Tuesday, January 31, 2006

At least the Fuller Brush Man never gave you hepatitis

You just know that any news story that starts out with the sentence
Some women in Springfield [Mo.] are regretting their decision last week to get a tattoo from a door-to-door tattoo salesman
is gonna have some ensuing hilarity. It does not disappoint. The enterprising gentleman, apparently fresh out of seed packets and Grit Magazine subscriptions was walking through the apartment complex with a tattoo gun looking for business. He found three bargain-minded women willing to "go under the needle". According to Linda Falls,
"It was wrapped with black tape, had a pin underneath it, had fishing wire going through it, you could tell it was a homemade gun."
No. Really?! The following day Falls passed out in a store; all of the women have been urged to be examined for HIV or hepatitis infection.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to get ready. Some dude I ran into last night at the bar is coming over to my house perform some Lasik surgery with some tweezers and a laser pointer.

(via Obscure Store & Reading Room)

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Friday, January 27, 2006

Cake as big as your head

Some gems unearthed from the Films section of the ultra-uber-awesome Internet Archive. Links along the lefthand side for streaming or download for all of these.


First up is one from 1959 called Lunchroom Manners.

Sidetrack: I originally saw this in the midst of an old (1981) HBO special called "The Peewee Herman Show". This was a young Paul Reubens, pre-movie and TV career, doing a more risque and adult-oriented nightclub version of what would years later become his kids' TV show Peewee's Playhouse. Right in the middle of his show, he ran this geeky little short which features Phil, the archetypical blonde, blue-eyed (presumably, though the film is in B/W) 1950s fourth-grader. Phil and his classmates watch a lame puppet show starring Mister Bungles, an ill-mannered hand puppet, behaving badly in the lunchroom.

Here we see Phil trying not to emulate Mister Bungles and instead washing his hands before heading into the lunchroom. Guess nobody told him a little soap goes a long way and that it's not necessary to pump out a Mount Foamamanjaro just to clean off a little dirt.
bigsoap


Phil doing some apparent carb-loading for lunch. Hey Phil! Is that a big enough piece of cake or what?! As you can see, he needs both hands just to heave it onto his tray.
bigcake


This next one is a bizarre little film from, what? The spring industry? There's a spring industry out there making films to promote a more spring-filled way of life or something.

It's called A Case of Spring Fever and it features some poor sap named Gilbert Willoughby, who while repairing his broken sofa, is punished for daring to complain about the pesky springs. He wishes there were no more springs and is immediately granted his wish by "Coily", an obnoxious, animated spring who subjects him to the hassles of a springless world.

I think Coily's animators intended him to be playful and funny, but every time he pops up to taunt Gilbert's unfortunate wish (Gilbert's pull-down window blinds won't stay rolled up without springs, Gilbert's car door won't shut without springs and so on and so on), his "No springs!" mantra becomes first creepy, then annoying and ultimately infuriating.

Here's our irritating helical friend once again taunting our hapless schmoe of a protagonist after he realizes the gas pedal in his car is useless, useless I say! without precious, life-giving springs. The nerve-jangling tension is finally resolved when Gilbert buckles like overheated tarmac and grovels to Coily to please, please, in the name of everything sproingy, can he just take back his anti-spring wish? Of course, he spends the rest of the film singing the praises of springs to anyone who cares to listen, and those who don't care, too. Which is everybody.

Hey Coily! Since you're already curled up, just go ahead and die already.
coily


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Who knew disk head damage could sound so sexy?

A couple of days ago I posted about the 6 sounds a dying hard drive can make. The gearheads at Gizmodo then ran a contest which invited their more musically-inclined readers to create a song using one or more of the sounds. Here are the 100 awesome results.

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Thursday, January 26, 2006

Meme tag, I'm it!

My compadre in West-Michigan blogging, Jonathan at A Splash of Lime tagged me on this list written in the name of Getting to Know Your Blogger Better. Here's his list and here is mine:

Four Jobs I've had:
housepainter
bakery employee
volunteer radio programmer for 88.1FM WYCE
IT staff for Kent County government

Four Movies I Could Watch Over and Over:
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Payback
Radio Days
A Christmas Story (Yes, even in July I could watch A Christmas Story. Shut up.)

Four Places I have Lived:

The Blinking Middle of Nowhere a/k/a Eau Claire, MI (Mom and Dad's house)
Mt. Pleasant, MI (Central Michigan University)
Just north of Dowagiac, MI on Magician Lake (First post-college house shared with a buddy)
Grand Rapids, MI (Current residence)

Four TV Shows I Would Love to Watch:
Arrested Development
Mystery Science Theater 3000
Futurama
Law & Order -- I don't know why. The show is on TNT about 23 hours a day and still if I come across an episode, I must watch, no matter how many times I've seen that episode. It's an illness.

Four Places I have been on Vacation:
Grand Canyon
Sante Fe, NM
Paris, France
Just driving to the East Coast one fall with my wife. No particular destination in mind, just somewhere in Maine. Stopped at America's Stonehenge in North Salem, NH, and Ruggles Mine in Grafton, NH (where they actually let you rent a hammer and wail away on their attraction looking for amethyst and other gems). Best vacation ever.

Four Websites You Visit Daily:
Digg
ExtremeTracking to check on my hit counter logs
Google (duh)
MTurk Amazon's "artificial artificial intelligence" project where they pay people to do tasks that computers are bad at doing.

Four of My Favorite Foods:
The chicken sub at Big O' Cafe, with something approaching an obscene amount of freshly grated parmesan added.
Chocolate covered raisins
Those french fries you get at the fair. You know the kind?
Pot roast, with carrots, potatoes, onions, celery. Mmmmm...

Four Places I would Rather Be:
At WYCE, playing music
Vegas, playing in the World Series of Poker
Hawaii, playing in the surf
At the movies, playing hooky. Why do we call it "playing hooky" anyway?


Four Albums I Cannot Live Without:
The Police - "Zenyatta Mondatta"
Radiohead - "The Bends"
The Pixies "Doolittle"
R.E.M. - "Reckoning"


Four People to tag:
Gerard at The Presurfer
MrBaliHai at Eye of the Goof
brymantra at brykmantra
Chris at Cynical-C

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Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Photoshop of the Living Dead

A step-by-step tutorial on how to turn a pic of a regular everyday-type person into an image of an evil, carnivorous undead zombie.

(via Digg)



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Monday, January 23, 2006

Brain sprain

Vizzini: I can't compete with you physically, and you're no match for my brains.

Westley: You're that smart?

Vizzini: Let me put it this way. Have you ever heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates?

Westley: Yes.

Vizzini: Morons.
-
The Princess Bride (1987)

How capacious is your lexicon? Choose/guess whether the two words are synonyms or antonyms. No dictionaries allowed! How'd you score? I got a 162, but with quite a bit of guesswork in there.

Dozens of other Uncommonly Difficult IQ Tests tests to either lower your basement-dwelling self-esteem or inflate your already aggrandized ego.

Who knows? Maybe you can get yourself admitted into the most exclusive high IQ club out there. Nope, not MENSA. These guys eat MENSA members for breakfast. The Giga Society admits only those scoring in the 99.9999999th percentile of a few accepted tests, most of which can be found here. I looked at a couple of the tests. Good luck with those.

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The Sound of Death

Sounds to make a geek cry. Six common sounds that mean your hard drive is failing.

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Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Dot dot dot dash, dot dash dash dash, (dot dot) dot dash dash, dot dash dash

Here's a neat way to try and identify that song you can hear in your head but don't know the name of. The Song Tapper lets you tap in the rhythm of the song on the spacebar of your computer, one tap for each syllable, and it will show you a list of matching songs.

I tried it out with the first song that popped into my mind, which to my eternal shame was, inexplicably, Bon Jovi's "You Give Love A Bad Name". So I tapped in the part "shot through the heart and you're to blame, honey you give love a bad name", which when tapped in, looked something like this:

dotdash

To Song Tapper's credit, the correct result did place at the top, though some interesting other potential matches came up, and it may be the first time in history that Simon & Garfunkel, Oingo Boingo and Bon Jovi came up together on the same web page. If the song you were hoping for doesn't come up in your attempt, you can add it to the database if you know the title.

tapper_results

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Tuesday, January 17, 2006

All 50, No Cent

50 of the weirdest Guinness World Records

The 50 Best Robots Ever

Pitchfork Media loves their Top 50 Lists. Here are their
Top 50 Albums of 2005
Top 50 Worst Guitar Solos of the Millennium

Stylus Magazine looks to Rock's less flashy side and uncovers the Top 50 Basslines of all Time

The Top 50 Firefox Browser Extensions

The 50 Least Affordable Cities in the US


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Friday, January 13, 2006

Yoohoo! Zaxnod37! Say cheese!

rome1967large california1970s
This site purports to host the best collection of UFO pictures ever taken from 1870-2005. The number of ones that are presumed fakes is inversely proportional to your gullibility quotient. (via Cynical-C)

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Clocks With Flava!

Clocks that march to the tick of a different drummer:

clockr
Clockr tells time using images found on Flickr. (via diggdot.us)


clockblock
Clockblock uses the little-known building-block timekeeping method

clocklink
Add a free little custom clock to your website at Clocklink.com


mcnally
Tom McNally's Cool Clocks I've Built ... (or collected)


flav
Yeeeaaahhhh Boyyyyyy! Gitcha Flava Flav alarm clock!


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Thursday, January 12, 2006

A Million Little Lies

Three months ago, in what the talk show host termed a "radical departure," [Oprah] Winfrey announced that "A Million Little Pieces," author James Frey's nonfiction memoir of his vomit-caked years as an alcoholic, drug addict, and criminal, was her latest selection for the world's most powerful book club.

In an October 26 show entitled "The Man Who Kept Oprah Awake At Night," Winfrey hailed Frey's graphic and coarse book as "like nothing you've ever read before. Everybody at Harpo is reading it. When we were staying up late at night reading it, we'd come in the next morning saying, 'What page are you on?'" In emotional filmed testimonials, employees of Winfrey's Harpo Productions lauded the book as revelatory, with some choking back tears. When the camera then returned to a damp-eyed Winfrey, she said, "I'm crying 'cause these are all my Harpo family so, and we all loved the book so much."
There does seem to be one teeny-tiny little problem, though. It might be all made up.

The Smoking Gun conducted a six-week investigation into bad-boy James Frey's life and were pretty much unable to find much more than a few hours spent in a county jail for a drunk driving charge back in college. A lengthy read, but interesting and thorough.


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Playtime

Andreas Gysin has a bunch of interesting
little Flash and Java toys at his alphabet soup website, ertdfgcvb.ch. Intuitive and simple, you'll be saying "Why didn't I think of that?!"

(via ThingsMagazine)


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