Random Thursday

Some sightings around the interwebz while giving a big shout out to the A&M women’s basketball team for thumping the world-class Baylor team and advancing to the NCAA Final Four for the first time in school history. (The only partial downer is that all the quotes I’ve seen have the Lady Bears blaming their loss on an “off night”; gee, do ya think the Ags had anything to do with that? Huh?)

• Of course, A&M’s foe on Sunday night is Stanford, the only team to beat Connecticut since the Ming Dynasty.
• According to this report in the Wall Street Journal, a “Russian investor” just paid $100 million for a house in Silicon Valley. That works out to more than $3,000/square foot. Our mansion has 10% of the square footage, but cost under 0.5% of that price and we don’t have to worry about falling into the Pacific Ocean. Of course, they probably have baby angel statues peeing into a pool, so they’ve got that going for them.
• I never worked in an office where lunch thefts was a problem, but I’d be tempted to leave one of these in the fridge just on general principle. (Via the Neatoshop, only $5.95 each. Sounds steep, but what is lunch peace of mind worth to you?)

• I’m not even a Disney fan, but this video is mesmerizing. I can’t imagine how long it took to make it.

• More from Neatorama: Hilarious Paper Street Signs. This is one of my favorites:

• I might be able to rationalize paying $100 million for a mansion, but more than $800 thousand for a rifle? And that’s a rifle that doesn’t even have any sights. I guess if you can afford a gun that expensive, you can afford to pay someone else to aim it for you. If you’re wondering what the market is for handmade firearms of this caliber (ha! awesome pun intended!), here’s a hint: the manufacturer’s website is in English and Arabic.
• And last but certainly not least, this site has been making the Facebook rounds lately. Someone went to a lot of trouble to create the faux Sokoblovsky Farms, billed as “Russia’s Finest Purveyors of Petite Lap Giraffes.” And, of course, PLGs (as the cognoscenti refer to them) are the true stars of the DirectTV ads featuring the opulent lifestyle of a Russian billionaire (say, you don’t suppose he just bought a house in…nah…surely not). You know, these ads:

Did you notice the PLG in the second video? It’s a throwaway effect, which makes it even more special. Anyway, DirecTV’s ad agency (or one of them, the Grey Group) created the website to supplement the broadcast ad campaign. It’s purely a buzz-builder, as DirecTV is never mentioned in the site’s text (and I had to do a WHOIS query to confirm that Grey owns the domain name and is hosting the site). However, if you click over to the Photos section and scroll down a bit, you’ll see the two preceding ads embedded in the page. The strategy is working; 442,786 people before me have click on the “I Want One” button and were added to the waiting list to get their very own PLG. I plan to name mine Jerry.