Rapture jet pack flyer

Rapture jet pack flyer. Via.

Rapture photos

Gizmodo posted some Rapture photos.

Bioshock screen

Bioshock screen via.

Link roundup

1. From Drew Magary's latest NSFW and funny, but probably offensive column:

I gotta go to church more often then. I think churches operate as the epicenter of most American daydreams. I can't sit in a church for more than five minutes without imagining a flock of vampires crashing through the stained glass window, and I have to stab them all in the heart with a steel crucifix. I'm pretty sure my visions are exactly like that new Paul Bettany movie.

I've been at ceremonies where they do the whole "Do you reject Satan?" thing, and it's impossible to not think of The Godfather at that moment. I also wish they had an effigy of Satan right at the altar that you could stab or shoot with a crossbow. Why not add a bit flourish to the ceremony?

2. Robin Hanson:

What if the airline industry lobbied to end the practice of routinely investigating the cause of each airline crash? After all, if there is no investigation, it will be hard to show an airline was at fault. You might imagine there’d be a public outcry. But in 1970 the US medical profession did essentially the same thing, and few complained:

Today, hospitals perform autopsies on only about 5 percent of patients who die, down from roughly 50 percent in the 1960s. … Autopsies play a critical role in helping to advance understanding of the progress of a disease and the effectiveness of various treatments. At the same time, they may identify medical conditions that clinicians and high-tech imaging miss or misdiagnose. …

In 1998 the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that autopsy results showed that clinicians misdiagnosed the cause of death up to 40 percent of the time.

3. The Batman by Aragones statue I posted yesterday is available for preorder at the BBTS for $80.

Link roundup

1. NERF stands for NonExpanding Recreational Foam. Via.

2. Lots of interesting anecdotes in this article about Tina Brown (including how much money The Daily Beast and Newsweek have lost recently). For example:

As is not uncommon in preparation for Brown’s parties, that afternoon the room’s furniture was loaded into a truck, which was waiting, out of sight, for the last guests to leave before unloading its contents back into the apartment. Sir Harold Evans, Brown’s 82-year-old husband, has been known to joke with friends that he’d prefer to be in the truck, where he could circle the block in the comfort of his own home.

And:

As her guests said goodbye, Brown and Evans looked eager to get their furniture back. Suddenly the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy wafted in, dressed in black and trailing a cloud of cologne and his mistress, Daphne Guinness, who was wearing a revealing black cat suit and heelless Alexander McQueen platform shoes. Lévy was fresh from Paris, where, he proceeded to tell Brown and a few stragglers, he had just single-handedly persuaded his old friend President Nicolas Sarkozy to go to war against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya. (A few days later, Steven Erlanger of The New York Times reported that this had, improbably enough, been the case.)

3. "An ongoing fight between Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei has taken a turn for the weird, as several of the president's closest advisers have been arrested and charged with being 'magicians' and invoking djinns, or spirits."

Link roundup

1. Tiny computer. Via.

2. Poisoned holy water for sale. Via.

3. Ming Doyle explains how she made her Thor Costume.

*Buy Frog Thor toys at eBay.

The Cross And The Switchblade

New to me, but not the internet, Wikipedia explains:

The Cross and the Switchblade is a book written in 1963 by pastor David Wilkerson with John and Elizabeth Sherrill. It tells the true story of Wilkerson's first five years in New York City, where he ministered to disillusioned youth, encouraging them to turn away from the drugs and gang violence they were involved with. The book became a best seller, with more than 15 million copies distributed in over 30 languages.

It was later turned into a movie and comic book. There are several copies on sale at eBay. Via.

Link roundup

1. The WSJ:

When Rabbi Naftali Marrus does his spring cleaning, he doesn't use a mop. He rolls with the Inferno.

The Inferno is a three-and-a-half-foot-long propane torch Rabbi Marrus uses during the critical days before Passover to scour commercial kitchens catering to observant Jews and obliterate the smallest particles of bread and other leavened foods, which are forbidden during the holiday that commemorates the Jews' flight from Egypt.

Maybe next April's art contest should be designing a logo for the rabbi and his Inferno? Via.

2. Digital subscriptions are for suckers:

Apparently, if you're a Kindle owner with a magazine subscription, and you decide to stop subscribing, the back issues you previously downloaded are also lost—for good.

3. Songwriter/music producer/former American Idol judge Kara DioGuardi has a new book to promote, in which she says that she was "date-raped by a well-known music producer" and "sexually harassed by a 'hugely successful artist.'" The article doesn't mention whether she took any steps to protect other women from the men.

Link roundup

1. The NY Daily News says, a woman won a settlement of $850 a month for life in alimony and "the couple's home by convincing a court three years ago that a 1997 car accident left her too injured to work." But her husband spotted photos she had posted about her daily belly dancing and turned them into the court. "Confronted with the damning evidence, [the woman] told the court she was prescribed belly dancing as treatment for her injuries - a statement her doctor contradicted on the stand."

2. The Awl imagines what the menu would be at Passover at Guy Fieri's House (for example, "Gefilte fish parmigiana jammers"). Via.

3. The Mortal Kombat 9 fatalities and Stage Fatalities stepped past amusingly violent and are more like short snuff films. But the babalities are very cute.