Chimpomatic

crazy cold war story about the CIA spiking a whole French village's bread supply with LSD and everyone freaking out

The US National Archives have made a large chunk of their Documerica project from the 1970's available on Flickr. In the wake of the Nixon-created Environmental Protection Agency, the project set up to document the environmental state of the US at the time - with Koyaanasqatsi-esque results.

Via WIRED

RIP: Corey Haim. The original Lost Boy. "Are you freebasing? Enquiring minds wanna know. "

nice #save6music mashup - Paxman grilling Mark Thompson w some added Thick Of It thrown in 

Taiwan's Apple Daily get round the "footage? what footage? problem again 

Never mind all this debate about whether we should be re-living the old masters or focussing on new art & literature - we can now have the best of both worlds. Screenwriter Adam Bertocci has re-written old classic The Big Lebowski as The Two Gentelmen of Lebowski. Check it out on his website.

VIA The Guardian

French nouvelle-vague director dies aged 89.

L'Ami de mon amie was one of my favourites.

Via BBC News>

RIP Brittany Murphy. Dead at 32 from a cardiac arrest.

No, not another spoof shark attack. This one's some actual data, acquired by tagging great whites with GPS tags. Turns out swimming from Alcatraz to San Francisco wouldn't be a good idea after all.

Here's part 1 of 3 from The Big Picture's photo round-up of 2009.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

UPDATE: If that's not enough, here's the whole 00s.

Somewhat surprisingly, the campaign to secure the Christmas #1 spot for Rage Against The Machine is working. They're currently at #2, with only 10% to make up in order to topple current leader Joe from X-Factor.

Not sure I like anyone telling me what to buy though. "@£&% you, I won't do what you tell me!"

Real time mapping of mentions of Tiger Woods on Twitter...

Here's some great insight into the money-making skills of genius producer Simon Cowell. Before last year's X-Factor winner recorded her hit cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, Cowell bought the rights to the song, meaning he benefitted (to the tune of $250,000 a day) from Alexandra's version at number one, as well as Cohen's original and Jeff Buckley's cover - both of which zoomed back into the top 10. Genius.

Remember that when you're buying the first Joe McElderry single. 

It's not just you that's been compromised by Facebook's recent change in privacy settings. Chief Facebooker Mark Zuckerberg's wasted-in-Tahoe photoset popped up, and Valleywag spread the word.... 

"the singer known as Sting" gets the Paxman grilling over his Amazon campaigns - starts about 16.50