By Xeni Jardin at 11:29 pm Monday, Mar 31
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Oogly says,
On Saturday, The New York Times mis-printed the CERN Large Hadron Collider as being the "Large HARDON Collider".
I have a web site tracking the proliferation of this Sopranos-worthy malapropism. It's funny when a fat New Jersey criminal doesn't know any better, but when the NYT and serious scientific journals make a Freudian slip, it's hilarious.
Link, mildly NSFW.
I wonder if this runs on DONG Energy.
By Xeni Jardin at 11:01 pm Monday, Mar 31
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This was the lesson I learned on Sunday evening, during a dinner + Mighty Boosh viewing party with a few friends. Noted grossout pastry expert Andrea James baked the cake, and also takes the cake, for ick-out ingenuity and an improvised recipe that was nilla-wafery, icing-frostily delicious. It was even vegetarian! Andrea explains:
Not vegan - has eggs (chicken haploids) and dairy (cow sequeezins). But no animal products derived from a dead animal. Pudding, which many recipes for this cake contain, has blood and/or connective tissue in it (gelatin). You could do it vegan, by using a vegan cake recipe and vegan wafers, if you wanted.
Above, iPhone snapshots I took (
1 +
2 +
3) before we dug in. I thought the photo would elicit more LOLs if I placed the cake on the floor next to actual catfood dishes. The dessert was as yummy as the photos are abhorrent. Note the painstaking attention to reality evidenced by the absorbent (sugar) blue sprinkles! Also the melted tootsie-roll cat doodoos! I could not bring myself to eat them, for I am as much of a fan of this particular candy as I am of
poo verité.
Anyhoo. Here are more photos and a HOWTO, from Andrea. Step one: buy a fresh cat litter box...
By Mark Frauenfelder at 9:08 pm Monday, Mar 31
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Jordan Crane's beautiful "Little Pink Pearl" is a 26" x 40" hand-pulled silkscreen print, limited to 53 prints.
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 5:16 pm Monday, Mar 31
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Dan Shapiro says: "Item #3 on this page consists of an attractive woman smearing superglue on her eyelid, then repeatedly poking herself. The goal is to create a western-style eyelid "crease", and the video is just creepy."
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 5:10 pm Monday, Mar 31
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I took this photo of a happy front yard in Ojai, CA, a couple of weeks ago. Click photo to enlarge.
By Mark Frauenfelder at 5:03 pm Monday, Mar 31
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Clay Roe says:
The podcast we produce, "Ask Mr. Biggs!", is a fictitious, small town radio call-in talk show.
A simple concept, to be sure. But there's a fun little twist.
Caller audio comes from real calls lifted from real talk radio shows. We remove the original host from the conversation, re-arrange the parts a bit, and insert Mr. Biggs as the new "host." The results are very seamless and comical, but not in ways you might think. We try not to go for easy laughs, but rather for a more subtle, nuanced, character-driven humor.
The podcast is produced by a couple of audio nuts, so the sound quality of the show is as good as you'll hear anywhere. Very clean and realistic. The calls are integrated with great care and precision. In fact, listeners to the podcast often never realize that the calls have been taken from other un-related sources.
It's this reason why we recently decided to lift our skirt, and expose the fact that these callers are from REAL talk radio broadcasts. You can't write this stuff. You can, however, edit and switch around what they're saying to make them even more unusual.
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 4:59 pm Monday, Mar 31
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Dav says: "The Feds have just banned IBM as a vendor, across the board: '"IBM and its subsidiaries are barred from receiving any new government contracts, new orders under existing contracts or purchase card transactions, according to a March 28 e-mail the Homeland Security Department’s Office of Procurement Operations circulated to procurement officials.'"
The ban seems to stem from "improperly obtained information about a contract [IBM] was bidding on from EPA employees."
Link
IBM is down just 1% in after hours trading.
By Mark Frauenfelder at 4:32 pm Monday, Mar 31
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The Collector's Quest blog has an illustrated list of "Thirteen Retro Kitsch Items That Likely Didn’t Survive For You To Collect." Shown here: "Dolls displayed in a dead tree." Link (Via Hang Fire Books)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 4:22 pm Monday, Mar 31
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Magnum Photos has samples of Dennis Stock's stunning photos from his 1966-67 trip through California.
Link | Stock's book:
Made in the USA (Via NotCot)
By David Pescovitz at 2:17 pm Monday, Mar 31
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Strephon Taylor liked the Bed Bug Murder label I
posted about a while back. He also digs William S. Burroughs, whose bug fascination and experiences as an exterminator appear throughout his novels. So inspired by both, Taylor created a fantastic Mugwumps Bug Powder t-shirt!
Link
Previously on BB:
• Bed Bug Murder vintage label
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 1:45 pm Monday, Mar 31
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It being the tenth anniversary of Mozilla, Jamie "Founder of Mozilla Project" Zawinski has declared today "Run Some Old Web Browsers Day!" He's mirroring a bunch of lovely old pages from "home.mcom.com, the Internet Web Site of the Mosaic Communications Corporation" for your antique browser pleasure.
* Trivia Question #1: Do you remember why home1.mcom.com through home32.mcom.com exist?
* Trivia Question #2: Do you remember the behavioral difference the browsers exhibited when they were talking to a Netscape web server?
* Trivia Question #3: When was the <HYPE> tag implemented, and what was its origin?
* I had originally planned on re-hosting these web sites on an SGI Indy running Mosaic Netsite Commerce Server, just for maximal comedic value... and to see how long it took before someone Øwned it, since there must be someone out there who still remembers how to launch an assault on Irix 5.3. Unfortunately, that wasn't possible for political reasons explained below.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 1:39 pm Monday, Mar 31
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Doran sez, "Flickr user el_rebelde has created a small but wonderful set of images from the Big Dipper roller coaster at Chippewa Lake Park, Ohio. His notes say it was built in the 1920's and ended service in 1978." Haunting pix indeed.
Link
(
Thanks, Doran!)
By David Pescovitz at 12:30 pm Monday, Mar 31
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Here's a fun Flickr set of found photos from the 1980s showing a group of friends doing some blow and having a blast. Flickr user
foundphotoslj writes: "I found these in a red photo album marked 'Darlene' at a swap meet in Huntington Beach, California."
Link (Thanks, Jess Hemerly!)
UPDATE: The majority of the photos have been removed.
By Xeni Jardin at 12:28 pm Monday, Mar 31
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Over at the Wired Danger Room blog, Noah Shachtman has an item about a report produced in 2006 for the U.S. Special Operations Command with suggestions that the military consider "clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers."
Since the start of the Iraq war, there's been a raucous debate in military circles over how to handle blogs -- and the servicemembers who want to keep them. One faction sees blogs as security risks, and a collective waste of troops' time. The other (which includes top officers, like Gen. David Petraeus and Lt. Gen. William Caldwell) considers
blogs to be a valuable source of information, and a way for ordinary
troops to shape opinions, both at home and abroad.
This 2006 report for the Joint Special Operations University, "Blogs and Military Information Strategy," offers a third approach -- co-opting bloggers, or even putting them on the payroll.
Link (image: Peter Starman / WIRED)
