Wall Street Journal

• 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:

• The Washington Post delivers one of the all-time finest editorial corrections after it was brought to their attention that Public Enemy’s “911 Is A Joke,” released in 1990, was not written in mockery of the events of September 11, 2001. The revised article actually casts PE in a positive light otherwise. The mistaken tune and its lyrics. And who among us could forget the Carlton Banks version?
• The Daily Mirror’s associate editor pledges to put SEO in its place after becoming sick of finding his site awash in traffic but bereft of readers. We say it a thousand times a day just to clean our teeth: good SEO is a tactic, not a goal. Having the galaxy’s highest-ranking website doesn’t mean anything if you’re not connecting with people.
• Self-explanatory! Ridiculous User Interfaces In Film, and the Man Who Designs Them

Special bonus thing.

I continue to marvel at the amount of time certain individuals are able to set aside for making Super Mario levels that play songs. This one features four Marios gallivanting simultaneously on four custom levels. They add up to recreate the four parts of Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now.” Can you believe this?

Lightning round.

We were linked to by the Wall Street Journal a couple days ago!

• The Wall Street Journal runs a tremendous interview of Cormac McCarthy, author of No Country For Old Men and The Road, featuring gems like…

WSJ: But is there something compelling about the collaborative process compared to the solitary job of writing?

CM: Yes, it would compel you to avoid it at all costs.

• “Someone once told me that there is nowhere we are more honest than the search box. We don’t lie to Google. Period. We type in what we’re thinking — good, bad, and ugly. There’s probably no piece of information that would better show what’s on someone’s mind than their stream of searches.” Context: here and here.
• Who says a grocery store has to stock Pepsi? Every grocery store stocks Pepsi. If anybody really needs Pepsi, they can get it at a gas station. But if they want hard-to-find and high-quality, they go see this guy:

There’s something to be said for offering customers something they can’t get anywhere else…

but sometimes that means not offering them what they can get everywhere else.

Ommmmmm.