Doctors say Mrs Roberts, who was born and bred in Indiana, has a condition called foreign accent syndrome. | This rare condition occurs when part of the brain becomes damaged. This can follow a stroke or head injury. There have only been a few documented cases. —Stroke Gives Woman British Accent (BBC) This article conflates the…
A Picture is Worth… Sigh. Do you remember when Jackson was black? As an academic, I try to keep an open mind… but in my humble opinion, this very talented man is really, really disturbing. I assume the mugshot, which I found on Drudge, is the same one that won’t show up when I try…
Aviva, Diageo, Corus… the trend for rebranding companies with “nonsense” names has led to some notable additions to the corporate lexicon. | But a stunt designed to ridicule the tendency has come back to haunt its creators after several spoof names were registered for real. —Spoof brand names snapped up for real (BBC) Thanks for the…
As delegates arrived at the meeting, they were handed an intelligent tag the size and weight of a PDA to wear around their necks. Called an nTag, each delegate’s device was pre-programmed with the conference schedule, which could be displayed on a small screen on the front of the tag, as well as with personal…
hey there…. i thought you should know about toastrecipes.com. It has some pretty cool stuff. i noticed you had something about Dr. Toast’s Amazing World of Toast. Well, I just thought you might like to check out toastrecipes.com. —James N. Mallamacee —Toast RecipiesE-Mail) Little did I know that when Rosemary sent me a rather giddy…
—Canstruction Model of Independence Hall, birthplace of the American Revolution. Made out of cans. Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary. Similar:I spent Thanksgiving break building a #trimsheet for steampunk control panels, because why…AestheticsDaily 10sq cm of control panel eye candy. #blender3d #blender3dart #steampunkAestheticsAudisee Presents: The War of the WorldsAs new age synthesizer music, a rich bar…BooksHorrifying…
On the surface, it is hard to tell that the story labeled “Study: Fellatio may significantly decrease the risk of breast cancer in women,” isn’t real. The original Web version has the CNN.com banner along the top of the page, the stock CNN medical graphic along the right side of the article and credits N.C.…
You have now entered the Stephen Kings’ home page… a place for the many of us whose daily lives are defined by who we are not. —Oh the Horror! Being Stephen King From Mike Arnzen’s Goreletter. Similar:Notes on Teaching August Wilson's Pittsburgh CycleI first taught Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle…AcademiaHow to Annoy Your Parents (Smurfs, Tweety, Jar-Jar…
Some 1,500 PEZ dispensers, all nestled in creative landscapes, fill the museum. | Disney PEZ sit in a 10-foot-high castle. Halloween-themed PEZ are displayed in a haunted house. And psychedelic PEZ are set beside a real Volkswagen Beetle that appears to be crashing through the wall. —PEZ museum pops up in Pennsylvania (CNN/AP) Similar:Fantasy football and…
Surely not all the bells and whistles are defensible, college officials concede, but given the expectations of students who have grown up with DVD players in their own rooms, any campus without, say, a nightclub and a food court is as obsolete as an eight-track cassette. “These are not frills,” said Daniel M. Fogel, president…
What does it look like at exactly 25 degrees N, 8 degrees E? What about the other places on the globe where latitutde and longitude lines intersect? Find out at Confluences. —Degree Confluence Project (Orbitals) Link via Rosemary Frezza, who also sends this BBC article: “A Unique Picture of the World.” Similar:Woman comments on man's looks.…
A trend for naming children after favourite possessions is accelerating in brand-driven America. | The records show that in 2000, 49 children were named Canon, followed by 11 Bentleys, five Jaguars and a Xerox. —John Harlow —Branded anything but Unique (news.com.au) The title refers to the fact that there were 24 children named Unique in 2000.…
It wasn’t until the package arrived last week that the secret was revealed. The man who sold Kunath the cookie jar was a brother he has never met. —Quest for cookie jar leads to long-lost brother (Orlando Sentinel) That’s a wonderful story, but that’s one ugh-lee cookie jar. Similar:Kairos: Open Since 1996As a plucky new faculty…
—Best of ‘Stealth Disco’ (Stealth Disco) “Stealth Disco” is the practice of creeping up behind an unsuspecting co-worker and dancing silently, to imaginary music. It is apparently a rite of passage that takes the form of semi-affectionate mocking — a way of saying “Look at how square that poor working slob is… I’m having fun instead.”…
”Dalton McGuinty: He’s an evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet,” said a release from Eves’s campaign headquarters, e-mailed to news organizations across the province on Friday morning in the latest, and oddest, Tory attack on the Liberal leader…. ”I think someone either had way too much coffee this morning or had way too much time,”…
I said I didn’t feel like blogging today, but this picture pretty much captures my mood: —Yahoo’s Idea of ‘Entertainment’ (Yahoo! News) This photo rather indelicately appears in Yahoo’s “Entertainment” section, as part of a profile of Edward Teller (inventor of the hydrogen bomb). As a kid growing up in the 80s, when Russia was still…
Fantasy stories of elves, dragons, and other denizens of faerie who intersect with the gritty streets of today’s cities. —Elfpunk/Urban Fantasy [List of Books] (Readers Advice) Elfpunk, modeled on “cyberpunk.” Amazing… I asked my journalism students to submit a report on a modern-day crime committed by a well-known fictional character, and the example I gave was…
“If people can confess on Oprah, Phil and Geraldo, I don’t see why they can’t confess right here on Eighth Avenue.” So said Father Anthony Joseph, a Dominican priest from San Bernadino who peddled a confessional booth mounted on the back of a tricycle to the site of the Democratic National Convention in New York…
The anonymous e-mail offered $5,000 to any vendor capable of promptly delivering a collection of far-fetched gadgets for conducting time travel. Among the mysterious devices sought by the message’s author were an “Acme 5X24 series time transducing capacitor with built-in temporal displacement” and an “AMD Dimensional Warp Generator module containing the GRC79 induction motor.” —Brian…
[W]ith the Mona Lisa, the Madonna was among only a handful of paintings known to be authentic Leonardo works. | The thieves arrived just before 11am. They were flamboyantly dressed, polite and personable until the moment one of them presented a knife to a woman tour guide who had led them to the Madonna. —…