June 2007 Archives
Prince is giving away a free CD in a national British newspaper, The Mail. The music retail industry executives are viewing this as an attack and are threatening to 'retaliate'. 'The Artist Formerly Known as Prince should know that with behavior like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores. And I say that to all the other artists who may be tempted to dally with the Mail on Sunday,' said Entertainment Retailers Association spokesman Paul Quirk. Mr Quirk also said it would be 'an insult' to record stores. Obviously the music industry views anything that doesn't result in a sale to be subversive or unfair. I say it's Prince's music and he can bloody well give it away if he wants to.
All This and World War II is a 1976 musical documentary that mixes World War II newsreels and movie clips with Beatles covers. Looks like Hitler disapproved. Wikipedia; hard to believe Terry Gilliam passed on this. Reviews, extensive case study, and interviews.
Even by the standards of the studio which dropped such oddities as "Myra Breckinridge," "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" and "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," this flick was more than peculiar.You can watch the entire movie (parts one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven) or just watch Frankie Valli's "A Day in the Life" (D-Day), Henry Gross's "Help!" (North Africa), Wil Malone & Lou Reizner's "You Never Give Me Your Money" (Liberation of Europe), Keith Moon's "When I'm 64" (US troop ships in the Pacific), The Bee Gees' "Golden Slumbers" (The Blitz; what is it with them and horrible Beatles movies?), Elton John's "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" (air war/kamikazes), and the London Symphony Orchestra's "The End." (The LSO did most of the music in the film.)
The Bee Gees also do "She Came In Through The Bathroom Window" and "Sun King" (Japan moves toward Pearl Harbor), The Brothers Johnson do "Hey Jude" (Stalin and the Red Army), Ambrosia does "Magical Mystery Tour" (Germany invades Poland), Leo Sayer does "I Am the Walrus" (Pearl Harbor attack) and "Let It Be" (internment of Japanese Americans), Jeff Lynne does "Nowhere Man" (Mussolini), Helen Reddy does "The Fool on the Hill" (Hitler), Peter Gabriel does "Strawberry Fields Forever" (his first solo song; Chamberlain appeases Hitler; "living is easy with eyes closed"), Rod Stewart does "Get Back" (as Nazis march backwards in reversed footage), and Tina Turner does "Come Together." And that's not all! (Somehow they avoided the temptation of matching U-Boats with "Yellow Submarine.")
You can buy the CD if you dare. AMG soundtrack review.
The Bee Gees also recorded "She's Leaving Home," "Lovely Rita," and "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," but those recordings weren't used in the film.
Totally rad Frontline video about Hero Rats who sniff out unexploded land mines in rural Tanzania. Not only a great idea, but this story had me on the edge of my seat: are the rats on a suicide mission or not?
The Database of Mid-Victorian Wood-engraved Illustration (Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research, Cardiff University) hosts well over eight hundred images from Victorian texts; you can browse the site by iconographic themes and features (tools, religion, etc.) or conduct more specific searches by author, publisher, and the like. For more overviews of Victorian book illustration, visit Bob Speel's nineteenth-century art website, which features a number of pages devoted to various topics in book illustration, and the Victorian Web. Illuminated Books features a small collection of digitized illustrated works, many of them Victorian; there's a larger collection at Children's Books Online. The Victorian novelist we most closely associate with book illustration is Charles Dickens, and David Perdue has brief biographical sketches of his various illustrators, with examples of their work. Famous illustrators with their own websites include Sir John Tenniel, Arthur Rackham, and Randolph Caldecott.
The Order of Canada, Canada's highest civilian honour, is forty years old this year. Some of its Members, Officers, and Companions include people like John Kenneth Galbraith, Dan Aykroyd, Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood, Jean Chrétien, Northrop Frye, Pierre Trudeau, Bryan Adams, Roberta Bondar, Bruce Cockburn, Wayne Gretzky, Mary Pratt, David Cronenberg, and current Governor General Michaëlle Jean, who is not only haute, but hawt.
I love my friends...My friends love me...We're just as friendly...As friends can be...And just because...We really care... Whatever we get, we share.
World Clock SWF application showing the time of day expressed in actual time, the number of species passed into extinction, barrels of oil produced, the temperature of the earth, prison population, world population, and deaths by various causes. Because, y'know, you weren't depressed enough already. Site also offers a number of free games, calculators and applications for your own site.
After Kwai Chung Caine and the Phantom - The Sadhu - the story of one man's choice between his spiritual oath and his human instincts. Brought to you by Virgin Comics. PDF of first issue.
Planet Earth, the new Prince album, to be given away for free as a newspaper insert. Music industry bigwigs splutter, fume.
MusicMoose wants "to provide the world with free, useful music lessons, and a community based site to help back it all up." The site contains hundreds of free video music lessons (often containing notation and/or tablature) with a distinct focus on acoustic and bluegrass music, all taught by some pretty badass pickers (including the astonishingly good mandolin shredder Anthony Hannigan). There are also obligatory but very useful forums. Takeaway: the whole thing is free and you don't have to register to watch the lessons.
A few cool shelves: a skull shelf and another, made of books by Jim Rosenau, invisible shelf, secret stash shelf, accordion shelf by Thut Möbel, maze shelf and broken shelves.
This weekend marks the 10th anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong to the mainland Chinese after 155 years of colonial British rule. Memories of the day are still online, showing the fear that the promised "One Country, Two Systems" policy was a trojan horse. Ten years later, the promise seems intact. Though universal suffrage seems a distant dream, religious and political freedoms are almost on par with Western standards and the economy has survived shipping its industry north. People are marking the day in different ways, while some just want to offer advice
"PLASMA PONG is a variation of PONG that utilizes real-time fluid dynamics to drive the game environment. ... In the game you can inject plasma fluid into the environment, create a vacuum from your paddle, and blast shockwaves into the playing area."
Essential tones of music rooted in human speech. Original Duke University paper by Deborah Ross, Jonathan Choi and Dale Purves [pdf].
"Should we ever hear the space-phone ringing, for God's sake let us not answer". First we are told Space Colonisation is a stupid and expensive idea. Then that contact with space aliens is inadvisable. Maybe David Bowie was right, the government would just ruin it anyway. That's why we can't have nice things.
5 types of Chinese fish subject to temporary import ban. Melamine in farmed fish. The safety of fish farming in question. Are we risking a trade war with China over food? Some see an upside to food globalization. China's loss may be the Gulf Coast's gain.
Stephen Colbert's Tek Jansen: The Comic Book is coming to newsstands in two weeks, but you can see an entire 7-page Tek story at Entertainment Weakly Weekly's EWW EW.com. A little promotionally fluffy info. Of course, there has already been Tek Jansen fan fiction, but this is, like, authorized and pre-read by Stephen Himself.
Fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 rejoice! Three of MST3K's writer/characters - Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett, and Kevin Murphy - have started a new venture: The Film Crew.
Dr. Craig Venter, known for his role as a pioneer in the human genome project, has taken a major step towards creating life from scratch: transplanting the entire genome from one bacterium cell to another. Commence the ethics wars.
Mary Shelly's (awful/wonderful) Frankenstein rap. They read the book, eh?
Had to take the day off work, sux
Hey Kids,
Almost done the complete redesign, sorry if it looked ugly off and on, decided to not bother building a dev server to test the site on, figured screw it, its just a blog. The way I figure it, I know how to run a secure site, who cares if its ugly for a little bit? Least it runs.
This guy's grandmother received this rejection letter from Walt Disney Productions in 1938, telling her that she wasn't welcome at animator training school because she was a girl. The sting seems to have been mitigated somewhat by the excellent stationery they sent the note on.
Matthias Wandel's astounding wooding calculatory enigma. A woodworker turns his talents to binary mathematics via a cunning series of cats-eyes, clinkers and rounders. Plus many other marbled wonders.
Anyone who has spent time browsing through Deviant Art has almost certainly run into the cartoons of a young Australian woman named Gemma Wilson. She is fond of Harry Potter, snakepeople and (occasionally) torture and hermaphrodites. She has a fan club. And she has detractors. Make of this what you will.
Bugaboo Daytrips is a gorgeous site featuring 22 strollable daytrips in major cities worldwide (not just US Only), all laid out on beautiful artistic (yet still helpful) maps with downloadable PDFs for taking with you on your wanderings. For those terrified of being marketed to, it should be noted that Bugaboo is a baby stroller company, although the site is by no means of restricted interest to parents only, and bugbaoo's presence on the site seems confined to the URL. Also note that unfortunately for those alergic to it, the site is designed entirely in Flash. On the other hand, the maps & art are really awesome, so you should do yourself a favor & get over it this time. Via.
Granular and Disordered Media. Condensed Matter Physics. Balloon jump. Balloon burst.
Red vs. Blue, the first and funniest long-running machinima series, is about to publish its grand finale, a 100th episode with a twist ending. Red vs. Blue has been running since April 1, 2003, a single hilarious storyline about the two rival armies in the video game Halo.
Having labored on the series for four years, Red vs. Blue creator Michael "Burnie" Burns, who remains the series' writer, editor, director and lead voice talent, wants to make sure fans aren't let down.
The 15-minute final episode will be "the biggest one we've ever done," says Burns, "but The Sopranos stole our ending, so we had to change it completely..."
"We didn't even know what machinima was," says Burns. "We played a ton of Halo at LAN parties because Xbox Live didn't exist yet. The humor of us yelling across the room led to Red vs. Blue.."
MIT researchers can reverse some symptoms of autism and mental retardation in mice by suppressing a specific enzyme. The research, conducted at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, is due to be posted on PNAS Online some time this week. Here is the MIT article. The specific symptoms reversed included hyperactivity, purposeless/repetitive movements, attention deficits and learning/memory challenges. The research was funded by the FRAXA Foundation, the Simons Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and the National Institutes of Health. According to the CDC, the genetic causes treated by this particular technique (called FXS) affects one in 4,000 males and one in 6,000 females of all races and ethnic groups. I would be interested in hearing about reactions that might be taking place in the various autism-related communities.
Puzzability is a puzzle writing company created by three former editors of Games Magazine. Start with their puzzle sampler and come back for a set of regularly updated games. Puzzability is also responsible for creating the New York Times' intricately crafted Op-Ed Puzzles. Unlike the Times' daily crosswords, these wonderfully elaborate puzzles are available in a free archive.
Poets' Graves. An international collection of.....wait for it.....poets' graves. Fascinating bios, a forum and a nice selection of classic poetry.
Möbius Transformations Revealed [yöutube alert]
See also: Stereographic Projection Demo.
Who was Garry Owens?
That�s right, he's an American radio announcer, but kids all over the world grew up with his distinctive voice
He probably better known for his work as the voice of this great American cold war warrior, and grist to this gratuitous youtube post.
Oh mah tailbone! Classic episodes of Deputy Dawg. Hen House Hassle; Seize You Later, Alligator; Dog-Gone Catfish; and Aig Plant. Oh, mah cotton-pickin' tailbone!
The Record Industry's Decline. "The record companies have created this situation themselves," says Simon Wright, CEO of Virgin Entertainment Group, which operates Virgin Megastores. Rosen and others see that 2001-03 period as disastrous for the business. "That's when we lost the users," Rosen says. "Peer-to-peer took hold. That's when we went from music having real value in people's minds to music having no economic value, just emotional value."
LOOK UP! (or down, if you happen to be reading from one of these. The annual "Amazing Roswell UFO Festival" happens this weekend, and it looks like people - er, visitors - are coming from all over! Who knew back in 1947 that this little incident would be the start of an entire sub-culture? Well, for me the fascination started with two of the the greatest UFO movies ever. For my grandparents, it started with one of the greatest radio broadcasts ever. But hey, there's no need to rely on fiction when we have one of the most insanely great UFO videos of all time provided by none other than the Mexican Government! Seen anything strange in the sky yourself lately? If so, you'd better report it here.
Classic Car Restorations - I was particularly taken by the Model A and the parade ground car of Stalin.
In 1973 CIA director James Schlesinger asked "employees to report activities they thought might be inconsistent with the Agency�s charter." You know, illegal stuff, black ops, the works. The resulting top secret documents are called the "Family Jewels." Today they were released. Press release with link to documents.
Fifty years ago, I suspect that along with Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and Sandy Koufax, most Americans could have named, at the very least, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Arthur Miller, Thornton Wilder, Georgia O'Keeffe, Leonard Bernstein, Leontyne Price, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Not to mention scientists and thinkers like Linus Pauling, Jonas Salk, Rachel Carson, Margaret Mead, and especially Dr. Alfred Kinsey.The prepared text of the speech delivered by Dana Gioia at Stanford University Commencement on June 17, 2007.
Introducing rPhone - Industry insiders at PiratePalooza have the specs on the first iPhone killer.
Contraption. Yes, it's a single link video post. Yes, it's explicitly a viral. Yes, parts of it appear to be faked. It's still awesome.
Robert Watt, Canada's Chief Herald is retiring. He has held the office since its inception in 1988 and has developed an
international reputation for practicing an old world art in a new world context. Among his more interesting designs are those for the municipality of Delta, British Columbia, an Ottawa synagogue and the personal coat of arms for our Haitian-born Governor-General, Michaëlle Jean.
This fellow reads up on electricity generating machines in old books and then builds them.
ThinkGeek is selling this sweet-looking DIY video-game console kit for $200. If your kids are going to spend the summer indoors getting pasty, at least they can learn a trade:
Written by best-selling game development author Andre' LaMothe, the included book is your complete guide to developing games, graphics, and media applications for the Propeller Powered Hydra Game console. The book assumes you have only basic programming experience. It covers all aspects of the Propeller chip from its architecture to using the Propeller Tool IDE for programming in both Spin and assembly language, with numerous demo programs to use as starting points for your own games.Included on the CD is all the source code and executables for all the included games, demos, tools and examples. Additionally, "Hydra Tiny BASIC" based on the "Tiny BASIC" specification originally published in "Dr. Dobb's Journal" in 1975 is included. With this classic version of BASIC you can write programs directly on the Hydra without the need for a PC! Simply load BASIC into the Hydra or on the included game cartridge and you are up and running with nothing more than your TV and keyboard.
Snip from essay by David Barboza of the New York Times:
As an American journalist based in China, I knew there was a good chance that at some point I'd be detained for pursuing a story. I just never thought I'd be held hostage by a toy factory.
That's what happened last Monday, when for nine hours I was held, along with a translator and a photographer, by the suppliers of the popular Thomas & Friends toy rail sets.
"You've intruded on our property," one factory boss shouted at me. "Tell me, what exactly is the purpose of this visit?" When I answered that I had come to meet the maker of a toy that had recently been recalled in the United States because it contained lead paint, he suggested I was really a commercial spy intent on stealing the secrets to the factory's toy manufacturing process.
"How do I know you're really from The New York Times?" he said. "Anyone can fake a name card."
Tim Knowles put a digital camera inside a cardboard box and rigged it so that it would snap a photo every ten seconds through a small hole in the box. Then he sent the box through the mail. It recorded a total of 6994 images and he made a movie with them. It's really cool!
I'm pretty hot for these quote-unquote bookends, made of concrete with a synthetic rubber cover.
Georgia Brown of Hampshire, England, has a 152 IQ and is the youngest member of MENSA. She's two years old. Brown's parents noticed how clever she was after she started crawling at five months, walking at nine, and chatting with people by the time she was eighteen months old.
From the BBC News:
(Middlesex University) psychologist Joan Freeman, who tested Georgia, said she thought the toddler could have scored even higher but needed a nap after 45 minutes of work...She told the BBC: "She is two years, nine months - not very much older than a toddler really - and she is able to answer questions five and six-year-olds can't.
"The test uses questions like 'If brother is to boy, then sister is to ...?'. If you take a normal two-year-old, they cannot hold a pencil, they don't know the colours and they would not be able to answer those simple questions.
"The thing I found most striking was the copying of a circle. Most two-year-olds cannot do that but she drew a perfect one.
The Central Intelligence Agency has just declassified 700 pages of documents about such creepy, strange, and titillating subjects as "cranks, nuts, and screwballs," "Soviet Tactical Laser Weapons," and "USSR-UFO Sightings." For example, here's a section of the mostly-redacted thriller "(TITLE DELETED)-USSR-UFO SIGHTINGS-SOMEONE MUST HAVE MADE A POLITICAL DECISION":
One one occasion XXXX asked if the U.S. forecast has even bothered with U.F.O. sightings. He explained that one time the XXXXXXXXX and the XXX in particular, has been plagued with calls and questions about the U.F.O. sightings. He said that some of their scientific balloon flights had prompted some of them. Now, he said, he never gets these calls anymore and half joking surmised that someone must have made a political decision that they were not to be sighted anymore.
A driver allegedly zonked on cocaine tried to elude police by driving through a cornfield. The moron ruined the farmer's crop, as seen in this photo.
SciTalks - from the press release [19 June]: "The site launches today with over 1,000 lectures online, and more are being added daily. Segments range from a series of hour-long lectures by the late Richard Feynman, to a short, hilarious Ali G interview with Noam Chomsky, and a fascinating talk on designing a semiconductor-based brain, by up-and-coming Stanford researcher Kwabena Boahen."
The top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills. "Obsolescence is a relative -- not absolute -- term in the world of technology."
BTW, in case you didnt notice, I'm goofing around with a new style or two. Stay tuned.
The folks from Japanese public TV's excellent children's show "Pythagora Switch" have for several years been creating some of the most delightful and inventive Rube Goldberg-esque contraptions you're likely to ever see. Here's a 9 minute clip featuring lots of these little kinetic masterpieces, guaranteed to entertain.
Boy's Hug Lands Him in Trouble At School With "No Touching" Policy. 7th grader Hal Beaulieu "hopped up from his lunch table one day a few months ago, sat next to his girlfriend and slipped his arm around her shoulder. That landed him a trip to the school office." Handshakes could be gang signs, and officials note, "in a culturally diverse school...families might have different views of what is appropriate." The PTA President remarks: ""Even high-fives can get out of hand ... someone can get bonked in the head." (CNN News Video)
Nearly all movie trailers shown in theaters, and on the web, come with a so-called green tag, saying they are approved for all audiences, or a red tag, saying they are approved for only restricted audiences. Since 2000, many theaters will not run red tag trailers; Warner Brothers will not make red tag trailers, and Universal Pictures has not ran one in theaters since "American Pie" in 1999. Wishing to show audiences more "edgy" previews, the producers are looking to the internet.
Rob Zombie�s �Halloween� remake became the first to display a new yellow tag, signaling that the movie was rated PG-13 or above, and the preview was �approved only for age-appropriate Internet users� � mandatd by the MPAA as visitors to sites either frequented mainly by grown-ups (as determined by Nielsen's Web Demographic reports) or accessible only between 9 p.m. and 4 a.m.
This August�s �Superbad� (autoplay music...) has an R-rated, red tag internet trailer, which MPAA regulations require a viewer to pass an age-verification test, in which the viewer 17 and older has to match their name, birthday and ZIP code against public government records on file."
In 2003, the Flying Karamazov Brothers workshopped a piece with The Bobs entitled "The Comedy of Eras". In 1992, they performed a show about Le Pétomane billed as "A Comedy of Airs". And in 1983, they started the cycle by creating a vaudeville adaptation of Shakespeare's "The Comedy of Errors". When they brought this adaptation back to the stage in 1987, PBS aired a performance live from Lincoln Center. Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of that broadcast, and if you enjoy good juggling or bad Shakespeare, you can celebrate by watching it online: part 1, part 2.
Chippewa Lake Park is a former amusement park in Ohio; opened in 1878, it closed in 1978 due to lack of attendance. During the decades since then, the ballroom, roller coasters & other rides have lain abandoned as the surrounding forest reclaims them.
Dale Rippy, 62, killed a rabid bobcat with his bare hands when it attacked him on his porch in Wesley Chapel, Florida. The Vietnam vet was later treated for bites, scratches, and exposure to rabies. From Associated Press:
Dale Rippy endured the (25 pound) bobcat�s slashes and bites until it clawed into a position where he could grab it by the throat. Then he strangled it.
When I read this, I flashed back to some storys Firlotte.com told me about his father. Heh.
The concept of alphabetization was invented at the Great Library of Alexandria in the third century BC, with words grouped by first letter. It wasn't until 1053, in the Elementarium doctrinae erudimentum that recursive alphabetization (where "Aab" comes before "Aac" and after "Aaa") appeared in rudimentary form.
You'd think that by now we'd have the process down, but controversies still rage. Does "sea foam" come before "seaborne"? Does "Michael Jackson" come before "Nick Cave"? Throw in international characters and an occasional foray into ASCIIbetical order and it's no wonder the alphabet can be so frustrating.
Two words: Hip Hop and Theremin. Turns out the weird, spooky sci-fi noise machine plays all sorts of good music: Video Killed the Radio Star, The Legend of Zelda and sometimes, in the right hands, it speaks of a man's love of White Castle.
It's been nearly 50 years since the beginning of the International Geophysical Year (IGY), an 18-month period of scientific activities and discoveries that ran from July 1, 1957, to December 31, 1958. Both the US and the USSR launched the world's first artificial satellites during the IGY (Sputnik 1 and Explorer 1). Other achievements of the IGY included the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts and the mapping of mid-ocean ridges. The IGY also inspired at least one artistic endeavor: Steely Dan's Donald Fagen wrote his 1982 solo song "I.G.Y. (International Geophysical Year)" as an homage to 50s optimism.
15 year old Indian boy performs a Caesarean Section on pregnant woman in presence of his Doctor parents. Father stands by his son�and says he did nothing wrong.
Scans from Jack Kirby's comic book adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Here are some scans of his sketches as well. You can read more about the adaptation here and here.
"The business is definitely an art, the men are craftsmen..."(YT) NYC's rooftop water tanks are a unique and often overlooked part of the city. Watch as one goes up (its worth the 10 minutes for the money shot at the end): "New York, is water tanks, yes."(YT)
"New York, which has thousands of cylindrical wooden rooftop water tanks with conical roofs, couldn't exist without them." Its the only city with its own section under Wiki's water tower page.
The Times reports: Lily-livered milquetoasts trying to suffocate the British insult. In case you illiterate turkey-buggering colonials have comprehension troubles, consult this handy glossary and usage guide.
Public Domain Photos. An extraordinarily rich resource for free stock photography.
The Simpsons Movie website just went live. In 12 languages, apparently (including non-American English).
Coping: A Survival Guide for People with Asperger Syndrome. A short, to-the-point guide to the unwritten rules of life.
Travis Corcoran is the owner of a wonderful how-to DVD rental service called SmartFlix. One of the publishers of a DVD that SmartFlix offers didn't like the idea that SmartFlix was renting out his video so he retained a lawyer, Robert H. Tourtelot, to try to get SmartFlix to stop renting the DVD.
Corcoran has published the email messages that the DVD maker and his lawyer has sent him, along with Corcoran's replies to these clueless emails. The lawyer was so out of his league with Corcoran that he resorted to making jokes about Corcoran's height! The email exchanges are hilarious.
Tourtelot: Dear Mr. Corcoran: I am in receipt of your e-mail to my client, Mr. XXX. I note your comments about me. I have a proposition for you. I will pay your way to California if you will agree to come and meet me in a gym, the address of which the limo driver who meets your flight will have.
Oh yes, the deal only includes a one-way ticket, as I do not believe you will be needing the return portion! Ciao, and have a good day. RHT
Corcoran: Are you proposing a boxing or MMA match?
I accept. I'll pay my own way back, of course.
Any weekend in June works for me.
Please mail the airline ticket (departing from Logan Airport, in Boston) to the address I previously supplied.
I look forward to our bout (I usually do heavy bag work in my training sessions, but I'll make sure to add some speed bag work to the mix over the next few weeks).
Shall we specify the same $1,000 wager that you suggested to Mr. XXX in your bet about my height?
Tourtelot: Plain and simple, pal. A street fight.! By the way, do you have a Black Belt also?
Corcoran: Please send the plane ticket.
I love themeparks, but I don't care for thrill rides -- I'm a Haunted Mansion guy, not an upside-down vomitcoaster 3000 guy. I don't have the stomach for it. Besides, people get hurt on those things.
A girl's feet were cut off Thursday when a free-fall thrill ride malfunctioned at the Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom Amusement Park in Louisville, Kentucky, police said.
A cord wrapped around the 16-year-old's feet and severed them at her ankles while she was on the "Superman Tower of Power," a police dispatcher said. The girl was taken to a local hospital.
Charming arrangement of toy cars depicting riots, murders etc.
Patrick Kovacich made this steampunky "Problem" light that you can switch on when your life is giving you problems; he lavishly documented the build in a Flickr set so you can make your own.
Here's a collection of 20 videos produced by amateur magicians showing you how to do some wonderful tricks with cards and other small props. Shown here: The Snap Vanish.
The Juice Bag is a beach tote with an integrated solar panel that will charge your phone, camera, laptop and MP3 player while you manufacture vitamin D.
Simple and striking DIY "soldier table" -- just line up your soldiers on a flat surface and cover with a sheet of glass.
The "toy soldier table" is very remenescent of the super-cool 'Floor' installation by Do-Ho Suh at the Indianapolis Museum of Art
From the BBC News website, this report highlights some of the ridiculous, yet common, reasons for UK visa refusal -- including 'planning a holiday for no particular purpose other than sightseeing.'
The government goofballs who reject tourist visas for no good reason also delight in using confusing language to explain why tourist visas were rejected:
The provenance of the funds depicted is not evidenced allied to other financial commitments.You have failed to complete pivotal areas of Section 6.
P>I can only assess your mutual knowledge in a subjective context.
A Field Guide to Chess Tactics. Chess tactics explained in plain English, with hundreds of examples. A great site for beginning to mid-level players. Includes a large library of positional problems, organized thematically, with the solutions explained and discussed. For example, learn about knight forks, then quiz yourself on the same topic.
Ratmaze 2 is a flash game by PixelJam.
You are a RAT. Start ACTING LIKE ONE. You noble mission: to EAT ALL CHEESE. Your universe consists of an ATARI MAZE. Your soundtrack is COOL PCM MUSIC. Eating cheese awards MORE TIME. DON'T FORGET THE CRUMBS! Eating FRUIT speeds you up. Eat LETTERS for SECRET BONUS. Some walls are FAKE. Get ALL THE CHEESE for AWESOME BONUS ROUND. Solve bonus round for .
PixelJam also made Gamma Bros..
Sarah Silverman roasting Paris Hilton at the MTV Movie Awards.
Some Girls and Cars. Just Girls.* Just Cars. Some Girl(?) and Her Cars. Some Girl's Cars.*Some Car Girls. Some Girls.Cars.
(*=Mildly NSFW if you work for idiots)
The LED Museum has long been the Internet's premier source of absolutely obsessive LED and Laser analysis. Going strong since 1999, Craig Johnson's amassed quite a range of test equipment. Recently, he acquired a Playstation 3 Blu-Ray Laser Module. Did he mod it? Oh yes he did. (Warning: NSFC64)
Crazy Mammoths is the finest single-button, mammoths-encased-in-blocks-of-ice racing game.
The great-grandfather could walk six miles to go fishing; the grandfather could walk a mile to go to the woods; the son can't go more than 300 yards from his house. How children lost the right to roam, including a map illustrating the point.
There goes an a**hole. Brooklyn neighborhood security camera set to music.
Prisons of the World | Interesting locations, harsh conditions and little known facts, includes images and video.
The Impossible Quiz: A very addictive quiz for demented minds.
I'm officially jealous of the people who get to work in this office workspace custom designed to look like Captain Nemo's Nautilus, from 20,000 Leagues.
�There has never been a massively successful consumer device based solely on a touch screen� ...designers and marketers of electronic devices centers are having a spirited debate about whether consumers will have the patience to overcome the hurdle that will be required to type without the familiar tactile feedback offered by conventional keyboards.
Any significant number of returns of the iPhone could conceivably undermine what until now has been a remarkable promotional blitzkrieg that culminates in the phone�s release June 29.
I have been called a voluptuary, a sybarite, a hedonist, a creep. .. George Meyer's silly rhapsody on conferences, symposia, seminars, etc.: "The OFF-SITE is a born provocateur. She blends the dirty fun of a PowerPoint presentation with the raw danger of a Kaffeeklatsch. One minute she�s showing you charts and graphs, then up pops a �Far Side� cartoon. It�s high-stakes poker, and everything�s wild."
from the New Yorker , May 2007.
Iron Butterfly Line Dancing. That is all.
An "order of magnitude older than the dinosaurs," even older than clams, bugs, vertebrates, are jellyfish. At almost 600 million years old, jellyfish are some of the oldest animals on the earth that have survived the test of time. Dr. Lisa-ann Gershwin, (yes, of that Gershwin family) is a scientist studying jellyfish in Queensland, Australia and was recently interviewed by the ABC. I was particularly disturbed by her gripping description of the tiny Irukandji jellyfish and how the venom affects humans. This summer, swim at your own risk.
A bowhead whale was recently killed off the coast of Alaska. When its hunters carved it up, they discovered someone else had attempted to kill it- more than a century earlier.
Australian TV show The Chaser recently went to New York and asked some American citizens what date the September 11 attacks occurred on. Here are some of their answers.
Here's the background of one of the nastiest divorce/custody/dead baby stories you're ever likely to run across. Alan Rodgers is a horror writer. This is his wikipedia entry, and this is his blog/forum at sff.net. He was originally married to Amy Stout, and together they had three children, two girls and a boy. After he tried to kill Amy Stout, she left him and married --
Me, Dan Moran. I'm the handsome dude in the eyepatch, if you click through to my profile. Together Alan and Amy #2 had a baby: Anthony Rodgers. Who died under interesting circumstances. A tragedy, I believe Alan Rodgers has called it, and by "tragedy" I suspect he means, "Thank God I wasn't prosecuted for negligent homicide." Or worse.
Sniff, Swig, Puff and your cares are temporarily gone.
Safari: innocuous browser alternative or sneaky way for Apple to build its homegrown platform on top of Windows? Through suggestions and bundling Apple is installing more on your PC than just a browser.
The Easy-Glider is everything the Segway is, but cheaper. Electric engine, 16-25 kilometers (10-15 miles) on a charge. Looks like fun [8mb qt] for only less than EU1000 ($1300 US).
Decorate a bus with paint, stencils, and other graffiti. (Click the big red button, and then the paint bucket to get started. You'll figure out the drawing controls. Click the "All-around view" icon in the upper right to return from drawing and OK! to save it, if you like - give it a name, and you'll get a linkable URL.) Here's a gallery of designs.
Self-Diagnosis: Five anonymous doctors frankly discuss their patients, other doctors, American healthcare, and the inevitable mistakes doctors make, including mistakes they've personally made that jeopardized their patients' lives.
The Wang Freestyle (warning: Google Video; part one of video). A curious footnote in the history of computing that took the desktop metaphor to new levels back in 1988. Featured sampled sound, high-res graphics, and the ability to stack documents on top of each other, the last of which is due in a certain big cat operating system later this year. Watch for how slow the system is, and the subsequent magician-like distraction techniques used by the presenter to avoid people noticing.
If you missed Elvis Perkins on Late Night with David Letterman making their national television debut, at least now you can say you knew about these guys before they really hit the big time (check out "Acoustic Slip Away"). I first heard about them on Lex and Terry. Warning, may be NSFW, youtube and audio links. Click at your own risk.
Relive the glory days of being the only male flutist in the middle school band. Fløjte Hero. [warning: danish flash sound]
Poor Sean Clifton, age 6, doesn't know the difference between a cartoon and an ad. "They just, um, taste so fruity to me." "They taste fruity, the Fruit Loops? What about real fruit? How do you like real fruit?" "Mm... I don't really like it." Kellogg agrees to major changes in the marketing of foods that are considered of "poor nutritional quality".
"I just like to have the hottest of the hottest. Whatever's hot at the time" In the spring of 2007, Lauren Greenfield conducted interviews with Los Angeles teenagers on the subject of money and how it affects their lives.
The link is a 15-minute selection of those interviews.
How secure is your password? If you're like some people, it's probably not secure enough. When did you last change yours?
"What You Need, You Know I Got It!" The Detroit Free Press celebrates 40 years of Aretha Franklin's "Respect" in grand style.
The gals at Jezebel.com recently completed a short series about vaginal plastic surgery, called Pimp My Vag.
Not at all satisfied with the "Maxim Hot 100," the editors over at AfterEllen decided to ask their readers to assemble their own lesbian and bisexual-oriented Hot 100.
Meet JANO, the beautiful bicyle built out of wood. This hybrid bike is the thesis project of Roland Kaufmann and is designed for both the very active and every day cyclist.
We've all seen the multitouch interfaces of Jeff Han, Apple, Tactiva, and Microsoft. Now, the ultimate guerrilla hack - the $2 multitouch pad.
Fritz Kahn was a German writer & illustrator in the 1920s who specialized in illustrating the physical processes of human bodies as though they were machine powered. Perhaps it's easier to show than describe.
From the Makers of Desktop TD and Flash Circle TD, comes the all new, all-addictive Vector Tower Defense! Goodbye productivity.
According to Men's Health, you can gauge how done your steaks are by comparing the elasticity of the steak to the way the meaty part of your thumb feels as it progressively flexes.
It works like this: You touch your thumb to your index, middle, ring, and pinky fingers, and the further you reach, the harder your muscle becomes. Apparently this should match up relatively well with rare, medium rare, medium, and well done steaks as you work your way from index to pinky. With a long summer of barbecuing ahead, this tip should come in very useful.
Rare.
Medium Rare.
Medium Well. 
Well Done
The Story is in Dutch, but it has better quality footage of Bush losing his watch.
"You are the first person to sit right next to me." What does that tell you? "That you're smart." Marilyn Manson isn't doing industrial howls anymore, but still has all the melancholy you could ask for. Fun interview by Polly Vernon.
Has some strange man been having orgasms inside your wife or daughter? Sure, you may think not, but can you be sure?? You can now, thanks to the revolutionary new CheckMate (get it) Semen Detection Kit that is not, in fact, a joke despite how absolutely creepy it seems.
Modern Military Ruins in San Francisco. Really awesome Flickr set includes documentation of Hunters Point Shipyard, Treasure Island Naval Station, Alameda Naval Air Station, the SF-88 Nike Missile Site, Hamilton Field Air Force Base, and Mare Island Naval Shipyard.
Yes, you conscientiously refuse plastic shopping bags and use enviro bags as often as you can, but still the plastic bags manage to breed like roaches. How many plastic bags do you have stuffed in (naturally!) a large plastic bag somewhere in your home? And do you despair of ever using them up? Fear not! If you have more bags than home furnishings and décor items, you could make a chair, a few throw rugs, cushions, a chandelier, or a Christmas wreath. If you'd like a stylish yet waterproof wardrobe, you could make a cape, a raincoat, or a bra. It would be less utilitarian but equally cool to make your own menagerie: chickens, a zebra, more chickens, sea creatures, and still more chickens.
Or perhaps you've got a mental block and can't think of the bags as anything but bags, so you just make them into better bags. If you're artistic, you could glue them onto a canvas and paint over them with oils. If you're very artistic and enterprising, you could become an environmental artist like Nicole Johnson of Tasmania or John Dahlsen of Australia and sell your creations for thousands of dollars. Rest assured whatever you do make will outlive you as a plastic bag takes 100 years to decompose in a landfill. But then you may decide to simply hoard those bags for picking up your doggie's doo-doo, because their days are probably numbered. San Francisco was the first city in North America to ban the plastic bag, followed by the equally progressive if not quite as fabulous Leaf Rapids, Manitoba, and Ontario, Canada is gearing up to reduce the number of bags we use, and Australia has already made significant progress in that direction.
President Bush received a hero's welcome on a recent trip to Albania. This has been the first time a serving U.S. President has visited the country, and it's probably the first time a president has had his wristwatch stolen while shaking hands.
How to build and start a fire. How to build and start a fire with stone age tools. How to start a fire in an emergency. How to start a fire without matches. How to start a fire with sticks. How to start a fire with air - and possibly inspire the birth of the diesel engine. How to start a fire with ice. How to start a fire with chocolate and a coke can.
Weird Tales: The Strange Life of HP Lovecraft is a 45-minute BBC radio documentary: "Geoff Ward examines the strange life and terrifying world of the man hailed as America's greatest horror writer since Poe. During his life, Lovecraft's work was confined to lurid pulp magazines and he died in penury in 1937. Today, however, his writings are considered modern classics and published in prestigious editions. How did such a weird, wild and ungodly writer get canonised? Among the writers considering his legacy are Neil Gaiman, ST Joshi, Kelly Link, Peter Straub and China Mieville." ST Joshi, a biographer of Lovecraft, has an essay up on The Scriptorium. Wikisource has an extensive collection of his writings, including not only his most famous novels and short stories, but also essays, letters, poetry and legal documents. He is buried in the city of his birth, Providence, Rhode Island, where he does eternal lie, even though someone made an unsuccessful attempt to exhume him in 1997.
Dutty Wine - the new dance craze that's sweeping the nation, or "a demon sen' from de pit a hell dat is taking the lives of the youth even before dem have time to repent?"
Rome Reborn is a digital model of ancient Rome as it might have appeared on June 21, 320 AD, including the Colosseum and the Roman Forum. More info.
Papiroflexia (Spanish for "Origami") is the animated tale of Fred, a skillful paper folder who could shape the world with his hands. The creator gives his methods here (third post). His website Pixel Nitrate has several other animations.
An international cadre of volunteers have collected all the maps that appeared in the original editions. They're beautiful.
Weirdly, the volunteers who scanned these in have added this to their page: "These maps may not be reproduced for commercial purposes." Given that the maps are in the public domain, and that scanning a public domain image doesn't make it yours, I don't know why they think they can dictate the terms on which these are used. We all benefit from the public domain and no one has the right to tell you what you can and can't do with it. Might as well post the text of "Hamlet" and say, "This text may not be used for commercial purposes." Sez who?
Johnny Depp recently appeared on Japanese TV to promote Pirates of the Caribbean Part 3. He sat in a chair while a bunch of people stood to the side and spoke to him. Then some cute little kids gave him a talent show. Mr. Depp appeared uncomfortable, but was polite during the bizarre ordeal.
Here's a photo gallery of outrageously customized vans in Japan.
Bad album covers: Volume 1 and Volume 2, (NSFW content!). Two flickr sets of album covers to make you laugh. cry, scream in terror, or just quietly go WTF? In addition is the related site of Strange records, which includes a page of mp3s.
Make love not war? The Pentagon confirms that it was researching the possibility of a "gay bomb" that could "turn enemy soldiers into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex than fighting." BBC discusses this and other unorthodox U.S. weapons proposals.
"Oh, boy, sleep! That's where I'm a viking!" From the Simpsons episode "Lisa the Vegetarian," one small Ralph Wiggum line that's sparked some big debate on the internet. Does Ralph use "Viking" to mean "One who excels"? Or does Ralph dream of being a Scandinavian warrior? Not content to keep it online, people are calling radio shows (June 5th's episode, around the 49 minute mark) to gain support for their opinion. Perhaps only the show's writer, David Cohen, can settle this.
Mick Jagger joins his little brother Chris onstage in a pub. It's safe to say the 40-odd people in attendance at the The Bull's Head pub in southwest London were more than a little surprised to see the pair performing "Dead Flowers."
Silk Road links: Silk Road Seattle, The Silkroad Foundation, The British Library's Silk Road site, The Ancient Way of Trading, Lost Cities of the Silk Road and some pictures
Anger Management... heh, reminds of me a lot of Jenn.. heh
Back To The Future, Hill Valley is a "from the ground up" conversion of the videogame Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, with the goal being to re-set the game in the world of Doc Brown, Marty McFly & Biff Tannen. Sample videos of the progress so far. Please note that Hoverboards don't work on water. Via.
Tetris fridge magnets -- it was inevitable!
The Graffiti Research Lab, creators of the LED throwie and inspiration for the mooninite signs that destroyed the city of Boston in January, went to Barcelona with their amazing laser guided graffiti project system. Here's a video of the event, which has a good shot of the pedal-powered projection system.
The medical journal The Lancet reports on the case of a hospitalized man who was discovered to have green blood.
"It was sort of a green-black. … Like an avocado skin maybe," said the patient's doctor, Dr. Alana Flexman.
The patient may have had a condition called sulfhemoglobin, caused by a drug interaction that makes sulphur bind to red blood cells, preventing oxygen from binding. Warning, the article loaded with Mr. Spock jokes about the incident
In an experiment, a team from MIT were able to power a 60W light bulb from two meters away. Calling their demonstration "WiTricity" the researchers believe that a system is possible that could send electricity to your battery powered devices within a room sized space.
It's a Tesla-dream come true.
"WiTricity" is based on using coupled resonant objects. Two resonant objects of the same resonant frequency tend to exchange energy efficiently, while interacting weakly with extraneous off-resonant objects. A child on a swing is a good example of this. A swing is a type of mechanical resonance, so only when the child pumps her legs at the natural frequency of the swing is she able to impart substantial energy. Another example involves acoustic resonances: Imagine a room with 100 identical wine glasses, each filled with wine up to a different level, so they all have different resonant frequencies. If an opera singer sings a sufficiently loud single note inside the room, a glass of the corresponding frequency might accumulate sufficient energy to even explode, while not influencing the other glasses. In any system of coupled resonators there often exists a so-called “strongly coupled” regime of operation. If one ensures to operate in that regime in a given system, the energy transfer can be very efficient.
Heck of an edge, brownie! The perfect tool for making sure all your brownies have edges.
The Heiligendamm G8 summit just ended. While some stuck to alcohol-free beer, fresh French President Nicolas Sarkozy clearly had something a bit stronger before his press conference.
The Dance, historic illustrations of dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. A Project Gutenberg ebook. Brief, illustrated history of dance in India. Vintage belly dance YouTube videos.
Where the South Really Begins [Flash] Forget the Mason-Dixon Line. The South really starts at the Sweet Tea Line.
Boy is this cool. Mostly useless, completely awesome. Try flying.
Han Solo's Axe is a Gibson 335 with covered humbuckers. Jar Jar on Banjo, of course. Perhaps you'd rather have Yoda on your beast instead of in your band. Maybe when you rock out you just need a little extra force in your pick, knob, or guitar case . Just remember, Darth Maul throws the horns 24/7.
"... straight out of Down-Under, explosive stuntman-editor-producer-writer-actor-director Nash Edgerton delivers his latest effort, "Spider", a 9-minute action-thriller that gives an all-new meaning to old Peugeots, stunning blondes and love-jokes."
Artist Rosemarie Fiore converted an amusement park ride called The Scrambler into a giant drawing machine. The specially-outfitted Good-Time Mix Machine produces huge geometric paintings that resemble the output of a Spirograph.
From the project description:
I connected a gas generator and air compressor to buckets of paint and secured them into the seats of a Scrambler amusement park ride. Once the ride was in motion, paint sprayed out of the benches onto vinyl tarps placed underneath. The result is a series of enormous hypocycloid designs which recorded the hidden patterns created by the ride as it turned.
The city council of Glasgow is fighting illegal handbills with science: they're paying city workers to go around and stick "canceled" stickers on all the illegal gig posters put up around town.
Staff who patrol the city every working day spotting new posters and marking them are now a central part of the council's �100,000 a year war on flyposting.
And other workers have been issued with "canceled" stickers which make it clear the ad has been banned by the council.
And they have already had an impact on some rogue promoters who have been inundated with complaints from music fans.
People who have bought tickets to some of this summers big gigs have complained, thinking that an event, rather than the advert, had been canceled.
Here's a pretty damned simple ice-cream recipe: combine ingredients in a baggie. Fill a bigger baggie with ice, salt and the baggie of ingredients. Shake for five minutes. Ice cream. Who knew?
1. Fill the large bag half full of ice, and add the rock salt. Seal the bag.
2. Put milk, vanilla, and sugar into the small bag, and seal it.
3. Place the small bag inside the large one and seal again carefully.
4. Shake until mixture is ice cream, about 5 minutes.
5. Wipe off top of small bag, then open carefully and enjoy!
An even cooler way to make ice cream - especially on a hot day with a pack of kids - is to put the baggie with the ice cream ingredients inside a small can, and then put that can and the ice and salt in a coffee can. Tape the lid on securely and ask the kids to kick it around the back yard.
Here's a soccer-ball-shaped thing: put all the ingredients in, kids kick it around for a 15-20 mins.
Scientists are testing a new diet pill that expands to the size of a tennis ball in your stomach. When taken with two glasses of water, the slow-growing 'gelatinous blob' gives one the feeling of having eaten a plate of food. Although it's no replacement for diet and exercise, it could help some people control their urges.
Can I Borrow Your Fucking Pen? A fucking single link fucking YouTube post about some motherfucking viral ad for some really shitty beer. Swearing encouraged - let's get fucking drunk today.
Submachine (Future Loop Foundation) You are trapped in your cube a padded cell, and you need to escape. Another fine Submachine game from Mateusz Skutnik. You can probably escape well before lunch and still have time to push some of that paper out of your cell cube.
MySpaceMP3.org allows anyone to download any MP3 on MySpace for free. In many cases, these are the same MP3s bands are trying to sell via MySpace's relatively new Snocap service. Trouble for MySpace?
If you wanted a fish condo but couldn't afford to drop hundreds of dollars on your beta buddy, I have good news for you: Fish Bowl 2.0 is here to revolutionize the lives of your fish.
The Real Life Simpsons -- A creepy depiction of how The Simpsons would look if they were real.
TV actress and hotel heiress Paris Hilton, infamous for her inadvertent comedic stylings on reality show "The Simple Life", was ordered to return to serve her incarceration sentence today. The order comes fast on the heels of an evacuation from her correctional facility in Lynwood due to supposed health problems(nsfw).
If you could kiss yourself, would you?
These photos make it happen, and the results are ... disturbing.
Site is in French.
Strange, small wars throughout history. Some were border clashes named after the item that sparked the confrontation, like the British-American Pig War or the Missouri-Iowa Honey War. Some were bloodless, such as the Maine-New Brunswick Pork and Beans War and the Texas-Oklahoma Red River Bridge War. North Carolina's War of Regulation resulted in eighteen deaths and six later executions.
Tactics 100 Live A flash game similar to Final Fantasy Tactics or Ogre Tactics. Spend 100 points to create an 8 unit army and battle it out on a 7x7 grid. Practice against an AI opponent, or face off in multiplayer combat.
Simple switch turns cells embryonic. "Researchers have finally hit the jackpot: Embryo-free embryonic stem-cells!"
A new video by Jed Davis' Hanslick Rebellion. A meanspirited, though easy to identify with, piece about office small-talk. A feel good summer song for those of us tied to desks. Warning: Loud swearing.
A nice set of photographic glass-plate transparencies depicting life in Japan ca. 1910. These "Yokohama photographs" were sold to foreign tourists between about 1868 and 1912. I found the Crafts and Trades section most interesting.
Hi, I'm a Marvel...and I'm a DC. A collection of videos on youtube targeting both the Mac/PC ads and comic book based movies. Ten videos so far, with more coming.
Wicked Crispy is the personal site of artist & animator Jeff Victor, who draws Star Wars characters (among other things) in adorable bobblehead style.
Have you ever wondered what would happen if you combined In the Navy with the Numa Numa song? The crew of the USS Enterprise has the answer.
MIT researchers report the identification of a mechanism in the brain that's tied to the experience of deja vu, French for "seen already." The neuroscientists studied how subregions of the hippocampus--a part of the brain responsible for creating memories--contribute to our ability to differentiate between distinct places that are very similar. To conduct their study, the scientists observed the behavior of genetically-engineered mice in similar chambers, one with a floor that could shock them. (Yeeowch!)
From the MIT News Office:
Researchers believe that a set of neurons called place cells fire to provide a sort of blueprint for any new space we encounter. The next time we see the space, those same neurons fire. Thus we know when we've been somewhere before and don't have to relearn our way around familiar turf.But if we enter a space very similar to one we have seen before, a new but overlapping set of neurons creates the blueprint. When there is enough overlap between the two sets, we experience an eerie feeling of deja vu--a French phrase that literally means, "already seen."
Steam Trek: The Moving Picture - Absolutely charming Star Trek parody done in the silent movie style.
A Gallery of Rubik's Cube Mosaics. Here's the index as well. (via)
TakeZer0 is a weekly videoblog by two young filmmakers aiming to be a free basic film school for anyone interested, with lessons so far on shot composition, lighting, camera stabilization & the overall process.
63 years ago today, 20-year old German lance-corporal Hein Severloh was armed with a rifle, a machine gun and 16,000 rounds of ammo when American forces landed in the early morning hours off Omaha Beach on D-Day. During the next nine-hour "Longest Day", Severloh gunned down up to 3,000 Americans before running out of ammo, making him personally responsible for about three-quarters of all casualties at Omaha Beach, comparable in scale to 9/11 or the Iraq War. Nicknamed The Beast of Omaha, today he says "I never wanted to be in the war. I never wanted to be in France. I never wanted to be in that bunker firing a machine gun. Thinking about it makes me want to throw up."
Mr. Lee is a cat in Germany, whose owner has attached a camera to his collar so that we can share his daily adventures! Some of the photos are mysterious. Others are beautiful. I love this!
Here's a how-to on making an ultra-potent, 99%+ pure Catnip extract to help form that cat army you've always been dreaming of. The guide uses readily available materials and provides very detailed, easy to follow instructions which makes this within reach of the average person with too much time on their hands.
Caveat stoner. This may be potentially harmful to cats, I do not know. Also, the idea of intoxicating animals who cannot give informed consent to getting totally baked raises issues of ethics and animal cruelty. I'm posting this here because I think it is funny, not because I think drugging animals IRL is cute.
The network is down you foolish IT Administrator and no one loves you ! [warning! Viral advert-video link that may or may not please or amuse you]
so my cell isnt going to be covered for repairs, i was told to eat it. So I'm going to contact the guy who hit me, and get him to cover the repair/replacement.
fucking phone is only 5 days old.
So what a nice weekend. I got nailed by a car while I was on my bike today, still dizzy/hurting.
The fourth part of a trilogy of interviews with Douglas Adams before he got all famous. "I find the difference, for me, between having no money and having quite a bit is that the bills get bigger. And that's it. The lifestyle doesn't change." Well, he certainly didn't. And for that, much thanks.
Virginia Tech: A "Cho"ose Your Own Adventure.
It's early on a Monday morning. You wake up and find you have your dorm room to yourself. The night before, your roommates had been talking about "hooking up" with some girls they met on Facebook while you were busy ignoring them and putting the finishing touches on your three page manifesto explaining why you decided to go on a shooting spree today...
