Links for fun

1. In 1587, Urbano Monte made the largest known early map of Earth. You can play around with a digital version made into a globe here.

2. A really annoying flight of stairs.

3. Come, Josephine, in my Flying Machine! "You're surprised that, having scored big with one ethnic novelty song, the wily Kraut didn't follow it with "If The Man In The Sun Were A Hun". Instead, over the next three and a half decades, he prospered in just about every genre: Irish songs ("Peg O' My Heart", one of the most beguiling of Tin Pan Alley's shamrock ballads), Irish mother songs ("Ireland Must Be Heaven For My Mother Came From There"), substitute mother songs ("Daddy, You've Been A Mother To Me"), anti-German luff ballads ("Lorraine, My Beautiful Alsace Lorraine"), pro-American luff songs ("Would You Rather Be A General With An Eagle On Your Arm Or A Private With A Chicken On Your Knee?"), songs about pedal extremities ("Your Feet's Too Big"), songs about railroad excursions through mining country ("Phoebe Snow The Anthracite Mama"), and songs of sound general philosophy ("There's A Little Bit Of Bad In Every Good Little Girl")." Mark Steyn - and with observations on Titanic too.

4. A Norwegian woman who runs and jumps like a horse.

5. When Slavoj Žižek wrote the text for an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue.

6. "As a gaggle of teenage girls waved their Blue-Shield-advertisement-paddles to cheer on the police, I thought to myself “Yes, this exactly captures the spirit of the original Stonewall rioters”." Scott Alexander on civil religion, specifically American civil religion.

7. Christopher Walken dancing.