10 Essential Re-Blogs, by John Spillane

10. Waterfalls, Tom Selleck, and a Sandwich. That’s it.

This was the last combination not yet pictorialized on a tumblr and, obviously, its omission became just too great for someone to bear any longer.

9. You probably like fun, jangly guitars, and Vampire Weekend, so give this track a spin while you skim. Surfer Blood (that’s the band) has been thoroughly blog-hyped, so if you’re OMG-ing me right now, I’m sorry. I’ve been helping my brother with that mail fraud thing and just joined a new gym so I wasn’t able to get to their album until this week.

8.Thorium, it could change our country. A great article from Wired that lays out why you shouldn’t ask the first technology you meet in the hall after homeroom to the government-funded energy dance. That’s right, people: Safe nuclear plants that could crank out electricity too cheap to meter. What?

(The element is named after the Norse God pictured above.)

7. After stalling out on Atlas Shrugged, Invisible Man, and On The Road last year, and before I check myself into the Derek Zoolander Center I thought I would try reading some short novels. Really short novels. Okay, novellas, in some cases. That’s where “word count” and my next link come in.

Page count is dicey, just ask the guy, me, who assumed Ayn’s tome had to be longer than War and Peace. Amazon has a semi-hidden feature called “Text Stats”, which serves up not only what I was looking for but also has a bunch of other metrics that might be interesting if I knew what they were. (Look for it in the “Inside This Book” section.)

6. Amoebablog has a unique mix of stuff I haven’t found replicated elsewhere. Themed album cover collections anybody? No, O.K., well I still swear they are the reason Urban Outfitters inexplicably put mini-blinds in their window display.

5. Just to get you amped up for Dr. Stranglove and the forthcoming Green Scare the curators of the Denver International Airport threw this lovely piece up: (via VigilantCitizen.com

4. Chuck Klosterman put up about ten tweets last week with the hash-tags #ifsnowmenwerereal, which of course got me thinking about my favorite Mr. Glass, after Sam Jackson, and the radio show/podcast This American Life. My favorite episode includes a great bit about 80’s crack riddled NYC, and then goes on to fullmox you with a weight lifting snowman tale.

3. O.K. I understand, you stopped reading Slate.com three years ago because of too many needlessly counterintuitive articles and headlines that oversold the piece. Plus, you’re already irked that I mentioned This American Life, but take a chance and iTunes some of their stellar podcasts. They’ve got one about sports that will give you everything from what Drew Brees actually said before the game to the origin of the word “Nordic”, and an anecdote about this Canadian football, ice hockey, lacrosse, baseball-playing wrestler/boxer who may or may not have died sliding into third.

2. Outside of Tina Fey in general and Ellen’s argyle sock Discover commercial, I’m not really a trumpeter of female comics, but this screen-writer/mom who Roger Ebert keeps re-tweeting is hilarious, and her blog is one I keep coming back to.

Clips from her blog:

1. I’m with Lucy when it comes to dogs and while I do really like music, movies, and being bitter I just ate a pizza by myself. I think that precludes my being a hipster, that and my friends think skinny jeans are something they hope their partners got from her parents. Queue “Final Countdown” I give you the funniest site I’ll encounter in 2010: HIPSTER PUPPIES!!!!! The dogs are funny but the captions are to die for, please view them all. (Note: The caption is theirs. I’m not that funny.)