171 West Monroe, Chicago

Every blog post, Digg submission, Wikipedia discussion, and Youtube clip has it. It’s the single comment that causes you to stop reading. Often it makes you close the tab, other times you must exit the browser, and in particularly awful instances you are forced to walk away from the computer. The fatal comment itself is not terribly offensive or earthshattering; usually it’s just the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

The fatal comment serves a simple, unintended purpose: with its own stupidity, it makes you realize that you do not want to be reading these comments anymore. You have already spent five minutes more than you wanted reading these comments. It makes you realize that you are not going to learn anything else the farther down you read. It makes you wonder if the writer has just read the same blog post or watched the same youtube clip as you. The inanity of the comment is mindboggling and you just have to get out.

John Lurie is the unlikely starting place for the Russian equivalent of the lolcats meme. It started when someone translated his painting, “Bear Surprise”, with a humorous spelling error. The bear says “Preved!” instead of “Privet!” (hello). Soon photoshopped bears and people with their arms raised across the internet were given speech bubbles, and the meme even made the cover of Russian Newsweek magazine. Surprise!

Washington Boulevard Bridge, December 20

The Strange Maps blog posts all sorts of interesting maps like the one above, a French political cartoon map from 1870 (click the link for a country breakdown explanation). The blog has also covered a nice typographic map of Chicago, and this map of Mississippi blues musicians.