The Hopp Stop

• Cut the Rope, a very fun iPhone/iPad game, has a free holiday version out. Recommended.
• Marco the Tumblr gets to use an enduring rotary phone with his Verizon FiOS connection.
• Spencer Hall with another hilarious column at Every Day Should Be Saturday, this time centering on the West Virginia hiring of a football coach-in-waiting.
• The Times has been running a series over the last week on the 1960 plane collision over NYC that resulted in a plane crashing in Park Slope. This article on the state of the neighborhood in 1960 is a great read if you’ve seen the vitality of the neighborhood today, or are interested in urban planning and post-war urban decay in US cities. It’s remarkable how much of urban decay was caused by a combination of lending practices (encouraging a move to suburbs by middle-class whites) and racism.
• This post, another in the Park Slope crash series, has a great 1960/2010 matched photo of the wreckage.
• I love the National, so I really enjoyed this Pitchfork interview with Aaron Dressner, one of the musical forces behind the band.

• Let’s start things off with some fresh sunset photos from one of my fellow DRA founding fathers, Chris Walton.
• I think my recent link posts have fired up the spambots, as I’ve been getting some amusing spam comments (they never show up on the site, as WordPress’ spam filter does a nice job catching them). Here’s a response to my post on Gmail setup under iOS 4: “Unhappy for the  analyze, but I’m truly fatherly the new Zune, and comic this, as compartment as the excellent reviews few additional fill have longhand, testament cater you terminate if it’s the aright prime for you.”
• Ha ha, the Taiwanese video site NMA (they quickly put together videos of current events and computer animate them, such as Tigers Woods crashing his truck or Stephen Slater jumping out of the plane) has a video up on the Chinese Confucius Peace Prize, celebrating “peace from the Chinese perspective”. Love it. And I love the armed giant Pandas serving as Chinese soldiers.
• Wild to see the aftermath of this 1960 plane crash in Park Slope in Brooklyn, given that I now live blocks away from the crash site.

Pretty great. Via Daring Fireball.

Thanks to Every Day Should Be Saturday for this hilariously scathing takedown of some football-oriented country crap rock from Kenny Chesney.

A sample paragraph:

He sucks, and most things do, but when he dips his toes across into the realm of football they deserve to be chainsawed off at the nearest convenience. The entire song is supposedly about football, but it’s really about how Kenny Chesney should be bound and gagged, bundled into an uninsulated rocket filled with honey badgers, and shot into the sun. Oddly enough, this is what we think every Kenny Chesney song is about. Hm.

DBag alert!

Love it. (I assume everyone has heard about the JetBlue flight attendant that flipped out.)

“Everyone was wearing fingerless gloves…” Love the Julian Casablancas aspect.