As the Yes Men shift the focus of their projects to climate change, we’re seeing some very good and very funny things. This is a (hoax) press release from the Yes Men purporting to be from the US Chamber of Commerce. It’s integrated right into the design of the Chamber’s site, and all the links lead to Chamber pages. The only tip off is that the URL isn’t the Chamber’s. (If you click on the navigation links now there’s a special warning that you came from a hoax page, but the damage was done.) This press release corrects the Chamber’s stand on climate change, the Chamber of Commerce itself was none too happy about this and released their own press release clarifying their stance.

Summarily, the Yes Men rightly made the Chamber look like idiots, and drew attention to their odd, backwards policy on climate change.

I just wrote that I get way too many things to believe from AG, but they’re usually in my email inbox. Today the post office box had yet another good thing from AG, a July 4th New York Times (“liberal” is an inapt adjective). AG met up with Yes Man Jacques Servin (nee Andy Bichlbaum, Ray Thomas, etc.) in Los Angeles for an event promoting the Yes Mens’ new movie The Yes Men Fix The World at the Hammer Museum. AG managed to pick up a couple NYTs and sent one on to me. The best thing that has come in the mail in quite a long time. Thanks bucky.

The London Review of Books is the only subscription I keep up to a paper newspaper or magazine, and Mary-Kay Wilmer, the editor, is one of the reasons why I’m so insistent that it keep coming. Here’s a good Guardian piece on her and her new book, which isn’t (very unfortunately) coming out in the States until April 2010.

[Photo from the Guardian article. Guardian article via AG, who sends me so many wonderful things every day I can't keep up with them]

CJR and I have been playing a game that her dad worked on, Thinkport’s fantastic The Lure of the Labyrinth. I’d come across the game before and never got into it, but on the second go round, I can’t stop playing. It’s supposed to be for ~5th grade kids in math class, there’s a lot of pattern recognition and arithmetic. Games that are explicitly “educational” usually aren’t that interesting to kids, but remove that “educational” tag, and you’ve got kids at at least one Chicago Public Library absolutely loving Labyrinth (CJR, worried about the silly games that the kids in the branch she’s working at were playing on the library computers, introduced them to Labyrinth. It was, and still is, a hit). The game doesn’t need to be played in a classroom, you can just sign up with a Thinkport account and go. It’s also Flash, so no downloading files necessary (except for, ah, Flash). There are some tedious parts and I wish the user had keyboard control of the character, but these are small issues. I’d recommend checking it out yourself and telling the kids you know about it.

[Image is a screenshot from one of the first narrative sections of the game.]

Jim Lewis for the New York Times on prison design.

[Photo from the accompanying slide show.]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html

[Via CRS, photo by Alec Soth for The New York Times]

jmtb02 & Armor Games’ very funny game “Achievement Unlocked.”

[Via Simon Parkin’s article Over-Achievers on EuroGamer.net, which I haven’t read all of]

To follow up a bit, Google Translate can’t guess that basic Zulu phrases are Zulu, nor can it guess that Xhosa phrases are Xhosa (it’s been saying they are Portuguese or German, but of course, not translating them). Firefox isn’t offered in any South African languages besides English and Afrikaans. Facebook (as seen above) isn’t either. Now, I’m not complaining, just thinking out loud. I don’t speak Afrikaans, no less isiZulu or isiXhosa, so I’m in no place to, for example, translate Firefox…

[Images from Wikipedia and Facebook]