Educate and excite, inform and infuriate.

Cover detail from Mansa Musa by Khephra Burns (2001)
Illustration by Leo & Diane Dillon

Technically, I’m a patron of Leo & Diane Dillon’s, the famed and widely awarded husband & wife children’s book illustrators. (I purchased a very small painting by them, at an extremely generous price, a few years ago.) As well, I’ve hosted them as guests on NONFICTION, my Friday 2 pm WBAI-NY radio show, commemorating their 50th anniversary in March 2007. (Leo has even said he’s a regular listener.)

But that’s just full disclosure stuff, because, what’s true is that I love their work with the kind of passion that almost halts one’s breath.

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Ready to serve: Paris Hilton

That loud slap you heard was Paris Hilton’s sabre-sharp response to John McCain, for goofily Photoshopping her pic into a campaign ad. An echo that resounds was expected: This essay on six reasons why she’d make a better president than a man who graduated 894th in his class of 899 at Annapolis.

The first three arguments, below:

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On one hand, I’m thinking Cindy “Miss Buffalo Chip” McCain has had a rough enough week as is, taking the brunt of her metal husband’s ongoing, passive-aggressive abuse.

But then I took a serious look at this photo, above, and, egged on by Charlotte Hilton Andersen’s devastating “Dear Cindy McCain, Please Pull Up Your Shirt And Tie Back Your Hair: An Open Letter In Pictures,” I had to ask: Who in the world told the McCain campaign that the sight of this scaly middle-aged woman, sporting a tousled, freshly-…fondled, nicotine-throated “Mmmm…hurry back to bed, lover…” gaze, topped off with a dap of cleavage, would be what the American people want to see from a prospective First Lady? Blecch.

But, most of all, when I look at this picture, why does “Yakety Sax” (“The Benny Hill Theme”) run, unimpeded, through my brain?

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Float on: Swimmer Dara Torres (Photo for TIME by Justin Stephens)

Dara Torres’s record-breaking return to Olympic-level swimming at age 41 has not only stunned sports officials but unintentionally made the American a worldwide poster girl for middle-aged vitality and strength. The nine-time Olympic medalist and mother of a two-year-old daughter is the oldest woman to ever contend at this level in her sport. Her recent qualification to battle in Beijing means that this will be her fifth Olympics. No American swimmer has ever competed in so many.

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Looks like those feisty Hilton women aren’t just taking up space: They’re actually taking on John McCain’s use of daughter Paris’s image in a controversial campaign ad, “Celeb,” that attacks Barack Obama.

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Caricaturist Drew Friedman sums up the psychopathic presidency of George W. Bush in this illustration, “No Joke,” for Vanity Fair, brought to yours truly’s attention via Boing Boing.

When director James Frost decided that he wanted to make a music video without cameras or lights, but instead using ultra-high bandwidth laser scanners, he wrote up a concept and sent it to the group he thought would be most responsive: Radiohead.

They bit. The result, “House of Cards,” is as eerie and emotionally unraveled as you’d expect from the R. (Thanks to Core 77 for the tip.) Special bonuses include a “how they did it” short, as well as frames you can roll under your mouse and see interpolate in real time.

If asked why M.O.P.’s “Ante Up” has possibly become the video mashup bed of choice, part of me—the part sloshing with ego—would love to take a little credit, due to efforts on a shotgun wedding of Hairspray with Brownsville, B’klyn’s official national anthem.

The rational part of me, though, would merely defer to superior skills, like those of Stian Hafstad. (I can’t read a word of his blog, but pictures are universal.) The Norwegian’s 580,000-views clip hilariously fuses Mashout Posse’s original track with rambunctious footage of Sesame’s Street‘s Ernie and Bert, monsters, and sheep. Even funnier than the felt-faced duo’s Casino riff, the bit invents tasty new moments, like Bert’s boast of “puttin’ work to the street like a slave.”

While you’re in the neighborhood, though, please check out Hafstad’s “Jay Z vs MacGyver”, which blurs a high-speed run through Jigga’s “Encore” video with the MacGyver TV show intro. I know: It just works. Can’t say why.

She clearly didn’t expect to be followed so closely: Oprah Winfrey

Since starting January 1st, a Chicago performer, writer, and artist, Robyn Okrant, 35, has committed a full year to living her life as Oprah Winfrey suggests on her highly-rated TV program, The Oprah Winfrey Show. So, if Oprah says buy white pants, Okrant buys white pants. If Oprah says visit an animal shelter, that’s where she goes.

NPR interviewed her, and she’s writing about the experience on her blog, Living Oprah. No word on whether Oprah approves of this, however.

It’s a hard life, being Star Wars bounty hunter Boba Fett, going from star system to star system in your spaceship, Slave I, digging through wretched hives of scum and villainy on a thousand known worlds. Sure, if things get too hectic, you can ignite your Mitrinomon Z-6 Jetpack and blast off, but sometimes you need to really…open up…set yourself free…what a feeling….