"Let's follow the power cord and see where it goes," the narrator says, and you know it's going to be good, but then find out that it's really good.

Here's an update from 7 years later:

Read the rest

Clemson's national championship football team went to the White House on Monday where President Donald Trump hosted them for winning the title. Trump had a bunch of burgers ready for them: Wendy's, McDonald's and Burger King. Read the rest

There are three Egyptian hieroglyphs depicting penises, each with Unicode characters: 𓂸𓂹 𓂺 Amazingly, no-one seems to know about them despite their being among the most succinct and obviously useful glyphs in the standard. The RealRevK reports:

They are rather innocuously named U+130B8: EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH D052, U+130B9: EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH D052A, and U+130BA: EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH D053.

I cannot actually work out what the middle one is meant to be doing, to be honest. Looks painful.

Someone will no doubt explain to me that in fact that is not what the hieroglyph is and that I just have a dirty mind, but if that were true, why are they apparently censored in some fonts?

Many unicode characters fail to attract use simply because they aren't present in any common fonts. The penis unicode characters render for me on MacOS Mojave Firefox and Safari, but disappear in Chrome. Are you seeing it on your system? Are they missing or conspicuosly "censored"? Tell us in the comments!

UPDATE: WordPress's "Tags" panel automatically bowdlerizes a single penis by turning it into the 👍 emoji, but left dual penises unmolested. Read the rest

: (◕(' 人 ') ◕) : Oh, the huge manatees! Need a mental health break? Step on in to our transparent canoe. 🛶 Read the rest

Oh my....... Read the rest

I was not expecting the surprise ending to Danny DeVito's retelling of how he once saved the life of his 'Romancing the Stone' co-star Michael Douglas on location in Mexico.

😳

🐍 Read the rest

The Twitter account of upscale retailer Nordstrom confirmed this weekend that it did not "like" a tweet that claimed the "DS" in "Nintendo DS" stood for "dick suck."

Another twitter user had reported that the offensive remark appeared in their feed because Nordstrom liked it, but it appears now that this report was itself mistaken.

"The DS in Nintendo DS stands for Dick Suck," wrote Nick Wiger, a Twitter japester with 32k followers on the popular social network. "The idea was, playing it was as fun as gettin your dick sucked. 3DS, as fun as 3 dick sucks."

"Um, this appeared in my feed because @Nordstrom liked it?," replied Katie Metz of St. Louis, or at least an account using that identity, concluding her tweet with a skeptical frowny face emoji and the hashtags #nordstrom and #fail.

"Sorry for the confusion, Katie," Nordstrom responded three minutes later. "We can confirm we have not liked this tweet."

At press time, Twitter had not yet responded to an inquiry concerning why the site was still free.

Photo: Mike Mozart (CC-BY-3.0) Read the rest

Another marker of the mainstream-ization of emoji: Dictionary.com is now offering entries that explain their meaning. As Time reports:

As Dictionary.com can now make clear with authority, having researched this emoji with the same tactics lexicographers use when defining a new word, the eggplant emoji is a symbolic penis. The goat emoji is used as a stand-in for the acronym GOAT, meaning Greatest of All Time. And the upside-down face emoji may convey “silliness, sarcasm, passive aggression, or frustrated resignation.”

Dictionary.com is not trying to insist that emoji are words, though they can function like old-fashioned letter-blobs. The company has not even defined them, per se. Lexicographer Jane Solomon compares what they’re providing to usage notes, paragraphs found alongside definitions that give additional context about how and when a word is used. The explanations for the first batch of about 20 emoji are more conversational and informal than your traditional ˈdik-shə-ner-ē fare. They tellingly live on the editorial part of Dictionary.com’s website.

Me, I'm in favor of this sort of codification. Emoji are a genuinely cool evolution of our daily communications; among other things, they have -- as linguists told me when I researched this a while ago for Wired -- consistent linguistic rules for use. (We most often put face emoji before other emoji, because face emoji convey our "stance" -- the emotional tone of the sentence we're constructing out of images.) I'll be interested to see how emoji start cropping up in Strunk-and-White-style writing guides in the years to come. Read the rest

Oh, Denny's.

How many meetings did you have before you decided on using an anthropomorphic poop-like sausage for one of your Grand Slam breakfast mascots?

The Dennys turd is here with lunch pic.twitter.com/uoqLsi2xzt

— AmericanPropagandist (@ArmyStrang) September 9, 2017

I had this same thought today 🤦🏻‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/4QVuNpgE6o

— SeanGallimore (@SeanGallimore) September 10, 2017

Not enough, clearly. I feel a little sad for you right now.

Good job on the tiny fedora though.

photo by Mike Mozart

(Mashable) Read the rest

Immigration police arrested three Chinese nationals in a raid on a rented room in Tambon Ban Mai Nongsai, charging them with work-permit violations and for "online trading of contraband goods." Read the rest