Whiz of the Web: Friday Fried Onions

A steaming hot pile of our favorite things from around the internets.

• It's Friday the 13th, and Cinematical has a nice present for us, in honor of the holiday.
• We usually find ourselves talking about a different Penn University around here, but Penn State is having a rap contest to build excitement about their big college football celebration, Blue & White Weekend on April 20 and 21st, and that's amusing. See the entries here (you have to sit through a short commercial/preview video first), and vote for your favorites here. (Via James)
• Ooh! Drawn! is doing a cool giveaway: send an email to drawn.contests@gmail.com containing your name and mailing address, and with "ANIMATION SHOW" in the subject line, by midnight this coming Monday (April 16th), and you could win one of five Animation Show DVD box sets that they're giving away! The Animation Show, if you didn't know, is an awesome touring animated film festival put together by Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt. The box set contains everything shown during the festival in its first two years, plus various other little bits and pieces that didn't make the cut. Awesome!
• This two-part Russian animated short film that's sort of a comedic, postmodern Sherlock Holmes story is very entertaining, and worth the time it takes to watch. (Via)
• Bountee looks like a pretty cool site; you can use it to design and sell your own T-shirts, as well as buy other people's. (Via)
• YouTube is giving the Democratic and Republican candidates for President a weekly spotlight, starting next Wednesday. Because what we all need are more political ads! However, YouTube members can also submit responses to the videos. Which is either insane or pure genius.
• They're still planning to make a Jurassic Park IV, and Laura Dern will be in it, but Joe Johnston will not be directing.
• Christina Ricci has signed on to play Speed's girlfriend Trixie in the upcoming live action Speed Racer movie. Nice choice! She actually looks kind of cartoonish...
• Sorry, but we cannot resist posting a link to pictures of cute monkeys on a tower made up of 5,000 bananas. That is gold.
• Cinematical posted their list of movie characters they'd like to date on Moviefone a while back; now they've put up a similar list, but this time generated by their readers. Our favorite picks: Nancy Callahan from Sin City (played by Jessica Alba), Westley from The Princess Bride, Captain Jack, Wolverine, and Leeloo from Fifth Element. Really the only choice we found particularly odd is Frodo. C'mon, if you're going to pick somebody from those movies, it's got to be Aragorn! (Via)
• Cinematical also has for us today a great big fat juicy list of all the big Summer movies that Paramount is putting out this year, complete with pictures, plot summaries, and other details. Neat!
• You know what, no, open source movies are not the wave of the future, in the same way that "choose your own adventure" books were not the wave of the future. That kind of thing is fun every once in a while (and indeed, the idea of being able to edit together our own version of the Star Wars films is a tempting one), but the rest of the time we just want to sit back and be entertained like the lazy slobs we are.

Image Credit: Flickr user numberstumper