Here’s a video of two olde tyme swing dancers set to modern hip hop music. I might try a few of these moves out at the next wedding or bar mitzvah.

(video requires Flash 8)

From McSweeney’s:

Movies That Won’t Be Shown on the Lifetime Network.

• Mother, May I Marry a Nice Doctor You Really Like?
• The Ideal Husband (Not Meant Ironically)
• A Child Accounted For and in No Danger
• The Amicable Divorce and Custody Agreement
• A Pleasant Family Christmas
• The Man Who Was as Nice as He Initially Appeared to Be
• My Daughter’s Internet Pen Pal Who Is Another Preteen Girl
• The Successful Surgery That Improved the Quality of the Patient’s Life
• The Number of Children We Planned For, All Healthy

This guy solves a Rubik’s cube in 20 seconds, one-handed. He’s gonna make someone happy… even if it’s just himself.

Don’t play it loudly at work.

Wired has an article about game design and game theory in Survivor:

While tweaking Survivor, he closely studied John Nash’s game theory in order to better engineer the hysteria and emotional blowouts of each season’s finale.

“What Nash’s theory predicts is that whenever you have a group of people competing, they collude to squeeze one guy out, again and again, until there’s only two guys left,” Burnett notes. “Yet when there are only two of us left, we’re surprised when one of us fucks each other over. That’s the fun part. It surprised John Nash himself, but it happens every time.”

Here’s a slideshow/quiz where you have to guess whether the person you’re looking at is a porn star reaching their objective, or a celebrity chef having a food-gasm.

This study shows by what generic term people call soft drinks in the U.S., and maps it by county. They only show “soda”, “pop”, “coke”, and “other”. I never understood the generic term “coke”. I know that there are plenty of generic goods that are best known by a brand name, like Kleenex and Xerox, but when you ask for a Kleenex, it is generally understood that any brand of facial tissue will suffice. Coke, on the other hand is a terrible use. It’s rare that when you buy a soda, you won’t have a choice of kind. When given options, I don’t know anyone that doesn’t have a preference.

So, how do you order an actual Coke in a region where the term is generic? Do you say, “I’ll have a coke with a capital ‘C’?”

Also notable is that in New England, “soda” is the term most used. I remember when growing up, most of my friends’ parents called it “tonic”.

Spiderman 3 trailer is up on the Apple site. Second sequels have a tendency to blow, but this one might be OK.