Fanart of Data dressed up in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle costume.


Or at least that's supposed to be Data. And don't ask me why he has a TOS-era Cochrane Delta on his shoulder strap.

Today's Link Thread post is in honor of Fred Astaire.



First, some quotes from the comment thread for the "The Way You Look Tonight" link below:


"Fred Astaire is the best singer of songs the movie world ever knew. His phrasing has individual sophistication that is utterly charming. Presumably the runner-up would be Bing Crosby, a wonderful fellow, though he doesn't have the unstressed elegance of Astaire." --- Oscar Levant



Question: What great singers of the past do you wish had sung your music? Stephen Sondheim: Nobody really. Well, actually, Fred Astaire.



"As a dancer he stands alone, and no singer knows his way around a song like Fred Astaire." --- Irving Berlin

"He has a remarkable ear for intonation, a great sense of rhythm and what is most important, he has great style - style in my way of thinking is a matter of delivery, phrasing, pace, emphasis, and most of all presence." --- Bing Crosby

"Astaire can't do anything badly." --- Jerome Kern


The Way You Look Tonight
Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails
Isn't This a Lovely Day to Be Caught in the Rain
Let's Call the Whole Thing Off
They Can't Take That Away From Me
Nice Work if You Can Get It
We're A Couple of Swells
A Couple of Song and Dance Men

Kirk shows us how to play fizzbin


I love how one commenter says "Still an easier game to learn than yugioh." I'm not so sure about that!

It's Christmas-related Disney Short day in the Link Thread!


Donald's Snow Fight
Toy Tinkers
Pluto's Christmas Tree
The Cookie Carnival (okay, not exactly Christmas, but the hero is a gingerbread man and there are candy canes all over the place)


Mickey's Christmas Carol deserves a category by itself
The short itself
The book-and-cassette version
"Oh What A Merry Christmas Day" by itself
OWAMCD instrumental organ cover
OWAMCD acapella cover

A Facebook meme featuring one of my favorites, Danish Butter Cookies!


It especially hit home with the sewing supplies angle. While I don't believe my mom ever used tins this big for sewing supplies, I do remember drawers full of little tins (closer to Altoid sized) of buttons and so forth.

The weirdest pop culture mashup Nativity ever


Batman as the Angel
Will Riker and Deanna Troi as Joseph and Mary
What looks like an Ultimate Muscle toy as Baby Jesus
A trio of Darth Vaders as the Wise Men
Bill and Ted as shepherds
A bunch of capsule toys as the sheep (meaningless aside, but that orange one reminds me of a Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends character)
And for some reason Metamorpho and a T-rex are there as well

Adam Savage presents his Blade Runner Blimp replica


I've never seen Blade Runner, but this was still cool because whenever Spoony played a game or whatever that featured a blimp with huge screens on the sides he'd play the "Live the good life in the offworld colonies" clip.



Take away the huge screens, and a huge blimp flying through the city reminds me of how many of them appear in Batman The Animated Series.

Courtesy of Reddit...


The Shiekah Pokeball!


I suddenly wonder about how an equivalent Millennium Pokeball would work (how many rules would you have to change, etc.)

Carol Channing is dead.



Ouch.



A compilation of Whose Line is it Anyway clips featuring Ryan Stiles doing his trademark Carol Channing impersonation.

(Also an Amazing Thing I Learned Today) Carol narrating a Winnie the Pooh audiobook.

Carol and Ginger Rogers on What's My Line
Carol as the White Queen in the 1985 Alice in Wonderland
Carol and Gomer Pyle in a Corn Flakes commercial
Carol on Sesame Street
Carol on The Muppet Show (note Miss Piggy in a Carol cosplay)

Lucille Ball imitates Carol
Carol on the Rosemary Cloony Show (1956, possibly the youngest I've ever seen her)
Carol on the Red Skelton Show (Carol kissing (or at least getting close to kissing) Red Skelton, you don't see that every day!)

Today's piece of mathematical trivia courtesy of Numberphile is The Trapped Knight. I like math problems that involve chess boards just so long as I don't actually have to play chess. I may have mentioned that I'm not terribly good at chess.

A collection of the inspirational speeches of Trek.



Q: Jean-Luc, sometimes I think the only reason I come here is to listen to these wonderful speeches of yours.

Mathologer tells us about what happens when you stack a bunch of circles within a box. There's some amazing geometry here.

Level UP shows us what happens when Pong has Zelda Physics (or rather, what happens when Link and Zelda play Pong using Zelda weapons...). It's interesting to see how Zelda weapon physics interact with Pong physics.

Recently I read my "The Inner Light" fiver again, and one of my jokes seems a lot less funny these days...


Kamin: The world is doomed! You can fire me with a hefty pension for insanity now.
Administrator: Not on your life. First of all, you're right, and second of all we like to keep our insane elected officials where we can see them.
Kamin: But isn't a system of government like that doomed to failure?
Administrator: You'd think so, but it's not.

Watchtower Database (if you like the DCAU you should subscribe) gives the equivalent of the Westphall Multiverse for the DCAU. Basically the DCAU touches all other versions of DC properties, the Scooby Doo multiverse (this also means that the whole Hannah Barbera multiverse is also linked in, but he doesn't mention that), the TMNT multiverse, Archie, the Green Hornet, the Bionic Woman, the (British) Avengers, the Looney Tunes/Freakazoid/Animaniacs multiverse, etc.



The phrase "turtles all the way down" comes to mind. This stuff will drive you insane if you let it.

The evolution of the Enterprise D set over the series and Generations.



Yikes, I didn't notice most of this stuff!

A guy restores an antique rusty cleaver.


The amazing part for me is when he drilled a hole down the middle of the handle with a stationary drill bit and a rotating handle on the lathe. Never saw that before!


It always impresses me when people take old things that nobody would pay more than a dollar for at a garage sale and transform them into something worth having. People who have tools and know how to use them.

The Opportunity Mars Rover has officially died.



Of course I was reminded of when XKCD told the life of the Spirit Rover.