This is remarkable customer service/damage control from an airline I routinely hear complaints about. English travelers trapped in Japan (for potentially nine days) were rewarded with free hotel stays, a flight to New York, where they were put up for a few days in 4-star hotels and given money for food, and then flown back to Glasgow via Dublin.

So instead of sleeping in airports like most other people, they had a free holiday on the side, complete with champagne and leopard-print bathrobes.

I found this last night while going through some old files on my harddrive. Someone at my old job had forwarded it to me as an example of humor in Thai advertising. As always, it’s all about the twist.

(In case the translation doesn’t make it sufficiently clear, the sporty tires gave him away.)

Buzzfeed collects a bunch of YouTubers doing creative Lady Gaga covers. I’m currently on the second video, where a guy called “Beatbox Hitman” is absolutely killing it.

Edit: Probably only #2 and #4 are worth seeing. #5 if you have time.

By which they really mean: freelancers and people who loaf about the home in their pajamas, take naps in the afternoon, and tweet incessantly.

Hilarious stuff from the NYT; find out how much you can deduct for pointing out grammatical errors in a sign or poster (oh boy, this really cuts too close to home for me).

Good piece from Kontra (counternotions.com) summarizing the empire Apple has managed to build over the last decade, and what developers angry at the App Store model will lose by walking away. And to where?

In order to become a better garden for developers, it’s not enough for other vendors to offer something that iPhone or iPad doesn’t. They have to match and better Apple’s current iPhone OS driven devices across all fronts. webOS had multitasking but no content. Nokia has market share but no direction or excitement. RIM caters to enterprise but not much else. Motorola still thinks it’s enough to manufacture handsets and leave everything else to ‘partners’ that turn around and stab you in the back.

Yet another beautiful Flash presentation from Uniqlo, this time in celebration of a new store in Shanghai. What is it? A grid of synchronized video thumbnails of girls wearing Uniqlo products, doing dance moves with their hands. Patterns emerge in waves and ripples. Music probably by Fantastic Plastic Machine once again. It works.

This is great news for board game lovers. I enjoy Carcassonne far more than Settlers of Catan, which got a lackluster, multiplayer-less iPhone version last year. Both games are available for the Nintendo DS, where Carcassonne has a barebones, unattractive presentation, but Catan is quite alright. In fact, the iPhone port of Catan looked even better.

The screenshots released so far suggest that Carcassonne on the iPhone is also going to be an improvement, and one sold at a much lower price at that. Which really makes Nintendo’s tough talk sound like famous last words.

April 8, 2010 will be remembered as the day that science set the Unagi free. In time, could this bring the price down to, say, $10 for a rice bowl?!