• Alec Baldwin launched a new podcast called Here’s the Thing on WNYC. While I could listen to him talk about almost anything, the show is promising—the first episode is a chat with Michael Douglas.
• A Times article on the terrible story of dozens of wild animals on the loose in Zanesville, Ohio last week. No one was injured, but local police had to kill all the animals.
• Eric Clapton’s guitar-work isolated from the Beatles song While My Guitar Gently Weeps. It’s impressive and charmingly rough.

• Since learning the word skeuomorph (a contemporary decorative touch that was once functional), I’ve been seeing them everywhere.
• Mapnificent uses CTA schedules to overlay Google Maps with an estimate of where you can get from any point in a certain amount of time.
• Talking Funny features Louie CK, Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, and Ricky Gervais talking shop about comedy. They’re able to really analyze jokes and still crack each other up. It’s available on youtube, at least for now.

Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks – Ilya Repin (1880)

Set in 1676, this painting depicts the scrappy Cossacks writing a legendary reply to a demand for submission by the Sultan of the Ottoman empire. Their vulgar letter is the stuff of myth (it circulated like a 17th century meme), but no one seems to put it past the Zaporozhians to have really sent it. Read the full correspondence on Wikipedia.

• They don’t make biographies like this anymore: Admiral of the Fleet Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas George Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma.
• A map of Europe, every one-hundred years, from the year 1 to the year 2000.
• The Ladies’ and Gentleman’s Model Letter-Writer: A Complete Guide to Correspondence On All Subjects with Household and Commercial Forms
• How disco became house: this documentary traces Chicago’s founding role in the music (house music is named after an old Chicago club, the Warehouse).

Two men are talking on a Pyongyang subway train.
“How are you, comrade?”
“Fine, how are you doing?”
“Comrade, by any chance, do you work for the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Have you worked for the Central Committee before?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Then, are any of your family members working for the Central Committee?”
“Nope.”
“Then, get away from me! You’re standing on my foot!”

A New Zealand site collected this and a few others.

Here are two bands playing in the snow.

I found a face in the Beacon Ave. alley.

• Translation Party is a fun little site that takes a sentence you type and translates it back and forth between English and Japanese until an “equilibrium” is found, that is until the words stop changing.
• Some Russian guy found what looked like an old airplane in a forest using Google maps. So he drove there to check it out and took pictures.
• A preview video of the new Mario game for the Wii. I love Mario.

Not only can this guy make an incredible trumpet sound with his mouth, but he can do it while beatboxing. And playing a kalimba. It’s impressive.