ONN: Franz Kafka International Named World’s Most Alienating Airport. I love the backdrops, especially the madly spinning clock. (via waxy)

Doomsday scenario #842:

…a year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation’s infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event - a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.

As if I didn’t have enough to fret over. Not to mention the indignity of having civilization shattered by something called “plasma balls.”

ArtsBeat at the NYTimes has a three-part interview up with Ricky Gervais:

• Winning Oscars and Demolishing Celebrities
• Winning Audiences and Demolishing World Leaders
• Directing Movies but Still Preferring Television

First question:

Q: Has Kate Winslet thanked you yet for providing her, on “Extras,” with the strategy that finally won her an Academy Award?

A: I’m sure she didn’t have that in mind. She’ll never live that down now. In her next film, she’s playing a deaf, dumb and blind girl. That’s not true. That’s libelous.

From the department of “sounds too good to be true but a guy can dream, can’t he?”, comes news that there might be hope for a one-time flu shot which not only works against your garden variety flu bugs, but some of the known pandemic-grade varieties as well.

So ThinkGeek puts up one of the better April Fools gags, the Tauntaun Sleeping Bag:

Use the glowing lightsaber zipper pull on the Tauntaun sleeping bag to illustrate how Han Solo saved Luke Skywalker from certain death in the freezing climate of Hoth by slitting open the belly of a dead Tauntaun and placing Luke inside the stinking (but warm) carcass. If your kids don’t change their tune on which Star Wars film is the greatest ever, you can do your best Jar Jar impression until they repent.

Turns out it might be too good an idea to pass up:

ATTN Tauntaun Fanatics! Due to an overwhelming tsunami of requests from YOU THE PEOPLE, we have decided to TRY and bring this to life. We have no clue if the suits at Lucasfilms will grant little ThinkGeek a license, nor do we know how much it would ultimately retail for. But if you are interested in ever owning one of these, click the link below and we’ll try!

If they pull it off, will this be the first Internet April Fools gag to become reality?

P.S. No way Lucas lets them.

(via TMoLT)

The winners of caption contest #183, plus my losing entry:

I liked this one because you could either read it like she put the car there as a design decision, or that their bed used to be against that wall.

The Big Picture has a bunch of cool before/during Earth Hour photos. Starting with the second photo, you can click the picture and watch the lights fade off.

Lyle McDonald on the 5x5 program.

Atul Gawande’s article in The New Yorker on solitary confinement is excellent:

“It’s an awful thing, solitary,” John McCain wrote of his five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam—more than two years of it spent in isolation in a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot cell, unable to communicate with other P.O.W.s except by tap code, secreted notes, or by speaking into an enamel cup pressed against the wall. “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” And this comes from a man who was beaten regularly; denied adequate medical treatment for two broken arms, a broken leg, and chronic dysentery; and tortured to the point of having an arm broken again. A U.S. military study of almost a hundred and fifty naval aviators returned from imprisonment in Vietnam, many of whom were treated even worse than McCain, reported that they found social isolation to be as torturous and agonizing as any physical abuse they suffered.

And what happened to them was physical. EEG studies going back to the nineteen-sixties have shown diffuse slowing of brain waves in prisoners after a week or more of solitary confinement. In 1992, fifty-seven prisoners of war, released after an average of six months in detention camps in the former Yugoslavia, were examined using EEG-like tests. The recordings revealed brain abnormalities months afterward; the most severe were found in prisoners who had endured either head trauma sufficient to render them unconscious or, yes, solitary confinement. Without sustained social interaction, the human brain may become as impaired as one that has incurred a traumatic injury.

Also, from The Book Bench, Charles Dickens' take:

I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers; and in guessing at it myself, and in reasoning from what I have seen written upon their faces, and what to my certain knowledge they feel within, I am only the more convinced that there is a depth of terrible endurance in which none but the sufferers themselves can fathom, and which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow creature. I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body; and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore the more I denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.

There’s You Suck At Parking stickers, and then there’s the xkcd approach. In fact, what I want is a pack of the easy peel-off stickers, but with that xkcd strip on them.

I really liked Let the Right One In, even with the crappy subtitles. So you should see it, but wait for the fixed DVDs to hit the shelves. I wonder if Netflix will update their collection?

LeBron’s 60 Minutes shot. Just like tossing a rock in the ocean.