* The Haunted Clock: outstanding analysis of all the clever that went into the chiming-13 grandfather clock in Disney’s Haunted Mansions. Bonus trivia: a Simpsons animator is a former HM butler, and sneaks Mansion trivia into many episodes.
* Slowed down birdsong sounds like classical music. Seriously. It’s like Animal Kingdom Inception. (via)
* European Commission Looks To Backdoor In ACTA By Pushing For Same Results Through ‘Voluntarism’. Because heavily lobbied, totally compromised Eurocrats know more than politicians, the public, scholars, industry and tech experts about how to run the Internet.
* Venom. DeviantArt’s Captainsarasparrow shows just how totally awesome facepaint can be. (Neatorama)
* VICTORIAN PROFESSIONAL MOURNERS, 1800s. Imagine how awesome being a goth would be if it was still possible to command a handsome salary simply by standing around, looking sad and wearing black. Hot Topic should pitch the world’s funeral directors on a revival of this noble trade.
* The Incoherence of Antonin Scalia. Judge Richard Posner eviscerates Judge Antonin Scalia’s new book. It’s a judgefight! Great read. I just wish Posner’s own rulings were a little more coherent.
* Byrne’s BAM Bike Racks. David Byrne designed the new bike racks for TK
* 21 World War I Recruitment Posters From Around the Globe. (via)
* Minnie Mouse, Daisy Duck Whittled Down for Barneys’s Holiday Campaign. Body dismorphia for the animated set. (via)
* “We asked for nothing. They offered us less” – Ontario’s teachers. The Ontario government manufactures a labour crisis to help it win key by-elections, punishes hardworking teachers for political advantage.
* Polycistic Kidney Disease Cake. De-gross-a-licious!
* 2012 Hugo Award Winners. Among Others wins best novel — and what a book it is, too!
* How copyright enforcement robots killed the Hugo Awards [UPDATED]. The Ustream live-cast of the Hugo Awards died suddenly when a cleared, authorized Doctor Who clip (from an episode for which Neil Gaiman won the Hugo) triggered Ustream’s third-party piracy-detection app. Ustream apparently has no way of turning this off once it’s triggered.
* Jeremy Hunt, Health Secretary, thinks homeopathy works. The UK LibCon government continues to put flaming, irredeemable shitheads into positions of importance. I thought that sticking George Osborne in the Chancellor’s office was as bad as it could possibly get, and yet… As the Telegraph‘s Tom Chivers says, “This is not unlike putting someone who thinks the Second World War began in 1986 in charge of the Department of Education.”