Daniel Johnston is a singer, songwriter, guitarist, pianist, and visual artist…who happens to suffer from crippling bipolar disorder. His songs are generally sweet, vulnerable, and at least a little weird. As Johnston has aged, his delivery has become increasingly warbly, though his youthful spirit shines through: the man radiates a wonderful mixture of joy and grief. There’s a quality to his work that’s disarming in the extreme — assuming you’re along for the ride. Among my friends, Daniel Johnston is either someone who makes you cry with joy or makes you hit the STOP button promptly. I hope that tonight I will turn you into the former kind of person by showing you ten lovely songs.

(By the way, if you look Johnston up you’ll note the Hi, How Are You art which was popularized to many music fans via Kurt Cobain’s shirt featuring the frog. You’ll also come across the excellent, heartbreaking documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston — if you’re at all interested in this man, watch the trailer and then rent the film.)

“Story of an Artist”

From the Don’t Be Scared album. “Listen up and I’ll tell a story about an artist growing old. Some would try for fame and glory; others aren’t so bold.” Clips from The Devil and Daniel Johnston.

“Go”

“To understand and be understood is to be free.” One of the most tender, heartbreaking performances I’ve seen. From The Angel and Daniel Johnston – Live at the Union Chapel, a live concert recording.

“Life in Vain”

With Swell Season and a children’s choir on Austin City Limits. Beautiful. “It’s so tough just to be alive when I feel like the living dead. I’m giving it up so plain, I’m living my life in vain, and where am I going to?”

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The comic strip Garfield has endured since 1978, when Jim Davis invented the lovable triad of Garfield, Odie, and their owner Jon Arbuckle. As a seven-year-old kid, I was a big fan — Garfield loved lasagna, and so did I. Odie (the dumb dog) was Garfield’s nemesis, so I decided that dogs were dumb. Garfield hated Mondays and diets…you get the idea.

Garfield as a comic strip succeeds mainly because it’s so accessible and bite-sized, featuring a predictable three-panel format. This accessibility has made the cartoon bland, leading creative cartoonists to remix Garfield into new strips, often reusing art, dialogue, and other portions of the original. While the remixes are of questionable legality (many are arguably parodies, others maybe not), they are consistently funny and weird. Because the humor primarily involves bleak madness, absurdism, and the absence of Garfield as a meaningful companion, comparisons to the work of Beckett come up a lot.

The primary fact that’s central to most of these alternate versions of Garfield is that, in the actual comic, Jon can’t hear Garfield’s thoughts. By shifting the perspective away from Garfield’s inner life, Jon’s life comes into sharp relief: he’s an isolated man whose home life with his pets is, at best, troubling. Enjoy!

1. Realfield

Garfield has been replaced with a regular orange tabby, minus thought bubbles. The site is in Spanish, but an auto-translation does a good job of explaining the effect:

Jon goes from being a beloved character to be a paranoid and shy type who talks to his cat … which of course is not answered.

(More Realfield.)

2. De-Garfed

Garfield’s thought bubbles have been removed, but nothing else changes. Jon’s paranoia is revealed.

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Though many countries have changed which side of the road they drive on over the years (did you know that in many parts of Canada, for instance, people drove on the left until the 1920s?), for this quiz, we’re asking what side of the road you’d drive on if you visited the following 10 countries today.

Take the Quiz: Which Side of the Road Do They Drive On?

If you ask Christine Sismondo about prohibition, she’ll tell you it didn’t have nearly as much to do with alcohol as it did with trying to close down the saloon. And that’s a key distinction if you, like her, consider the American bar to be the equivalent of the London coffeehouses and Paris Salons.

Sismondo contends that America is the way it is largely because of the saloon culture, which provided a place for people of all classes and creeds to get together and discuss their problems, goals, politics, etc. Eventually, these gathering places led to revolution, rebellion, strikes and more, all of which had a permanent change on the American political landscape.

To learn more about her theories, you can read more in Sismondo’s new book, America Walks Into A Bar, or enjoy this her fascinating interview in The Smithsonian Magazine.

At your typical American shopping mall, one in every 11 stores is currently empty — the highest vacancy rate in a decade.

Related Link: The stories behind 20 mall staples.

[Sources: The Week and TIME. See previous Numbers of the Day here. ]

Image credit: NorthJersey.com

As General Muammar Qaddafi continues to evade the Libyan rebels who chased him out of Tripoli last week, there has been some tongue-in-cheek speculation about the possibility of him fleeing all the way to his five-acre estate in—wait for it—Englewood, New Jersey.

Almost thirty years ago, in 1982, the Libyan government paid a million bucks for this three-story, 10,000 square foot, 25-bedroom mansion, which they inexplicably named “Thunder Rock,” on Palisade Avenue in Englewood, a suburb in Bergen County. It’s a bizarre choice of neighborhood for a government that has made a habit of bankrolling terrorists and talking about how much they hate Israel, considering it’s right smack in the middle of a sizeable Orthodox Jewish community. In fact, Thunder Rock is directly next door to the largest yeshiva in town, and just a short walk from the home of one Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who, if in case you missed that episode of Oprah, is an outspoken leader in the American Jewish community and a former spiritual mentor to Michael Jackson.

Who’s up for a block party?

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You visit this blog every day (and if you don’t, why the heck not?!). Sometimes you notice the ads on the page, sometimes you don’t. Regardless, ever wonder how they help offset the costs of running a Web site/blog? Ever wonder how they get on the site? Well, it’s time for a little primer. Web Ads 101, if you will.

There are two basic kinds of ads, display ads and text ads. Text ads are slowly being phased out, though our friends over at Neatorama still use them on post pages. The one pictured to the side for GoPro Cam is a good example. These ads are dynamically fed into the page by Google AdWords, who figure out what kinds of ads to place on the page based on what kinds of keywords they see in the post itself. The title of the post can often influence the Google placement bots, which is how you sometimes get those funny juxtapositions; a post about the benefits of nuclear power can trigger a text ad to sign a petition against nuclear power. A Web site makes money when you click the text and go off to the petition Web site. How much money? It depends on the size of the Web site, the placement of the ad, and a bunch of other factors. But it’s not much money at all.

Much more common are display ads. These come in various sizes and shapes known in the industry as leaderboards, skyscrapers, blocks, and in rare cases, page skins where the sponsor takes over a page and wraps the whole site with their campaign. These ads are very rarely click-based, meaning they don’t need to be clicked for the Web site to make money. The bulk of display ads usually earn between 25 cents and $1 per every thousand impressions, or views. Some campaigns on popular Web sites earn a lot more, but the traditional “run-of-network” ad (sometimes called “backfill”) is generally under $1 per 1000 impressions. With display ads, the advertiser is looking to get the brand out there in front of you and is willing to pay whether you click through or not. On average, .02% of people will click through on any given ad—so it’s really more about raising company/product/brand awareness.

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Despite the Soviet Union’s position as the key Cold War enemy of the United States, few Americans knew much about the leaders of the USSR – even their names. In this quiz, you’ll have 10 minutes to come up with 11 names – the 8 former leaders of the Soviet Union, and the 3 leaders of the Russian Federation. Last names are fine, but spelling DOES count – hence the longer time limit. Good luck!

Take the Quiz: Back in the USSR

Do you want to make a website, but don’t know how to do all the techie stuff…or know just enough to make a super-crappy site? If that’s you, check out Don’t Fear the Internet, a video series that teaches you basic HTML and CSS, using a WordPress blog as the basis for your new website. (HTML and CSS are two of those mildly techie things you’ll learn. It won’t be hard. Heck, I’m typing HTML in WordPress right now!)

Here’s the trailer to give you a sense for how low-key this thing is (the “girl and guy” are Jessica Hische and Russ Maschmeyer):

And here’s the first real installment (great quote: “If we never closed our tag, the rest of our lives would be lived in a permanent state of ‘lunch.’”):

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Wednesday Wordplay is the challenge for today’s mentalfloss.com Brain Game. Today, the seventh entry in our popular new Filling Station puzzle series. Enjoy!

Each of the following 5 entries can be turned into an English word by adding the letters from the name of a musical instrument – in the order it’s spelled – into the blanks provided. An example appears below to get you started.

example:  _ _ E _ _ _ O
solution:  ORGAN ( O R E G A N O )

1.   _ _ R _ _ N
2.   _ _ _ _ A T _ O _
3.   _ H _ L _ _ T H R _ P Y
4.   _ _ _ _ O O N
5.   _ _ S _ L E T _