Ooooh. Classy.

The long awaited Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will debut at Cannes this year, four days before its worldwide release.

This should give those snooty ‘art’ films a run for their money. Euro-angst? Scenery chewing? Thoughtful explorations of new millennium zeitgeist? Screw that. Indiana freakin’ Jones, suckers.

As you may have gathered from previous frenzied posts, I like Iron Man. And I’m really over-the-moon for the new movie. C’mon, Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark? Awwwwesoooome.

Anyway, there’s a new trailer out that rocks much harder than previous interations. I particularly enjoyed the stuff with the jets. Finally, my two great loves united: superheroes and wicked cool fighter planes.

Anyways, check it out:

Photo: Russia’s Democracy in happier times.

Russia’s Democracy, grandson of Tsarist Russia and son of a disastrous experiment in Communism, is dead. It was 17 years old.

A sickly child, Russia’s Democracy survived several bouts of Coup and Crippling Insurgent Wars. Recently, Russia’s Democracy’s health took a downturn, as an advanced case of Strong Man Syndrome led to restricted civil liberties, constraints on the media, and the murder of several journalists.

Russia’s Democracy finally succumbed to reports that the Kremlin is planning to rig the upcoming presidential ‘elections‘. The centrally co-ordinated plan to force civil servants to vote for Putin-puppet Medvedev, inflate voter turnout figures, and stuff ballot boxes overwhelmed Russia’s Democracy at approximately 7:40 AM this morning.

Russia’s Democracy is survived by an ugly, former-KGB troll of a man who has nothing but bad things planned. For everyone.

Guy 1: Man, I really like sea salt.

Guy 2: Yeah, that’s good. I like that kosher salt.

Guy 1: I think kosher salt is sea salt…just, you know, kosher.

Guy 2: Huh. But kosher salt is really good, right?

Guy 1: Yeah. Those little flakes…

Guy 3: But you know what’s really good? Tarragon.

Guy 1 & 2: Yeah.

Guy 3: Love that Tarragon.

The mortgage market is a turbulent place right now. Many people are looking for a home mortgage refinance. If you need to get out of your home mortgage, start by doing crunching some numbers with a helpful mortgage calculator.

Completely fascinating article over on Wired.com featuring psychologist Phillip Zimbardo. He served as an expert witness during the Abu Ghraib trials, and was behind the now infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. The experiment, which involved undergraduate students playing the roles of prison wardens and prisoners, had to be terminated after five days due to the increasingly depraved behaviour of the participants.

Zimbardo is giving a TED Talk this year on how otherwise normal people can commit monstrous acts, a topic he also explores in his book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Wired.com has posted a video from that presentation featuring unreleased pictures from Abu Ghraib (extremely disturbing and NSFW- features torture, simulated sex acts, and soldiers posing with decomposing corpses), as well as a really interesting interview.

I found Zimbardo’s take on heroism particularly interesting, that it is in fact a form of social deviancy:

To be a hero you have to take action on behalf of someone else or some principle and you have to be deviant in your society, because the group is always saying don’t do it; don’t step out of line. If you’re an accountant at Arthur Andersen, everyone who is doing the defrauding is telling you, “Hey, be one of the team.”

Heroes have to always, at the heroic decisive moment, break from the crowd and do something different. But a heroic act involves a risk. If you’re a whistle-blower you’re going to get fired, you’re not going to get promoted, you’re going to get ostracized. And you have to say it doesn’t matter.

Well worth a read.

Best show on TV? I think this clip speaks for itself.

Via Gizmodo.

Need a fast cash loan? Get a cash advance! Payday loans are available almost everywhere and are as simple as walking into a cash advance store.

This is so genius I had to share.

Some Internet savant has taken a bunch of Garfield cartoons, removed Garfield, and posted the results. Here’s a sample:

As the creator so correctly observes:

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?

Indeed.