John Baeder paints Diners (article at DesignObserver)

Undercover with a Michelin inspector (newyorker, via metafilter)

Hasselblad's $48,000 camera. Those 60 Megapixel snapshots should fill up your hard drive pretty quickly (acquire)

Deadmalls.com chronicles the vacant and deteriorating malls that dot the American landscape. Any near you?

Smiling while they steal your wallet: In anticipation of a healthcare overhaul measure that would have drug makers cut prices, the pharmaceuticals are raising prices (nytimes)

A Harvard health economist, Joseph P. Newhouse, said he found a similar pattern of unusual price increases after Congress added drug benefits to Medicare a few years ago, giving tens of millions of older Americans federally subsidized drug insurance. Just as the program was taking effect in 2006, the drug industry raised prices by the widest margin in a half-dozen years.

"Contains Sulfites"

[Utterly Descriptive Domain Names XXII] ugliesttattoos.com

This just sold for $43.7M

Toronto Star editor takes revenge using considerable editing skills on an internal memo describing why in-house editor positions would be eliminated from the newspaper.

Re-Meet the Beatles: Popmatters does a 7 day examination of the Still Fab Four
Day 1 looks at the records

Airless tires

Endless Rain record

Charlie Allen does some pretty amazing nature (and generally everything-else) illustration. Check him out at CAWS.

Weather Drawings by Alexis Rockman

The Gallery of antique radio tuning dials (via boingboing)

Baguette dropped from bird's beak shuts down large hadron collider

While schoolchildren go without H1N1 shots, Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs are being sent private stocks of vaccine. This is utterly outrageous. Tell them to stop.

Oops:

We're Governed by Callous Children (wsj)

They don't feel anxious, because they never had anything to be anxious about. They grew up in an America surrounded by phrases—"strongest nation in the world," "indispensable nation," "unipolar power," "highest standard of living"—and are not bright enough, or serious enough, to imagine that they can damage that, hurt it, even fatally.

We are governed at all levels by America's luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they're not optimists—they're unimaginative. They don't have faith, they've just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don't mind it when people become disheartened. They don't even notice.

Horrific Honeys!

The industrial paintings of Anna Held Audette

Why Your Stadium Sucks: Citizens Bank Park vs. Why Your Stadium Sucks: Yankee Stadium

Happy Halloween! Skelecans

Worst Homemade Star-Wars costumes
Also, Retrocrush's Worst Bag'n'Mask Costumes of All Time

NYC and Paris map-cuts. Bblocks cut out. Streets remain.

The Drug Pushers (the Atlantic)
Drug reps have been calling on doctors since the mid-nineteenth century, but during the past decade or so their numbers have increased dramatically. From 1996 to 2001 the pharmaceutical sales force in America doubled, to a total of 90,000 reps. One reason is simple: good reps move product. Detailing is expensive, but almost all practicing doctors see reps at least occasionally, and many doctors say they find reps useful. One study found that for drugs introduced after 1997 with revenues exceeding $200 million a year, the average return for each dollar spent on detailing was $10.29. That is an impressive figure. It is almost twice the return on investment in medical-journal advertising, and more than seven times the return on direct-to-consumer advertising.

The world's largest treehouse, in Crossville, TN, is almost 100 ft. tall and has 10 stories.
Additional pics here.

Robozzle - robotic puzzle programming game

The NYTimes is running a fantastic series of articles, "Held by the Taliban", which is a journalist's account of being held hostage for over 7 months while on assignment in Afghanistan.

Part 1 - 7 Months 10 Days in Captivity
Part 2 - Inside the Islamic Emirate
Part 3 - ‘You Have Atomic Bombs, but We Have Suicide Bombers.’
Part 4 -
Part 5 -

Fox News isn't even pretending anymore (salon)

Pretty nice, as yachts go.

Saturn at equinox - amazing pictures from boston.com

Wow:

New Ralph Lauren models look like funhouse-mirror reflections.

Great Mac laptop vinyl sticker (etsy)

Images of glaciers from space

Bizarre: Ever dream this man?
Me? No.
(via metafilter)

Wall Street's Near-Death Experience (vanity fair)

Airport Gestapo cost U.S. Olympic bid

Pitchfork is showing the entire documentary "Dig!" online for a limited time. Great rocknroll movie.

Gore Vidal: "We'll have a dictatorship soon in the United States" (TimesUK)

DailyDropCap features a new decorative letter a day

The plain beauty of well-made things (designobserver)

The 20 dollar millionaire (esquire)

The Making of Glenn Beck (salon)
From drug-addicted shock jock to right-wing mouthpiece

A stick figure guide to (Advanced Encryption Standard) AES

Suburbs of the Imagination (Infrastructurist)

Chulha Stove (designobserver)
This simple stove promises to help reduce the 1.6 million fatalities associated each year with indoor cooking, 25 percent in India alone.

The Jet-propelled Couch (Harpers (1954), via boingboing)
A psychiatrist's account of a physicist who believed he was an extra-terrestrial being.

Ghost Fleet

The Cat Piano from PRA on Vimeo.

The Richard Balzer collection of antique optical toys

A great selection of vintage bike ads at RatRodBikes

Graphic concrete

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.

Every Infocom game. Online.

South African internet speed faceoff: Pigeon vs. DSL.
Pigeon wins.

cargocycling

Honda rickshaw

Clambrau

Interesting. Impractical. cutlery made from cut-up plastic bottles, then coated with metal.

Slide Rule Museum

Other companies should have to read this internal netflix presentation (techcrunch)

It's time to embrace American royalty (salon)

Foreigner admissions to U.S. grad schools are way down (techcrunch)
It’s happening: Lou Dobbs’ dream come true and Silicon Valley’s worst nightmare. We’re already seeing the reverse brain drain as smart immigrants take their US educations and experience building companies and creating technology back to their home countries. But now, xenophobia and the lack of any sensible H-1B visa policy is keeping the world’s brightest minds from coming to the U.S. in the first place.

Personal space protector

Edward Kennedy, RIP

How did I miss wuchess.com - the world's only online Wutang hip-hop/chess portal?

The snakehead has nothing on this. Indiana fisherman catches pirahna. In Indiana.

Hard Crime rebrands Sherlock Holmes. Great cover!

The social history of the mp3 (pitchfork)

A nice online James Ensor collection from the MoMA

Nice bike: Core77's Dutch Master

Why AT&T killed Google Voice (wsj)

Apple has an exclusive deal with AT&T in the U.S., stirring up rumors that AT&T was the one behind Apple rejecting Google Voice. How could AT&T not object? AT&T clings to the old business of charging for voice calls in minutes. It takes not much more than 10 kilobits per second of data to handle voice. In a world of megabit per-second connections, that's nothing—hence Google's proposal to offer voice calls for no cost and heap on features galore.

What this episode really uncovers is that AT&T is dying. AT&T is dragging down the rest of us by overcharging us for voice calls and stifling innovation in a mobile data market critical to the U.S. economy.

Tracking Dylan's talk
The Atlantic "makes a pilgrimage to Bob Dylan's hometown in search of the source of his bizarre accent."

Rat-eating plant discovered in Philippines

Boycott Fiji Water
(motherjones)

Finding new meaning in thrift store items at Significant Objects

EW embeds a video ad in print magazine. That had to be pretty pricey.

5000th Daily Jive post!!
since blogger started tracking posts. Site has been up since 1999, and on blogger since '02. Here's to another 5000!

Your pal,
Joe

Target table

The Monster Cereal Blog is pretty self-descriptive

Despite his intentions to the contrary, Barney Frank does indeed argue with a dining room table. (youtube)

The Atlantic: How American Healthcare Killed My Father

Indeed, I suspect that our collective search for villains—for someone to blame—has distracted us and our political leaders from addressing the fundamental causes of our nation’s health-care crisis. All of the actors in health care—from doctors to insurers to pharmaceutical companies—work in a heavily regulated, massively subsidized industry full of structural distortions. They all want to serve patients well. But they also all behave rationally in response to the economic incentives those distortions create. Accidentally, but relentlessly, America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results. Incentives that emphasize health care over any other aspect of health and well-being. That emphasize treatment over prevention. That disguise true costs. That favor complexity, and discourage transparent competition based on price or quality. That result in a generational pyramid scheme rather than sustainable financing. And that—most important—remove consumers from our irreplaceable role as the ultimate ensurer of value.

citysounds.fm - a city-by-city survey of current music

thegreatflu.com - online flu pandemic video game.

New low of PETA offensiveness? That should only last a week or so.

The Swiss Menace
NYTimes Paul Krugman on how Obama's healthcare plan would look less like Soviet socialism and more like the plan that Switzerland has in place.

If we were starting from scratch we probably wouldn’t have chosen this route. True “socialized medicine” would undoubtedly cost less, and a straightforward extension of Medicare-type coverage to all Americans would probably be cheaper than a Swiss-style system. That’s why I and others believe that a true public option competing with private insurers is extremely important: otherwise, rising costs could all too easily undermine the whole effort.

But a Swiss-style system of universal coverage would be a vast improvement on what we have now. And we already know that such systems work.

North Korea's Dollar Store (vanityfair)

Office 39, North Korea’s billion-dollar crime syndicate, pays for Kim Jong Il’s missiles and cognac. Why did the Bush White House choose not to shut it down?

Les Paul, RIP

100 Photographs of Hiroshima taken in the days after the bombing in 1945
(designobserver)

Robots to get their own operating system (newscientist)

I knew it. Bush was batshit.

Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.

Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.

You do not have health insurance (baseline scenario)

That’s why, when shopping for insurance, you are supposed to look for a company that is financially sound – so they will be there when you need them.

If, like most people, your health coverage is through your employer or your spouse’s employer, that is not what you have. At some point in the future, you will get sick and need expensive health care. What are some of the things that could happen between now and then?

Japan's robot ramen chefs

pr*ttysh*tty - highlighting bad design with a focus on corporate rebranding.

Lowest of the low: Scary Republican "info"-graphic on healthcare reform (hosted, of course, by brownshirt provocateur foxnews)
Meanwhile, the wsj has seen the enemy in the Dem's difficult battle to win mindshare in overhauling our broken healthcare system, and it is us.

Interesting NYTimes interactive graphic on how Americans of different demographics spend every minute of every day.

Further guaranteeing her unemployablity, a recent grad has sued her alma mater because she's unemployable.

She suggested that Monroe's Office of Career Advancement shows preferential treatment to students with excellent grades. "They favor more toward students that got a 4.0. They help them more out with the job placement," she said.

Obviously not an English major.

The 1930 Brough Superior SS100 motorcycle on Jay Leno's Garage (thanks, Mike!)

BBC Four doc on Tony William's Factory Records (Durutti Column, Joy Division, Happy Mondays)
(google video 90mins)