Here’s a nice collection of photos from inside the Obama White House. Most of the shots are pretty candid. In the one I pulled out, above, Obama selects an Oval Office desk chair. Looking at the other photos, it seems he went with the black one.

• Life at 1000 FPS. French dude takes a new hi-res, high-speed camera (I-Movix SprintCam v3) to a rugby match. The shots are amazing.
• Wikipedia provides a long list of nicknames for poker hands. At least I can sound like I know what I’m doing.
• The right place at the right time: a photographer was out on a boat looking for whale sharks when thousands of rays swam by under the boat. It looks like something out of Planet Earth.

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.

I’m a sucker for musical flash toys. This one’s called Tone Matrix. Click to turn some squares on, or click and drag to create a pattern. Up and down is tone, left to right is time.

Previously: Pianola.

• Matt Zoller Seitz at Moving Image Source has been doing a series on Wes Anderson’s style influences. The last part is a five-minute annotated video essay on the prologue of the Royal Tenenbaums. It’s lovingly made. Find the video link in the right-hand column.
• The International Olympic Committee was in Chicago two weeks ago scoping the plans to make a decision about the 2016 Olympics. Chicago Reader staff writer Ben Joravsky published an “Open Letter to the IOC” that sums up the serious objections to the Olympics from a financial perspective.
• Is Google building the next Facebook right under our noses? There are some pieces falling into place. But of course we have to think bigger than that.
• Beautiful piano. Girl singing. In French. …Check check check. Hooray.

This is a remix of the Beatles song “Get Back” with LCD Soundsystem’s “Daft Punk is Playing at My House,” with a little of the Kinks “You Really Got Me Now” thrown in for good measure. It’s like everything I want in my head at once. The whole thing is called The Beatles vs LCD Soundsystem vs The Kinks: The Brits are Playing at my House and was created by FAROFF.

I’ve redesigned the blog. I’m still working out the details, but I’m pretty happy with the way it’s looking. Let me know what you think!

• Dork Yearbook collects endearing childhood pictures of huge dorks, often with the machines they loved. I know there are few pics of me staring at a screen that would fit right in. My favorite part is that all the old electronics are so precisely named in the captions.
• A pretty comprehensive list of old-timey medical ailments. Use these for your next band name, to add drama to your historical re-enactments, or to be understood when you travel back in time.
• From 1989-1997, photographer Andrew Bush compiled a series called Vector Portraits, capturing people in their cars driving down the highway. Wonderful shots.

This seems amazing, and it will be much easier to understand by simply watching it. The artist took a bunch of photographs to tell a story, and after developing them, created a stop-motion story with the photos themselves. The whole thing is very impressive and inventive.

How It’s Made must be one of the cheapest shows to make on television. The format couldn’t be simpler – follow a product as it’s created and assembled in a factory. The show covers three or four products per episode, and then they slap a voiceover on it. That’s it. Here is How Bubble Gum is Made as a example.

Watching this show gets me thinking about other objects around me and what goes into them. I can often makes guesses about their process from seeing similar things on the show. Anyway, I wanted to suggest some topics (I know.), so I went to the website. There’s a forum for discussion composed of almost nothing except two epic, two-year-old threads. I’d like to think they are competing. One is 81 pages long and every post is a sentence. The other is 91 pages long and seems to attract entries in list format.

Taken together, they are nearly two hundred pages of people simply naming objects. It starts:

-phones
-computers
-chocolate-covered cherries
-mechanical pencils
-the machinery used to create everything on the show
-all-in-one printers
-electrical outlets
-digital/analog clocks
-light bulbs
-candles
-barbeques
-pencil sharpeners
-household onens/microwaves
-buildings
-air conditioners/heaters
-pencils/pens
-rubber erasers
-pencil toppers
-calculators
-mousepads

And goes on and on. It gets surreal if you try to read more than 3 pages.