I was reading Magic and the Brain: Teller Reveals the Neuroscience of Illusion in the new issue of Wired, and had to check out the Cups and Balls routine mentioned therein. I found the one with the potato and the one with the golf ball. I wish these were in HD.

Inspired Bicycles just vaulted onto my top five Parkour videos list. Having “bicycles” and “Parkour” together doesn’t seem right, but there’s really no better way to explain it. I wouldn’t have imagined some of that stuff was possible. Really great. (via waxy)

Based on the trailer, I have high hopes for Moon:

Kamni Khan posts an ode to actual, physical books. Among other thoughts, Khan imagines if the books in The Reader were replaced by a Kindle:

Would Michael use it in the tub? It’s not waterproof, so there’s a high probability of damaging it. Would Hanna throw it to the floor in a rage of passion, right before another lovemaking encounter? Highly unlikely! The breakable Kindle, as we all know, comes at a hefty retail price. Hanna wouldn’t ask Michael where he got a particular book; the answer would always be Amazon.com.

I had a couple relatively funny spam subjects in a row containing the word “pants,” so did a quick search of the 3,000+ or so spam GMail caught for me recently. 16 feature pants

• Hold the enormous manfullness in your pants.
• Suddenly you feel that your pants have steel inside them.
• Your pants will be in order all the time.
• If you think that power in your pants is not good enough, check this pill out.
• US senator crapped his pants!
• A big equipment in your pants brings big fruits for hot chicks to pick up.
• You feel like a giant comparing to the midget in your pants?
• Feel your pants expand with the new formula
• The vigor in your pants will be unbreakable.
• More inches in your pants - more attention from female friends.
• Get king-kong in pants
• Change the turmoil in your pants with the blue pill.
• Now you don’t have to turn off the lights when you take off your pants.
• Chicks will be at a loss for words when you take your pants down.
• Unzip your pants knowing that you have a real treasure there.
• Your little friend in your pants is capable only for visiting toilets.
• The hard friend in your pants will look up into the sky.

“Manfullness,” I must work that one into my vocabulary.

“Are your pants in order all the time?” really wants to be a new way of asking somebody if they’ve got their shit together.

“Suddenly you feel that your pants have steel inside them.” Oh no… Can’t. Bend. Knees…

I do NOT want to know what medical condition “turmoil in your pants” alludes to.

At least a couple of these would make for good fortune cookies.

The Big Picture has a nice collection of Easter shots. I really like the eggs in the first two pictures. While we’re on the subject of Easter, Amelia had a stroke of genius this year, suggesting we do the egg hunt in the dark, kids armed with flashlights. It’s at least twice as much fun as a daytime hunt, and even eggs in plain sight can take awhile to find. Give it try next year.

Tweenbots are Kacie Kinzer’s little robots that roll in a straight line and rely on the kindness of strangers to get from point A to point B in the city. Nice.

Wow, I love this:

It’s a relief print of an actual tree trunk by artist Bryan Nash Gill. $4,000 is way out of my price range, but I can admire from afar. (via swissmiss)

Twitch embeds the trailer for Park Chan-Wook’s (Oldboy) upcoming vampire movie Thirst. If it delivers I can see myself running a fun Halloween double feature with Let the Right One In one of these years.

I just finished The Year of Living Biblically by AJ Jacobs, in which he attempts to follow the Bible as literally as possible for a full year, and really enjoyed it. I was expecting humorous mockery of some of the absurd rules a la that Jeb Bartlett lambasting of the Dr. Laura character on The West Wing—and it is indeed very funny—but instead I was quite impressed by how hard Jacobs works to get at what the real meaning behind these rules are, his delving into many different sects, practices, and interpretations, and in general how even-handed he is about the whole thing.

That said, his long-suffering wife’s response to his following Leviticus 15:20, “everything upon which she leis during her impurity [menstruation] shall be unclean; everything also upon which she sits shall be unclean,” is a riot:

I came home this afternoon and was about to plop down on my official seat, the gray pleather armchair in our living room.

“I wouldn’t do that,” says Julie.

“Why?”

“It’s unclean. I sat on it.” She doesn’t even look up from her TiVo’d episode of Lost.

OK. Fine. Point taken. She still doesn’t appreciate these impurity laws. I move to another chair, a black plastic one.

“Sat in that one, too,” says Julie. “And the ones in the kitchen. And the couch in the office.”

In preparation for my homecoming, she sat in every chair in the apartment, which I found annoying but also impressive. It seeming in the biblical tradition of enterprising women—like Judith, who seduced the evil general Holofernes, only to behead him when he was drunk.

I finally settle on Jasper’s six-inch-high wooden bench, which she had overlooked, where I tap out emails on my PowerBook with my knees up to my chin.

Nate Silver points his big stats brain at gay marriage and ranks states by what year they would likely vote against a gay marriage ban (bit of a double-negative there). He’s got a full half of the US theoretically ready to jump on board by 2012.

Video of Andy Bolton’s new deadlift world record. 457.5kg (1008.6 lbs). Over one THOUSAND pounds, and he looks like he could have lifted even more.