Educate and excite, inform and infuriate.

Keeping an eye on the Michelle Obama-haters as they wind up their catapults, slings, and arrows? Michelle Obama Watch collects the links so you don’t have to do so.

For example, did you catch this piece, above, from late last week, depicting the Divine Mrs. O as a cantankerous, neck-wagging waitress? Or, what’s up with this photo of the candidate’s wife, below, showing mad thigh?

Michelle Obama Watch looks for the dolts, critiques them, and keeps track of the naysayers. Should be worth staying tuned.

One heck of an alternate timeline: Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest planned skyscraper, shown for scale in a New York City skyline where 9/11 never happened

Spurred on by this NY Times piece on the Middle Eastern / Asian rush to construct the world’s tallest building, I dug up this impressionistic, 90-second promotional YouTube, below.

In it, both man and beast are awed by the dawn of the Burj Dubai hotel and residence, which, at a yet-unfinished 2,087 feet and a planned 160 stories minimum, is the world’s tallest structure. (I say “planned” because the building’s final height is being kept secret, in order to intimidate would-be one-uppers.) Let’s hope that, along with the Giorgio Armani-designed hotel, the $4,000-a-square-foot office space, and the 700 private apartments, they put in one unbelievable bungee cord.

Though it’s currently out-of-stock and nearly two years old, I just go to glee every time I see this videoconferencer’s dream come true: The Business Bib.

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There’s little I can add to this wonderful, 24-second clip, in which a cute blonde with a delirious life-zest makes beauty out of riding an escalator. Agreed, Gizmodo: We love you, Spinning Lady.

I think part of why I so dig Go Fug Yourself is that, while I love fashion—the creativity of it—I detest the fashion business. I detest the hype and flakiness of what surrounds the marketing of apparel.

I detest listening to women on TV talk in that breezy way they do about the “shapes” that are “in” “this year” or “this season,” and the color that “everyone’s going crazy for.”

Why? When I think about it, what I most dislike about that way of speaking is that it lacks precision. It sounds like someone trying to sway people with words they’re making up on the fly, hoping that the audience won’t catch on by the time that they’re done.

It’s like, for example, the way some musicians will say, “Yeah, man, everything’s cool and laid back. I’m just rollin’, man. (Big smile lights up his face.) Takin’ it easy.”

Huh?

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Bet she kept this clip off of her reel: Ayds diet candy commercial

What do you do when the name of your number one product, under which you’ve been selling your goods for decades, becomes a homonym for a deadly scourge?

That’s the foul question the makers of Ayds, an appetite suppressant, found themselves having to address 20 years ago. By that point, it had become clear that acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS, was not going to be a flash in the pan—a temporary blip that the company could just ride out—but would be, in fact, the disease of the century, if not the millennium.

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Take a bunch of sexy twentysomethings, have them remove their clothes, get ’em dancing, and, in no time, you’ll be watchin’ ’em get it on, right?

Right, but only if “get it on” means “make funny signs and symbols out of the censorship bars that inevitably accompany televised U.S. nudity.”

At least, that’s the way it works in the brilliant video for “Toe Jam,” above, by the BPA (Brighton Port Authority), a collaboration between Fatboy Slim and David Byrne, here featuring Byrne and Dizzee Rascal on vocals. Scandalous!

While it’s always tragic when a young person kills herself, I wasn’t inclined to eulogize Ruslana Korshunova, 20, the pretty Kazakh model who apparently jumped to her death from her 9th floor apartment this past Saturday. I’d never heard of her, though, clearly, I probably saw her, based on the level and prominence of the work she was doing—ads for DKNY, Marc Jacobs, Vera Wang, or this Pantene piece, above, featuring her lengthy and much idolized tresses.

However, a couple of details concerning her death have stuck with me.

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Some of Barack Obama’s idealistic young supporters are taking endorsement of the candidate to an eerie new level, one familiar to fans of the 1960 film, Spartacus, above, says The New York Times: They’re informally adopting his middle name, “Hussein,” to refute right-wingers who “use it to falsely assert that Mr. Obama is a Muslim or, more fantastically, a terrorist.” (Thanks, Afi Scruggs, for the tip.)

(In the Stanley Kubrick classic, fellow slaves all identify themselves as “Spartacus” when Roman soldiers come looking for the rebellious leader.)

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