Pop music

1. If you only read one Michael Jackson article for the rest of the year after reading 2,138 of them a few weeks ago, make it GQ’s September cover story.
2. Some things on movies:
   • Uncomfortable Plot Summaries
   • This marvel:
     
   • I’ve wondered what it is that’s so creepy about the premise of Inglourious Basterds (revisionist WW2 cheat-code rampage by Nazi-scalping Jews). The Peril of Perfect Evil captures a lot of it. (I wrote about five paragraphs here, but deleted them all. They were pretty good and REALLY rambly.)
3. On an infinitely lighter note, here’s 25 things that are easier to get rid of than Brett Favre.

• A lengthly behind-the-scenes look at the upcoming Beatles Rock Band game: While My Guitar Gently Beeps. Supplemental materials: the game’s more-or-less entire tracklist, and a hands-on.
• Been waiting all morning to see some ugly, really ugly couches formerly owned by the visionaries behind websites you use everyday? Your wait is over: Where 14 of the top internet businesses were started.
• A 73-year-old Harlem businessman defended himself and his employees from four robbers, neutralizing all four by firing only three shots! Safe to assume New York’s uptown criminals have marked his business with a Do Not Rob tag on their iPhone maps apps.

Bonus editorial commentary

Some deserve second chances: Philadelphia Eagles head coach talks about signing Mike Vick. Other items have had more than sufficient opportunities to get with the program: IE6 Cannot Die.

It was a STRONG week of internet.

• This one has already changed a small part of my life: How to watch a Michael Bay film… of course, its lessons are useful beyond just Michael Bay films. Any bad art is now tolerable! His advice involves dumbing your brain down while also training yourself to see “a mega abstract conceptual art project” instead of just a bad movie. In other words, treat it as if it’s a little bit dumber — and much, much smarter — than it actually is. Employed this strategy while enduring some smarty-smart accident called Let The Right One In last night. It really works!
• The wife and I have found a fun new highway game after reading People Like Angry Car Faces, which compares American car design with foreign cars and finds that domestics look “absolutely freaking livid” while imports convey “upbeat, capable.” It’s fun to describe the emotional state of each car you pass. Here’s a Flickr set of car faces to test your skills on.
• You remember that video of the wedding party entering the church to Chris Brown’s “Forever”? I Now Pronounce You Monetized breaks down how the video’s viral popularity wound up making money for Brown and his label… a good lesson on Free for the final generation of paranoid record labels.

Here’s the original wedding video, BTW:

3. Roger Ebert’s Transformers 2 review and subsequent on-piling
2. From SEOmoz: A Bad Day for Search Engines: How News of Michael Jackson’s Death Traveled Across the Web
1. Via Jay Smooth: 125th Street, Harlem, NYC. Late Thursday night.
   

3. Fan-made video for Kanye’s “Robocop.” Count the references… I spotted Battletoads, Double Dragon, and Punch-Out!, and maybe Contra and Metroid. Obviously Mega Man. The slickest thing about this video is how, by including Kanye’s bear mascot thing as the boss, it hits the big secret of Kanye’s relationship songs: he’s not exactly the good guy.
2. Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive
   
1. One of Seth Godin’s best ideas yet—his call for open-source scholarly databases to replace the useless textbook industry. Too good an idea to happen, of course.