Top Ten Cheapest Celebrity Tippers. Bill Cosby? Say it ain’t so!

I have been listening to The Moth podcast for a little while now, and I love it. So far these are my favorites:

• Sherman “O.T.” Powell: Cocktails in Attica
• Christian McBride: The Gig
• Matteson Perry & Jeff Simmermon: GrandSLAM Stories
• Anthony Griffith: Best of Times, Worst of Times

Warning: the first three are fun and entertaining but that last one is absolutely heart-rending.

Nicely produced and impressive parkour video, with one guy doing it all on rollerblades. Very cool.

Another totally, totally awesome Danny Macaskill street trials biking video: Industrial Revolutions. The railroad tracks! The flip! The ROPE! Good god.

Phoenix Jones, Real-Life Superhero. "I am finding myself ostentatiously nodding at everything the crack dealers are saying, I suppose in the hope that if the shooting starts, they’ll remember my nods and make an effort to shoot around me."

I loved In Bruges (don’t look for trailers, they are all misleading), so can’t wait to see what director Martin McDonagh does with Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Mickey Rourke and Christopher Walken in Seven Psychopaths:

A screenwriter (Colin Farrell) struggling for inspiration for his script, ‘Seven Psychopaths' gets drawn into the dog-kidnapping scam of his oddball friends Billy (Sam Rockwell) and Hans (Christopher Walken).

When a psychopathic gangster’s (Mickey Rourke) Shih Tzu goes missing, Marty finds he has all the inspiration he needs, as long as he can live to tell the tale.

Stop Coddling the Super-Rich by Warren Buffet. "Since 1992, the I.R.S. has compiled data from the returns of the 400 Americans reporting the largest income. In 1992, the top 400 had aggregate taxable income of $16.9 billion and paid federal taxes of 29.2 percent on that sum. In 2008, the aggregate income of the highest 400 had soared to $90.9 billion — a staggering $227.4 million on average — but the rate paid had fallen to 21.5 percent."

Christoph Niemann turns in a great New Yorker cover.

Fascinating Planet Money podcast on why the Tappan Zee Bridge in NYC is built in the wrong place (over one of the widest points on the Hudson River, at much greater expense than narrower points a few miles south, and to the detriment of the long-term health of the bridge).

The Secret History of Guns. [In the 1960s, with the Black Panthers making a point of walking around visibly armed] "Republicans in California eagerly supported increased gun control. Governor Reagan told reporters that afternoon that he saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” He called guns a “ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.” In a later press conference, Reagan said he didn’t “know of any sportsman who leaves his home with a gun to go out into the field to hunt or for target shooting who carries that gun loaded.” The Mulford Act, he said, “would work no hardship on the honest citizen.”

You might want to give 13 Assassins a go, if you’re looking for something to rent. If you don’t like either (a) samurai movies, or (b) very violent movies (some disturbing scenes, especially in setting up what a monster the bad guy is), you should probably steer clear of this one. But for everybody else, this one’s a keeper. The last 45 minutes is an epic battle that somehow never loses momentum or interest (45 minutes!), in part because you have no idea which, if any, of the good guys are going to survive, or if they will succeed at all, and you really really want them to succeed because the bad guy is so very very bad. Here’s the trailer:

Watch at marvel at the Detective Dee trailer. Filled equally with OMG and WTF moments. Kicking the deer in the head is both: