Life can often be stranger than fiction - after all, life doesn't have to make sense. After the US Federal prison system banned smoking in prison in 2004, removing snout as a form of currency, inmates have turned to other items for barter, chief among them mackerel.

Yes, mackerel.

Hardly surprising though, really - after all, you can smoke mackerel. Some people also can smoked mackerel.

I'll get me coat.

Ouch!

I have a friend for whom the mark of a good curry is to burn thrice: once on the way in, once when it's in there and once more on the way out. This guy appears to have forgotten the final phase.

Parenting advice on flickr

Jon Stewart, known primarily these days for The Daily Show, also had a memorable turn in the stoner movie Half Baked in which he played the Enhancement Smoker, someone for whom everything becomes more enjoyable when you're ON WEED.

Ten years on, the drug of choice for Enhancement Smokers is now Salvia divinorum, and the Enhancement Smoker du jour is the affable (and very, very high) Erik. Here are his instructional videos on how smoking salvia can affect Driving, Gardening, and Writing a Letter to Congress.

Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the world yet? Find out!

Need more cowbell?

Look no further - all your cowbell-augmentation needs can be met right here. Get it while it's hotRIAA hasn't shut it down.

So, what have they been putting in our water to create rainbows from our sprinklers?

Must be the electrolytes.

What the heck is "spacetime fusion"? It's SCIENCE!

(Thanks Serge!)

Business Guys on Business Trips - sorta like We The Robots meets Get Your War On, which is a Good Thing.

(* - Not affiliated with Reprobates® brand humorous blog)

Fake Windows pop-under browser hijack spam FAIL.

This pop-under ad, complete with carefully-crafted "warning pop-up", appeared on my desktop recently - I love how they went to so much trouble to make it look exactly like a Windows error message, but didn't actually bother to check what OS I was browsing on.

But, hey, better safe than sorry, right? After all, Ebola, Marburg, Avian Flu, they've all made the species jump ...

As they say on Fark, "useless without pics", the key word here being 34FF.

When a small crane gets into trouble, you can always bring along a bigger crane to help it out.

So what do you do when a big helicopter gets into trouble? Why, you bring along an even bigger one!

This Flickr photo set is full of AWESOME and WIN. Also, ducks.

Cunt brings the art of anything

(OK, it's machine translation from Finnish to English, but still ...)

FAIL

I'm formatting a big hard drive at the moment so found myself at a bit of a loose end. Seems the guys over at failblog.org are Reprobates at heart - kind of a pictorial litany of failure. I especially liked this particular piece of design:

I Love Country Music

Of course I don't really. File under the "Damn, I wish I had thought of that" category.

Quick like a bunny, now - this - parody or the real thing?

(BTW - it's the real thing)

Kasparov harassed by remote-control helicockter.

Great tits cope well with warming

One day when you're at work and sober, get together with a sober work colleague and go see your boss - may be a good time to ask for a raise.

More go than whoa (unless you mean in the Keanu Reeves sense) - but still, whoa ...

But wait! There's more!

When you were a kid, did you own an Atari 2600? No, neither did I. Still, this is funny ...

FIRE FIRE!

Sorry Mr. Heater but you're yesterday's flame.

Heat your heart out

Super SizeHigh Me.

Bono estente! Hethethethethethe hethethethethethetheth, Sminki-pinki Disco lessons in Finnish. Boutros boutros ghali!

Hedgehog bomb? Hedgehog bomb!

Ass Pennies for confidence.

Following several lawsuits Microsoft finally open-sourced some of the code to Vista.

It explains much.

Ninja pu-riso!

Horsepital

"Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth. Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this universe, there shines a star."

Goodnight, funnyman.

BeingBathing John Malkovich [NOT HOMO-EROTICIST]

When nature calls

"Does this toilet make my ass look fat?"

Headlines - love 'em or hate 'em, they're here to stay!

The BBC News site currently has a headline rivalling the NY Post's classic "Headless Body Found In Topless Bar", that reminds us all that there's none so blind as those that won'tcan't see.

... and cue study rebutting this one is 3 ... 2 ... 1

Of course, if it were accepted for distribution like mainstream medicines, it would have to include disclaimers such as:
Side effects include: lowered inhibitions and standards, loss of motor control, loss of motor car control, loss of driving license. Some users have reported that prolonged use results in them breaking out in handcuffs. Ask your barman if this product is right for you.

The Front Fell off

Bjørk vs. Diddy

Liberty Fillmore is The Cart Whisperer.

Today's "No Shit, Sherlock!" award goes to Italian doctor Maria Cerruto whose ground-breaking research suggests that High heels 'may improve sex life'.

In a planned followup, the good doctor is expected to also reveal that human female breasts are not only functional in providing nourishment for infants, but that, among certain subcultures, are also considered decorative in their own right.

Dave Secretary writes funny stories in (with one exception, towards the bottom) ALL CAPS, so they are easy to find when you're scrolling fast, as well as being all the more AWESUM for it.

He also draws poorly, with a bad drawing tool, and produces shite cartoons which he nonetheless protests "are gold", which is half-right. In fact, his deadpan blow-by-blow expositions of the cartoons' subject matter and the putative "joke" told therein are (mostly) gold - the cartoons themselves? See for yourself.

When I was seven years old, I remember approaching the radio with trepidation whenever it was switched on, for when it was on, it might start playing a particular song that made me very sad, and which I hated. The song was Terry Jacks' maudlin, saccharine and thoroughly weepy "Seasons in the Sun", although, to be honest, even though I had divined that the song was about someone dying, I really thought the title referred to seasons that had been spent living, literally, in the Sun, much as one lives in, say, London, or Wagga Wagga. But I digress.

So anyway, I was in Harper's Ferry yesterday and I stopped in at a coffee shop for a thoroughly nasty coffee, an experience which was made truly transcendently awful by the radio's insistence on wailing on and on about how we had had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun ... and of course I was transported back to 1974 and all that entailed. I quietly took my leave soon afterward and surreptitiously dumped the remainder of the dismal coffee in a trash can. Unfortunately, it was not so easy to jettison the lingering sonic memory of Jacks' lachrymose lament, and for the next 24 hours, that song buzzed around my head, occasionally swapping places with one of the other two songs that are stored in the same part of my brain.

Those other two songs, incidentally, are Billy Don't Be A Hero (or should that be an hero?) - understandable, since it was released in the same year - and, perhaps, less explicably, R. Dean Taylor's Indiana Wants Me. A friend of mine refers to this kind of apparently localized recall as the "cloud", and I think it fits. Those three songs, for me, are close together in the cloud.

So anyway, I decided to do a bit of googling and see if I could figure out anything about this cluster of songs, but perhaps unsurprisingly, I found a lot more hits for the Jacks' monstrosity than for the other two combined, and while I was combing through the SitS pages, I found something that made it all worthwhile - gearchange.org, which explains, among other things, exactly why SitS is so particularly gruelling to listen to.

Back in the summer of aught-four, I posted the following in relation to really black stuff:

None more black?

but in these more enlightened days, and since "they" now seem to have invented something even blacker, what can I say but:

Blacker than black

My only concern here is that the word 'ever' is hardly ever justified in these circumstances, and for the most part, we'd all be better off if they used a word that has more chance of being correct in the long term: 'yet'

Yes, as in 'yet black'.


Thank you, and goodnight.

Er, stewardess...?

Is it supposed to do that?

Say Clem?

Yeauh?

Ya dun seen Jim Bob's new limuzeen"?

yeauh. Shur is suweet.

yep. Wish'n ah hayd wunudem fer me, the missus and all the june'yers.

yeauh.

(they) can count your money...

What's scary is that, based on the latest polling numbers, there are approxmiately 50,000,000 idiots^H^H^H^H^H^Hpeople who would cheer an idea such as this.

Anyone know the citizenship requirements for Australia? . Sure they're hated by most of Asia but that would be a huge step up from here.

Déja vu: a recent xkcd webcomic recapitulates my own Leopard upgrade experience.

Attention WalMart Shoppers!

Their prices just can't be "beat". 

Believe it or not, reading Reprobates requires college-level reading skills. It says so on the Internet, so it must be true.

So Amazon has announced its e-book reader, the Kindle. This means I can now spend $400 on a device so that I can then buy books in softcopy for $10 each rather than, say, $20-$25 for real, actual books. The real draw of this thing though is supposedly its abilty to hold 200 or more books and enable you to carry them around with you - this is a good thing if you're tired of having to trundle around a wheelbarrow with you to carry your physical book collection with you.

I'm not sure who the target demographic is, but the video overview shows someone who could be a student carrying the thing around. That makes sense on one level, because I remember carrying at least 187 books with me between classes when I was in college. Actually, no I don't, because I didn't. I carried maybe one or two books with me, tops, and a notepad. "Ah!" you say, "But college textbooks are reeeeeally expensive, so this thing gives instant payback!" which, yeah, it might if a) college textbooks were available for purchase in softcopy and b) college students weren't able to buy all the textbooks they need second-hand from last year's users for, you know, $10. Plus - show me the college student, who, given $400, wouldn't immediately turn it into mad quantities of weed, beer and Ramen, possibly not in that order.

It has what looks to be one piece of cool technology, which is the display technology and which is touted to be almost as good as real paper! - for $400. Yeah.

So then what of the device's aesthetics and its behavioral design? Jeff Bezos' stated design goal is to make "Kindle disappear in your hands", as in, have the experience be as immersive as a (real) book. I can see what he means by saying a real book does this, but my larger concern would be over reading this thing in public where it may well literally disappear from your hands - along with your wallet, cell phone, iPod and any other valuables. But then you watch the video demonstration and, right there at 1:01 in, the dreaded phrase "page turn buttons" (emphasis mine, but it hardly matters) surfaced, and my heart sank. I was thinking - oh, hey, page turn gesture, like the iPhone ... but no. Stinkin' buttons. It gets worse - "Use the select wheel when you want to choose an item on the page or menu". Groan. So much for immersive, and disappearing in your hands. Plus, one other little kicker - "the display doesn't use backlighting, so just like paper, it's as easy to read outside in bright sunlight as it is inside your living room or office" - and, just like paper, is illegible unless you have pretty strong frontlighting. Again, the iPhone (and other devices) have already solved this problem - it's called a transreflective LCD, and it works very nicely.

To sum up - FAIL. As a device, ironically, I believe, because it doesn't have enough advanced technology in it - no touch screen, no colo(u)r (thus no killer app), and no transreflective goodness. As a cultural artifact, it will also FAIL because, oh yeah, FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS.

But, hey, go ahead. Be a good American, buy several of these things and use them in the manner suggested by the device's name, and also by the residents of the state next door to mine who refer to "books" by a different word.

Nerd (red) alert.

Can not move bowels in the urine the pond.

Bi(ke)sexual

Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward.

Paging Paul - paging Paul. Boy, you got some 'splainin to do - "Fart in the Duck".

Unfeasibly large

The MTV show Pimp My Ride (not to be confused with that other show, Ride My Pimp) has spawned a video game that, apparently, and not surprisingly, "sucks".

So anyway, before I found the scathing review referenced above, I followed a number of useless links served up by Google in response to the query string pimp my ride wii review, most of which were pages talking about a review of the game, or which contained the keywords in otherwise unrelated contexts, but eventually I hit gold.

Yes, our old friend keyword-driven advertising strikes again, and this time the lucky company is BizRate.com, a pretty reputable p2p business ratings site, where somehow the keywords noted above translated into the following howler:

... but apparently they didn't stop watching even once they figured out the movie was about a very different kind of Pajama Game.

In American media, hearing the words "a very special episode of ..." before this week's episode of your favourite sitcom-slash-drama means that said show is about to jump the shark and become crap.

In British media, it apparently means your favourite newspaper column is about to end with the word "cunt".

REMEMBER KIDS CAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL AND TODAY IS INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY!

I wanna talk to you about the Cannonball Run - no, not that Cannonball Run, this one, the one the movie was based on. See, it's a real thing - or at least, it was a real thing, but now there's also the Gumball 3000, and that's also hella fake, so what's real any more? Where's the real Two-Lane Blacktop-style outlaw driver action?

I'll tell you where it is - right here, buddy. And here, but most especially here, and here.

"It's hard to be a Don Juan...

...when you've got a chinchilla on your..." SFW? Maybe... Music video is a treat and the test drive is worth trying for the n00b.

Fun with automatic reference generation - nice title this guy has (yes, I was looking for my own name, no, I'm not in there). Bonus points for the way the title was (incorrectly) inferred from the borderline-patronizing usage as applied to the "Equipment Maintainer" in the next paragraph, in an apparent "local boy made good" kinda reference.

(POSTING REDACTED)

"There's no way I'll work with Jennica again. I was really shocked what that cunt said to me."

Magic Bus

Dasher for photos?

Actually, dasher for everybody's photos. Eek, I wonder how many different ways there will be to get a pic of the inside of my nostrils...

"Brrrrr, it's cold in here. There must be some A/C in the atmosphere."

And a generator on the trunk.

What comes after Windows Vista? Behold! Windows RG!

Worst. Tradenames. Ever.

She may be pretty, but she's not real smart. Nosirree.

Transcript: "I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because...ah some...people out there in our nation don't have maps and...ah...I believe that eh-education such as in South Africa and the Iraq everywhere like such as and I believe that they should....our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. or-or should help south Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for our gen..."

"The main thing is, we don't want to rob them of their culture, as you said. We don't want to introduce plumbing, and electricity, and housing, and doorknobs, because that's going to take away what it means to be inherently ... 'African'"

So you come across an academic paper entitled "On the Efficiency of AC/DC" and you assume that it's about, say, large-scale electricity generation and distribution systems, but then you read the second part of the title: "Bon Scott versus Brian Johnson"

Ever wanted to hear a sexy girl moaning your IP address? Wish granted!

Would you wager money on this horse?

Maybe you should've. His heart was certainly in the race.

And he runs like the wind.

Biggest


nerd


ever.

Stop pussyfooting around

Remarkable. NSFW, unless you work for some seriously freaky foot-fetishists.

They call him Flipper... Flipper... FLIPPER OF DEATH!

"That's cool. Does it blend?"

iPhone. Blended. Mmmmmmm.

When it's my time, I can only hope to be remembered with an obituary like this one.

iPhone? shmiPhone.

Who says all video game players are sunlight-fearing, couch potato, no-life-having nerds?

Some of them are sunlight-loving, no-life-having nerds with way too much time on their hands.

Marvin gets a laser canon in his face

I read this and I can't help but imagine it saying "Need Input".

Bad, yet classic 80's movies aside, that may be one of the coolest things I've ever seen.

Every now and then, you come across an idea so revolutionary that it is greeted with Schopenhauer's now-classic formulation (I am paraphrasing here): "it won't work, it is trivial, and besides we already do it that way". I believe we may be witnessing a (kill me now) paradigm shift in text input for small personal electronic devices that will revolutionise the industry by freeing devices that operate on text input from the size constraints that keep them at a certain minimum form factor. The system is called Dasher and it comes from a research group at the University of Cambridge. Watch the Google lecture series video on it, download the beta software and then play with it. Oh and, yes, I did write this blog entry using it :)

Thou shalt not ... do a bunch of things. Like, say, rip off LCD Soundsystem?

No, it's not (thank Zarquon) some kind of fetish porn - but other than that, the site Hot Chicks with Douchebags delivers exactly what the domain name promises. More douchebags here, here, here, and, oh, say, here. Hot chicks can be found ... wait, you need help finding pix of hot chix? Sorry, you fail at the Internets.

OMFG - chekk it owt: A l33t pr0ngr4mmng l4ngu@g3..

SFW.

Once you click here, you will have experienced this phenomenon.

A meme within a meme within a meme.

Where does it end? It doesn't, it's memes all the way down.

An interesting Idea...

Saw this on Reddit. No need to read the whole thing, because some of his arguments are stupid. We're way too lazy in America to walk up 1, let alone multiple floors.

What does rock is the very 1st comment.

You may have heard someone say "you've got a friend in Jesus". Now you can put a Jesus in your friend.

totalcleaningsupplies.com

We all get spam. But not all of it leaves you laughing & wondering quite like this one:

Would you like to have a killer meat stick? If you do, Penis Enlarge Patch should be for you.

After taking Penis Enlarge Patch make you sure your dick doesnt make too much shadow on the beach.

Web 1.0 was insufficiently legit, but this new Web 2.0? Too legit, it seems. Too legit to quit, that is.

Viddy this my droogs - Ongopongo is Digg for Google My Maps mashups!

What the fuck has happened to our language? Now, get off my lawn.

Bible Fight

It sounds to me as though the US Department of Defense have a taken a leaf from these guys' playbook.

Rock, Paper, Scissors TNG

Bored with Rock, Paper Scissors? (Well, these guys aren't, but that's another story.). Expand your hand-to-hand contest repertoire with an updated 21st century version.

Brain cramps? Form a line on the left.

George Carlin, of seven dirty words (and many more), and Rufus from Bill & Ted fame, has a new rant/rap/monologue about being a modern man (transcript here) that I find oddly reminiscent of this.

Threat Alert Jesus - sorta reminds me of this dude.

In case you're worried that Reprobates has been a bit "tame" lately, I offer the jury the following for their consideration on the topic of the word "shitcock":

Exhibit 1 - John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory
Exhibit B - Shitting dick nipples (NSFW)

That is all.