You don’t need to speak German to understand how this delightful game works. I want one of these for my desk.

Forget the news; if you can’t trust your own eyes, what can you believe? But, just as with a lot of what purports to be news, sometimes what you believe you’re seeing is an illusion. Here’s a great one I found online today, with a handy notification to hit pause in the middle if you don’t want the trick revealed. I figured out right away how this was done, and you can too if you watch closely.

The Pew Research Center has put out a brief survey that looks at just what Americans know about the  news. I would say the ignorance is shocking… except sadly it isn’t. I don’t want to tell you specifically where people were wrong, because I think you’ll want to take the test first. But in a nutshell, lots of Americans are wrong about:  the unemployment rate, the degree to which the TARP “bailout” has been paid back, the results of the mid-term elections, where government expenditures go, and so forth. The quiz covers what I think (hope) most of us would think are the basics of the current (non-celebrity) news cycle. And the results explain a lot.

Here’s where to take the quiz.

I tried Stevia. It tastes bad. More like crystallized urine than sugar. Wikipedia mentions its “bitter aftertaste.” You bet.

This is Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs,” adapted (?) to video by Spike Jonze. It mines the same territory as the Wallace Shawn play “The Designated Mourner” — that our obliviousness to the freedoms we take so casually endangers them — but more believably. That’s saying something for a music video, over the work of perhaps our greatest living playwright.

Today over lunch a friend and I were sharing our disappointment about John McCain. Today’s John McCain bears no resemblance to the one we believed we knew 10 years ago.

Then I came home tonight and saw this.

Somehow or other, the LA Times recently finagled a phone interview with the reclusive R. Crumb, whom I got to see, once, at a comic-book convention in either Philadelphia or New York, 25 or 30 years ago. Opportunities since then have been just as limited.

I’ve enjoyed Crumb’s work for more than 30 years now. I admire his talents, his frankness, and his artistic scruples.  But Crumb the man is getting left further and further behind. Which is fine for him. For me, it’s different. What he sees as relentless commercialism, I see as an offshoot of a web of possibility that almost all of us were utterly closed off from until the past 20 years. Thanks to the Internet, we can connect with almost anyone. We can self-publish — instantly. We can self-produce goods and services. We can record and upload and share and sell digital music. Artists in particular should cheer the new age. It isn’t for Crumb — but it’s great for the rest of us.

Oh, if only Ikea made instructions for everything. Here’s how much more easily things could work.

Thanks to good friend Doug Hackney for sending me this excellent post about the impact of paywalls on online newspapers. Clay Shirky’s post gets at two key points:

• That whereas  the average newspaper formerly enjoyed status as a monopoly, the internet has commodified the delivery of  news.”The classic description of a commodity market uses milk. If you own the only cow for 50 miles, you can charge usurious rates, because no one can undercut you. If you own only one of a hundred such cows, though, then everyone can undercut you, so you can’t charge such rates. In a competitive environment like that, milk becomes a commodity, something whose price is set by the market as a whole.

  Owning a newspaper used to be like owning the only cow, especially for regional papers. Even in urban markets, there was enough segmentation–the business paper, the tabloid, the alternative weekly–and high enough costs to keep competition at bay. No longer.

  The internet commodifies the business of newspapers. Any given newspaper competes with a few other newspapers, but any newspaper website compete with all other websites. As Nicholas Carr pointed out during the 2009 pirate kidnapping, Google News found 11,264 different sources for the story, all equally accessible. The web puts newspapers in competition with radio and TV stations, magazines, and new entrants, both professional and amateur. It is the war of each against all.

•  That as newspapers move behind a paywall in an attempt to squeeze some revenue from their heretofore free delivery of news, their online numbers dwindle to only a highly engaged fraction of their print subscribers — or, in Shirky’s brilliant analysis, what one equates with the subscribership of a newsletter, not a mass-consumed, mainstream, newspaper. In Shirky’s analysis of the Times of London, as way of example, the online version is trending ever more Torie for this reason.

I bring this up not only because of my longstanding love for newspapers, but also my ongoing daily thoughts about the Los Angeles Times in particular. Last month I did finally call to cancel, as I’ve threatened to do so many times on this blog. I don’t like paying for the delivery of a newspaper that everyone else gets for free online, and which contains news (and even features!) that is older than the free online version, and which often lacks content that is found free online. It seems counter to common sense, and decidedly unmeritocratic. In fact, it seems like charity on my part — and I don’t feel that I owe the Los Angeles Times any charity. My sense of this deepened last month when I was given an iPad, which now enables me to read the LA Times with as much ease of portability as the print version. The final rub was when I learned that the Times was charging me something like four times (!) the rate they are charging new subscribers. That finally got me to call and howl — “I’ve been a paying customer for 23 years, but you’re discounting for new people?!?!?!” Whether or not that’s an industry standard in print marketing (and it is), it’s insulting — especially to someone who has begun to feel that he shouldn’t have to pay anything.

A friend emailed me tonight to let me know that the television show “Rubicon” had been canceled. He said he knew it seemed silly, but he was a little down about it, as though he’d lost a friend. Why did he email me? Because he knew I’d feel the same way. We were the only two people we knew who were watching it.

“Rubicon” dealt with a group of government analysts tasked with sifting through reams of data, usually in the form of stacks of reports, to find clues about terrorist strikes. Ultimately, the team finds the source of terrorism against the U.S. — and it turns out to be their own organization. The first (and now last) season ended with the group having perpetrated a terrorist attack of enormous proportions, scuttling U.S. access to oil from the Gulf of Mexico and deeply wounding the U.S. economy. What would have happened next, we’ll never know.

What drew me to the show was its deliberate pacing, and its layers of meaning and characterization. In an age where it’s expected that everyone will be distracted at all times, “Rubicon” insisted that you pay attention. Midway through the season it occurred to me that some of the characters’ odd names must have been anagrams, or clues — and, indeed, I unscrambled “Kale Ingram” into Leak Margin — because he was a leak, and he played the margins. That sort of exploration provided superficial fun; what was more exciting was deciding that Mr. Ingram, who by all evidence could not be trusted, needed to be trusted by the main character, Will Travers, because Travers had nowhere else to turn. And so we were vicariously put into the position of all the characters — making alliances with unfit allies, just as players on the world stage do every day.

I did my bit advocating for the show, and I did manage to get one new person to watch it. “Rubicon”‘s finale claimed just over one million viewers. “Mad Men,” a show that has descended into ludicrousness, netted two-and-a-half million people for its own season finale. In a nation of 300 million people, that’s not that great a difference. While “Mad Men,” somehow, is in the zeitgeist, it didn’t start there; most people climbed onto the show via DVD prior to the second season. I think something similar would have, or could have, happened with “Rubicon.” At the least, I wish AMC had invested in one more season to find out.

I’m not the only one who will miss the show. (Here is Vanity Fair’s Mike Ryan bemoaning the show’s demise.) “Rubicon” was the only show I ever wanted to have a water-cooler conversation about. The problem was that no one else was at the water cooler yet.