5 Must-Read Blog Posts

The internet is home to approximately 112.8 million blogs, according to internet tracking firm Technorati. Every day, 1.6 million new blog posts are uploaded—more than 18 per second. The vast majority of these posts are unbearably lame, but a few have resonance that warrants a larger platform. Each week, the Beast will sift through the slush and scoop out what needs to be read, looked at and discussed.

1. From the minds of bored graphic designers working at major food conglomerates, genius springs.

2. For a moment of clarity, view this short video of a crocodile embryo on the verge of birth. It’s the kind of astounding clip that makes you wonder whether technology or biology has the miracle market cornered.

3. Are those teeny, toy-like gas-sippers that bomb down the highway surrounded by Escalades mere deathtraps? Not if this blogger’s experience is any indication. “I rolled my Toyota Yaris three times this morning after hitting a six-foot-high dirt embankment at highway speed,” he writes. And though the photo of his totaled car suggests tragedy, he says he emerged with hardly a scratch.

4. “I’m of Italian extraction, from caves in Minori, south of Naples,” writes this blogger. “My great grandmother, Nanny Savino, even at 80 years old, would sell Woodbines and Silk Cut from the doorway of her Holloway council flat, which we would proudly collect from under her bed.” She goes on to review Gomorra, the new swooned-over indie film from Matteo Garrone. Her verdict: “It makes Goodfellas look as inauthentic as Disney.”

5. A stay-at-home father notes that it’s been exactly a decade since Bill Clinton declared that it “depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” at his impeachment hearings. He connects this dodgy assertion to Alaska Senator Ted Stevens’ linguistic acrobatics as he testified in his own defense in Washington last week.