Ladies and gentlemen, the new hybrid experiment between Mercedes and European auto manufacturer Smart Car -- for all you Americans now needing to watch your budget, but who don't want to give up the empty pointless status-symbol self-satisfaction of your hubristic consumerist youth. Retail price: $12,000. Originally spotted at culture blog LostAtEMinor.com.

Below are simple links to other interesting stuff I've come across on the web in the last day or two; they may or may not concern literature or photography, or indeed the arts at all. You can click here to learn more about how I compile this list and what software I use, if you're interested.

Real-life cable-worthy European erotic courtroom thriller about to begin
I became fascinated by this case when the arrests were first made last year, and now it's finally coming to trial: the trial of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, that is, for the alleged murder of her college roommate Meredith Kercher during an extreme group-sex experience gone bad. She's American, he's Italian, the victim was British, with the two girls studying abroad in Italy at the time and sharing a cheesy-movie-worthy breathtaking villa as student housing; and what pretty much everyone agrees on is that the three of them plus an illegal African immigrant all got wasted on Ecstasy that Halloween and decided to have an orgy in said villa. But that's where the stories start wildly diverging: a bad wasted idea that seemed good? A freakout reaction to the victim running away? Deliberate Halloween ritual? Were all four of them even present? In any case, Knox has become a dark celebrity in Italy, a metaphor for attractive entitled out-of-control Americans in the 2000s. Fascinating!

Shuttered "Dodgeball" co-creator vows to make a new one
Yesterday I reported how one of the small services Google is planning on shutting down soon is Dodgeball; it was basically a pre-Twitter version of Twitter, a service that lets you send small messages from your phone to a webpage, although in their case designed much more around letting big-city hipsters announce to their friends en-masse where they are at any given moment. (Let's not forget, there were plenty of Twitter-like services before Twitter; just that Twitter was started by a few of the founders of Blogger as well, so had more tech-industry insiders as members from the beginning, which is how it grew in popularity so monumentally fast and why it got mentioned in the media so many times.) Anyway, now one of Dodgeball's founders, Dennis Crowley, is vowing on his blog to create a clone for all the NYC hipsters that were still using it, which I think is nice of him.

WATCHMEN studio dispute resolved, film to again open on March 6th
Rejoice, WATCHMEN fans; the annoyance lawsuit brought about by Warner over the film's distribution rights has finally been resolved. (Here, Aint It Cool News covers the events in their typical smartass style -- "Terms of the settlement were not disclosed, but insiders suggest it involved money.") Also, did you know that the film will be opening the day after my 40th birthday? Guess what I'LL be doing for my birthday this year?!

It was colder in Chicago yesterday than at the North Pole
If you were under the impression that it was historically, insanely cold in Chicago yesterday, you were right -- at an average temp of eight below zero, it was literally colder here yesterday than at the North freaking Pole. Also, the city officially went 24 hours in a row yesterday without the temperature ever getting above zero; of the 50,000 some-odd days the city has now been recording the weather, this is only the 44th day when such a thing has happened. And things aren't getting better anytime soon either; temps are supposed to stay in the sub-arctic range for an entire week if not more. Sigh.

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