Vanderbilt and the Yeggman. Vipers. Vigor, the Hammersmith wonder.

Four-and-twenty virgins came down from Inverness;
And when the ball was over, there were four-and-twenty less.

Four-and-twenty virgins came down from Invermuir;
And when the ball was over, there were four-and-twenty fewer.

Four-and-twenty virgins came down from Invergordon;
And when the ball was over, there were four-and-twenty more o'dem.

• Body Ritual among the Nacirema -- famous and influential anthropological article by Horace Miner. A bit dated now (hog hairs?) but it still works pretty well as satire, both of the society and of anthropogical perceptions.
• Are you being ripped of by motor insurers? -- specifically, have they tried to write off your car for a nugatory value when you could get it repaired and roadworthy? THis article shows how to get your own way.
• Natural Science Museum of Barcelona visual database -- clever and fun piece of Flash to explore the animal kingdom. Includes links to Flickr images! This could eat a lot of your time.
• Wikileaks needs money -- a very worthwhile cause, I think.
• The Four Big Myths of Profile Pictures -- not a very serious subject, but neatly and entertainingly explored by the OkCupid people.
• Dewey Organizes Internet Archive Music -- there is loads of great (legal) free music at the Internet Archive, but it's hell browsing it. This new interface seems to do a good and useful job.
• Spotiseek -- uses Last.fm technology to generate Spotify playlists according to your requested likes. This seems to really work well. You can just drag the playlist into your Spotify window.
• My Consulate in Samoa, by William B Churchwood -- a fascinating historical document, very readable and entertaining. Includes an account of the strange Samoan version of cricket.

• Went the other night to see Burn after Reading, the new Coen brothers film. We thought it was pretty good fun: just a fairly shallow piece of fluff really, but there's nothing wrong with that. The galaxy of stars (Malkovich, Swinton, McDormand, Pitt, Clooney) all put in entertaining turns. It kind of cops out and runs out of steam at the end, but it wold be harsh to resent it for that.
• The Plantbot moves autonomically around in search of light for its precious cargo. Excellent idea! I think ideally you'd want it to also rotate so the heaviest part of the plant was facing away form the light, so it grows evenly, but maybe its drunkard's walk will achieve evenness anyway. (Via curiosity_ips.)
• Last night we were at a get-together of children's book illustrators organized as part of the National Year of Reading, with which T's involved. Michael Foreman, Anthony Browne and Nick Butterworth were the headline names, but plenty of lesser luminaries too, plus some publishers, writers, etc. They mostly talked about the industry, which was interesting for me but may have been deathly for the kids who were present. Also, a bit strange that the three main speakers were all middle-aged blokes, when there are plenty of young people and women in the field. They were all engaging enough guys, but there was definitely a tone of "these young art-school types today, never been taught to draw properly, we had to come up the hard way" etc.
  It was in Suffolk's Council Chamber, which is pretty new and had a rather snazzy mike system, like a sort of automated "speaking object" for those of you who were ever at OUSFG discussions or similar. If you want to speak, you press the button on your mike, but that doesn't interrupt the current speaker until they press their own button to signal they've finished: so only one mike is live at any given time. The good bit though is that there are three big projection screens on the walls of the room, fed by a handful of ceiling of cameras that are slaved to the mikes -- so as the "live mike" changes, the live camera switches to the one with the best view of that mike, which pans and zooms as required, and the projections all automatically go with that so as to display the current speaker most effectively. Maybe this arrangement is commonplace these days, but I hadn't seen it before and thought it was pretty neat.
• I expect everyone's seen this reinterpretation of A-Ha's Take on Me video by now, but just in case you haven't -- you should, it's very very funny.
  

• BgPatterns is a terrific resource for generating background graphics. Choose your motif, colurs, canvas texture, rotation, scaling, opacity and basically every tweak you might reasonably need. Preview it live on the site, then save it locally as a jpg for your own use. Really nice implementation.
• The Nietzche Family Circus is a small and silly idea, but an effective one. Pair a random Family Circus cartoon with a random Nietzche quotation, step back and admire. This is my favourite so far.
• Essex have introduced what they grandly term Essex Cricket Television. The only clips up so far depict various Essex players humiliating hapless Yorkshiremen last Wed with bat and ball on a screen too small and low-res to identify players, devoid of context such as the current score, and in my case at least the sound wouldn't work. Well, it's a start I guess.
• Rather better are Tim Hunkin's short films about the workings of slot machines in general, and his Under the Pier Show in particular.

• The Kadir-Buxton Jump Start - "All I then had to do was wait until I came across a dead body, and the rest is history."
• The Kadir-Buxton Fertility Treatment - "I was with a girl friend, and we thought it would be worthwhile to see if it was feasible to unblock fallopian tubes. When we entered the womb via the cervix, which had to be done very slowly, we found that the womb needs lubricating to avoid immense pain." [NSS! -- ed.]
• Alleviating Menstrual Cramps - "With this method no one need know of the discomfort being suffered, and the pain soon goes. Do not try this whilst driving or operating heavy machinery." [This sounds quite plausible actually...]
• The Kadir-Buxton Method - "You will find that the Kadir-Buxton Method is also effective against comas and senility, amongst other things." [The best of the lot, you really have to read the whole item.]

• Word Strips, a Flash game of spotting cobinations of lettert aht form words, quickly. There are loads of games like this about, but this is a nice realization and the scoring mechanism is pleasingly straightforward. Also, it's too difficult to be a real time-eater. My best is about 300...
• The Slingshot -- "the Great British Paper for Young Chaps. Its watchwords are Patriotism, Clean Living and Fair Play... Immerse yourself in the healthy, hearty pages of The Slingshot and you will soon understand why it is that the sun never goes down on the British without asking permission first." Very much in the tradition of Ripping Yarns. Not truly brilliant, but with some good bits, especially the adverts.
• When cake-icing software goes wrong. Poor Aunt Elsa, I bet she ends up getting the slice with the code fragment.
• Did you know that Unicode incluides the Hebrew Alternative Plus Sign, for people who find the normal one looks a bit too much like a cross? I didn't.