Baby books have gotten way weird. Today’s bookstore shelves spill over with tot-oriented “toybooks” shaped like cats, dogs, hens, horses, lions, elephants, insects and other things… —Linton Weeks —Touchable and Teachable, Toybooks are Big Business (Washington Post (registration; will expire)) Can’t be a toy… can’t be a book. Must be… a toybook! (Thanks for the suggestion,…
A letter has been sent to a woman who died three years ago ordering her to tidy up her own memorial plaque. Leeds City Council mistakenly gave Moira Thoms 14 days to remove two vases, each containing a single white rose, from around the plaque at Lawnswood Cemetery where her ashes are scattered. —Dead Woman…
“The Forever Flashlight uses no batteries or bulbs. Instead it uses Faraday’s Principle of Induction and a bright LED to produce light without batteries. The light is shaken for about 30 seconds to recharge a capacitor and it will then provide about 5 minutes of light. As the light is shaken, a magnet passes through…
“University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty member dangled from his parachute on a wire 150 feet above the Seattle area for more than two hours Monday after his jump off a radio tower went awry.” Nahal Toosi —Professor Arrested after Jump from Tower (Journal Setntinel) So… was the tower ivory? Found via Incoming Signals, who files the…
“Turns out Alex had been snooping in her Web cache, found the URL for the blog, and voilà , her secret was out.” —Busted By a Blog: Online Journal Reveals Relationship Infidelity (ABC News) Here’s a good example of how a journalist can subtly editorialize. Alex and Johanna have mended ways and learned a lesson: “We clear…
have you guys ever seen gummi octopi before? they are so much fun to eat! gummi octopus gummi hectopus gummi hexapus gummi pentapus gummi quadrapus gummi tripus gummi bipus gummi monopus gummi oedipus! mmm “stacey” —have you guys ever seen gummi octopi before? (it makes sense that it should happen this way) Where the author…
—Did you hear the one about men hunting women with paintballs? (Sun-Sentinel) Good post-mortem of the whole ridiculous “Hunting for Bambi” scenario. It’s amazing how gullible people are. I still can’t believe the “There will be no bananas in 10 years” story because I first heard it around the time I heard the “Blondes will become…
“I was in a lot of pain, but managed to do about 15 minutes of material while on the floor, passing out every now and then because of the pain, and then coming round to do the punchline.” — Mark Olver —Funny Bone (This Is Bristol) Olver broke his leg onstage 15 seconds after beginning his……
“Mr. Berk has become higher education’s humor guru, a title for which, admittedly, there wasn’t much competition. Along the way, he has racked up a shelf full of teaching awards, a cadre of wisecracking disciples, and stacks of gushing student evaluations.” Thomas Bartlett —Did You Hear the One About the Professor? (Chronicle) Similar:What Miley Cyrus Did…
Slashdot Poll Yes. No. ! Worst Poll Ever. No, there’s been a worse one. No, there hasn’t. Yes, there has. No! Yes! No! —? [Slashdot Poll] (Slashdot) Nearly 70,000 people took the time to vote in this poll. This is beyond stupid — so far beyond stupid that it approaches significance. It’s impossible to deconstruct this…
“A Taiwan man who used a different identity through the Internet to double-date his girlfriend, has committed suicide after the girl fell for his email-based alter ego, a Taiwan newspaper reported on Wednesday.” —Woman Dumps Man for Online Alter Ego (IOL) Sounds like an urban legend, but then again so does “Escape” (better known as “The…
“To be named after the number one website for vegetarian information — what could be better?” — GoVeg.com, formerly known as Karin Robertson —Woman Changes Her Name To GoVeg.com (NC Buy) See an earlier entry about the Cool 2B Real Home Page, ( “Sponsored by America’s Beef Producers”). Similar:Minneapolis protest cleanup: Did you share this meme…
“After reading this, I don’t see how anybody can be concerned about computer game players axing orcs.” Torill Mortensen —Game Violence (Thinking With My Fingers) I’m hoping somebody will jump up and announce that the whole “wimpy guys dress up in camoflage gear and hunt naked women with paintball guns” thing will be exposed as a…
“One guiding principle of committing the perfect crime is to leave or no evidence of the misdemeanour. | Sadly, the five Texas men who took an axe to an oak tree in Austin completely ignored this criminal tenet when one of them posted a full photo spread of the outrage on his website. Three of…
“A political science instructor at Santa Rosa Junior College is being investigated by the Secret Service for telling his students to compose an e- mail to an elected official that included the words ‘kill the president, kill the president,’ a school administrator said Wednesday.” —‘Kill the President’ E-Mail Sparks Probe (SF Gate) Google tells me that…
“The industrial show had its humble beginnings during the post-WWII boom. Two types of industries began experimenting with the idea: the retail industry and the automobile industry. As far as show collectors know, a department store was the first to jump into the fray – Marshall Field’s with Give the Lady What She Wants, a…
“Set to gather at 7 p.m. at Grand Central Station for what promised to be an elaborate ‘mob ballet,’ the crowd of about 250 was greeted by a ‘huge’ police presence, according to the Mob Project’s anonymous organizer known only as Bill. | Bill said the mob moved to the Grand Hyatt next door instead.…
“Paul Hillard, spider specialist at the Natural History Museum in London, said researchers first discovered the effects of psychotropic drugs on spiders during experiments at the end of 1960s.” —Spider Experiments with Drugs (Miss Black Widow) This is just weird. Similar:Split Infinitives in English: Not Actually Wrong, But UnwiseThe rule against split infinitives is a …CultureMonsters…
“The fun, simple and safer way to turn ordinary hotdogs into exciting to cook and super fun to eat… OCTODOGS!” —Frankfurter ConverterOctodog) You know it’s a slo-o-o-w weekend when this site reaches #21 on Blogdex, with only 4 links. Note the weasel word “safer”. Safer than what? Similar:Never trust a corporation to do a library’s…
“This study provides an exopolitical analysis of the policy dimensions of an historic extraterrestrial presence that is pertinent to Iraq and a US led preemptive attack. It will be argued that competing clandestine government organizations are struggling through proxy means to take control of ancient extraterrestrial (ET) technology that exists in Iraq, in order to…