Why have an economist explain the sub-prime crisis when you can listen to David Byrne? ["Burning Down the House" mortgage joke here]

• Whiskerino – the social beard-growing site. Your beard wants friends. Track their progress.
• If you could take a 24 hour long exposure photo of all the flights in the US, it would look something like this.
• I am working on an article on BASE jumping and came across this: the fatality list. Fascinating.
• The Psychedelic 60′s: Literary Tradition and Social Change

Some of the best half-baked ideas at the Halfbakery. A couple favorites:

Fatal Auto Collision Song
My blood is rapidly emptying itself onto the side of the road. My vision is getting dark. This is it. Somehow the radio still works and my dying breaths are drawn while Barry Manilow’s “Copacabana” takes me off to the hereafter. “Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl,” etc., while my essence drifts away.

What an intolerable and undignified way to go! With Fatal Auto Collision Song, an audio device is wired into your car. When unsupportable body damage is done to the car, an override system goes into effect, canceling the currently chosen audio selection with the music you’d prefer to hear on your deathbed. [more]

Night-Shift Towers
There have been many studies that show that nightshift work is hard on the body and soul, causing depression exhaustion and even high blood pressure. Nightshift house aims to change all that by creating a community of nightworkers in a building with technical innovations to make night work more pleasant. [more]

The comments are usually pretty great too.

About this time every year the Chicago commute gets a little more festive and a lot more tacky. The Holiday Train is making its rounds, visiting all of the lines over the course of the next month. It’s a rare sight, but the CTA provides a schedule so you don’t miss Santa waving from a sleigh on a flatbed train car. They really go all out with it.

There are rumors of Holiday Buses as well, but I haven’t seen one.

The photos are from flickr user kudzoplanet.

Johnny Hallyday has been called everything from the French Elvis to the French Tom Jones. Maybe Neil Diamond would be a better reference, but comparisons like that never work (Donovan always had to endure being compared to Dylan for no good reason). Whatever the case, Johnny Hallyday was and is immensely popular. And how much fun is this French scopitone?

The song “Noir C’est Noir” is a translation of the hit Los Bravos song “Black is Black,” and the video for their version is almost as much fun.

After Indiana Jones 4, Steven Spielberg will start working on a bio piece on Abraham Lincoln, starring Liam Neeson. I am not always on the front lines of Hollywood gossip so maybe this is not news, but I am excited.

Also, there are some neat colorized images of Lincoln by artist James Nance.

An article in The New York Times which covers a New Tom Stoppard play, “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” and tells the story of Czech psych band the Plastic People of the Universe.

Pretty great album cover collages. I especially like the ones that mix illustrations with photos.

NPR launched a new site called NPR Music, which brings together all of their music features and programing and adds a few new ones. This is bound to become a site I visit daily.

Besides music news, interviews, and blogs, there are some nice “Discover Songs” features. I’m a sucker for a song list or mix chosen by a musician, and I’m pretty excited about the Song a Day.

An important part of any good music site is the ease of navigation and listening. The media player on NPR Music seems kind of clunky, with an interstitial ad when the player loads, but at least it is not using Real player. The playlist feature could be a great thing as it becomes usable across the whole NPR site.

Finally, the way they decided to break up genres is humorous to me: Rock/Pop/Folk, Classical, Jazz & Blues, World, Urban.

Yo Momma is so dumb she failed the Turing test.
Yo Momma is so fat Herman Melville wrote her biography.
Yo Momma is so fat her mass altered the Earth’s orbit, causing a global climate change and mass extinctions.
Yo Momma is so dumb she went to college and and learned to fight or flight.
Yo Momma is so fat she sneezed and some of her squeezed into the fourth dimension.
Yo Momma is so fat she was shot by poachers while visiting africa.
Yo Momma is so slow Zeno’s Paradox doesn’t even apply to her.
Yo Momma is so fat she got out of the bathtub and William Howard Taft fell out of one of her folds.
Yo Momma is so ugly she caused imperialism.