First up in a wonderful report from John Oliver, covering the recent Republican retreat in Hawaii. The angle is that the Republicans made a lot of hey about Obama being from Hawaii and continuing to vacation there, claiming it made him out-of-touch with the American people (it being taken for granted that Obama is to blame for his place of birth). Hawaii is, in general, one of the more expensive places to live in America, so the claim is not wholly without worth. However, watching the... [More]

A recent collection of photos called Eid al-Adha and the Hajj, 2009 (Big Picture Blog) included the following photo:

Saudi special forces display some of their skills and equipment during a ceremony as they prepare for the influx people to participate in the Hajj, in Arafat 15 kms outside of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, Sunday, Nov. 22, 2009. (AP Photo/Issa Mohammad)

These Saudi soldiers’ uniforms looked awfully familiar. A little work with Google Images and I came up with the following image of actions figures from the mid-80's.

GI Joe Cobra Guards

The Saudi special forces’ uniforms are clearly based on those of the forces of Cobra in the G.I. Joe cartoon universe. I wonder how subconscious this was?

So, there’s this show on the Discovery Channel called Dirty Jobs starring a fella named Mike Rowe. He’s got an all-American blue-collar image and he’s popular enough with the geek crowd to have attracted the attention of Reddit, which invited him to answer some questions. The final question in this video involves his obvious appeal for the ladies: “Is there any chance you’ll stop having sex with my wife in her dreams?”

His answer is absolute comedy gold, from the writing to the timing to the... [More]

Biden is at it again[1]:

Gaffe-Prone Biden Embarrasses Nation Yet Again By Sneezing During Meeting (The Onion)

The consensus on Biden and his constant slip-ups is summed up by one analyst thusly:

“It’s a stupid, stupid error from a half-human, spit-spewing gaffe machine. […] It’s our fault for voting Obama into office alongside a half-retarded adult baby.”

In colloquial Swiss-German, the English word “easy” has been incorporated in some of its senses: as a synonym for “simple” and as a synonym for “relax”, as in a shortening of “take it easy” or a replacement for “no problem”.

For example (and I’m taking liberties with the Swiss-German spelling here because there are, at best, unwritten rules for that), you can say:

“Das isch doch easy! (But that’s easy!)”

and you can also say:

“Kasch es nid mache? Easy, ich mach es.(You can’t do it? No... [More]”

Here’s a story originally published back in the Seventies and carefully passed from hand to hand to newsgroup to newsgroup and now from blog to blog: How to Build an H-Bomb. There’s a lot of pseudo-realistic–sounding scientific babble about various chemical compounds and elements, but the home-liquefaction process guide takes the cake:

“First transform the gas into a liquid by subjecting it to pressure. You can use a bicycle pump for this. Then make a simple home centrifuge. Fill a... [More]”

Heavy Metal Band Names by Doogie Horner (Comics vs. Audience) (pictured below; click for larger version) offers a well-thought-out taxonomy of many heavy metal band names, with five main categories—Deadly Things, Death, Religion, Animals and Badass Misspellings—branching into over a dozen sub-categories, among them “Pleas for Help”, “Umlauts”, “Medieval” and so on. All in all, not a bad job at all.[1]

Heavy Metal Band Name Taxonomy

Extracted from a PowerPoint show that made the rounds via email a while ago; there were more, but some were clearly photoshopped[1] or just dumb.

Improvisation

Improvised HardhatImprovised JackImprovised Scaffold Leveling

Ladders

Power Tools and Swimming PoolsLadder Extension

Trust

Painting the Last SpotAn Exercise in Trust

As reported in the article For Bush’s staff, upbeat talking points on his tenure (LA Times):

“A two-page memo that has been sent to Cabinet members and other high-ranking officials offers a guide for discussing Bush’s eight-year tenure during their public speeches. […] The document presents the Bush record as an unalloyed success.”

A lovely take on this bit of (unsurprising) news is in Recent Giggle-Me-GYWOs by David Rees in December 2008 (MNFTIU), linked below:

Memo About Bush's Unalloyed Success

“Where are all the other pages?”

Indeed.

The eyeballing game is an interesting game that challenges you to “eyeball” distances and angles for fabulous prizes, fortune and fame. You have as much time as you like to perform each of the following tasks three times:

• Make a parallelogram by dragging one corner to the correct position.
• Identify the midpoint of a line
• Bisect an angle
• Find the center of a triangle
• Find the center of a circle
• Make a right angle out of two line segments
• Find the point of convergence for three line segments

... [More]

The Daily Show and the Colbert Report aren’t the only games in town anymore. The Onion, which started as an actual physical newspaper before migrating online, has a lot of audio and video content available, as well. The video content is incredibly well-produced and is designed to inspire the same “wait a second…is this real?” feeling as some of its better news articles do.

They have a few recurring themes, covering sports, political news and even a morning show. Here are a few of the better... [More]

Sarah Silverman is back with a slightly-less-profane video offering than her last outing, this time stumping for Obama. On a site called The Great Schlep, she lays out her angle: with Florida playing such an important role in previous elections, jewish Obama supporters should “schlep” to Florida to convince their grandparents to vote for Obama.

The great schlep officially takes place over Columbus Day weekend. Talking points are available in PDF form from the web site.

SNL: Hillary Clinton & Sarah Palin Make an Announcement (NBC.com)

This segment was inevitable the first time someone noted that Sarah Palin wears “Tina Fey” glasses. Clinton & Palin come together to address sexism in the media; hilarity ensues.

SNL: Couric interviews Palin, Part 4 (NBC.com)

Katie Couric, not known for her hardball interviews or journalistic acumen or sophisticated questions, interviewed Sarah Palin this week; disaster ensued. No matter how hard Couric tried to toss Palin softballs, she bobbled... [More]

Take the FM 100 Hue Test (XRite); make sure you have about five minutes or so. Decent light conditions and an LCD help. If you have a CRT, you should probably run some color calibration if it’s been 10 years since you last did one ;-).

When you’re ready to go, you get a grid like the one shown below.

The Color Test

If you’re wicked awesome and have eyes like Superman, you’ll be taken to the following screen after moving the little tiles and pressing “Score Test”.

You Have Perfect Color Vision!

Booyah!

The Daily Show did an extremely silly tribute to fallen British soldiers recently, with Jon Oliver reading a list of heroes and Jon Stewart caught completely unawares[1]:

Britain's Fallen Soldiers by John Oliver & John Stewart (Daily Show)

The list of names is extremely silly and transcribed below[2]:

• Algernon Bottomside
• Percival P. Pocketnubbin
• Wing Commander Battle Morningwood
• Remington Snatch
• Cecil Hardboner
• Lt. Cl. Buntington Cornhole
• Jeffrey Incestershire
• Cpt. Oroffis Schwartz
• Lead Seaman Huffington Knobgobbler
• Alastair Vaginafoot (Allie to his many friends)... [More]

Top 5 Amazing Kinetic Sculpture Videos (Wired) reported on a Theo Jansen, an amazing Dutch sculptor. However, some of their video links aren’t working anymore, so here are some fresher ones below.

Theo Jansen − Animaris Rhinoceros (YouTube) This sculpture weighs two tons and is made of steel and cloth—but a strong wind can push it along, articulating its huge legs in elegant slow-motion.

Kinetic Horse Sculpture (YouTube) This is a kinetic origami, powered by a central motor with a single offset axle moving its four legs. The carefully folded joints coupled with the single... [More]

There are a lot of versions of this, but this one is pretty neutral and to-the-point.

Here’s a neat (rhyming) poem for those learning English (or think they already know everything they need to know), found on I thought I had it ruff, er rough! by David Bogner (Treppenwitz)[1]

This is a cool presentation of English accents. I can verify most of the American ones (I guessed the state before she said it), and the British/Irish/Oceanian ones sounded about right too. It’s about two and half minutes long.

21 Accents by Amy Walker (YouTube)

The Sarah Silverman & Matt Damon Sitting in a Tree… (earthli News) video soared to over 8 million views on YouTube. Kimmel, Silverman’s boyfriend has responded with a video of his own.

Jimmy Kimmel is F@cking Ben Affleck Response to Matt & Sarah (YouTube)

It features Ben Affleck, Brad Pitt, Macy Gray, Robin Williams, Josh Groban, Huey Lewis, Harrison Ford, Joan Jett, Perry Farrell and many other famous faces. Looking forward to Silverman’s response.

About a week ago, the Obamians released a black and white video (YouTube) supporting their candidate. It features an acoustic guitar as accompaniment to snippets of Obama’s most inspiring words[1] as spoken by him and sung or intoned by various other famous persons. It was pretty schmaltzy, but not horrible. Since McCain didn’t come up with a video response of his own, the crew of Election08 threw one together for him, using a very similar style. This one’s a lot shorter and a lot funnier; it starts going... [More]

So this weekend, one mildly out-of-touch ex-pat discovered that:

1. Jimmy Kimmel, who used to host The Man Show with Adam Carolla, now has his own late-night TV show.
2. That Jimmy Kimmel has been dating Sarah Silverman for over five years.
3. That Matt Damon totally doesn’t take himself too seriously.

To celebrate their anniversary (and his show’s), Silverman showed Kimmel a video she made for him, called Sarah Silverman “I’m F*cking Matt Damon” on Jimmy Kimmel (YouTube). It’s hilarious. Silverman is fully... [More]

Free Rice ScoreInstead of chasing down video references in YouTube, you can expand your vocabulary for a good cause using FreeRice, all while remaining glued to the internet. The initial levels aren’t bad, but the game nicely adjusts to your level of vocabulary and, after a while, you’ll find yourself using educated guesses almost exclusively as they shovel words at you that you’ve never, ever seen before. The word list is maintained and expanded by a “team of professional lexicographers from the firm of Lexiteria... [More]”

The Traveler IQ Challenge (Travelpod) is a Flash-based game with 12 levels, covering famous places, world capitals and other cities with increasing difficulty.[1] There will be countries whose names you have likely never heard before. It times you and gives you points for accurate clicking and speed. You need a certain number of points to proceed to the next level.

You might want to brush up on Statetris (earthli News). There used to be a site with a “name as many of the 192 UN countries as you can in ten minutes” game,... [More]

Every once in a while, Reddit does a “tell your best jokes” thread. Here are my favorites from the last one; try not to hold it against me.

Brewer’s Convention

At a world brewing convention in the States, the CEOs of various Brewing organizations retired to the bar at the end of each day’s conference.

Bruce, CEO of Fosters, shouted to the Barman: “In ‘Strylya, we make the best bladdy beer in the world, so pour me a Bladdy Fosters, mate.”

Bob, CEO of Budweiser, calls out next: “In the... [More]

The strips from October 2007 (MNFTIU) have some pretty good lines:

“I used to have a friend who was skeptical about whether bombing the shit out of people was the best way to fight terrorism. I bet he feels pretty stupid now.”

“If Turkey invades Northern Iraq, we should try selling them a ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner. I know where you can get one cheap. … You know, if enough countries invade Iraq, maybe we can just slip out the back…”

In response to the possibility that Blackwater employees might be... [More]

The internet is lately being overrun by pictures with captions. Most of these pictures features cats with bad grammar, but not all of them. For some unknown reason, some are incredibly, laugh-out-loud, tears-in-your-eyes funny. Most of the images are from 100 Top Internet Pictures by TheWalkingDude.[1]

Exhibit (A) below is an image that originated somewhere on the internets—most likely Something Awful or Fark (browse at your own risk/not for the faint of heart/your mileage may vary), but which indicates that it... [More]

This picture showed up when you clicked through on this link title: AP Photo of the President and some fucking asshole that bankrupted our country and killed 1,000,000+ people. (Reddit)[1] Sure, it’s a cheap trick, but funny as hell.

Statetris is Tetris, but with countries or states/counties. You can choose from the following difficulty levels:

• Easy – States/countries are labeled and already rotated to the correct position.
• Medium – States/countries are labeled and are rotated to a random position.
• Hard – States/countries are not labeled and are rotated to a random position.

Some of the countries are really small and must simply be placed into one of the magnifying glasses. It’s a pity that they don’t leave the... [More]

Every once in a while, there’s something on Slashdot worth reading. More often than not, it’s in a comment rather than one of their “articles” (quotes intended to convey ample contempt for the editing process there). There’s a discussion there, High Court Trims Whistleblower Rights (Slashdot), in which one participant got pretty shrill in responding to a troll[1], trotting out all of the arguments that trolls dearly love to feed on (as well as those ever-delectable tears of frustration and rage).

Some... [More]