Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Eat your heart out, Wonka! Hmmmm... eat...heart... Hey! I think we have a new flavor!

bertiebottsbeans

The Candy Kid over at Candy Addict recently reviewed a few of the many disgusting flavors of the Harry Potter-inspired candy Bertie Bott's Every Flavo[u]r Beans.

His review is here, while the entire quease-fest list of flavors (Rotten Egg? Sardines? Earwax, anyone?) is available here.

At least one of the flavors you can enjoy twice. Once going in and once going out. Yes, that's right. There is a vomit-flavored jelly bean. Bon appetit!

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Wednesday, November 23, 2005

tday

Phone/internet status at home might be touch and go over the weekend, as SBC will be repairing a damaged line to my house. If we don't talk, have a great Thanksgiving and save me some stuffing!

Monday, November 21, 2005

Whaddaya mean it's "Kiss The Sky"??!!

evil
To prevent you from singing out the wrong song lyrics a la "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy", EvilLyrics is a free little plug-in that will display the lyrics to whatever song you're currently playing in WinAmp, iTunes, Music Match, etc. (via Look At This...)

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Friday, November 18, 2005

Heads you win...

The Flip Site has tossed a virtual coin once every five seconds since midnight on January 1, 2005. By the end of the year, over 6 million coin flips will have occurred. You can even watch the flips LIVE!!! Boy, does that flipper guy look tired. As you might expect, it's a tight race, but Tails is holding a slim lead as of this posting.

If you get tired of watching Dr. Flipper do his thing, Flip Site has some other interactive things to do.
  • Flip Parade will call up a visual history of any portion of flip history.
  • Flip Streaks will show you the longest all-heads or all-tails streaks.
  • Flips a la N will let you set up whatever evil coin-flipping experiments the mad scientist in you cares to hatch.


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A mulatto, a salami, a mosquito, origami

stag_beetle_bp
Robert J. Lang has been mastering the art of origami for over 30 years. Most of the works on his site are made from a single sheet of paper. Wow.

Inspired, I carefully crafted my first origami object and you can buy it for way cheap.

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Risk your life in the name of Physics!

lead
David G. Willey is a physics instructor at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown and loves to give interesting demonstrations on the various aspects of physics. Here he explains how to walk on broken glass, smash a concrete block on someone's chest while they are lying between beds of nails, pick up a piece of orange-hot space tile and, as you can see from the pic above, dip your fingers in molten lead. The physics behind all these seemingly dangerous stunts are explained in this CSIOP article.

He also goes on the road from time to time with his show, "How Does A Thing Like That Work?"

(via Boing Boing)

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Thursday, November 17, 2005

Have a hundred, leave a hundred. Need a hundred, take a hundred.

funnymoney
Here's a handy tip to all would-be counterfeiters. When sending in your the printer for repair, make sure you take out the fake money first.

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Tangram: (n) What you get when your mom's mother sits in the sun.

Here's a fun little version of the the Chinese puzzle tangrams. Move the puzzle pieces to make the shape shown in the screen. Sounds easy. Sometimes it even is! I cracked 1000 once. How did you guys do?

(via Digg)

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Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Gorgyles and Psychlics!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

godwarrior
The latest video making the rounds on Teh Internets is the complete meltdown of the self-proclaimed "God Warrior" on the Fox reality TV show Trading Spouses.

ebaywarrior
Some enterprising soul has fashioned a talking bobblehead doll of this woman and are auctioning it off right now on eBay. Current bid as of this posting is somewhere north of $650. When you visit the eBay site, turn your speakers up, for they have also included a God Warrior remix, no charge.

I never saw the show (nor am I inclined to), but... watching the video, it does indeed sound like she's saying "Gorgyles" instead of "Gargoyles" and "Psychlics" instead of "Psychics".

(via Mookie)

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Gad-bazooks!

The gum was terrible. A little pink rectangle, soft as flint and after two minutes in your mouth, about as flavorful. The "comic" inside, and I'm using the term very loosely here, was either incredibly unfunny or just inscrutible. It's Bazooka Bubble Gum®! Here, have some Bazooka-flavored links to chew on...


Might as well start at Topps, the home of all things Bazooka and check out some of the aforementioned comics.


A dissertation on the societal roles of Bazooka Joe & Friends over yonder at The Shrine of Bazooka Joe.


bazookajoe How did Bazooka Joe lose his eye?


woodsy Give a hoot! Don't litter! Make that Indian stop crying and recycle by making Bazooka gum wrapper origami shirts and pants.


I'm not sure why it's called this, but here's how to make a drink called a Bazooka Joe.


gadzooka Contrast Bazooka Joe comics to the much funnier 1970's contemporary: Wacky Packages. Man, I used to love those things, and collected tons of them. Tom's Wacky Packages Page has pretty much all of the original series that ran off and on through the 70's. All lovingly scanned and posted for your nostalgic enjoyment.


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Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Frame that equation

Jared Tarbell at Complexification.net has written some Java and Flash code that can create stunningly beautiful art. Most of the code is based on just a few mathematical rules that reiterate over and over until what emerges is just amazing. Because there's a seed of randomness at the heart of these, the outcome is different each time. Most are hypnotic just to watch as they evolve. For example, this one called Substrate uses a few basic rules to "grow" city-like structures. The more you let it run the more complex it becomes.

substrate

Or Guts, which renders a kaleidoscope of, well, what looks like intestines. A little icky, but a lot cool.

guts

What's also nice is that he provides the source code for just about all of these, so if you've a mind to, you could get in there and tinker to your heart's content.

(via Digg)

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Monday, November 14, 2005

Back from some R&R with a little... R&R

101 Things You Didn't Know About Rock N' Roll

Can you pick out the true rock rumors from the lies?

Marilyn Manson was on The Wonder Years and 9 other Rock Myths (some true, some not)

Yet another piece on Rock Urban Legends

I saved the best for last. Good Lines, Bad Lines features one man's opinions of some of the best and worst in rock lyrics. Puzzlingly, he has not yet nominated Sammy Hagar's "Your Love Is Driving Me Crazy" for the lyric Hot sweet cherries on the vine -- Huh?! Sammy might want to visit a cherry orchard, because the last time I checked, they grew on trees. No vines involved.

The same guy who wrote up the Good Lines, Bad Lines stuff also wrote a nice piece called Annotated Rock! It dissects the lyrics not only to Don MacLean's "American Pie", thorough work though it's been done by lots of other people before, but also the interesting choices of Tom Waits' "Jitterbug Boy" and They Might Be Giants' "Purple Toupee". Maybe it's just because I am a big fan of Waits' and TMBG's early stuff myself, but I got quite a kick out of it.

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Thursday, November 10, 2005

Toys of Yesteryear

Actually, if yesterday is the day before today, wouldn't yesteryear be... 2004?

If you grew up in a certain time frame, the items at Feeling Retro may cause a twinge of nostalgia. They've got a nice list of toys, games, food and music from the 60's and 70's. You can even share your favorite memories. Nice.

Everyone has their favorite childhood toy. For me it was the Krazy Kar.

krazykar

I had no idea they still made them anymore, but they do. You sat in the middle, and turned the handles on the sides of the wheels. You could go forwards, backwards or do 360s. Awesome.

Funny, I don't have memories of riding this outdoors, though I'm sure I did. I do vividly remember riding it in the house in my mom's upstairs sewing room. The room had plenty of open space and my sister and I would spend hours racing around up there, spinning in circles until we got falling-down dizzy or building up speed and seeing how far we could skid with the plastic wheels on the bare wood floors. The racket we made directly above our parents' heads must have been a nightmare; it's a wonder they didn't kill us.

Now that I know these are still being made, I will definitely consider getting one of these for my boys this spring.

Being an adult and way (way, WAY) over the weight limit of 70 lbs on these things, I wonder how hard it would be to build a Dad-sized version to play around with?? Hmmm...

Other toys of my (and maybe your) misspent youth can be found at TimeWarpToys.com. Similar site, but a LOT bigger listing. A little hard on the eyes compared to Feeling Retro, but what it lacks in aesthetics it makes up for in volume. Enough links to suck up a couple three hours of your day.

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Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Technical difficulties: having trouble posting -- come back soon!

Okay, it appears the technical problems I was having have gone away. I wasn't able to publish anything new. The only thing that would show up was the title of the post. I emailed Blogger support, but I haven't heard back from them. The problem seems to have gone away, though.

New posts tomorrow...

Thursday, November 03, 2005

Guess The Tagline

This is great... thousands of movie taglines. Test your knowledge, do you know which movies these taglines came from? Here are some from the "Cream of the Crop" section. Answers are posted in Hi-Tech-Inviso-Font after the tagline. To read it, click and drag your mouse across the space immediately after the quote.

Like this!
invisifont

Easy
In space no one can hear you scream. Alien
He said 'I'll be back!'... and he meant it! Terminator 2
An adventure 65 million years in the making. Jurassic Park

Medium
He's having the day of his life...over and over again. Groundhog Day
He charges $10 but he's willing to negotiate. Deuce Bigelow: Male Gigolo

Tough
Check in. Relax. Take a shower. Psycho
God made him simple. Science made him a god. Lawnmower Man

The same site is also a good source of movie quotes, too.


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How tacky can you get?

Ripped from today's headlines:
Man Sues Home Depot After Getting Superglued to Toilet Seat

From headlines of the recent past:
Thai Monk Mistakes Superglue for Eye Drops
Thai Man Commits Suicide by Supergluing Mouth and Nose Shut

Which begs the question, what is it about Thailand and Superglue?? By the way, below that suicide story there's a rather overheated and pointless (but funny) flame war between some of site's members on whether Superglue is toxic. Well, it certainly was for the gentleman in question...

Q&A Time:
How does Superglue work, anyway?
And how do you remove it?
Why doesn't Superglue stick to the inside of its tube?
Was Super Glue invented to seal battle wounds in Vietnam?

"DUBIOUS ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS, BRITISH DIVISION...

"Rubber Cushion: To John Bloor, who mistook a tube of Superglue for his hemorrhoid cream and glued his buttocks together." and other Superglue urban legends.

Apparently scientists have discovered how mussels make their own Superglue.


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Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Captnkurt! Come on down!

I don't know if you've ever watched The Price Is Right, but growing up in the 70's, game shows like this were about the only things on TV during the day that were semi-interesting for a kid to watch.

One of the perennial games on TPIR is called Race Game. A contestant is brought up and shown 4 prizes and four price tags. The challenge was to match the price up to the correct item. Once they made their guess, they came back and pulled the lever on this ginormous slot machine-looking thing that would flash the number of prices they got right. If they missed any, they had to keep going back and making changes. Oh, and they had only 60 seconds to get them all right.

What often happened was you got someone who had absolutely no clue. They're up there putting a $5,000 tag on a wicker chair and $300 on a speedboat. Maybe it was the bright lights and the shouting audience. Maybe it was nerves. Or maybe they were just morons. Who knows?

race1

Anyway, watching the game when someone just totally at sea was pretty nerve-racking for the audience, not to mention the contestant. Invariably they initially would get one, maybe two correct, but then get flustered when they ran back to make changes. Usually they freaked out and blindly switched around two random tags and raced back to pull the hideously oversized one-armed bandit only to see they still had two right and two wrong.

It was usually at that point that things pretty much unravelled, and the befuddled player hemmed, hawed and generally agonized over trying to decipher which tags the audience was screaming for them to switch. They usually got in one last yank, only to find they had gone from two right to one or even zero correct.

race

"So?", you may be asking. "Your point is...?"

While playing this game called Star Chemistry, I felt just like one of those TPIR Race Game losers. Making crazy guesses, desperately trying to divine the right answer, but really doing nothing more than blindly stabbing in the dark.

In this game, you are shown a group of actors. How many depends upon the difficulty level you choose. In this example, I have chosen the medium level of difficulty. It wouldn't have mattered. I sucked on the Easy level, too. You job is to place each star next to one of the other stars they have appeared onscreen with. It works out so that it forms a little circle, with each actor appearing with each of his/her neighbors in a different film. It's a bit like The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon on steroids. By the way, that is another game I really, really suck at, but I know of a couple of friends, plus my very own Mrs. captnkurt that would totally wail on this game.

stars

Although the Star Chemistry game was not my cuppa tea, the page listing the history of every single pricing game ever played on The Price Is Right (over 80) in the past 30-some years was pretty sweet.

(via Little Fluffy Industries)


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Tuesday, November 01, 2005

When You've Got A Problem, Think Silicones!

When You've Got A Problem, Think Silicones!
When You've Got A Question, Think Silicones!
Because you see
Silicones by GE
Are unquestionably
The answer!


The 50's and 60's brought about the strange entertainment/propaganda hybrid (enterganda? propatainment?) known as the corporate musical or industrial musical.

Wikipedia sez:

An industrial musical is a musical performed for the employees of a business, intended to create a feeling of being part of a team, and/or to educate and motivate the management and salespeople to improve sales and profit.

Industrial musicals are not resticted to corporations or to businesses involved in industry. They should not be confused with ...musicals produced by companies to be seen by the general public, for example, Disney's stage production of The Lion King.

Oh, I don't think there's any danger of that.

Parts One and Two of Recruit, Train and Motivate: The History of the Industrial Musical will give you some background.

Some of the more jaw-dropping "They really recorded that?!" gems include:

American Standard's "The Bathrooms Are Coming!" The aching ballad "My Bathroom" is available for download.

GE's Got To Investigate Silicones (okay, this one was actually a corporate film instead of a stage show, but it's in the same style) featured "The Answer". The mp3 can be found at I Eat Tapes. Check it out. It's a showstopper and a chart-topper.
silicones

The Name of the Game with Loretta Swit and David Hartman to hype up Listerine salesmen. (I know you're heartbroken, but sorry, I couldn't find any audio)

That hipster David Letterman also has a bunch of bizarre corporate jingleage over at the Late Night website.


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