As one of only five people in the country who thought THE DA VINCI CODE was a pretty rotten book, full of pompous art history lectures and generally bad writing, I am now nevertheless curious to read Dan Brown’s ANGELS & DEMONS, after having learned of one particular element of Brown’s novel: ambigrams, or words that can be read the same from many different angles, including upside-down. I didn’t believe that such a thing was possible — until I saw Word.net’s Ambigram.Matic, which allows you to make one yourself.

At the risk of repeating myself or turning this into the All Jon Stewart All the Time blog: did you happen to hear that Comedy Central’s THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART was awarded the OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN NEWS AND INFORMATION award, over respectable news stalwarts FRONTLINE and NIGHTLINE, by the Television Critics Association this past weekend?

THE DAILY SHOW. Appearing on Comedy Central. A fake news show.

How can you not love this country sometimes?

A few weeks ago, Vic raised the interesting prospect that Joe Lieberman, is, in fact, Senator Palpatine. So I offer you this for consideration. Talk amongst yourselves.

Apparently, it has come as a big shock to, like, everyone that a show billing itself as an unauthorized documentary of filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan was really a guerilla marketing hoax designed to promote Night’s new movie, THE VILLAGE.

Well, crap. But at least I know that THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT was real. I swear. There was a show about it on Sci Fi and everything.

Here you go: typoGenerator, which creates art by taking input text combining it with random images and backgrounds scoured from Google Images using that particular string of words. Neat in a weird sort of Photoshop-shortcut kind of way.

(via metafilter)

What the hell? Sandy Berger, President Clinton’s national security advisor, is under criminal investigation for allegedly removing some form of classified documents from a secure reading room prior to participating in the 9/11 Commission hearings. Unclear whether these were actual documents, handwritten notes detailing the same, or copies of the documents (which shouldn’t have been removed either, apparently.)

Weird. Joshua Marshall has more details.

Also: Damn you, Butcher. All your fault.

Here you go: Jon Stewart manages to be funny and summarizes America’s apathetic and lazy political attention span in less than sixty seconds:

JON STEWART: “Talking points. That’s how we learn things. But how will I absorb a talking point like ‘Edwards and Kerry are out of the mainstream’ unless I get it jack hammered into my skull? That’s where television lends a hand.”

Read the partial/whole transcript here (found via Wonkette.)