Food with attitude

David St. Hubbins once said: "I know what the Stonehenge monument looks like. We don't have that piece of scenery anymore." I'm not sure this is what he was talking about. Come to think of it, I'm not sure I see the resemblance ...

Couldn't they just tell Dubya that "brothel" is the Kiwi word for "soup kitchen"?

Chugga-chugga

Not mentioned in this article were some other unneeded things the Danes sent to Iraq:

• NBC suits


• chemical-weapons disposal systems


• lead-lined radiological containment vessels

The Onion, as regular readers will know, is one of my favourite sites - pretty consistently funny, waaaaaaay politically incorrect, and just an all-around good site. Rarely, however, do you see an item like this, one that comes so far out of left field, I can only say - what were they smoking? And further more - where did they get it? (PS: this infographic is pretty good, too)

Updated the blog template to get rid of the annoying "edit" links - test post to see if it worked.

"Don't make me horny. You won't like me when I'm horny. "

Stupid technology

if you are reading this then, my phone made an xml rpc call to the blog.

Bilderbergers. Mmm .... burgers ....

Take three random words, say: "dead", "pig" and "boat".

Now, put them together, and what have you got? A dead pig boat!

Spot the difference:

Cthulhu	Octodog

Don't know how long this will continue to work, but:

Go to Google, type in "weapons of mass destruction", and hit "I'm Feeling Lucky"

Even the Aussies have noticed ...

"Life imitates art", they say. Well, ConsumerFreedom.org (basically an advocacy group for the "bad for you" industries - fast food, alcohol, tobacco, etc,) certainly imitates The Onion.

Strongbad = Funnyshit.

Obscene Interiors: Hardcore Amateur Decor (Surprisingly, safe for work. More or less. Depends where you work I guess)

Any of you in the UK a more regular blogger? A friend of mine would like to interview you for the Daily Mirror if you blog on a more or less daily basis, especially if you have your own. To quote her:

"All I would need is a 30 minute phone chat, questions to include who are you, what do you do, why did you get involved in blogging, how did you go about it, why is it so important to you etc. We'd then need to send a photographer to him or her and get a shot of them in their blogging headquarters"

If you're interested, mail me here

Think your rice-mobile is the dog's danglies? Not without these it's not...

Not so much a case mode as a whole room mod. This guy's linked 9 pc's and 13 monitors together just to play flight sims.

My cousin Nick just sent me a copy of "Dirty Fan Male". Trunk Records, publisher of said item, have amassed some interesting links in the "toy" area of the site. Check 'em out.

More casemods, this time from guys who not only have no social lives and too much time on their hands, but they also seem to have some real skill with fabrication and design.


Sphere (auto-translated from Japanese)

Pyramid

No idea what to do for a holiday next summer? Why not take a cruise with Face from the 'A' Team?

Not had your yearly fill of exploding microwave ovens, shattering CDs, magnetically launched projectiles and other high-voltage stunts? Well, these guys are here for you.

Occurring at a mall near you...

- "We're sorry, but we can't rehire you because there's already too many Filipinos working here."

- A manager pointed at a poster of a blond-haired, blue-eyed male model and said the store needed more staff members with a similar appearance.

- A line of T-shirts that showed two slant-eyed men in conical hats and the slogan "Wong Brothers Laundry Service -- Two Wongs Can Make it White."

Is it "casual classic American lifestyle" or simply a pack of racists?

Re: this item. We have a bunch of jackasses in the White House. Is that why it's been raining so much here on the East Coast?

I have only one question about this item: when are they going to get around to treating the rest of France? And the French, for that matter?

non se·qui·tur (nn skw-tr, -tr)


n.

1. An inference or conclusion that does not follow from the premises or evidence.
2. A statement that does not follow logically from what preceded it.

Example: Damn those Montenegran water-polo hooligans

Sure sounds like an interesting way to convince lots of people to install keystroke logging software onto their PCs. Then, someone with access to this central server could search for things like URLs for bank accounts or retail websites and sift through the keystrokes to find usernames, passwords, PINS, and credit card information.

Or maybe I'm just paranoid.

Huh? Does anyone see any point to this? At all?

If this had involved, say, Bernard Manning, I could have understood it.

If only this happened in real life. And went further. Much further.

The unfortunate URLs saga continues. Sadly, these sites aren't what you'd think:

http://www.powergenitalia.com/
http://www.gotahoe.com/

"... with the exception of certain celebrities and politicians, statements like Chipper's are almost always made by talking animals, superheroes, omniscient narrators, anthropomorphic trains, wandering magicians, friendly dragons, sentient heavenly bodies, Jesus, and other characters subject only to the rules of narrative causality"

A tasty update to the somewhat less interesting periodic table of the elements as baked up by a new coworker of mine.

I would have thought that the Falcon was the coolest case mod I'd seen yet to date, until I saw this... I think this guy needs to get laid (even!) more than the Falcon guy.

My childhood can best be defined by listing the things I did not have. I did not have any toy guns. I did not have any toy weapons, period. I did not have video games or a video game console, although I consoled (good pun, I think) myself by abusing Ataris and Nintendos at my friend's houses. I did not have a computer, although there were a few years in which I busied myself with a TI-99/4A. And, I continued my practice of abusing things that belonged to my friends, although I did much less "damage" playing Zork on an Apple IIE and dialing up BBSes on an old Wintel clone than when playing Pitfall or Contra.

So, in the cruel world of childhood politics, in which the winners are those with the best toys, why would anyone be my friend? It helped that I had the foulest mouth on the block. But, it also helped that I had the coolest Star Wars toy ever made...the "full-size" Millenium Falcon. You could seat Chewie and Han in the cockpit and stuff Luke and the ambiguously gay robot duo in the back. Over time, Star Wars figurines were not enough to entertain me and the Falcon. Many a GI Joe got to ride on the Millenium Falcon before facing an inevitable firecracker death in my neighbor's yard.

Why all the reminiscing? My memories were sparked by this awesome casemod. I have neither the time, the patience, nor the understanding wife to do something like this, but at least I can enjoy reading about it.

Dude, the folks at Blogger might have done a good job on the new UI, but the mechanics still leave something to be desired. I've got four posts sitting around since Friday that have not showed up on the actual published site yet. In fact, I'm just writing this message to see if this one will actually get posted and published.

Lord knows I've been associated with some buggy-ass software, but I always wanted to give the stuff a good strong round of testing before foisting it upon my clients. Reprobates could be the only blog with problems, but I doubt it.

UPDATE: Old posts have posted...but some bugs still remain...

For some reason, the three postings I made earlier today are simply not showing up on reprobates.blogspot.com. I don't get it. And blogger.com must be having some problems as well now since the XML keeps puking every time I try to get to the Discuss pages.

Another prank for today. This is from a good friend of mine and one of the people that convinced my wife and I to buy a Prius.

This one is a real shocker. 80,000 volts...in a jacket?

I really enjoy silly little pranks. And they are doubly satisfying if they exploit weaknesses in the systems that manage our everyday lives. This one is the next on my list of things I must see for myself. It will be so much easier to just sign with a grid from now on.

Well, when you're a small, midwestern Canadian city who has lost your prime source of entertainment (in the form of a once-proud NHL franchise), your winters are brutal, and you have such a problem with mosquitoes that you have a city-sponsored bugline, there's not much left to promote tourism. What better idea than to make Homer Simpson an honorary citizen? D'oh!

This is just so wrong on so many levels:

1. Insurance? Against your husband leaving you?
2. For becoming ugly?
3. As judged by a panel of builders?

I wonder what she did with the money ...

What every office needs (especially mine) is a good, solid, offensive office linebacker.

Got a sick kid? Wonder what'll cheer them up? Try a soft toy...

Last week, I had the luck to get "invited" to work the NDIA show in Baltimore. More specifically, I represented my company by trying to explain biometrics, RF tags, and wireless technology to government bureaucrats and blue shirts (rank and file of the Coast Guard) for 10+ hours straight. It wasn't all bad, though.

After having discussed mobile apps with one blue shirt in particular, he invited me to come over to his booth to play with the toys he was showing off. About an hour later, I was looking through the sight of a shotgun, having a chain gun targeted on my chest, and taking a look at this. Afterwards, they handed me a pretty neat giveaway.

And, only a few booths away from where I was working, was this beautiful thing. It was just sitting there, all alone, begging for some attention. I looked for a price sheet or an order form, but I couldn't find one.

They speak English in South Africa, right? To quote Inigo Mantoya - "You use this word a lot. I do not think it-a means what you think it-a means".

I'm sure it's not 'cool' to admit it, but I have followed Amazon's product recommendations on music several times ("People who bought this bauble you just looked at also purchased the following gewgaws ...") and the results have usually (though not always) been rewarding.

As a result, I have travelled from Tortoise and Hooverphonic to Blue States and Boards of Canada and beyond.

So, as I have taken this journey into the ambient/trip-hop/IDM/illbient "post-rock" netherworld, I have noticed something: the names of the bands, the albums and the songs all have a curious sameness about them in their infinite abstract "weirdness" and variety. Consider this selection of track names from the Tortoise album TNT:

I Set My Face to the Hillside
A Simple Way to Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work
In Sarah, Mencken, Christ, and Beethoven There Were Women and Men
Almost Always Is Nearly Enough

or these album names:

Born into Trouble as the Sparks Fly Upward
He Has Left Us Alone But Shafts of Light Sometimes Grace the Corners of Our Rooms
Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada
Music Has the Right to Children
Goodbye Enemy Airship The Landlord Is Dead
Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven

or these band names:

Godspeed You Black Emperor!
The Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra-la-la Band
Do Make Say Think
Explosions in the Sky

Don't get me wrong, I love this stuff. But, jeez, could we get some track/album/band names that aren't so, aah, pretentious? That so visibly strive to be "different" and "memorable" that they end up merging into a forgettable sameness?

Maybe like The ABC Song?

IROQ!

Animals, computers, and excrement. Sounds like the makings of a great story to me.

Turns out that monkeys would probably never write a play, let alone a copy of one of Shakespeare's works. Although, they seem to have made their own version of "Urinetown".

Don't dismiss monkeys just yet. A small, tree-climbing, monkey-like animal known as a Luwak does have some interesting uses for its own poop. And people seem to like it.

Got this in email:

"This gave me a chuckle so I thought I would share.

Apparently this kid videotaped himself practicing his Star Wars fighting skills on a school camera and left the tape when he was done. Now the video that he left behind is spreading over the net.

Somebody also did a video with special effects and lightsaber noises that is also pretty fun."

Y0 - w3 ridin d@ PH@T Bu5 to 5k00L!

Further proof of racial profiling. Are you going to try and tell me the police would have stopped the guy if he weren't "an ethnic Albanian from the Serb province of Kosovo". For shame!

Exhuming McCarthy

"Let us not assasinate this lad further, Senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

Plane hijacked by terrorists? You're about to crash into a national landmark? Don't want to look, or get an annoying crick in your neck? Try one of these.

Also, while I'm here, more wacky shit from Japan. Strangely, these don't appear on J-List. Yet.

With Mother's day coming don't you think you should pick up the phone and thank your Mom for not abusing you the way these poor slobs were? Don't forget to tell her you love her. We'll wait....

And what could be a better Father's Day gift than one of these?

MAKE.MONEY.FAST!!! (by suing telemarketers)

Is "Inul" Indonesian for "Elvis"?

What's next? The rest of the 50's and 60's? Indonesian Beatles? Tropicalhardwoodstock? Megawati Sukarnoputra's Presidential motorcade arriving in Dealy Plaza, making the slow turn at the triple overpass in front of the Texas School Book Depository?

I'm going to stop now before this turns into a bad Billy Joel song ...

Honda Accord...by Rube Goldberg

You know how most theaters insist that you silence your cell phone before the start of a show? I wouldn't recommend it at this play .

This chap (the one fondling the nymph's ass of brass) is my old school mate Tim Walkup, in Singapore's "Bot"anical Gardens.

He's on his way round the world in the Clipper 2002 race.

Having completed the "third leg" (fnarr fnarr) of the race, they're on leg 4. Leg 6, the final 7,100 mile segment of the odyssey will bring them to New York, where I hope to meet up with Tim, an Original Reprobate from Back In The Day, for the first time in twenty years, some time around the end of August.

"The ridiculous tale of me trying to surrender is a lie made up by the infidel invader. In fact, it is they who are trying surrendering to me!"

He wasn't heavy, that was his brother.

"In a moment we'll take a look at one of the more creative uses I've seen for power tools. But first, let's take a moment to talk about shop safety..."

I think this probably looked like a great idea on paper. No doubt much hilarity would ensue if one tried to, say, get it past airport security. Worst of all though, and somewhat surprising, in the complete absence of visible cameltoe in the accompanying photographs.

The TidalForce ShockTrooper is a high-performance, all-terrain folding electric .... bicycle? ...

This sounds like the joke that ends with the punchline "Answers to the name of Lucky"

News coverage in the UK is different than what we get here in the US.

CNN, for example, by comparison with BBC News, is difficult to watch - flying graphics, a heavily-windowed look and feel (crawler across the bottom of the screen, weather forecasts on the left-hand middle, a story-related graphic in the top left, and a small video area in the top right which incorporates its own graphics, captions, subtitles, etc) and the screaming rock-guitar "War in Iraq" special-news-story theme music.

What's interesting to me is that BBC News and CNN International (which seems to be mostly run out of the UK) share a common, comparatively stripped-down look and feel - a newsreader sitting at a desk, reading from the TelePrompTer, and a single crawler at the bottom of the screen - which is almost the polar opposite of CNN's all-ADD-all-the-time presentation.

The same stylistic differences exist between the web sites, too. Look for example at CNN.com (admittedly restrained by comparison to the TV broadcasts) and news.bbc.co.uk

The funniest difference in coverage that I saw, however, is that former Iraqi "Information" Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf is almost universally known in the UK press as "Comical Ali".

This combines more Reprobate interests into one URL than I have seen in a while. Sex, motor vehicles, violence, Freud... the list goes on.

Eric Taziz, the Apple Information Minister:

Q U O T E D

"Do not believe the lies of the PC infidels. The PC chips have not reached 3GHz. It is Apple that is at 3GHz. Our initial assessment is that the PC is still at 250MHz, and we will slaughter Microsoft in the server market and in the home. Our market share is at 90%."

"We are in control. The PC users are in a state of hysteria. They do not even have control over themselves! Do not believe them! Losers, they think that by building fabs and plants and chips and trying to distort the feelings of the people they will win. I think they will not win, those b@stards."

"NO! We have retaken the education market! The infidels attacked the education market but we have killed them all with bullets and shoes. There are NO PCs there. I will take you there to the public schools and show you. IN ONE HOUR!"

Me and the old lady finally got a Prius, but I won't waste your time describing my love for this car. What I will do is share some more information on environmentally friendly fuels...

As great as it would be to power a car on refined fast food waste, it would be even cooler to simply dump all sorts of junk into a machine and create fuel in an environmentally friendly way. Heck, according to this article, if a 175-pound man fell into one end of a machine like this, "he would come out the other end as 38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, as well as 123 pounds of sterilized water".

"Sex in a Palace and Sex on the Street--the Taste is the Same" - does your religion tell you things like this?

Mind you, the same dissertation also contains the following pearls of wisdom:

"You'll find the bats, they are hanging down the head, and they're passing stool. Sometimes man also does so, when there is strangulation. That is very dangerous disease. What is called? Intestine strangulation. Then passing stool through the mouth. In Bengal sometimes they curse, "You'll pass stool through the mouth!" Yes, sometimes they do. Sometimes they eat through the rectum. Do you know that?"

and

"You are thinking that I will be very much happy if I enjoy sex like the dog."

So - get this - not only do the Hare Krishnas know the ins and outs of oral & doggie style, they'll also tell you to eat shit & die. Now that's a religion I can get behind!

Is this for real? If so, it could qualify for the title of Coolest Software Ever. All it would need is for some bright spark to make it into a worm and everyone's computer woes would be over ... forever ... Bill Gates forced into abject poverty ... Steve Ballmer forced to look for work as an open source (altogether now) "developer, developer, developer, developer ..."

If a company is listed on FuckedCompany, where would you expect to find its help wanted ads? Why, FuckThatJob of course!

More worrying than the PANC article Ken linked to is their actual site - newamericancentury.org. Plenty of insight into what key members of the Bush administration really want out of the Iraq conflict and beyond. Even their statement of principles basically says "We won the cold war, there's no-one out there left to stop us, let's remodel the world our way."

I own a modified '92 Land Cruiser. It has lockers, bigger springs and tyres, a big fuck-off winch on the front and the mother of all rear bumpers.

I like to take it off-road. Get it muddy. Get it stuck. Use the hi-lift jack. Break out the winch, hook up the snatch straps, and get it unstuck.

Now, here's the question - did that little description get you all hot and bothered? Yes? No? Either way, check this out ...

Project for a New American Century - via Brainwoofer

One thing leads to another.

Death squads? Ha ha! Hostages? Funny stuff, no? Torture! Stop it, you're killing me ...

Netflix seems to think so.

I can't believe someone actually named a model of sports wheelchair "The SpaZz". Joey!

Time traveller makes killing on the stock market, gets caught, reports Weekly World News

A popular middle-eastern dish from Weight Watchers of Iraq? Actually, there are plenty of other unappealing recipes from Weight Watchers circa 1974 on this site.

Whitehouse.org (see link in previous article - PRESIDENT'S STATEMENT etc) and Jason's psychedelicrepublicans.com are actually both productions of the same outfit - Chickenhead Productions. There's all sorts of goodness to be had there!

PRESIDENT'S STATEMENT REMINDING UPPITY IRAQASAURS TO LOSE THE INFERIOR ARABIAC PRIDE, SMILE PRETTY FOR THE CAMERAS, AND OPEN WIDE THE DOORS TO CHRISTIAN JDAMS OF FREEDOM

AskJeeves? Why bother? Jeeves don't know shit. Get on the AnswerBus instead.

Dog Island (WTF?). An island where you can send your dog to be a real dog. Some choice quotes:

• "Every now and then some dogs gang up and kill and then eat another dog, but this is just natural, and it's okay for it to happen now and then"


• "We apologize to not offer this to poor people but it takes an enormous amount of money to afford this type of beauty"

The Director of Imports is someone named Soong Lee. Anyone know if that's a Korean name, and this is just a big front for his other business, "DogBBQ.com"?

Aussie newpaper The Age claims that the U.S. used napalm in Iraq - a banned weapon of mass destruction. The Pentagon denies this, saying that it removed napalm from it's arsenal in 2001. Apparently, it sold it all to these guys. Interestingly, this article from theSchmews (a satire site) claims the U.S. never ratified the law preventing it's use.

One of these three links is to a true news story, the other two are links from previous Reprobates postings. See if you can guess which is which!

1) Kim Jong Il Unfolds Into Giant Robot
2) National Guardsman Changes Name To "Optimus Prime"
3) Voltron's Office of Homeland Security Is In The Heeeeeouse!

Holiday home swap available. Reeeaally available. You have to wonder about the area description though...

Shock and Awe.

Lyndon LaRouche may be mad as a hatter but this makes for, ahh, interesting reading nonetheless.

This just in from all the major news organizations on Operation Iraqi Liberation (uh - doesn't that spell OIL?) - we don't know anything yet. Stay tuned for more information we don't have, more details we're waiting for, and more rehashing of the fact that we don't know anything yet. Don't go awa

Get YOUR war on (again, or still, depending on your viewpoint).

An alternative to becoming a human shield in Iraq, should you want to get "obliterated".

Axis of Weasel: your online guide to the Newspeak for Gulf Wars: Part II.

If Good Eats (host, fan page, book)
were a cartoon, it would be Deep Fried Live.

If this had happened in Cameroon, maybe their Government would be considering a ban by now ...

Strangely, this is not the origin of the expression "taking the piss".

Fall down, go boom - redux.

Incidentally, I haven't seen it yet, but I'm waiting for some hapless US media scribe to refer to this thing as "the world's biggest conventional weapon ever". I probably won't have to wait long as not only is "The US The Greatest Country The World Has Ever Seen" but "Fifty Years Is A Very Long Time". These statements notwithstanding, the WWII "Grand Slam" designed by Barnes Wallis was not only bigger (and, at 22,000lb, therefore much badderer), but it wasn't even American.

Think about this for a second - this bomb was used 58 years ago. It was so big (over 26 feet long, and almost 4 feet in diameter) it had to be strapped under the belly of a specially-modified Lancaster bomber. Dropped from an altitude of 12,000 feet, this thing would attain almost supersonic velocity before it hit the ground and could penetrate up to 15 feet of reinforced concrete before the eleven-second delay fuze detonated the 9,500 lbs of Torpex inside the chrome-moly steel shell ...

No wonder they called these things "earthquake bombs" ...

Dave, thanks for that touching tribute to the late, great Mr Rogers. I thought it was very classy, very understated, nicely done, and I'm sure Mr Rogers will be sorely missed by many millions of American kids who grew up watching his show.

Now, that said, and bearing in mind this is the Reprobates blog, I do have to ask:

Did Mr Rogers creep anyone else out, or was it just me? Wasn't there a lascivious twinkle in his eyes as he undid his cardigan? Did he strike anyone else as looking like a child molester?

OK, so now I've sullied the memory of a dear old man, perhaps you'd care to ponder this: Men who look like Kenny Rogers - dot com.