Cigarettes and Coffee

Are you guys aware of the spam emails that are going around in the guise of breaking-news updates from MSNBC? I was just skimming my Gmail spam folder for misidentified messages when I saw these:
BREAKING NEWS: World Leaders Gather To Roast Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
BREAKING NEWS: [audio] Church Group Offers Homosexual New Life In Closet
BREAKING NEWS: Bush [...]

This is the “big thing” on the web today. I try not to link to things BoingBoing posts (because I assume pretty much everybody reads BoingBoing), but I’m gonna have to make an exception for this. If you want to feel kind of good about our often-miserable species, the next four and a half minutes [...]

- If the name alone isn’t enough to get you to play Puzzle Farter, we will probably never be friends.

- In my last post, I mentioned Josh Cotter’s amazing Skyscrapers of the Midwest, and I’ve been making notes for a more in-depth post about the book. Instead, I’ll just direct you to Brian Heater’s review [...]

I’m on a magazine deadline this week, but I want to point a couple things out real quick-like. The first is the Boston Globe’s new online photojournalism/photo-essay section, The Big Picture. I’m just blown away by the quality of the photos they’ve posted so far, particularly in “After the Quake,” which looks at the Sichuan [...]

- First and most importantly, this weekend is the annual MoCCA Art Festival here in New York. For comics fans who don’t really have an interest in superheroes and the Marvel/DC stuff, MoCCA (the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art) is where it’s at. It’s mostly indie and “literary” stuff, and lots of creators [...]

I’m not shy about my love for Disney World. My family made the trip from Pittsburgh to Orlando every few years when I was growing up, and it was worth every single 17-hour drive (Dad’s not big on the air travel).
Columnist and blogger James Lileks has written about Disney before, and he just finished a [...]

Just watch it. Trust me.

Link via Tycho at Penny Arcade.

One of my favorite discoveries at this year’s New York Comic Con was Dan Goodsell’s Mr. Toast, a series of single-panel comics that combine whimsical awesomeness and absolute nonsense in the very best kind of way. Goodsell had a booth on the floor and was signing comics, greeting fans, and - best of all - [...]

Say hello to your Friday productivity killer.

Muxtape is a site that lets you upload your own mp3 files and create web-based mixes. The servers are getting hammered pretty hard, so you’ll run into some snags when you’re uploading, but it’s a lot of fun to play around with. And I love the interface for the mix - gigantic and minimalist all [...]

Spinning: Oliver Nelson, The Blues and the Abstract Truth
I’m digging the new layout - minimalism is good. It’s a theme called LetterHead, shamlessly lifted from Robin Hastings.
More later.