Comics

• Indian government workers demand bribes from people all the time. Solution: hand those crooks some worthless currency made especially for bribing. They say it’s working; corrupt bureaucrats are falling back at the sight of people sticking up for themselves.
• If you want to overthrow the government of South Carolina, first you have to pay a $5 registration fee. Even if this article was a joke, it might still qualify as a Best Thing: Comedy Edition entry, considering South Carolina’s especially overthrow-y history. But it’s for realsies — some legislators in South Carolina think Al Qaeda is going to stop by and fill out some paperwork. This is a real law! A real law. You’d think. Um. It’s. Wait, does. Mind broken. Real law. Only just. Really? I. (Let’s move on.)
• Not mindhacking your zen is cluttery/unrefreshing. Truly ground-breaking zen: 43 Simple Ways to Simplify Your Life. Sample zenhacks:

1. Remove your doors
2. Eat half of each pet
3. Sit on a big, thick book
4. Something something keyring holder
5. Paint clocks cheery pink

But wait

Spider-Man by Wes Anderson.

• Watching football is a big waste of time. The average NFL game features only about 11 or 12 minutes of live gameplay content. The rest is replays, crowd shots, loitering, promos, and so on. But is this really a problem? When watching a game by myself, I can play with my daughter, read blogs, work (as I’m doing right now — Hi mom! — there’s 6:16 to go in Cowboys-Vikings!), etc. without really missing much, and lots of people Tivo games anyway. When watching games with friends, there’s plenty of breaks in the football we can use to discuss football. Who really loses in this arrangement? ELSEWHERE IN SPORTS: Calculating Charlie Brown’s Wins, Losses, and Other Pitching Stats based on one man’s Peanuts extrapolatin’. No, not this Charlie Brown.
• Regarding the strange and unreadable Esquire thing about Jay-Z… Oh man. Plenty of writers had problems with its content, while others focused on its baffling syntax. (FULL DISCLOSURE: I liked that “campefire flickers” line.) I’m not sure which part of this messy, messy article qualifies as a “Best” anything. It’s the most forced writing I’ve ever read — it reads like it was written by a suburban 15-year-old boy who always looks for chances to remind his teachers that Mos Def is poetry. Maybe it’s the article’s amazing music-writer-unifying properties, as the spectacle of rap writers rallying to shoot it down was inspiring.
• OK OK, time for a Happy News Contest… I’ll trot out this one: apologetic Guantanamo guard reunited with ex-inmates via Facebook. How are you gonna top that?
• One more… What movies like Die Hard express about the ways people interact with architecture.

Two Rich Guys Arguing

Jimmy Kimmel lays into Jay Leno on Leno’s own show. Around 1:40, Kimmel dings Leno and Leno refuses to play along. You can see Kimmel’s eyes light up, as he realizes he gets to tee off on Leno for the next four minutes. Jay loses his audience, and all he can do is wait it out. I don’t watch any of these shows, so I don’t really have a dog well-trained competitor in this fight, but Leno is impossible to like at this point.

“Why would anybody ever wanna leave Baltimore? That’s what I’m askin’.”

The new trailer for Treme, the upcoming series by The Wire’s creators:

3. Seeing these two things within like five minutes of each other: Digg would prefer to not put up with IE6 and Digg is among the slowest 11% of all websites. Did this amuse anybody else?
2. Four dozen husbands
1. Via Rafi Kam: Flaming Garbage Cans in Hip-Hop Videos. What more could you ever ask for?

Special bizarre bonus: In many markets, coming up with a catchy piece of linkbait isn’t all that difficult. But the big, strange market of SEO people selling SEO stuff to other SEO people is different. It’s pretty much all been seen and done, daily. But every now and then somebody gets just weird enough…