If I could type the sound of a plunger working, I would

I've got this backup in my bookmarks, and it's time to clear a few things out.

These are all things that I bookmarked hoping to eventually turn them into full posts, but nothing ever quite came together. So here they are with small comments...

• High Fidelity deleted scene - this scene was yet another in a whole movie of glimpses into the character of Rob, and it should be a textbook to any movie writers who are working on the concept of showing a character rather than telling about that character. It's sad that the filmmakers demoted it to the cutting room floor. And in case you have trouble getting the JoBlo player to load (I do from time to time), here the same scene with subtitles on YouTube.
• 100 commonly misspelled words - Each one has a handy mnemonic trick to help you spell it correctly next time.
Erik Millikin's Obama painting is kinda cool. You'll have to click previous once when you get to his site to see it.
• Wizard's 200 Greatest Comic Characters of All Time - The list is a joke. I can only assume that they wrote it just to get people talking about it because some of their choices are absurd. Start at the top, for example, Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man could all be defensible choices for #1, and they picked none of the three. Snake-Eyes at #12 is ludicrous. I love Watchmen and all, but having two of its characters in the top thirty is nuts. Tulip at #31? Sheesh...
• Various Niki Huey links...an interview...a profile...Jesse McCartney talking about her...weirdly, a workout video...and Niki's video channel...and now I'm done ever posting about Niki because I'm starting to feel icky again...
• The Weston House - the current project on This Old House may be their coolest yet...loads of environmentally-friendly touches, gorgeous interior, very neat stuff.
• Oceans in Glass is a PBS special about the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I've been sucked into the show two or three times, and it's a bio geek's dream program. They go through how the aquarium maintains its amazing and ocean-linked habitats, how they tried to keep a great white and were more successful than any other aquarium had ever been, and it balanced its science with really pretty imagery.
• The picture of Jason Thompson in the box score of this game report is horrific.
• Removal of DRM from iTunes is awesomely big news. The variable pricing tiers doesn't do much for me, but I can certainly understand the attraction. Apple's promised some big things before, and I hope this one comes through in the Spring as they've promised. More details here...
• Superuseless Superpowers is an outstanding new blog (with only a few entries, you can still get in on the ground floor) of cartoons of the most useless superpowers that you can possibly think of. Check out, for example, 13th Bullet Bulletproof.
• Obamaconme in which you can turn yourself into an Obama poster with your own tagline. It's a little late to point this one out, but it's still loads of fun.
• Semantic Web sounds interesting - an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content. I'm skeptical, but I need to learn more.
• Voucher students doing poorly...this recent article in the Enquirer point out something that I think most educators could probably have predicted - that students given vouchers from public to private schools aren't doing magically better. The possible underlying reasons are many: the students didn't get a good background in their public schools, the students know they don't have to pass the OGT so they're not trying very hard at their news school, etc. But I like to think it's really just because the private schools suck.
• I have to get around to reading Heinlein's "All You Zombies" because it sounds awesome.
• TVTropes is an interesting site collecting some of the most common tropes used in TV writing. For example there's the ...and a Diet Coke trope, the Did you get a new haircut? trope, and the Time for Plan B trope.
• Lego is fun blog with its sadly few posts even though those posts are pretty awesome.
• Another clip - this one slightly from 500 Days of Summer.
• I'm thinking about ordering the Yacker Tracker for my tenth bell class. They're chatty.
• URLesque is another blog of entertaining links - kinda like Neatorama before they crapped up their site with the new queue.
• And we close with the recipe to make a rainbow cake. I have no idea whether it would actually be tasty (the recipe kinda suggests to me that it might not be), but it would be awesome to taste - and subsequently poop - the rainbow.

I'm out, folks...