The Dieline examines 50 such bottles that would get my business whether or not the product is any good.  Despite the overabundance of Absolut Vodka bottles, it’s nice to see to Portland spirits make the list.  That both 12 Bridges Gin and Lovejoy Vodka (both are crafted by Integrity Spirits, whose Trillium Absinthe also made the list but I haven’t partaken yet) are excellent tasting spirits in their own right is an added bonus.

If you’re wondering that’s the Hawthorne Bridge on the bottle.

You probably haven’t watched Saturday morning cartoons in, um, well, forever, right?  But, let this cook your noodle: there’s a Teenage Muant Ninja Turtles 25th anniversary crossover/event/cartoon movie Turtles Forever, airing tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. EST on 4Kids.tv (check local listings and all that but most likely the CW).

Holy shit! Eastman and Laird’s black-and-white original comics turtles are joining the ’80s cartoon Turtles and the ’00s cartoon Turtles in some sort of geek-tastic cartoon bacchnalia. 

Yes, I will be glued to the television tomorrow morning to see how the original TMNT incarnation will be portrayed, since they were stoic badasses.

When The New York Times showed Elmhurst spokesman Dario Centorcelli a photo of what two missing letters added up to, he seemed perplexed. “Oh, God, are we going to get this fixed?” he wondered.

Turns out this wasn’t a prank on the Queens, N.Y. hospital but just a rather curious coincidence.  Just as bad for the hospital would have been if the bulbs burned out to spell “Elm St.” No one wants to get fixed up by Freddy Kreuger. [via]

Why?  I don’t know why the Heroes actress would do such a thing but this is a good way to get the blood pumping early this morning.  She goes from wet to dry in this reverse video portrait of her taken by photographer Tyler Shields. [via]

Anyone remotely curious as to what’s up with Jason Segel, now that he’s performed the same song not just with Maroon 5 but now with (Oscar-darlings) The Swell Season?  Is he laying pipe for a potential musical-comedy album or something?

Anyways, the supposed backstory to this song goes like this: “The band was at a restaurant in Los Angeles; drinking tea, when they were offered a bottle of wine by two celebrities. Paul Rudd and Jason Segel. Now The Swell Season has been enjoying watching their “Freaks & Geeks” DVDs while on tour, so this was a nice coincidence. They became good acquaintances, so The Swell Season asked Jason Segel to be a surprise guest and sing a song for us. ”

Now I’m really going to call the number to see what happens.

So Tuesday night.  Good.  Because now there will be something on Tuesday worth watching.

You can download the free virtual appliance of Chrome OS here. The tarball is containing vmdk and vmx files, so you’ll need a free VMware Player or VirtualBox in order to run this appliance. 

Not sure if this is on the up and up but Google did hold a press conference today with details of their much bally-whooed OS and it sounds impressive. 

It won’t be officially launched until first or second quarter 2010 and it really will be a browser-based interface.

“Van Rompuy, a soft-spoken fan of Japanese poetry, beat out contenders including former British Prime Minister Tony Blair for a post whose duties are not yet clear.”  What they leave it out is that he sort of looks like Dick Cheney’s doofy younger brother.

Sounds like a good job though.

The best part is that  she’s a scientist! Dr. Brooke Magnanti is not just a high-class call girl, but a specialist in ”developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology. She has a PhD in informatics, epidemiology and forensic science and is now working at the Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health. She is part of a team researching the effects of exposure to the pesticide chlorpyrifos on foetuses and infants.”

So basically, every geeks dream girl.  Darren from LinkMachineGo, guessed Belle de Jour’s identity soon after her blog started. How? Before becoming an anonymous sex-blogger, Brooke Magnanti ran an obscure Robotwisdom-style link blog and wrote in a few other places ; Darren recognized the writing style. Rather than reveal the secret he set up a method to detect people searching for her secret identity and tipped Magnanti off that The Daily Mail was sniffing around. [via]

I don’t know what to say about this remake of a very good, very influential movie, other than to say you could see it coming with blinders on and it looks like utter crap.

Okay, okay. The movie itself doesn’t look bad, but that trailer. My god. I’m no rocket scientist but what is up with the Limp Bizkit score and the movie’s tagline: “Titans Will Clash”? The movie is called Clash of the Titans and the best the marketing department could come up with as a slogan/tagline is titans will clash. Jesus H. Christ someone should be fed to the guillotine.

Also? Is Sam Worthington the real deal or is he just the latest in a string of Hollywood male leads they are really trying to jam down my throat. It was hard to tell with the latest Terminator, but we’ll get a really good look with Avatar and now this. Still, if anyone has seen Somersault then you know the guy is capable of delivering a nuanced and subtle acting performance.

Amy Adams is, without reservation, poised to inherit the romantic comedy crown Julia Roberts was more than willing to walk away from.  And after sitting through the dreck of Night at the Museum 2 where Adams’s plucky Amelia Earhart was the only redeeming thing, it’s evident she could act her way out of a Chinese prison camp (do those even exist?!?) with both hands tied behind her back.

Adams is a revelation and there is nothing wrong with the plucky heroines she portrays time and time again.  It’s a rare quality that few actresses can believably pull off and do so without being annoying.  I would watch her in just about anything, even if we already can tell how the movie will end.

“I have a great sympathy for the spiritual view of life, and I think that it’s meaningful. But am I a spiritual person? I would like to be. Not that I am thinking about some afterlife that I want to go to, but just in terms of being a better person,” he says.  “I have friends at the Institute. They’re just really bright guys who do really difficult work solving difficult problems, who say, “It’s really more important to be good than it is to be smart.” And I agree it is more important to be good than it is to be smart. That is all I can offer you.”

The entire interview is filled with fantastic chestnuts ready to be opened.

It’s that kind of day and trying to jump back into the swing of things so quickly after vacation is hard work.

Whilst on vacation I saw a commercial for a new Super Mario Bros. game for the Wii and it featured four players playing simultaneously.  Holy moly, I almost ran out and bought the game and a Wii on the spot.  The game is only $47 on Amazon.com.

Paul Nicklen, a contributing photographer for National Geographic, talks about his wild sea adventure with a giant leopard seal. His photographs tell a frightening story, but his memory of the events is quite different. Leopard Seals are amongst the animal kingdom’s most vicious predators. [via here/here]

Turns out the practical joke was from director David Fincher himself.  The original two-disc DVD is one of my favorites, in fact it was the reason I bought a DVD player in the first place back in 2000.  Fight Club bombed at the box-office in 1999 (the best year in recent memory for movies), while the Drew Barrymore rom-com did not.  The gag was approved by Barrymore at the behest of pal and Fight Club-star Ed Norton.

I don’t think this will make me buy a Blu-Ray player, but it will certainly make me polish off the movie and watch it again for the umpteenth time.

Travis Pitts‘ incredibly awesome picture of a post-zombie-apocalypse Scooby Gang, well an incredibly hot Velma getting her Buffy on and ready-to-kick-ass Scooby as the only survivors of the zombie attack, is now a t-shirt from Threadless for $18.  Geeks and horny stoners rejoice!

I can promise you this one thing: during my trip to Maui this never happened.  But holy shit would I have loved to have seen a military plane crash into the ocean.  [via]

This has been making the rounds over the past few days.  It’s pretty well done.  As Clay Davis would say, “Sheeeeeit!”

Listen up, this is real talent here.  Real, real talent.  He even nails the solo.  By the way, we’ll be back into the full swing of things on Wednesday. Honestly, Maui is too amazing to even think about getting on the internet, but the vacation is winding down so I figured I’d share this little treat with you. So, everyone else on this planet but Gerry Phillips just won the life contest. [via]

I’m trying to promise Lady Oyster that I’ll be off email, cellphone, the site, etc. for an entire week.  I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it, however.  We’ll be back next Wednesday with bloggy goodness and possibly sporadically throughout the week.

Love these guys.  Their LP To Travels and Trunks has become one of my favorite recent discoveries.

Pac-Man recreated in real life using hacked Roombas linked wirelessly to homebrewed guidance software. And the story makes it seem waaay more complicated than that. [via]

Water droplets interacting with water at 2,000 frames per second.  They can bounce!  Incredible. [via]

[via]

Ricardo Autobahn has constructed a coherent mix-video song from all sorts of movie and TV clips. It’s just flat-out awesome. It’s like Girl Talk but for the movies. [via]

This has been making the rounds, but I first saw it over at Topless Robot.  A Russian actor’s group called “Big Difference” (Bolshaya Raznitsa / Большая Разница) remade The Matrix as a Charlie Chaplin silent film.

I’m not surprised by any of the breweries on this list, nor am I surprised by their ranking.  I don’t really consider Sam Adams (Boston Brewery) a craft brewery anymore.  They’re just too big, too national; they’ve traded in their quality of product for the ability to compete with the macro-domestics.  But otherwise, you can’t go wrong with any of the breweries on this list.  They’re all making great, quality beers.

My 10 favorite from this list would be (in no particular order): Deschutes, Magic Hat, Matt Brewing Co. (Saranac), Stone Brewing, Dogfish Head, Lagunitas, Brooklyn Brewery, Rogue, Abita, and Shipyard.

Whew, that was close. Unless you were rooting for the Lions, in which case the results were not too dissimiliar from the Detroit football team.

Huh, well I’ll be damned.  “In 1999, writer Orhan Pamuk bought a three story building in Istanbul to interact as a museum with his new novel, “Museum of Innocence,” a first of its kind of this application.  He hired an architect, Ihsan Bilgin, before he started the novel to transform the building into a museum where the novel and the museum criss cross each other in a love story between Kemal and Fusun, the main characters. In an autobiographical story, Kemal obsessively collects every object Fusun touches, in remembrance of their complex history into the Museum he builts… After nine years, both Book (Turkish and German print at this time) and the Museum are available.” 

Basically, the guy wrote a fictional book about a musuem that collects objects representing a love story and then went out and physically created the musuem in real life.  I somehow love this idea as a method of storytelling. 

As the author himself has said, “The museum is not an illustration of the novel and the novel is not an explanation of the museum. They are two representations of one single story perhaps.” [via]