Some smart alecks got together and made this hilarious sendup of the tyranny of America Online. (Thanks to AskROM for the tip.)

Way back in March when I returned to New York from my stint overseas, a friend of mine loaned me “Hawks on Hawks” by Joseph McBride, a book-length collection of interviews with Howard Hawks, who’s probably my all-time favorite director. It’s hard not to have a macho kind of respect for a director that spins these kinds of tales to his biographer.
On the subject of a dispute he once had with Howard Hughes over a scene in Hughes’ “Hell’s Angels,” Hawks said: “So he got his writer to go to my secretary and offer her two hundred dollars for the script. She told me about it and I had a couple of detectives hiding in her closet. When the guy offered her the money, they said, ‘You’re under arrest.’ Hughes called me and said, ‘Hey, you’ve got that writer of mine in jail.’ And I said, ‘You son of a bitch, he’ll stay there.’”

Dammit, I’ve got to get off my ass and back to blogging. In spite of the amazing paucity of Web gigs out there, what little work we have at the office is keeping me feverishly busy. What’s more, my girlfriend has just moved into a new house, which is a thirty-minute train ride outside of the city. Balance is a process.

NASA has posted these beautiful technical drawings from the Mercury program. If you can just excuse the poorly designed Web page, you’ll see that they’re stunning in their precise aesthetic — marvels of earnestness, like old photographs from a collateral world dense with terrific optimism.

“RESTON, Va., and NEW YORK, May 14 /PRNewswire/—Motient Corporation (Nasdaq: MTNT) and Rare Medium Group (Nasdaq: RRRR) today announced the signing of a definitive merger agreement through which Motient will acquire 100 percent of Rare Medium Group using a combination of newly issued Motient stock, shares of XM Satellite Radio stock (Nasdaq: XMSR) owned by Motient and certain other considerations.”

Read the full text of the press release here. I have absolutely no comment right now.

Why settle for the Internet Explorer “e” logo (or the Netscape “N” logo, I guess, if you insist on using Netscape) spinning in the upper right-hand corner of your browser? If you’ve got a Mac, you can change this branding area — commonly called a “throbber” — with custom throbbers using Apple’s venerable ResEdit.

This is clever.

Majestic is a new-breed video game from Electronic Arts, not just net-based or multimedia-based but many-media based. It uses your Web browser, Flash, RealPlayer, AOL Instant Messenger (driven by AI), your fax machine and your telephone to “infiltrate your life”. Game sessions are short and can be tailored to gamer-defined parameters (default settings, for instance, might result in telephone calls to you from the game in the middle of the night), and can occur over the course of days or weeks. I’m not much of a gamer, but this has the ring of the future.

The Far Eastern Economic Review, an excellent weekly overview of the other side of the world, has a great interview with Hun Sen, Prime Minister of Cambodia. It’s a fascinating peek into the mind of a former Khmer Rouge member trying to translate his current leadership position into something grander.

My girlfriend gave me this amazing album the other day, a live Nina Simone recording from 1961. Incredible.

Adbusters is holding a re-design contest for its First Things First initiative, which last year united “six of the design industry’s most influential publications” under a single manifesto that, ahem, “set the design world on fire.”

It’s an advertising trick of practically evil subtletly, but the five-film series “The Hire” is still worth a look. Ostensibly a collection of short films directed by some major talent — John Frankenheimer, Ang Lee and Guy Ritchie among them — and all starring the highly cool Clive Owens from last year’s “Croupier,” these films are, at heart, a disturbingly clever campaign for BMW cars. The film releases are staggered, with Frankenheimer’s “The Ambush” available for viewing right now, and Ang Lee’s “Chosen” due next week. The one I’m really waiting for is Wong Kar-Wai’s “The Follow.”

“The Mummy Returns” is two hours of cornball idiocy designed to fill theater seats, but it’s still a fun flick, I have to admit.

It looked like a miserable day this morning when I woke up and my toilet flooded. Groan. But then I came back to the office from an all morning meeting and heard the news about the new iBook — a really sweet home run of a laptop just announced today. Apple’s back on track.