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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]
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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.
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Published by marco on
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.
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!
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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]:
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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]
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There are a lot of versions of this, but this one is pretty neutral and to-the-point.
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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]
“I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough
Others may stumble but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, laugh* and through.
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?“Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead: it’s said like bed, not bead -
For... [More]”
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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)
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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.
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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]
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So this weekend, one mildly out-of-touch ex-pat discovered that:
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]
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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]”
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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]
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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.
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]
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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]
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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]
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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.
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Statetris is Tetris, but with countries or states/counties. You can choose from the following difficulty levels:
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]
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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]
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Googlewhacking—finding a search combination that returned exactly one hit—used to be all the rage, with some people devoting astonishing amounts of time to it, only to report it on a blog, have Google index it, immediately invalidating it (because now there are two results). Below is one that I stumbled on recently:
At the time (May 12th, 2007), it returned exactly one result and, amazingly, has stood the test of time, returning only one relevant result today (as shown below):
Googlewhack July
... [More]
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Keeping it short and sweet, Discrimination by Scott Adams throws out a few observations on paradoxes in our society’s of valid and invalid prejudice. For example, though most prejudices aganst traits people can’t control are regulated, “it’s totally legal for an employer to reject a stupid person” who applies for a job. To the hypothetical argument that this is a worthwhile exception, he retorts:
“You might argue that it is in society’s overwhelming best interest to discriminate against stupid people because... [More]”
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Lucky Stars (Time) is an interview with George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Ellen Barkin and Matt Damon. The interviewees literally have no interest in promoting the movie, unless you count them parading their hilarious camaraderie that undoubtedly features heavily in the film as promotion. At any rate, it seemed incidental to just having a whale of a time.
The first question asked them how they kept their cool and turned out a quailty product—according to general opinion, the best of the series— instead... [More]
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There are all sorts of sites that produce content meant to be funny, like The Onion, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Something Awful or a Pointless Waste of Time. Whether or not you think the invidual attempts at humor are successful or not, that is their purpose to at least some people. The Internet offers humor in unlooked-for places as well, like this collection of Cool Cybersex Logs, in which one or more users troll chat rooms to prank unsuspecting partners with frustrating experiences. For... [More]
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Street Installations has a list of pictures of street art involving mannequins posed in realistic & strange positions.
The one below—with a walker kryptonite-locked to a parking sign—is probably the best of the bunch.
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So there’s this mime, David Armand, and he does a bit called Karaoke for the Deaf (Google Video) on HBO. His shtick[1] is acting out the song “Torn” by Natalie Imbruglia.
It’s wicked good, so he gets invited to do it at some awards show, Torn by David Armand (YouTube), in the middle of which Natalie herself joins him on stage and starts miming the song with him.
A good time was had by all.
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You probably shouldn’t do this one at work because it takes a full six minutes of concentration and silence—during which bizarre sounds are emitted from your speakers. Either that, or you need some headphones. Test your musical skills in 6 minutes! is a Flash-based test for tone-deafness / musical ear. It plays 30 pairs of musical sequences that may or may not differ in tone: that’s for you to decide. For the really bored, there is also Can’t dance? Test to see if you’re rhythmdeaf!, which... [More]
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Wally is Dilbert’s coworker. He is, without a doubt, the absolute king of work-avoidance. His talents are numerous and his fame wide-spread. This latest Dilbert cartoon shows him at his absolute best—right down to the Dr. Evil-like gesture of sipping from his slightly-oversized coffee cup.
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If you’re a regular peruser of Reddit[1], you’ve probably already seen at least one XKCD cartoon. They really do tend to be pretty unique and, often enough, have something interesting and funny to say. Dreams, for example, is a discussion between a firm embed of society and a doubter:
“The infinite possibilities each day holds should stagger the mind. The sheer number of experiences I could have is uncountable, breathtaking. And I’m sitting here refreshing my inbox. We live trapped in loops.... [More]”
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Normally, optical illusions are the stuff of chain letters and AOL home pages. Those found on the pages at eChalk optical illusions are a cut above that. The two most impressive ones are Colour perception and Colour perception 2. It’s hard to believe that there is no trickery, but, if you need to, take screenshots of the before and after to prove it to yourself.
These tests are especially interesting for designers, and especially graphic designers. On the web, not only must you remember not... [More]
