We all played with them growing up but it's time to come to realize that army men are so 20th century.

Behold their 21st century descendants. They're posable! They're flexible! They're cheap!

Devo's through being cool? Does that explain this, a definite harbinger of doom and signifier of the Apocalypse if ever there was one? Devolution of the human race is one thing, selling out and having your music re-recorded by kids and issued on Walt Disney Records is quite another.

Huh? These guys are buying these guys?

Next up: Your dog wants to buy these guys

Puppets haven't been this much fun since ... well, ever, really. Unless you count these guys.

This is why the intarweb was invented (by Al Gore)

The Driving Standards Agency (part of the Department of Transport) here in old blighty has decided it's time to update the Highway Code, a set of best practices for using the highways and byways of the UK. One of the recommendations it makes is that cyclists should use cycle paths wherever possible. What could be more sensible, given the fantastic facilities we have for cyclists here?

Having a row - good for you, or not?

Friggin' Laser Beams

"I have one simple request - sharks with friggin laser beams attached to their heads, and it can't be done." Or can it.

I'm not quite sure the purpose of this device other than to be cute.

And of course to have the phrase "PVC pecker" in print while still being SFW.

What's going on?

Baby got back - Vida Guerra

As “luck” would have it, I got the apartment, the money, and the girl. Not bad for a Wednesday. - The G Manifesto

Former US President and Nixon pardoner Gerald Ford was famously clumsy, but it is beginning to appear that Preznit Dubya is building himself an (un)enviably comparable track record for general klutziness.

No doubt a multi-billion dollar no-compete contract for the benefit of Halliburton to supply these and these is in the works.

Vader burns one

It's just your mind that makes it dirty ...

Old and busted: MC Hawking. The new hotness: Some dude (ab)using BT's SMS-text-to-Tom-Baker's-voice service to cover "Video Killed The Radio Star"

When using power tools it is essential to remember to wear safety goggles, hearing protection and gloves. As seen here

My Team

Not really sure why I haven't posted this before now, nor am I entirely certain why I am posting it right now. It may have something to do with this. Then again, it may not. Anyway, it's probably about time the whole Reprobates crew (you know who you are) knew about the My Team game.

I don't remember who I first learned the game from - probably Ian or Skippy - and I certainly don't remember who claimed to have invented it. So what I'm saying is - these may not be "the" definitive rules, but they're close enough for practical purposes.

Remember back in school, back in PE, when they would choose teams for some nominal game of dodgeball or crab football or whatever? The biggest/fastest/strongest/meanest kids would get picked first, then the middle of the pack, and then ... the dregs would be picked last. Basically, not so much picked, as resignedly "allowed" onto one team or the other. Not that yours truly has any memories of this sort, you understand ...

Anyway, now we're all (mostly) grown up, we can pick our own games, play by our own rules, and most importantly, pick our own teams. Which brings us nicely to - My Team.

You can play My Team with 2 or more players, and you can play any time you encounter someone other than your own little clique. The object of the game is simply to pick the "best" members for your team, and to be the first in your posse to do so, where "best" is basically defined as "most outstanding" as in "someone who stands out in a crowd". It's hard to define exactly what this means, but perhaps a few example characteristics will help get the ball rolling.

The best team members often have an off-kilter dress sense, and/or perhaps a haircut with unusual topography. Unlike in high school, team members can be very heavy, and while extreme bulk can certainly be sufficient cause to draft someone to your team, it is far from necessary. Indeed, some of the best picks I've made were of people who were total beanpoles. In fact, it may only require that someone make a really interesting facial expression, or sufficiently odd gesture, especially if the expression or gesture is out of place, unexpected, or inappropriate for the venue.

The only real rule is - you cannot draft an obviously handicapped (mentally or physically) person to your team. You want to at least be reasonably certain that a team member looks that way as the result of a (at least partially) conscious choice, and not because of an accident of birth.

So is this just a fashion police thing? Certainly not. Is it a "ha! ha! that person doesn't look just like everyone else!" Mmm, no. What it is is more of a slap in the face of the conventions of high-school style jocko-homo team picking.


So how do you play? Quite simply, you and your "krew" are out for a constitutional, when all of a sudden you come upon someone dressed in, let's say, a white headband, bright yellow tinted reflective sunglasses (indoors, at night), luminous yellow turtleneck, matching leggings, and a brown Ultrasuede jacket. Like, say, oh, I dunno, the person I drafted to My Team pictured here (Picture taken with world's crappiest cameraphone, under less-than-ideal conditions, standing in the checkout line at Giant, your mileage may vary). The first person to "call" or "draft" the individual for their team (which you do by announcing "my team!" to the rest of your homies, while subtly indicating the draftee) wins that round. Play continues ... forever. There is no overall winner, or exit strategy. "Winning" the overall game is the kind of thinking that high-school-sports-team-pickers engage in, and they, as we all know, are losers. Yes, you read it here. Winning is for losers.

So, actually, the other thing I'm illustrating here is that you can even play this game alone - all you need is a cameraphone, madd surreptitious camera-usage skills to "draft" the team member, and a place to post your results. Like, say, here. Let the games begin.

Interior design began with the first cave dwellers. Most likely it was a gay caveman who decided to paint pictures of running bison and other frolicking animals on the rough walls and low ceilings of his abode. Not only were these flourishes artistic and decorative, they also served as a way to feel more comfortable while living in a hole in the earth.

But, my how times have changed. Gone is the stereotypical association of gay men with good interior design. Despite the popularity of TV shows like Queer Eye For The Straight Guy, the Internet has shattered the gay style myth forever with its slew of nude amateur self-portraits that clog newsgroup bandwidth from New York to Sydney and back again. These Feng Shui-challenged souls have proven over and over again that male homosexuals can be just as color uncoordinated, sloppy and nastee as their straight bretheren -- and despite the crippling setback from the Discovery Channel's token screaming queen, home decor fluffer Christopher Lowell, the gap between what defines gay and straight is slowly beginning to zipper shut.

For us at Luriddigs.com the charm of amateur pics has never involved the vulnerability displayed by the model's self-willed nudity. As soon as a JPEG has fully loaded in our browser, we immediately begin to scour the image's background in search of clues and signs that are a thousand times more intriguing than bare butts or engorged genitalia. Interiors are like handwriting, and for those who know how to decipher the mishaps of furniture meeting form, many secrets are revealed. Join us inside, while our snooty panel plumbs the background life of the Net's most audacious and careless interior designers.


Horrifying gay amateur interiors (SFW? Mmm ... not so much)

In the beginning, readers of tedious British populist tabloids would write in with facile and trivial "reader's tips". Then, Viz got into the act with their "Top Tips". (Things took a weird but brief detour in 1996 when McDonald's briefly got involved, but no matter)

Then, the web made everything old new again, and a lot of terribly earnest young men and women started posting "life hacks". And then Jason Kottke posted a satirical "popcorn hack".

Soon, everyone was getting in on the act.

Wibble wibble, yip yip.

We've probably all seen something like this by now - you take an empty 2 litre plastic soda bottle and a bucket of water, you put a piece of perforated foil over the top, cut the botto... ah, no. Wait. Different technique for getting into space. You use a bicycle pump type thing, and make a rocket out of it.

Discovery Channel's best program, Mythbusters, recently made one, and found it to be more powerful than they had anticipated. No shit. Take a look at what they do with them in Japan.

I am so building one of these things.

Although the otherwise-excellent aircraft seat maps at seatguru.com don't show it accurately, the economy-class heads or toilets behind row 26 on United's 777-200 XC consist of a row of three regular aircraft bogs in front, and a second row that contains only two. Of these two, the aft port-side head is gigantic - at least by economy class aircraft standards - and thus eminently suitable for mile-high hijinks.

For those who aren't soon planning a flight on United to Europe however, Mile High Atlanta offers an alternative. Downside: it's a Piper Cherokee, not a plush 777. Upside: you get to use a real bed, not an aircraft bog. And, included in your $299 "ride" - you get to keep the sheets. At least you won't have to worry about those who have, uhh, come before you.

The city as an avatar of itself

It came to me as something of a surprise just how easy it is to mislead someone into thinking they're looking at a photo of a model when they're actually looking at a photo of the real thing.

If you want to spend a lot of money and do this the "right" way, you can buy a tilt/shift lens like this one. When you do so, you can get results like these by Olivo Barbieri (story, more), Marc Räder, Miklos Gaál, or Håmish Gránt.

However, it's a truth generally acknowledged today that any technique that requires pieces of aspherically curved glass can also be done with bits, quicker, safer, cheaper, more repeatably, with more chances to tweak the results, and so on.

So, if you want to make pictures like these but don't want to spend a ton of money doing it, you can actually fake it pretty easily.

How easily? Well, here's my first attempt (before, after) which was OK, but not as convincing as I'd hoped. So then I tried again with a photo from Singapore (before, after) which I tweaked more extensively. Compare, especially, the perspective change between the before and after.

Once I got the technique more or less down, the next two (Harper's Ferry, WV before and after, and Wellington before and after) took only a few minutes each.

If you want to know how I did this, leave a comment.

Funny eBay feedback.

Web 2.0 - or is that twenty? - where the pages turn themselves.

Meet Myranda Didovic. She's here to introduce you to today's vocabulary word (technically, acronym), which is EFRO.

Random violence can be strangely hypnotic. If you don't believe me, try watching it with the sound off.

Mousetrap!

Whoa. Cool as Kim Deal.

Old and busted: eXtreme Programming conference. The new hotness: Waterfall 2006

Ken is great. All hail Ken.






Olbermann, that is.

This story could only have been improved by a huge "10 TON" lead weight dropping on the unfortunate goober when he reached the bottom of the stairs.

Q) When is a near miss not a near miss? A) When the CAA says so, apparently.

Good taste. Good design. Good aesthetics. Un-American?

You're in a dark, twisted Internet where all pathways look alike. Looking around you discover a nostalgia stimulant.

Did you bring your grue repellent?

iTunes Signature Maker. Very cool. Here's mine.

Create a "W" Mashup

Create your own W. Speech Mashup.

I love watching Apple's rivals talk about the success of the iPod, and why their own devices and software have not enjoyed the same level of market penetration (heh-heh "penetration").

First up in the "not really getting it" stakes is Microsoft's Stevie B with this quote that reminds me of George H.W. Bush's "vision thing" gaffe:

We've got a lot of work to do. On the PC, our stuff is still the most popular stuff out there. It's not true in the portable device space, and I think we have to do some stuff to simplify the experience.

"Do some stuff to simplify the experience". Yeah, that. Maybe they could do some, like, interaction design or whatever. And calling theirs the most popular "stuff" on the PC is a bit like Ford saying "yeah, we have the most popular Taurus out there".

But then C|Net make a nice point about MS's branding around portable music players:

Virtually all devices that use Microsoft technology carry the company's "Plays For Sure" logo, intended to show compatibility among all the devices and online services that Microsoft's products mesh with. But there's been a catch: Not all the devices have actually been fully compatible with subscription services.

I like the "Plays For Sure" logo. It serves the purpose of introducing fear and doubt where it may not have previously been, the way a car that proudly bears a sticker saying "Guaranteed not to blow up and kill you in a horrible fiery death!" would.

But the very best part of all about the "Plays For Sure" logo is that there is a caveat to it - a disclaimer that says "May not actually be true. Not valid in AK and HI. Price and participation may vary. Caveat emptor" - aah, the big print giveth, and the small print taketh away, because in fact all the music for which you pay a monthly fee so you can continue to enjoy it, the big differentiator over Apple and their so-last-year "perpetual license" model, you can't actually listen to it on your not-an-iPod because it doesn't actually Play. For. Sure.

The winner, though, in the "denial is not just a river in Africa" sweepstakes comes from Mark Farish, senior product manager for Samsung Electronics America, who says:

Apple has buried the market with advertising for (iPod and iTunes), and since then it's been difficult for any other company to shake that bedrock

Riiight. It's Apple's superior advertising muscle - that's why they're so far ahead. It's not because the iPod doesn't need a poxy "Plays? Oh ya, ya sure, ya betcha!" sticker, or because they've already "done some stuff" to de-shittify the experience, it's because Apple has better advertising.

But ultimately this is all good news for Apple, because so long as these dilweeds continue to believe that all they need is better advertising and slogans to convince users that, really, bleeding from the eyes is a good thing, that wanting to smash that shiny plastic gewgaw you just bought to smithereens because it won't play the Smithereens is healthy, normal, and above all a fun experience, Apple ain't got nothin' to worry about.

World's greatest blonde joke

I've know blogged the MetalStorm before (I just can't find the post ... on this blog ... that's frickin' owned - not pwned - by Google ... go figure), but now I bring you ... the DREAD.

If this thing catches on and becomes the dominant projectile-firing weapon of choice for the military, what are kids going to say instead of "BANG!" when they shoot one another? And what are they going to use to simulate the weapon when it doesn't look like an outstretched index finger? Inquiring minds want to know.

... and here's another thing. "Recoilless"? So ... they've managed to overcome Newton's First Law? Intriguing. I'd hate to see what kind of gyroscopic effects you'd get from this. They're talking about speeds up to 8000fps, implying that the spinny disc thing inside is achieving 8000fps tangential velocity at the rim - let's say the thing is about two feet in diameter, or about 6 feet in circumference. It's doing over 1,300 rps? 80,000 rpm? Hmm. Also, if you watch the video, the grouping they're getting from the prototype doesn't look too hot.

Meh - move along, nothing to see here. Except that the music on the video is bitchin'.

Engines

Big (yes, those are stairs and walkways you can see on it) and bigger (alas, blogged here before, but I can't find it right now), small and smaller, and then you have ... this, umm, thing.

Way more fun than it oughta be.

Best mugshot of 2005.

Tomorrow I'm going to do this to K-Mart.

Missed a Darwin Award by [ ] THAT much!

They say that necessity is the mother of invention. Well, perhaps this guy is a little too close to that mother.

I'm not sure if posting on Reprobates qualifies as type "a" or type "b" procrastination, but I'm pretty certain it's not type "c".

"It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future", as many people have allegedly said. Not Dr. Mysterian though.

Can anyone read Japanese - I reeeaaallly need to know what these are actually for...

At last, the truth about the rather curious speech habits of Dubya - it's all carefully scripted.

You want a War on Christmas? I've got your "War on Christmas" right fucking HERE, buddy!

Every once in a while you come across an image that on its face is quite innocuous, but upon reflection is just deeply disturbing.

I consider this image to be in that category.

Real-time flight tracking and a whole lot more - here.

Can you say issues? Maybe this will lead to a whole slew of chicks having silicone replicas made of something so they can have them implanted in their chests, like, say, one of these.

Bugatti Veyron

Can any production road car exceed 250mph? The Bugatti Veyron is a brute vying to.

Windy?

This is what I need: A job where I get to break stuff in unimaginable ways, and get paid lots of money to do it. I especially love the last line:

"It's a service we provide"...

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. When the writers at the Onion are on, damn, they are on. Below I present a prime example from the current edition, and I have to say the way they have combined the themes of Bush's ignorance and religious fervor with Cheney's Machiavellian conniving is, to my mind, nothing short of flawless:

"Voice of God" Revealed To Be Cheney On Intercom

I mean, you know, "Jokes? I get jokes!" and all that, and I've made a few people laugh in my time, but once in a while you're confronted with a line like that and ... wow. That's comic genius. The mental imagery it conjures up - man, I'd kill to be able to come up with one like that.

They say comedians are some of the hardest people in the world to make laugh. You tell 'em a great joke, and they sit there, just analyzing it, trying to see how it works, and then they discuss it, earnestly, picking it to pieces. If that's the price of being one of the comedy greats, then I'm actually happy just being regular Joe Schmuck, laughing his ass off at funny shit.

The hills are alive, with the sound of ... jackboots?

Desperate Airlines

I flew with 2 turkeys from IAD to LAX last week. Details here.

Shoot the lock off

Stuck down an alleyway behind a locked gate? Bad guys coming up fast? Why not shoot the lock off? Because it's hard, that's why.

In these days of high(ish) gas prices many people are considering ways of using less fuel while commuting. With some obvious exceptions a Diesel gets better mileage than a gas motor and motorcycles are some of the most efficient vehicles of all. What was that? What were to happen if were to combine those two ideas?

Someone crazier than you already did it. Nice try, Edison.

Presenting Sin Destroyers - the world's Christianest rock band.

The very best kind of satire is that which takes something that's just begging to be parodied and tweaks it slightly. By this measure, The Onion once again delivers in spades.

Educate-Yourself.org is a free educational forum dedicated to the dissemination of accurate information in the use of natural, non-pharmaceutical medicines and alternative healing therapies in the treatment of disease conditions. Free Energy, Earth Changes, and the growing reality of Big Brother are also explored since survival itself in the very near future may well depend on self acquired skills to face the growing threats of bioterrorism, emerging diseases, and the continuing abridgement of constitutional libertie

The ironically-named "educate yourself" website aims to be the one-stop portal-slash-clearinghouse for all your crackpot nonsense needs. And, by estimation, it succeeds. It's an odd mixture of stuff, to be sure, combining, as it does, such diverse craptacular subjects as UFOs, "chemtrails", colloidal silver (the substance that turned Montana Libertarian US Senate candidate Stan Jones blue), the New World Order and many more.

In this regard, it seems some parts of the site seem to bear the hallmark of the particular kind of weak-mindedness and doughy-headed "thinking" called New Age, other parts seem to embrace the paranoic ramblings of the John Birch Society, and still other parts engage in the messianic spoutings of Christian fundamentalism. All-in-all, it is an interesting - in a clinical sense - study of the machinations of people outside the "reality-based community".

So now they have a formula to calculate the prescription strength of beer googles. Perhaps they can use the same kind of thinking to figure out how fast you can travel on your beer scooter.

I love you...

...you love me! Let's all get together and sing about Biggie!

Green DayDean Gray presents American IdiotEdit. - a mash-up not to be missed.

Xtreeeeme paper models.

Babar? Is that you?

Unhealthy glow

Guy: Yo, that Hamburgler's a scary motherfucker, 'cause you never know what that nigga be sayin'. He be all "robble robble robble robble" and shit!

People say the damnedest things (Example comes from the first link)

And now from Penis Land...

Poorly choosen domain names.

Most. Disturbing. Themesong.

Evar!

Presenting, for your consideration:

The Adventures of Dr McNinja

and

Things To Do When You're Bored

Panexa - it's good for what ails ya.

Confessions of a Crypto-creative Geek

As a dedicated Mac guy and inveterate iLife and Photoshop Elements hacker, I sometimes like to engage my right brain and "do stuff" with the audio, video and music capabilities of those products.

Recently for example, I've been playing with the so-called "artistic filters" in Photoshop and I've been particularly enamored with the "cutout" and "watercolor" filters. The effect of both filters are easier to demonstrate than to describe:





Pretty cool, huh?

I've also turned videotapes of the kids into DVDs, complete with navigation menus, transitions, effects, music and so on. I volunteered my services at work the other day to produce some company-internal videos. The guy I was talking to said "How are you going to do that?" I told him I'd bring in my DV camcorder, shoot some video, then edit it at home. "Oh," he said, "Mac guy, huh?".

Last of all, and, for those who know me, most improbably, I've been dinking with GarageBand and Rax. GarageBand is the now-legendary easy-to-use studio application that comes with iLife, and Rax, a "virtual audio rack" that you plug software instruments and effects into. When we first got the Mac, we bought the kids an M-Audio Keystation 49e MIDI controller to play with, so I used that and "composed" a little four-note jingle to use on company podcasts (if you think four notes does not a jingle make, David Dundas and Channel Four might have something to say about that), and overlaid it with my voice which I recorded with a cheap Shure 8900 mic and a Griffin iMic USB audio adapter.

When I was trying to come up with a jingle, I just waited until I sort of "heard" the kind of thing I was after in my head, and, not really knowing the first thing about music, just sort of poked keys on the Keystation until I got it approximately right. Then I used the stave editor in GarageBand to slide the notes around until it sounded good. Over that, I looped a beat and added a final high note that fades out gently to sort of bring the thing to a close. I'm actually quite proud of it.

Audio logo

I figured I might also want some stripped-down versions to use as bumpers in between segments on a podcast. GarageBand's software instruments are really nice. Check out the modulation on the final note in the acoustic guitar version, or the audible key "thump" on the grand piano.

Acoustic guitar
Upright jazz bass
Vibraphone
Grand piano

Anyone who's ever played the game with me that involves mashing-up band names to come up with things like "Grateful Dead Kennedys" (and their best-known song, "Sugar Magnolia Fuck Off") will surely find this site instantly comprehensible and very funny.

If only they'd been around back then

If Faux News had been around through history some of its top stories might have gone a little something like this.

PS: While dutifully researching this blog entry I came across an interesting image of our fair president. [full story] Is that a microphone shadow over your crotch or were you scared pissless by your latest poll numbers?

It sure isn't pornography any more, but is it art?

Nice to know my home town in the news, even if it is firmly in the "oops!" category. Sig Sauer don't actually make a 9mm automatic pistol, only a semi-automatic, but never mind ...

The latest iPod - 60GB, 15,000 songs, cup size DD.

So when are we going to create regime change within the oppressive dictatorship of Wal-Martistan? Oop, never mind, nothing to see here.

Lost for words?

Never again, with the ProfaniWiki! Needs some work, so get contributing, you badger wanking sons of sultans!

A cautionary tail

NSFW, and also NSFlunch either. How *not* to go about first-time anal.

This actually sounds like it could make being in church tolerable. Until they have to go and spoil the fun with all that religious crap, anyway. Perhaps they're just trying to invent Church 2.0 - maybe they should ask this guy for some pointers.

Programming language inventor or serial killer? (Thanks John)

OMFG! (thanks, Chris)

The sooner we can proceed without DeLay, the better for the whole country.

High-speed photography and video, here, here and here.

Washing away again in 'Ritaville

Elderly terr'ists to blame for bus explosion? Oxygen canisters - not the same type that brought down KiluJet flight 592 - are apparently to blame here. But you can never be too sure - I've got $5 betting some of these wrinklies had been illegally buying their prescription meds from Canada, thus making themselves enemies of Big Pharmathe State so I don't think it's too much of a stretch to suggest they were, in fact, terr'ists.

I think it's also interesting to note that they can't even get the evacuation right in Bush's (adoptive) home state of Tex-ass. It's even in Republican Majority leader and former exterminator Tom DeLay's home district ferchrissake. And the fact that people are getting stranded in their "big" (because everything's big in Texass) 'merican-built dumbass SUVs because they're - get this - running out of fuel sitting in 103-degree heat on the gridlocked roads with t he A/C running - comedy gold.

Oh, and the 9th Ward of New Orleans is getting a good soaking again as water once again pours over the top of the levees. But no-one could have predicted that. And remember folks, none of this has anything to do with global warming.

Two great tastes that taste great together

Rev. Michael Hinton has spent two years cutting the Bible down to something that will consume only 100 minutes of your time. I can beat that by two years and 100 minutes.

Avian grief

A touching story of a swallow pining for a dead companion.

Although the first comment kinda spoils the mood.

Hey, God - like praying, only with more swear words.

More FSM goodness

He hath touched us with his noodly appendage so that we might enjoyeth his game!

He also hath created a T-Shirt in his noodly image. Check out the details from Boing Boing.

Signage for Jeeeesus

Endless hours of fun! Generate your own church signs, like this:



or this:



or even this:

Head To Christ

Ex-KoRn rocker Brian 'Head' Welch finds God. Uggh. If there's one thing worse than Nu Metal, it's Godbothering Nu Metal. Where are the nice heartwarming stories of young, teenage Bible-belters finding riches and salvation in honest, wholesome sex, drugs and rock and roll? Post! Post!

Internet vs. Real Life

Every now and then you turn over a rock and find someone not well-acquainted with the Internet. Finally: a for them.

Captain Canuck is on his way!

Wow - talk about friendly neighbours! The entire Canadian Navy (yes, we actually have a navy) is on its way to Nawlins to help provide disaster relief in the wake of Katrina and the Waves.

One more wow: In an eerie sense of foreshadowing, Popular Mechanics predicted the New Orleans disaster with remarkable accuracy, back in 2001. Even more ironic? The story was published on Sept 11. Yes, THE Sept 11.

Looking for the perfect gift for a loved one?

Why not give something decorative you made yourself? Say, right after breakfast?

If y'all haven't seen the transcript of the WWL radio interview with the mayor of New Orleans, y'all should. This guy kicks ass. Also, and this is something I've been waiting to see - before and after aerial pictures of New Orleans.