Use 75 words or less to motivate the Socceroos for Radio National - win a Digital Radio!

Photos by Eddie O’Bryan. Do any other cities photograph as well as NYC?

Brisbane indie-pop-folk, nice and dense and stomping. They describe themselves as like Sigur Ros, Akron Family & Dirty Projectors, which sounds about right if you add a dash of Arcade Fire too. Download from triple j unearthed.

David Beckham, Daft Punk, Snoop Dogg, Franz Beckenbauer, Noel Gallagher, Ian Brown, etc prepare for the World Cup, courtesy of adidas.

This will be hugely popular.

Massive news in the massive genre with Lord of the Rings Online going “Free to Play”. I’ll definitely logon now, whereas before whilst interested I was always held back by not wanting two subscription games and the consequent feeling of “I should be playing ‘cos I’m paying”.

Bio Break has the community reactions covered. It’s all happening “in Fall”, whenever that is - a pet hate of mine is online release dates referring to seasons: I assume they mean US Autumn, so Septemberish.

Terrific story on the ups and downs of elevators:

The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war.

I’ve always thought the maths of elevator service must be intriguing - at my work, the 14 story building serviced by 4 fast lifts is the cause of endless frustration, while the 7 story serviced by 6 slow carts is a relative pleasure:

The term “elevatoring” refers to the discipline of designing a building’s elevator system: how many, how big, how fast, and so on. You need to predict how many people will be using the elevators, and how they’ll go about their business. It isn’t rocket science, but it has its nuances and complications. The elevator consultant George Strakosch, in the preface to “The Vertical Transportation Handbook,” the industry bible, refers to it as the “obscure mystery.” To take elevatoring lightly is to risk dooming a building to dysfunction and its inhabitants to a kind of incremental purgatory.

Slightly insane and brilliantly obsessive research into the perfect French Fry, including a heist of frozen McDonald’s fries for good measure:

I go home fry-less, contemplating whether attempting to leverage an unborn, un-conceived son in exchange for a couple dozen frozen potato sticks is grounds for eternal damnation. Thank God I’m an atheist.

He’s right about McDonald’s fries being the gold standard.

After only 18 perfect games (27 up, 27 down, no hits) in 150 years, there has already been two in 2010 (Oakland A Dallas Braden & Philadelphia Philly Roy Halladay). And today Armando Galarraga from the Detroit Tigers had the third wrapped up, but for a stuffed up umpire call on what should have been the final out. On the upside, as Bill Simmons tweeted, Galarraga will go down in history with the first ever 28 out perfect game.

In other US sports news: go Blackhawks!

Excellent thoughts on handling social media as an introvert.