Music

• Thing: My Best Worst Friend from Free Darko. A regular Joey, so regular he runs a Blogspot blog, somehow stumbled into a years-long friendship with THE Michael Jordan (THE THE Michael Jordan). Post reconfirms Mike-iavelli’s endearing insanity and kind of makes me hope I never accidentally cross MJ’s path.
• Thing: How Not to Depict a War from the New York Times Lens blog. The Hurt Locker: a deserving Best Picture nom that’s well-directed, -written, and -performed. But true to life? Its reception has been a case of mistaking grittiness for authenticity; seriously, a bomb squad wanders onto some rifles and then downloads sniping mastery from the Matrix, or so it seems? It’s pretty much a literate Call of Duty, or Rambo in Apocalypse Now skins. And the idea that it’s an anti-war movie is MOOTED by the movie’s final scene. In the Times essay, American soliders in Iraq remotely detonate the movie’s bona fides. So to speak.
• Thing: The making of the new OK Go video from Make Magazine. In case you’ve been living under a rock made of no internet, here’s OK Go’s new music video:
  

  In case you’ve been living INSIDE a rock that’s under a rock, here’s OK Go’s old music vide OH WAIT their label made it unembeddable.

In our weekly link rundowns, I usually try to present three great links you may have missed.

But this week was strong internet.

Five.

• For your next love letter or grocery list or PUT DOWN MY SANDWICH note, wouldn’t you like to use the actual letterhead of Elvis Presley, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Johnny Cash, or whatever Robot Salesmen Ltd is? Thing: Letterheads of famous people
• Most articles about How Google Works are actually about How Much The Author Likes Google. Leave it to Wired to dig into how Google’s system of algorithms, basically a machine made of robots made of math, learned that when a human types hot dog, the goal is almost certainly to see something like this, not something like this. Thing: Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web
• You’ve already made your mind up on how you feel about this link from Reason. Thing: Everyone Who Knows What They’re Talking About Agrees with Me
• The way people freaked out about Napster, claiming it would end the music industry, is similar to the way people freaked out about VCRs killing the movie industry. Similarly, the way people freak out about sharing personal location information on Foursquare/Twitter is similar to the way people used to freak out about answering machines and listing wedding notices in the local newspaper. Thing: Regarding Foursquare and PleaseRobMe (SIDE NOTE that proves how NEVER SCARED we are: In all the PleaseRobMe hysteria, I up and joined Foursquare myself, and so did Ben. You ain’t a crook, son.)
• Recently the Guardian ran a series of writing advice lists by successful writers. NY Mag distills them all into a single top ten. Thing: The Best Writing Advice of the Best Writing Advice

Also, regarding this post’s stupid, stupid title: here’s proof Johnny Cash would’ve loved Foursquare…

You’re going to a Super Bowl party Sunday night, but you have no idea which of these two teams Eli Manning plays for. Don’t worry; we’ve got your entire Super Bowl fan pack right here.

What snack should I bring?

Buffalo chicken dip, a dip made of buffalo chicken. Next question.

I’m not from Louisiana or Indiana. I’m from somewhere like Canada, Pakistan, or Nigeria. Who should I root for/against?

America is rooting for the Saints, but thinks the Colts will win. But you’d like a little more than that before you make a choice this critical.

You should root against the Colts because Peyton Manning is obnoxious. Also, the NFL says you can’t root for the Saints. Screw the NFL! You’re rooting for the Saints!

You should root against the Saints because head coach Sean Payton is obnoxious. Also, a Louisiana high school principal says you can’t root for the Colts. Screw that Louisiana high school principal! You’re rooting for the Colts!

Tough, tough call.

OK, blah blah blah. Which team is the fun team?

Saints celebrations look like this:

While Colts celebrations look like this:

I hear The Who is playing the halftime show.

Here are the four best Super Bowl halftime shows ever. All of them are much better than The Who will be:

4. Diana Ross, 1996: A medley of 534 #1 hits, plus exit stage helicopter, in ten minutes? Why not!
3. Michael Jackson, 1993: Remember — as MJ stood still for what felt like minutes, worldwide TV ratings were going up. And then the show started.
2. Prince, 2007: “Purple Rain,” performed in rain that is purple.
1. U2, 2002: Perfect. U2 fulfilled their obligations as a band with this show, but sadly decided to stick around anyway.

What about the commercials?

We agree; it’s sad that so many people care about Super Bowl commercials.

Who’s gonna win?

First, decide which you trust the most… Math, machines, or middle-aged men?

• Math: Football Outsiders, the nerdiest of all football stat sites, have crunched one million pounds of equations to determine… it’s a toss-up.
• Machines: Madden 2010 likes the Saints — and, believe it or not, Madden is almost always right when it comes to predicting Super Bowls.
• Middle-aged men: Almost all the self-declared experts are picking the Colts to win.

Also, predictions by Colts fans and Saints fans. (May not be objective.)

No really, what about the commercials?

Here’s a Google search for best super bowl commercials ever.

Wholehearted Super Bowl rap songs made by white fans?

Colts:

 Saints:

Give me some trivia to try out.

• Celebrity picks! Maya Angelou and Bill O’Reilly agree: Colts win. Hulk Hogan and Roseanne find common ground in the Saints.
• The 2009 All-Unwanted All-Pros: players who are really good despite nobody thinking they’d ever be any good.
• How Super Bowl gambling works
• Sports video games are changing sports: “It’s one thing to suggest that videogames may be making us smarter. It’s another thing altogether to say they might be making us better athletes.”
• The odds of a single cow’s leather being used for a Super Bowl football: 1-in-17,420,000.

And if you really want to impress, tear into the NFL’s gigantic new Hulu presence, featuring videos of like everything ever.

Will the announcers talk about anything besides the dumb game?

Oh good lord yes.

• As you may have heard, the Saints are from New Orleans. Also, Colts receiver Pierre Garcon is from Haiti.
• Colts quarterback Peyton Manning’s dad, Archie, played for the Saints, and the Manning family is from Louisiana.
• Saints running back Reggie Bush is dating famous celebrity Kim Kardashian.
• Is Peyton Manning the best quarterback ever?
• Some more about New Orleans.
• Some players are hurt, but will play anyway.

Give me something to complain about that nobody else will be complaining about.

When players list their alma maters during introductions, many of them haven’t actually graduated. GET OFF MY LAWN.

What happens after the game ends?

Regular-season basketball.

• You’ve heard of the uncanny valley. How about the completely useless valley? Realism in UI Design takes us there. More like Useless Interface, am I right?
• A lesson in late-night TV walk-on music, music publishing, and markets by Questlove of The Roots, known by many as the greatest-ever hip-hop band and by others as Jimmy Fallon’s house musicians. If you know them by the latter, then… well, then you and I are probably not friends already, but we can get past this! (The big question: How much would it cost to use “Walk On” as walk-on music?)
• To help Haiti’s earthquake victims, change U.S. immigration laws. Also: the photo of the year?

Because we love you

When it comes to Lost, I’m like a doorbuster sale… I have ZERO ZERO ZERO ZERO INTEREST!!! But this seems like a thing that took work to make and that you’d like.

• 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: