A 32-slot bracket for a film supervillain showdown.

The Cassini spacecraft has sent back some new images of Saturn. There's a cool time-lapse video of making an orbit around the rings, with the moons zipping by in the background.

Distorted maps of the earth, redrawn to be proportionate to wealth, disease, toy imports, war & death, etc. Plenty more over at Worldmapper.

Results from the Clich?© Rotation Project, where old idioms are retired and replaced with submissions from readers.

A list of names of books combined with names of bands, like "Jane Eyre's Addiction" and "The Cat Power in the Hat" and "My Friend Lynrd Skynrd."

Ira Glass, host of the NPR show This American Life, talks about storytelling in 4 short films.

I'm going to have to take a look at Matt Madden's 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. It's a one-page comic told with 98 variations, inspired by Raymond Queneau's prose book by the same title. There are some sample pages on the book's website.

Well said:

This is not meant to put down anyone else‚Äôs musical taste, or point out how cool I am. I could (and have) walk into any college radio station and get that attitude aimed at me by some DJ with a crate of out-of-print Lithuanian ska-tech remix 12‚Ä?s. That‚Äôs no fun! If you want to club people with ‚Äòtude, explain to them why their favorite API sucks. You talk about music to share it, make friends, and find more of it, not to alienate people.

Mental note: be nicer when talking about music.

A somewhat goofy interview with comics writer James Kochalka in one two three parts. "There have been occasions where I’ve said things to people, just to get reactions from them, so I could draw a strip about it. I’ve done that to my wife before. It’s kind of a mean trick."

Square America is a gallery of vintage snapshots and vernacular photography. I like the photos of people asleep, and the defacings are kind of interesting, too.

A directory of signs, glyphs, and symbols.

Interesting graph charting relationships, potentially useful as a guide for writing screenplays. I love the "null set" portion.

The Telegraph has a couple articles on the toxic wife.

I have every admiration for women who choose the selfless task of caring and nurturing the next generation. No, the toxic wife is a completely different species. She is the woman who gives up work as soon as she marries, ostensibly to create a stable home environment for any children that might come along, but who then employs large numbers of staff to do all the domestic work she promised to undertake, leaving her with little to do all day except shop, lunch, luxuriate. Believe me, there is no shortage of the breed and I've been inundated with horror tales about them.

Photos taken with a thrown camera.

Photos of vending machines in Japan. Newspapers, underwear, beetles, fried foods. Oh, and drinks.

I like the Ridiculous Business Jargon Dictionary. A new personal favorite is "acluistic: the state of being completely without a clue." And percussive maintenance is good, too.

Austin Kleon's blackout poem vertical is spinning out into a blog dedicated to the form. It begins with a contest.

Some cool infographics drawing on aspects of American culture, using pictures of 2 million prison uniforms, or 15 million sheets of paper, etc.

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything was pretty much a disappointment. I wouldn't go so far as to call it bad. I was just hoping for a less history and a more speculation. Unfortunately, if you've been paying a moderate amount of attention to the internet/ social software/ business world for the past few years, you won't find much new information. Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams have done a good job of rounding up the big trends, their so-called Principles of Wikinomics: openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally. Much of the work is a sort of biography of these paradigms and the companies & products that embody them. You probably know their names: Linux, Wikipedia, Google, Flickr, IBM, BMW, Best Buy, etc.

Each chapter reviews a new trend, fleshes out the history and summarizes by way of canned, italicized guidelines for business. I wish I hadn't returned the book to the library already or I'd quote a few. Anyway, they also mix in a few Trendwatching-like neologisms, like "Ideagoras" and "New Alexandrians". By far the most intriguing part of the book was Chapter 9, discussing the "wiki workplace." Perhaps that's because the idea is still the most nebulous and little-tested: "We are shifting from closed and hierarchical workplaces with rigid employment relationships increasingly self-organized, distributed, and collaborative human capital networks that draw knowledge and resources from inside and outside the firm" That'll be an interesting process to see over the next few years. I think free agent/ consultant/ collaborative culture will become more and more popular.

Here's a great parody video, a performance of Rachmaninov's Prelude in C# minor (pdf). An assistant brings out a specially-cut chunk of wood to help play those huge chords.