The Honus Wagner Baseball Card, "The Holy Grail of Baseball Cards" has sold for $US 2.3 Million Dollars. One of the first baseball cards, and extremely rare, this specimen was previously owned by Hockey great Wayne Gretzky. more inside

Curious George: Blinking HDD Light! I noticed the hard drive activity light on my computer was blinking every second - on the second - when I was absentmindedly staring at it and noticed it synched up with the ticking of the clock on the wall. Thus began my strange odd-yssey to make it stop. more inside

HowTo: Make DVDs out of YouTube videos How can you watch those visually stunning YouTube videos away from the pesky Intertubes? Just follow the instructions, and it's a snap!* * Is not a snap. Involves downloading and installing two or more separate (but free) programs and reading some or all of the instructions. And the video quality on your television isn't all that great anyway but hey there you go. Do not take thread comments internally. Not for sale to minors. Free drinks until 5 p.m. for the Ladies. via Lifesmacker more inside

Australian National Public Toilet Map Now that's handy. via growabrain more inside

Frontline: News War Readers didn't need a week of front-page stories about diaper-wearing astronauts and the alleged cultural significance of Anna Nicole Smith to tell them that the Fourth Estate is having an identity crisis. There's also last week's Pentagon inspector general report criticizing the Bush administration's manipulation of prewar intelligence, reminding Americans that most of the Beltway media danced to the White House's drumbeat to the Iraq war four years ago. more inside

They Got Older, Too ...and in theory, wiser. We asked the pop icons you grew up with what they've learned about money. Bill Shatner, Cheryl Tiegs, Ron Howard, Denzel Washington, James Taylor and more with a sentence or two on what they've learned about money. via linkfilter

Curious George: Make Windows Pretty Now! I'm sick of the look of Windows and want to make it pretty and/or shiny. Or something. I use Style XP on one machine, but I paid for that years ago and there's got to be some excellentness out there in free, opensource glory. What do you use? See also the Desktop thread. more inside

Celebrity StupidBowl Picks! Bears or Colts? Colts or Bears? StupidBowl XLI is just about . . oh . . 49? Hours away! Yes, enjoy the predictions of celebrities such as John Travolta, Jimmy Buffet . . um, Okay I don't know who that is . . nnnope don't know them . . uh, some dude . . Anyway - What's your prediction??

Armed America This isn't a book about guns. It's a book about people. Whether it's 39% or 50% of Americans, it's still an awful lot of people. I started wondering just who they were, what they looked like, and how they lived. . . . I realized that I could probably photograph a hundred people in two months, but it wasn't a number of people that was important, it was their stories -- a cowboy in Texas, a survivalist in Montana, a deer hunter in Pennsylvania, a sheriff in Georgia, a soldier in Idaho.... What I really needed, I realized, was to get moving, to drive across the country and find America somewhere between here and there. via J-Walk blog more inside

Bush's Presidential Liberry: Tower of Babel Aiming to raise $500 Billion in donations, the George W. Bush Presidential Library would cost more than all other presidential libraries combined. Controversy around the library, involves an executive order that reverses the Presidential Records act. (The Presidential Records act makes presidential records available to the public after twelve years. Or it used to. Before the 9/11 freedom-loving terr'ist peoples of the world watched this drive.) more inside

Accepting Acceptance. Sometimes, acceptance is a very good prescription. By Cynthia M. A. Geppert, MD, PhD, Psychiatric Times via linkfilter more inside

Jimi Soda Recognizing the opportunity for a high quality, all natural beverage line, delivered to consumers in a high-impact package that connects customers to a legendary entertainment icon and identity, Beverage Concepts secured the exclusive marketing and licensing rights to the Jimi Hendrix brand. Under the brand name Liquid Experience, Beverage Concepts will introduce a complete Jimi Hendrix line of specialty drinks that embody the rock-n-roll passion associated with this legendary musical performer. "Beverage Concepts is committed to providing in our beverage line the same level of excitement, undefined coolness, rock 'n roll feel and unprecedented taste that is synonymous with the Jimi Hendrix image," explained Beverage Concepts CEO Josh Glass. via J-Walk

50 Fun Facts About Credit Cards Okay, let's face it "facts" are never fun and "credit cards" are only fun half of the time. So how can this be fun? I dunno, it just is. Ever notice all your credit cards are of uniform shape and size? Their dimensions are governed by the ISO 7810 standard, an international standard for identification cards. Banking cards, as well as driver’s licenses and retail cards, follow ID-1 (passports follow ID-3). If your card has a smart chip, it follows ISO 7816, and if it has RFID, it follows ISO 14443. Interested to know what’s on the magnetic stripe? Check out this breakdown of the three tracks on Wikipedia (the rest of the page explains other magnetic stripes). via J-Walk blog

High Definition Porn . . . Too Much? "Pornography has long helped drive the adoption of new technology, from the printing press to the videocassette. Now pornographic movie studios are staying ahead of the curve by releasing high-definition DVDs. They have discovered that the technology is sometimes not so sexy. The high-definition format is accentuating imperfections in the actors — from a little extra cellulite on a leg to wrinkles around the eyes." more inside

Grammar Girl is apparently quite poplar.

Bill Moyers Speaks on Media Conglomerates' Threat to Democracy "The lobby representing the broadcast, cable, and newspapers industries was extremely powerful, with an iron grip on lawmakers and regulators alike. Both parties bowed to their will when the Republican Congress passed and President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996. That monstrous assault on democracy, with malignant consequences for journalism, was nothing but a welfare giveaway to the largest, richest, and most powerful media conglomerations in the world. Goliaths, whose handful of owners controlled, commodified, and monetized everyone and everything in sight." video, audio links here via Ol' Bluey

Midichlorians are real! Specifically living in tick ova. Midichlorians are fictional organisms described in Star Wars. Tick ova are not. more inside

Middle School Girls Gone Wild They writhe and strut, shake their bottoms, splay their legs, thrust their chests out and in and out again. Some straddle empty chairs, like lap dancers without laps. They don’t smile much. Their faces are locked from grim exertion, from all that leaping up and lying down without poles to hold onto. “Don’t stop don’t stop,” sings Janet Jackson, all whispery. “Jerk it like you’re making it choke. ...Ohh. I’m so stimulated. Feel so X-rated.” The girls spend a lot of time lying on the floor. They are in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades. When are girls too young to go wild? . . . What happens when the whole culture crosses over? more inside

Curious George: Best MoFi Post of 2006? Well it's happened again. You've wasted another Internet Year (tm) watching MoFi. So, if Pandacam made the best post of 2005, what's your vote for "Best MonkeyFilter Post of 2006"? more inside

Superzoom: From The Universe to a Quark Having a bad day? Spilled marinara on your Great American Novel? Lost your glasses again? (Check on top of your head) - Don't worry, get some perspective. Like a visualization of the Universe that focuses in on the Milky Way, our Sun, Earth, etc.