Internet Miscellany: This is Not An April Fool’s Post

Apparently, the easiest way to guarantee you can’t think of a damn thing to blog about is to tell yourself you’re going to participate in Blog Every Day April, which is exactly what it sounds like. It’s Wednesday, see, which means this week’s paper is done, which means my brain is fried. So it must be time for that old favorite, Internet Miscellany! Get your clickin’ fingers ready!

• Apparently, the thing to joke about for this April Fool’s Day (Fools’ Day? Are we all fools together, or singularly?) is Twitter. At least two papers pretended they were going to Twitter-only. LiveJournal pretended it would automatically cut off each post at 140 characters. The jokes aren’t the most original, but put together, they make for an interesting illustration of Twitter’s current place in the cultural hivemind. (On a different topic, NPR’s amused report about The Economist opening Econoland made me laugh, but I hadn’t had coffee yet, so everything was funny.)

My personal favorite annual April Fool’s event is the addition of something goofy to the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab lineup. Black Phoenix, for the uninitiated, is the creator of many, many, many addictive scents (I refuse to call them perfumes, for they do not contain the ingredients that make me cough and wrinkle my nose, like most commercial perfumes do). (Also, stop me if I’ve told you this before.) BPAL scents are particularly intriguing to me because many of them are based on stories, on Shakespeare or myths or legends — or on books by Neil Gaiman (the Gaiman scents are extra super awesome because they benefit the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund). Or they’re based on places, both real and imagined. Or paintings. Or, in the case of today’s humorous holiday, velvet paintings. Last year’s April Fool’s scents were tiki-themed; the year before, they were based on various dogs playing poker paintings. Don’t you want to smell like a Velvet Cthulu? Or a Velvet Unicorn? And if not, why not?

• This guy built Minas Tirith out of matchsticks. I can’t even focus on a single game of Scrabble, some days. His attention span is clearly worthy of study.

• Writing about Monsters vs. Aliens this week reminded me of this smart blog post about Pixar’s gender problem. The post is from last June, when WALL-E was released, but it’s still getting new comments. Like the post’s author, I love a good Pixar flick, but sometimes their gender weirdness is truly strange. I will never understand, for example, why every rat in Ratatouille was male. Yes, I’m complaining about the absence of female rats. It’s a wacky world we live in.

• “Obama Depressed, Distant Since ‘Battlestar Galactica’ Series Finale.” In classic Onion fashion, this piece manages to be a pretty sharp critique of said finale while also being worthy of a hearty LOL. Honest to the gods of Kobol, I’m still stewing over the finale — and amassing a hearty pile of links I want to talk about when I finally post about it. Just one more viewing of “Daybreak, Part 1” and I’ll probably be able to form a post more eloquent than, “OK, so I cried. But I also ranted.”

• Over at Pitchfork, the unstoppable, exceptional Amanda Fucking Palmer talks about why she wants her record label to drop her. It’s a fascinating and specific look at an industry in at least at much turmoil as, oh, say, the newspaper industry? I think I’ve heard something about that…