The French magazine Sport & Style recently put together an elegant little photo essay featuring the costumes from various famous films. Can you name each movie using only the costume pieces shown?

If you know an answer, put it in the comments. One answer per player for now — let’s give more than one person a shot at this. Or if you absolutely cannot wait to know the answers (and you speak French), you can find the full photoessay here.

I’ve seen my share of con games — Three Card Monte and the like — but I’ve never before seen one in the form of a hand-cranked automaton. I can make some guesses as to how this works, but I’m not sure I want to know for sure. That would spoil it.

Stefan Fatsis (author of Word Freak) reports on all the drama — and there was plenty of drama — from this year’s tournament.

This past weekend was the National Scrabble Championship. I watched some of the games live on the Web — it’s hypnotically fascinating to watch these word geniuses play things like UNWISHED across two triple-word scores, netting 176 points in one go. (Not that I saw that one happen, but it’s a good example of how impressive these players are.)

But the most mind-boggling thing to come out of the tournament may be this board created by Dan Stock. All the words are legit, and it uses all 100 Scrabble tiles.

Hat tip to Trip Payne. Photo credit: Patricia Hocker of the National Scrabble Association.

What are these musicians sitting on, exactly? I love it when elements of magic work their way into non-magic performances.

Hat tip: Neatorama. (I expect to say the words “Hat tip: Neatoarama” an awful lot on this blog.)