Saturday was the immortal Minnesota Geek Prom. (Full disclosure: Because I’m rumored to occasionally contribute to a so-called “Weblog,” I was given free VIP admission for me and a guest. I took my buddy Nathan, but I would totally have taken you if you’d asked.)

Observations:

• I wish I’d been cool enough in high school to be friends with the girl who wears leather to the prom and sneaks in a flask of bourbon. That made the 10-year-old Omnimax movie infinitely more entertaining.
• Actually, now that I think about it, I did go to my high school “prom”* with a badass, leather-wearing girl. And I was, if anything, slightly geekier then than I was at the actual Geek Prom. So the whole experience was kinda dejà vu.
• As Alexis notes, I was not crowned prom king, nor was she crowned prom queen, despite the honest-to-goodness Klingon tattoo on her chest, and despite my Buffy thesis and singing of the score to Evita.
• Chuck Olsen’s hott MNStories video story will give you the best taste of the exuberant mood that reigned o’er the evening. (Look for me very briefly at about 5:04.)
• Alexis’ photos will give you the best taste of my adorkableness. (Note: there’s also some XXX NSFW geek ass on display. Not mine, though.)
• While there was an ironic sheen on all of this, there also seemed to be unspoken widespread understanding that yes, most of us present truly were geeks. And we were embracing it. And it was awesome. I’m totally going next year. And I will be King of the Geeks.

* Because I went to a fundamentalist Christian high school, we did not have an actual “prom” with actual “dancing.” Instead, we had the Bible-rific “Junior/Senior Banquet,” typically held at schools like Bob Jones University.

Horrible segues, with anchorman Clive Rutledge:

“… Experts say speed dating’s popularity continues to rise. After seeing that clip featuring the hottie in the halter-top, something else is rising, too, heh-heh, if you catch my drift—that’s right: interest rates. Today the Federal Reserve recommended they be upped by half a percent.”

Philips Electronics bought the first page of Time and four other magazines (space usually reserved for ads) and will put the mags’ table of contents there. Taking off the journalistic umbrage hat for a moment, purely as a reader, I would love this. And the whole Philips “Simplicity” campaign is kind of genius.

People throw skeptical glances my direction when I say I enjoyed living in Fresno. But it’s true. I often describe Fresno as having been completely emptied of people sometime in 1943, and repopulated only in the last few years. That’s not how it was at all, but the city is filled with traces of incredible, abandoned Americana — gorgeous motel signs, classic theaters, dive bars, thrift stores. The city is phenomenally diverse, more culturally varied than even the rest of California, which itself makes the rest of the US look inbred.

When I interviewed for the job in Fresno, among the things that drew me to the city was coming across one of those old, beautiful motel signs. It was just sitting in a parking lot, leaning against a building in the middle of nowhere (it was downtown, but “middle of nowhere” still kind of applies). I figured the sign had to have a story, and I loved the thought of being a reporter there and getting to unearth that story.

Months later, I found out that the sign was leaning against the building that housed the H Street Collective, a space for some of Fresno’s most brilliant artists to practice and display their work. H Street was a beautiful nightmare. Its walls were covered to the last inch in the most grotesque, eyepopping, otherwordly art. The bathroom of the collective was the artists’ sandbox, stuffed with visual ideas and experiments, half-painted creatures, obscenities, paint on the floor, on the toilets, on the stall doors.

The H Street that was is no longer. But you can still find the work of some of the artists on many of the walls of Fresno. And one of my favorite H Street artists, Mehran Heard, has an awesome Web site.

Just to prove I can actually still write posts longer than five words for Snarkmarket, here’s an awesome New York Times article about mounted police. Enjoy!

• CP: Al Franken, Senator? Q&A.
  (tags: article interviews politics twincities)

• A decade of search engines.
  (tags: search article internet)
• TYFSmoking title sequence typography. (Kottke)
  (tags: animation design fonts movies typography video)

• Lifehack: Keep headphone wires untangled.
  (tags: lifehacks music tips)
• 3QD: Palm Pilot, Human Brain.
  (tags: essay science ideas philosophy toread)
• Sleep more, lose weight. (Wired)
  (tags: article science diet sleep obesity)

MetaFilter has long had one unbreakable rule: Thou shalt not self-link. Thou mayest e-mail thy link to thine fellow MeFites, but never, never must thou posteth said link to the front page of MetaFilter.

This rule kept a lot of crappy Web hobbyist sites from being posted to MetaFilter, I’m sure. But it also meant that MeFites who made something legitimately post-worthy often wouldn’t get their stuff linked on the site until it had already become popular somewhere else. So Matt Haughey created MeFi Projects, where members could pimp their own stuff to their hearts’ content. Other members could vote for the stuff they liked best, and post it to MeFi if they wanted.

It’s been wildly popular. Just yesterday, Adrian Holovaty posted about his databasing the tragic, excellent Washington Post “Faces of the Fallen” project.

And it just got totally better. Matt Haughey has made an archive of the most popular projects by month.

Favorite new discovery? Roundtuit: a community blog for posting the great ideas you’ll never do.

You guys rock. Can someone put this on a t-shirt? (From this post on MNSpeak. See also.)

P.S.: Gavin totally reminded me. Add me.