Friday, July 21, 2006

Friday Surrogate-Post Blogging

This week I've been doing long-ish posts every other day instead of nice bite-sized-ish daily ones. I don't know why this happened, it wasn't part of the plan or anything, and I'm sure it's somehow 100% not my fault.

What's worse, today I've fallen even further off the already slackened pace. I've been working on a shiny new bad movie post, and it's sort of taken on a life of its own, and to make a long-ish story short-ish, it's not done yet and probably won't be done today, period. I may even have to break it up into manageable post-sized chunks. So I figured I ought to get on here and write something, so this blog's Gentle Reader(s) -- yes, both of you -- don't start fretting that I've fallen off the edge of the flat earth or something.

[Updated: The bad movie post I mentioned is here. I guess it could've been a bit shorter, but like I said, it took on a life of its own.]

It's nudging 100 degrees outside and I'm not feeling very ambitious, so I think I'm going to cheat a little here. You know, because a blogger can really work up a major sweat coming up with original material -- even really lame original material -- and on a day like this there's the danger of heatstroke to consider. So instead, here are a few mostly light-n-fluffy items from my Sent Items folder in Outlook. That's the unifying theme today. It's all stuff I found somewhere, and forwarded on to someone, usually because I thought it was funny, or cute, or interesting somehow. You've probably seen a few of these before, and I humbly apologize. (What, you want me to work harder at this, in this heat? Are you freakin' crazy?) Also, I apologize if some of these seem a bit out of date. That's because they're from old Sent Items. So again, if that bothers you, sorry, I guess. So here we go:

  • An account of recent progress in the study of the mating habits of wombats.
  • More about wombats.
  • A fantastic and useful new invention: the Babycage!
  • "The Top 100 Things I'd Do
    If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord".
  • A NYT story from February praising Oregon beer, notable (& unusual) because it mentions the True Center of the Universe, a.k.a. Tugboat.
  • A McSweeney's exclusive about the shiny(?) new iPod zepto, because the nano is far too huge and clunky and non-microscopic.
  • A post at Y! SCOX about poorly named websites. I imagine this is one of those forwarded email things, but this is where I first saw it.
  • A great way to tell loved ones how you really feel: A Valentine's card featuring Gollum.
  • The ritual sacrifice of an Xbox 360. To some, this was a tragedy, but I'm arguably the world's biggest non-gamer, and I just burst out laughing when I read about it.
  • In France, people will apparently do just about anything if you tell them it's for an art film.
  • Classic tech from last October's El Reg, the mp3 breast implant.
  • Brew better beer with FreeBSD.
  • Keep your beer cool with a CPU fan and some fiddly electronic bits.
  • And BeerAdvocate's "You Know You're a Beer Geek When..."
  • And a bit of beer history for ya: A History of Malt Liquor, I kid you not.
  • Moving right along, here's a BBC piece about the amazing Millau Viaduct in southern France. If a programmer (such as myself) ever tries to convince you he or she is a "real engineer", point them at the Millau Viaduct and ask if they can pull off something even 1% as cool. Someday they really ought to run the Tour de France over this thing.
  • A nice cozy article from the Helsingin Sanomat: What does Finland really look like?
  • All About Frogs. Because if anyone ever asks "What about frogs?", I know to say "I like frogs".
  • 2 photos of a long-nosed monkey. Yes, that's the official name. Click the link and see why.
  • The original link is gone, and the video itself has disappeared from the net entirely (AFAIK), so instead here's a funny "film review" of the infamous Wendy's "Grill Skill" video.
  • A 2004 innovation in Scottish cuisine: The Stonner, a pork sausage wrapped in doner kebab meat, battered, and deep fried. Mmm!!!!
  • A bit about trash talking Mars rovers.
  • Maybe they were just in a bad mood after Spirit got mugged by that sneaky Beagle 2.
  • And a non-satirical but quite funny Jeffrey Bell rant about Beagle 2, while I'm on the subject.
  • You can now (or could at one time) purchase a nice, proprietary, fascist-DRM-protected e-book copy of the U.S. Constitution. Irony died once and for all the day this hit the market.
  • The greatest news headline of all time: "Zombies Drive Jesus From Top Of Box Office".


There's plenty more where that came from, naturally, but I'm tired of looking at old email, and it's taking a while, and today's post is all about not overexerting myself, you know, due to the heat and all.

So, well, there you go. Enjoy, or not. Whatever.

No comments :