerrys, iPhones and iPads, most journos have absorbed the major newspapers and websites before they show up to the press conference. If Kevin Rudd has said something in Brisbane, or Candidate X has made some Holocaust reference, the journos will know all about it. And the questions reflect that, I think. Whereupon in former campaigns, the questions might have centred more around the policy being offered, these days they are more likely to canvass the campaign issue of the day. This liberalisation of communication has been answered by the campaign teams with even tighter management.

Sculptures carved on the end of a pencil.

The number of published books in the world. No wonder it’s almost impossible to ‘make it' as an author.

Asimov’s robotic laws on last.fm

Global album-of-the-week, and deservedly. This time they’re keeping it close, revisiting childhood haunts, examining the angst of growing up and losing touch with the ‘kids', and the changes to memory:

So can you understand Why I want a daughter while I’m still young? I want to hold her hand, And show her some beauty, Before all this damage is done

Glowing indie rock at it’s finest.

Yikes:

Evolution did the rest: It divided the earth between humans and ants, and in so doing created another fundamental dichotomy. There are billions of humans on earth, and trillions upon trillions of ants - an estimated 1.6 million for every human being. If the earth were a scale, and all the humans were placed on one side and all the ants on the other, it would not budge. Ants have answered the ever-expanding human biomass with an ever-expanding biomass of their own, so that the planet is poised, teetering between its two most successful civilizations - each of which is social, aggressive, expansionist, and well suited for war.

The return of Road Runner & Wile E. Coyote (Genius), easily my favourite Looney Tunes characters. Even passes the laugh-out-loud test :-)

(via Daring Fireball)

Alan Moore, the great thinker:

I’m interested in the superhero in real life, but not the comic book version. I’ve had some distancing thoughts about them recently. I’ve come to the conclusion that what superheroes might be - in their current incarnation, at least - is a symbol of American reluctance to involve themselves in any kind of conflict without massive tactical superiority. I think this is the same whether you have the advantage of carpet bombing from altitude or if you come from the planet Krypton as a baby and have increased powers in Earth’s lower gravity. That’s not what superheroes meant to me when I was a kid. To me, they represented a wellspring of the imagination.