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Most things online about the late 2'9" Filipino action star Weng Weng creep me out because they tend to smack just ever so faintly of racist exoticizing, but I have to admit I do really like this Weng Weng rap, by The CHUDs:

The lyrics are on their site if you'd like to sing along plus you can buy Weng Weng shirts—and if you still haven't had enough Weng Weng, the Australian guerilla filmmaker Andrew Leavold's currently working on a documentary called The Search For Weng Weng, billed as the "ultimate history of Filipino B-films, and chronicles Leavold's obsessive quest to find the truth behind the midget James Bond of the Philippines."

I know the New York Asian Film Festival doesn't screen documentaries but I'm hoping they make an exception for this one, I'd really love to see it!

[ via YesButNoButYes ]

Selections From H.P. Lovecraft's Brief Tenure as a Whitman's Sampler Copywriter, by Luke Burns: "Toffee Nugget: Few men dare ask the question "What is toffee, exactly?" All those who have investigated this substance are now either dead or insane." [ via onfocus ]

How much would you expect surcharges would be a for $23 concert ticket? $3? $5? Ticketmaster would like it very much if you'd bend over and take $17.05 worth of fees in the ass, making the real cost to you of one ticket come out to $40.05.

(Meanwhile Fandango is basically in the same business but only charges $1.50 or so. WTF! Oh Pearl Jam, why did you betray us way back when...)

35-year-old yoga teacher/performance artist/blogger spends a year living according to the dictum of Oprah Winfrey: "With some of the things, like the clothes, in the beginning I was like, 'How dare she tell me what to wear! I'm an individual!'" Ms. Okrant said. "But recently, when I went shopping with my mom, I was really excited to fulfill some of the rules. I felt kind of proud of myself. It takes a huge amount of pressure off to be handed a spiritual path."

And yes, you guys, this is somehow from the New York Times and not The Onion.

I love it when people mash two of my favorite things together to come up with something awesome, and then actually manage to get it into production. Say, for example, Donkey Kong Jenga, now available for preorder for $24.99—a new instant must-have for nerds who like to have friends over. [ via Topless Robot ]

Archinect has the scoop on Architecture School, a six-part tv series premiering tonight on the Sundance Channel, that "follows twelve students enrolled in the Design/Build Program at Tulane University's School of Architecture as they build a sustainable, design-forward home for a family returning to New Orleans."

Show co-creators Michael Selditch and Stan Bertheaud are both architects as well as filmmakers; the story arc tracks the process of the design-build studio led by Bryon Mouton over the course of two semesters, from pin-up critiques to the actual building of the site, featuring student stories, studio politics, the individuals living in the neighborhood and the issues of the post-Katrina city. Set your TiVo or download the first episode free from iTunes!

[via The Morning News ]

Alex Balk's definitive answer to the age-old conundrum: "The number of sexual partners that makes you officially promiscuous is always one more than the current number of sexual partners you've had. Unless you're a woman, in which case any number greater than one means you are a total slut."

It's pretty amazing/appalling—but not surprising—that there are still guys so insecure that they only want to date virgins or women who've had three or less partners total. Me, I'd rather be with someone more experienced because, well, unless you're incredibly lucky and strike gold the first time around with someone compatible with you physically, kinks and skills-wise, how are you going to know what really works for you or for any potential partner, other than through actual trial and error?

Diesel Sweeties: "America invented Coca-Cola, yet it's the only place where Coke tastes like boiled ass." Okay, so it's total hyperbole—even made with corn syrup, a cold Coke over ice cubes on a hot day is one of the most satisfying things humanity's ever produced—but cane sugar is just so much better. Damn corn subsidies!

Fellow ITP alum, technologist, artist and Graffiti Research Lab co-founder James Powderly was detained by Chinese authorities earlier today in Beijing, where he was about to debut his new laser stencil protest project The Green Chinese Lantern, developed in conjunction with Students for a Free Tibet. China hasn't acknowledged his detention yet and no one knows where he is—here's hoping James is safe and makes his way home soon.

update: James is back in New York and he and a fellow prisoner both say they were mistreated by the Chinese government. Ugh. Glad he is home in one piece, at least.

Dockdrop makes uploading photos to Flickr or files to a server through FTP, WebDAV or SCP as simple as, well, dropping files onto its dock icon. I love it when a product's screencast demo proves it's as easy to use as it says it is.

If you've got OS X, Wii Transfer lets you browse your Mac's music, movies and images on your Wii using its Internet Channel; listening to iTunes playlists and viewing iPhoto albums both work just fine, but the UI for streaming movies needs a lot of work still. Also: you can copy Miis from your Wiimote to Mac via the magic of Bluetooth.

Penny Arcade, on what makes a troll: "Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad"

Design world superstar Stefan Sagmeister says the framework he works with is whether you can touch someone's heart with design: "Quite a while back, a friend of mine named Reini was coming to New York and was worried none of the sophisticated New York women were going to talk to him. So we ran a poster on the Lower East Side that had his photo on it and said, "Girls, please be nice to Reini." He got a girlfriend out of it."

This totally slays me: Alone In The City of Order & Desire. Oh Kfan, If I had Warren Buffett money, I'd give you a full-time position just being awesome all over the internet.

Restaurant critic Giles Coren's nasty emails, foul-mouthed and excoriating, are so over the top that they're hilarious, especially if you've ever worked as a writer and have ever been edited by someone who didn't know what they were doing. Coren basically takes the nastygram you'd write to be therapeutic but immediately delete, ups the asshole factor by a factor of ten, and then actually presses send:

the joke is gone. I only wrote that sodding paragraph to make that joke. And you've fucking stripped it out like a pissed Irish plasterer restoring a renaissance fresco and thinking jesus looks shit with a bear so plastering over it. You might as well have removed the whole paragraph. I mean, fucking christ, don't you read the copy?"

Garrison Keillor on the craziness of the current political attack ads:

It's an amazing country where an Arizona multimillionaire can attack a Chicago South Sider as an elitist and hope to make it stick. The Chicagoan was brought up by a single mom who had big ambitions for him, and he got scholarshipped into Harvard Law and was made president of the law review, all of it on his own hook, whereas the Arizonan is the son of an admiral and was ushered into Annapolis though an indifferent student, much like the Current Occupant, both of them men who are very lucky that their fathers were born before they were. The Chicagoan, who grew up without a father, wrote a book on his own, using a computer. The Arizonan hired people to write his for him. But because the Chicagoan can say what he thinks and make sense and the Arizonan cannot do that for more than 30 seconds at a time, the old guy is hoping to portray the skinny guy as arrogant.

So true, and so ridiculous; hopefully people will see right through it. In the meantime, it's pretty funny that Paris Hilton's energy plan is better than McCain's—unfortunate in a practical sense, but still funny.

I've been enjoying Fashionista for a while and was pleasantly surprised to see that they picked my friend Dan as the star of their daily street photo feature last Friday. He always looks effortlessly cool, we should all be so stylish.

The Strand's classic tote bags are iconic for New Yorkers and out-of-town bookworms, but the first three bags in their new Artist Series are fantastic—David Hockney's and Art Spiegelman's are lovely, but my heart belongs to Adrian Tomine's. [ via Racked]

"If you think of Matthew McConaughey as a celebrity product, he's one of the most consistently branded and immediately recognizable products on the planet. In most photos, he is a) on a beach, b) in shorts, c) holding a surfboard, d) wearing a do-rag, e) drunk, or most often f) a combination of at least 3 of these. Matthew McConaughey is his own logo, and it looks like this." (Posts like these are why I love Amy's Robot so much, and why you should too.)

Many thanks to Salon's Rebecca Traister who wrote this great ode to Dana Scully, saving me the trouble of doing it myself:

Scully was a leading lady to fall for, a smart-girl icon who was (and would still be, alas) a rare television bird: professional, independent, unsentimental. She liked boys' things: Her favorite movie was "The Exorcist," her favorite book the phallic classic "Moby-Dick"; her nickname from her father was Starbuck; she wrote her thesis on Einstein's twin paradox. She was the opposite of squeamish. In possibly the best "X-Files" episode of all time, the vampire farce "Bad Blood," there is an ur-Scully scene: She is doing an autopsy after a long day of chasing the undead through a small Texas town. Annoyed, she sighingly hoists the departed's heart, lung and intestines onto the scale, reading their weights into a tape recorder. Then she opens up the victim's stomach and starts poking around with her scalpel to determine his last meal. "Pizza, topped with pepperoni, green peppers, mushrooms." Here she pauses, looks up briefly from the bloody innards. "Mushrooms. That sounds good." She orders a pizza.

The new X-Files movie opens this Friday—I'm terribly excited to see it, despite the stupid subtitle ("I Want to Believe"). If you're a) in the city and b) not creepy, ping if you'd like to come with. Oh, and because it really is great, here's a clip of that autopsy:

Helen Mirren, on the perils of youth: "Your twenties are torture, really, because you don't know what you are going to be or whether it's all going to work out, and you are supposedly an adult but you haven't really learnt anything. You're always looking for your own place in the world, but you're insecure - you think you're wonderful one minute and you think you're a disaster the next. I think your thirties are a wonderful time."

McCain Makes Historic First Visit to Internet: "McCain aides said that the senator's journey to the Internet will span five days and will take him to such far-flung sites as Amazon.com, eBay and Facebook." [ via The Morning News ]

New York City has a quota of 3,000 street food licenses with a years-long waiting list and the Vendy Awards, an annual cook-off to celebrate the city's best food carts. Meanwhile San Francisco, by all accounts an equally food-obsessed city, only has 120 licensed pushcarts—and 71 of them are inside a ballpark. Why so few carts on the streets?

Rules include leaving 10 unobstructed feet of pedestrian passage, not being within 18 inches of a curb, not stopping on sidewalks with colored curbs, not being within 12 feet of a building's entrance, and not selling food available in restaurants within 600 feet. Entrepreneurs complain that year-round licenses forbid cooking on the carts, so food can't be fresh but must be prepared ahead and reheated.

Also: no carts within 1,500 of a school. Oh SF, you nanny state, you!

Previously: my town can take your town.

"Lately I’ve heard a lot of people ask, 'Is Steve Guttenberg really that nice?'" he said. "And I think, how shitty. When you’re a prick, people believe it right away. No questions asked. If you’re really nice, people are like, 'Is he really that nice, what’s up his sleeve?' Oh, fuck you."

Helen Mirren, in a bikini, at 63. Looks better than any 23-year-old starlet I can think of.

Asimov's 30 Laws of Robotics: "8. A robot may not act in such a fashion as would make dogs obsolete, because dogs are less expensive than robots, and robots should be reserved for science things."

Fourteen Passive-Aggressive Appetizers, by Yoni Brenner: "6. For a taste of the U.K., fry up mini-servings of fish-and-chips. Take it to the next level by wrapping them in small pieces of newspaper, which, oddly enough, all seem to be printed with unfavorable reviews of Jeff ’s novel."

It's not surprising at all that Manny Pacquiao completely demolished David Diaz to win his fourth world title in four different weight classes—he's widely considered the best pound-for-pound fighter in boxing—but what is pretty amazing is that apparently so many Filipinos were glued to their screens during the bout that there were zero major crimes reported in Metro Manila during Pacquiao vs Diaz, and 30% less cars on the road than usual Sundays. [ via angry asian man ]

Christoph Niemann's sons are obsessed with the NYC subway system: "The A train pulled in, and Gustav (who had been hoping for the C) started throwing a fit. However, the other passengers in the car gave me warm smiles. I guess they hadn’t seen that many 3-year-olds sobbing, "Local…I want the local." I would love this story even if Niemann's illustrations weren't note perfect—and they are! This made me so happy today.

David Sedaris on nit-picky fact checkers: "I take a story, put it on a scale, and say, "OK, if this is 96 percent true, that's an acceptable ratio for ground beef, and it's more than acceptable for heroin and cocaine, so I'm going to call it nonfiction." [ via The Morning News ]