And Sigur Ros sped up sounds sort of like Justin Bieber.

Malibu Mustang, originally uploaded by Shiny Things.

So this is what I ended up with when Hertz couldn't deliver a Mustang coupe with GPS.

And it's actually not bad. It's the 2011 model, so it's got the new 3.7L V6 (305 horsepower, up from the 210 horsepower that last year's rubbish model squeezed out of its 4.0L V6, and almost as much as last year's V8).

Admittedly, it's no Corvette (previously on JRE). It does jump away when you mash the loud pedal, but it doesn't turn everything into warp-speed smears. The handling leaves a bit to be desired as well (although it's certainly not bad - just a little bit of understeer, and if you give it a dab of throttle it corrects nicely).

But the Corvette starts at $50,000 (for the 430hp coupe). The Mustang starts at $22,000 (for the base V6 coupe). How can you say no?

Skate or Die 2, originally uploaded by Shiny Things.

A skater at the Venice Beach Skate Park, on a blazingly bright late-summer day. And there's plenty more where that came from.

Homage to a Starry Knight, originally uploaded by Shiny Things.

The LA suburb of Venice is a completely different animal to its ritzy northern neighbour Santa Monica. Santa Monica is clean, trendy, and immaculately kept; Venice is grungy, laid-back, and packed full of artists and craftspeople.

And Venice has a spectacular collection of murals in the alleys alongside Oceanfront Walk and Venice Beach. Here's Homage to a Starry Knight (yep, that's how it's spelt).

Missile Command, originally uploaded by Shiny Things.

A bonus photo from the Intrepid Museum - this is the (formerly Top Secret) missile control room from the submarine USS Growler.

The Growler was armed with four Regulus nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, each of which could unleash two megatons of messy fission-powered death on any target within 900km of the submarine. And this was where the missiles would be controlled from. Rather scary.

The Standard Hotel, originally uploaded by Shiny Things.

Until 1980, the High Line was an elevated railroad that ran through Chelsea and the Meatpacking district. It was abandoned and left to rot for 25 years, until someone had the bright idea of turning it into a park... and this is the result.

It's a mile or so (with more to come) of elevated greenery, winding up the west side of Manhattan. Here's the southern end, running underneath the painfully trendy Standard Hotel.

And some more pics: the 14th Street overpass; and a bumblebee buzzing around some flowers.

Om nom nom, originally uploaded by Shiny Things.

The Intrepid Museum is all sorts of awesome. How often do you get to climb all over an aircraft carrier, a nuclear-armed submarine, and Concorde, all in the same day?

This photo is of one of the planes parked on the USS Intrepid's flight deck; how cool is that paint job?

And here's some more pics: a Lockheed A-12 (the precursor to the famous SR-71); the missile command room inside the USS Growler submarine (yes, it carried nukes); the Growler's torpedo room; and a souvenir of Dilbert's little-known career as a Navy pilot.

Land ho!, originally uploaded by Shiny Things.

SQ21/22 is the world's longest regularly scheduled non-stop flight - eighteen hours of flight time, fifteen thousand kilometres, and it flies just 130km from the North Pole - just a shade less than 89 degrees north.

This is the far northern coast of Greenland, hemmed in by pack-ice. And here's some more pics from the top of the world, including: the first sight of the Arctic icepack around Russia's Severnaya Zemlya islands; a lonely Russian Arctic island; and a glacier flowing down a dry hill in Greenland.

(Plus, bonus: maps are deceptive!)

17:45 to go, Johor Bahru: seatbelt sign off. Bust out my half-finished copy of The Rational Optimist.

15:15, Thailand: take a break from reading. Matt Ridley was a terrible bank manager, but he's a brilliant science writer. Good to see he's decided to stick to his doctrine of specialization and trade.

15:14: leaf through inflight duty-free catalog. What on earth is a Lancome Duo Virtuose Precious Cells and why does it sound like something pilfered from a Genentech lab?

13:40, northern Laos: finish The Rational Optimist. What now? Walk around a bit.

13:39: The guy four seats in front of me looks exactly like Weird Al Yankovic. Or maybe Slash.

13:38: Gruen Nation. The ABC's MP4 video downloads work great on iGadgets; feel momentarily guilty that I'm no longer paying my eight cents a day.

13:37: Where does Todd Sampson get his tee-shirts?

13:15, Laos-China border: John Hewson is a really good sport. Can we get him on TV more often?

12:15, northern China deserts: stare out window. Try to watch Treme. It's by David Simon, therefore it must be good.

12:00: give up on Treme. Overtaken by sleep.

10:30, Lake Baikal: wake up. Slept through Mongolia. Not sure I missed anything.

09:15, Siberia: looks like we're headed straight north off the top of the map. I knew I shoulda taken that left toin at Vladivoishtok.

09:00: bust out camera, take some photos of rainbow clouds. Double rainbow clouds. What do they mean?

08:30 to go, Severnaya Zemlya: The enormous bloke in front of me in an Australian Bodybuilding Championships tee-shirt is listening to the Glee soundtrack. Yeah. Don't stop believin'.

08:00, Arctic Ocean: "feet wet", as they say - or as they would say if this were a Tom Clancy novel. But Tom Clancy novels don't have stewardesses serving chocolate cake. (Or do they? I've never read Without Remorse; maybe it's in there.)

7:30: the little plane on the flight status screen has just flown off the top of the map. This doesn't look like Narnia.

7:25: first sight of Arctic icecap. NOW it looks like Narnia. "always-winter-but-never-Christmas" Narnia, but still.

7:00, 38,000 feet above the Arctic ice: It's just gone 9:30am in NYC. Need to stay awake or risk world-class jet lag. One thing making it easier: through a quirk of timing (taking off mid-morning, flying through the 24-hour-sunlight zone above the Arctic Circle, and landing late afternoon), the sun never goes down for the whole 18-hour flight.

6:30: picturesque broken pack ice out the window.

6:00, 87 degrees north: the most northerly screening ever of Yes We Canberra. NEW WORLD RECORD.

More after the jump...

Ed note: your humble correspondent is on holidays right now. Expect more photos and less meaningful commentary.

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Well, the Australian election this weekend was an absolute clusterfuck (if you'll pardon my French). We have no Prime Minister. The government will basically be run by the three independents, all of whom quit the (conservative) National Party because it wasn't conservative enough. (Which, incidentally, means they'll probably caucus with the Liberal/National coalition and give the Prime Ministership to Tony Abbott. Freshman Green rep Adam Bandt in Melbourne will definitely caucus with Labor, but that'll only give Labor 74 seats - two short of a majority.)

A minty- fresh Morgan poll suggests that if the election had to be re-run, the Greens and Independents would each lose a couple of points, and the votes would flow back to the Labor and Liberal parties. Rob Oakeshott - one of the kingmakers - is proposing exactly that, but he holds his seat by a vast margin, so I doubt he's worried about a couple of percentage points' swing.

If minority government turns out to be as dysfunctional as it usually is, and we have to go to a double-dissolution election sometime before the three-year electoral cycle, expect voters to flee the minor parties like a bad smell.

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In other news...

From the people who brought you How To Cook A F*cking Steak (warning, sweary) comes How To Make A Pizza, Fundamentalist Macaroni and Cheese, and How to Barbecue a Turkey The Super Easy Way (step 1: shoot the turkey)

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For kids starting college this year (meaning they were born in 1992), Czechoslovakia has never existed and John McEnroe has never played professional tennis. I feel old.

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The best words to use in Hangman. "Jazz". "Faff". "Hajj". "Vex". "Fuzzy". "Quizzing". "Bubbliest". "Zigzagging". "Grogginess".

And JRE keeps you entertained all weekend with one of the greatest moments of the Aussie election campaign.

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To mark Singapore's 45th birthday, here's an interview from 2006 with David Marshall, Singapore's first Chief Minister. Why, no, he didn't draw a three million dollar salary after he stepped down.

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ABBA backwards (eM nO ecnahC A ekaT is weirdly awesome). No Satanic messages, though, which is frankly a bit of a disappointment.

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The governor of Wyoming has threatened to sell off parts of Grand Teton National Park to fund the state's education budget. I reckon some enterprising investor should buy it and turn it into a REIT.

How about the GrAnd Teton - Trees And Conservation Alliance REIT? GATTACA-REIT is now taking subscriptions, minimum investment $1 million, institutional investors only, please form an orderly queue.

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The Confined Nomad is trying to eat his way through the cuisine of every country in the UN, in alphabetical order - without leaving New York's city limits. He's up to China and going strong. (He had trouble with Chad, though - anyone know a good Chadian restaurant somewhere in the five boroughs?)

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And JRE keeps you entertained all weekend with Jane Austen's Fight Club.

Here's a piece of Australian political history - the TV interview that cost John Hewson the 1993 election. The Liberals promised to introduce a goods and services tax on everything except food, and this was the result.

Watch as Hewson's campaign implodes on one simple question: "if I buy a birthday cake from a shop, and GST is in place, will I pay more or less for that birthday cake?"

NDP 2010 fireworks #1, originally uploaded by Shiny Things.

It's National Day today. Happy 45th birthday, Singapore.

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Here's the sales brochure for the world's first supercomputer: the CRAY-1.

The CRAY-1 stood astride the world in 1976. It cost north of five million dollars, but look what you got for your money! The monolithic machine came with eight megabytes of memory, three hundred(!) megabytes of disk, and a processor so fast it could perform eighty million multiplications every single second!

...which means it's got less computing power than your snazzy new iPhone 4. But the iPhone doesn't double as a couch.

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"Several of you told me that I was 'going to die' if I drank 13 beers while running the San Francisco Half Marathon. I did not die. ... I puked three times, blacked out for miles 11 and 12, and needed five hours to finish. This is my story."

Disclaimer: JRE does not endorse drinking beer while running marathons. (You might spill some.)

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One thought about the whole UAE/Saudi Blackberry-blocking scandal: as far as I can tell, iPhones with a VPN (like, say, WiTopia's service) are still kosher. Erm, halal.

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And JRE keeps you entertained all weekend with the greatest catch ever (although Alex Jesaulenko and Santonio Holmes and most notably Gary Moorcroft might disagree). Via Deadspin and Daring Fireball:

It's slightly less than a week until the kickoff of the world's first Youth Olympic Games, and the overpowering mood in Singapore is that NOBODY CARES. Maybe I'm jaded. Maybe the host nation has spectacularly dropped the publicity ball. But it's hard to shake the impression that nobody, nobody gives a toss.

And that comes despite the fact that this is probably Singapore's best chance ever to land their first Olympic gold medal, with a full contingent of 70 athletes competing across 26 events. Singapore's first appearance on the Olympic podium only came in 2008, when their womens' doubles table-tennis team walked away with the silver medal - which promptly sparked a charged debate about Singapore's identity, because all three team members were born in China and became Singaporean citizens through the Foreign Sports Talent Scheme.

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UPDATE: I wuz wrong! An observant reader pointed out that the Beijing silver medal was Singapore's second taste of Olympic glory, not its first. Singapore won its first medal at Rome in 1960, when Tan Howe Liang won silver in the men's lightweight weightlifting (and gold at the 1958 Commonwealth Games in Cardiff, where he set a world record in the clean and jerk). Credit where credit is due.

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Sydney at this stage of the 2000 Olympics countdown was an absolute madhouse. The papers were going nuts. People were excited. People were complaining about the transport mayhem. But in Singapore, there's not been much in the papers (two articles today). People aren't excited. There's no transport mayhem (the Grand Prix will cause more traffic problems than the Youth Olympics).

And unlike Sydney, there're no dry mockumentaries making fun of the whole thing. Back in 2000, Australia gave the world The Games, which ruthlessly satirised the bureaucracy behind the Olympics, achieved fame for broadcasting John Howard's apology to the Stolen Generations, attempted to include ballroom dancing in the Olympics, smuggled Scottish skeet-shooters into the country disguised as Bulgarian wrestlers, and introduced the 94-metre running track to the Australian lexicon:

Imagine the equivalent for Singapore 2010:

INT. DAY

JOHN CLARKE

We're stuffed. It's one week to showtime. We've got three hundred thousand tickets to sell. How many have we sold? One hundred thousand - and that's only because those clowns in the Education Ministry took down eighty thousand. We are stuffed, Bryan, what are we?

BRYAN DAWE

We're stuffed.

JOHN CLARKE

Exactly, Bryan, we are stuffed, we are stuffed like a Christmas chook.

Because satire works best when it's got a grain of truth.