NJS[BLOG]

Given the excitement about the royal wedding, though, I thought that a bit of royal gossip with French & Saunders might be appropriate.

I don’t even normally like The Decemberists, but there is something about this video that really does it for me. Maybe the filter that makes it all look like Anthropologie’s post-apocalyptic collection catalogue shoot?

I’m not necessarily endorsing the new film Abduction but I did want to point out this trailer. Some of you might remember that Kate’s parents’ neighborhood was recently set upon by hordes of teenaged girls because a certain teen-wolf was living there. Well, this movie is the reason for that mob of spotty trollops as it was filmed in and around their streets. Now you know!

Make the jump and you’ll get to the next stage. But if you fluff the event — jump too early and you’ll slam into the adjacent skyscraper, jump too late and you’ll trip over the edge and plummet to your death — it’s game over, forever.

No pressure or anything, right? Still, One Single Life does sound like a thought-provoking – and unbelievably frustrating – art project, if not a game.

(Wired)

Really, though, Audi does.  And it is beautiful in this “Samoa Orange” color – that we probably won’t get in the States because, you know, Gott forbid.

In fact, we may not get any Q3 here in the US at all, as Audi has apparently put its distribution “on hold” for America – whatever that means.

It’s a real shame because I am all over the Q3 if it makes it here by February 2012.  Especially with this fantastic new interior design language (and because the 2012 A3 has recently become a 2013 A3 due to more Euro-first model planning).

(Autoblog, where a gazillion photos await)

64 million empty apartments. An entirely customer-less shopping mall with 1500 stores. It’s all vaguely creepy and completely Stephensonian. I kind of want to go live in one of these abandoned never-occupied cities.

(io9)

Melancholia from Zentropa on Vimeo.

I love Lars von Trier.  I love conspiracy theories.  I love the idea of Nibiru/Zecharia Sitchin.  I love Charlotte Gainsbourg.  I love Kirsten Dunst.  I am ALL kinds of ALL over this movie.

(Thanks, Kate!)

Oh Land “Sun of a Gun” from Oh Land Music on Vimeo.

Not to be confused with Soylent Green or Ubik, Product 19 is a cereal from Kellogg’s that was conceived in the 1960s as a healthy competitor for Total. Apparently the copywriter had one of the largest “fuck it” moments in the history of his trade and named the 19th product pushed through his office in 1967 exactly that. No, really. Though still being produced, Product 19 is being discontinued by grocers, thus providing the scifi/surreal (ce-real?) cart you see above.

[...] a modern economy requires “collective action”—it needs government to invest in infrastructure, education, and technology. The United States and the world have benefited greatly from government-sponsored research that led to the Internet, to advances in public health, and so on. But America has long suffered from an under-investment in infrastructure (look at the condition of our highways and bridges, our railroads and airports), in basic research, and in education at all levels.

In light of Pennsylvania’s genius decision to potentially slash funding for public higher education, the recent Vanity Fair article “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%” was most apropos.