Chili Powder

DMX Target Audience

Where the hood at?

Fainting Goats etc.

Marcel and I are having a true Lazy Sunday, finding great movies on YouTube to watch.  Check out these goats.  Marcel says, "I thought they were having beer or wine." 

Lighting farts.

Low budget zombie movie that Marcel liked a little too much.

Ice pee guy.

Don't hate the Hasselhoff

Maybe this is something he had to make in rehab?  In any case, it makes me very happy.  I'm Set Adrift On Hasselhoff Bliss.

Mormor.nu

Very charming online baby clothing store straight outta Denmark.  Not that this means ANYTHING!  Don't get no ideas...

Get Human

I found the best database of ways to scoop automated phone services to get a real person.  Check it.

Onesie

I'm helping out with a surprise baby shower for a buddy, doing some onesie research.  Check out this great onesie I found.

Love it/Hate it

Love it:

Google's tribute to Louis Braille.

Hate it:

Salado barfed up a gallon of frothy dog urp in my car last night.

Odds on the Odd

Want to bet what Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes name their egg?  Place yer bets!  I'm thinking 'Maverick' is nice and understated. 

What's Going On?

I'm having a nutzo week at work, and I try, oh my god do I try, but sometimes things get so crazy that I have to say Hey!  What's going on?

But I'm in good company.  He-Man apparently does the same thing.  Except he has a disco track playing in the background.

Be sure to watch for Beast-Man's cameo!

zack

Hot or Not Maps

Jen uses Google maps quite a bit for plotting runs, researching other people's runs, finding neighborhoods from childhood, etc.  Thanks to my new find we can put a stop to all that constructive behavior and get back to some good old random internet time-wasting.

zack

More Heavenly Translations

A colleague's German-to-English translation of the Deutscher Ring site, courtesy of Babelfish:

Each humans have other desires and concerns. But for each need and each concern exactly the correct solution can be found.

Most of it find you by the way here. Select simply the range, which is to you momentarily particularly because of the heart.

And a very fine Aventis press release, I think from French to English:

The initiative "belly extent is heart thing" informed: Measure hold also in the vacation - increased belly extent refers to heart cycle risk.

These are beautiful things, made even better if listening to John Coltrane as the Friday afternoon just slides on by...

zack

Zacky Wiki

Googling myself got old years ago, but hey! Am I on Wikipedia?  No I'm not.

But Zack Wheat is, a left handed MLB outfielder.  And entrepreneur Zack Yang, who recieved a Nobel at age 19.  And Argentinian ping pong player Oscar Gonzales.  And Sef Gonzales, an Australian who killed his family -- Sef is apparently part of the Wiki series on Australian crime, which focuses on the Melbourne underground...?!? 

I'm just two degrees of Wiki separation away from the Australian bushranger Captain Thunderbolt.  Or I would be, if I was on Wikipedia.

z

Finding Satori in Translation

Sometimes the Babelfish online translation engine is so wrong it becomes profound.  A colleague ran a Dutch to English translation of text off of the Royal DSM website, and its result is beautiful:

When you experience nuisance of our activities, for example because of fragrance, sound or otherwise, late it then as soon as possible know us. How earlier we are informed, how larger the chance that the source can be traced and effectively fought.

zack

James Lipton & DC Shoes

Check out the new DC Shoes commercials starring James Lipton!  They rule.  And great footage of Danny Way (who I remember as a wee tyke, riding for H-Street forever ago) jumping the Great Wall of China too.

zack

Self-Evident Health Report

TV is bad for children's education

McSweeney's Authorial Candy Bar Rejects

This candy bar list at McSweeney's has me crying from laughter.  My favorite -- the Chaucer Sweet Cheese Bar.

zack

Self-Evident Health Report

Staying active in old age keeps people mobile

Remind me again how immobility can also contribute to activity?

zack

Aminals

If'n I had any hacking skills whatsoever I'd change everyone's home page in the world to this.

zack

Self-Evident Health Report

Obese kids' excess pounds make exercise tough

You know what else is tough?  False compassion in medical reports that actually treat kids like lab rats.  It's summer time too; they're having a hard enough time at the pool.  I hate stuff like this.

zack   

Self-Evident Health Report

Coping skills affect life after breast cancer

And then there's this one:

40 could be the new 30 as scientists redefine age  AWW COME ON!!  I'M ALMOST THERE!  Don't make me wait 11 more years before I'm 30.  Pleeeez.  I'll save money, I'll act my age, I'll stay off the smokes.  Just don't draw this out any longer.

zack

Self-Evident Health Reports

Slips, falls in tub common cause of kids' injuries

Aircraft noise may impair kids' mental development

You know what impairs my mental development?  The idea that some well-decorated researcher is out there making some nice money off of studies like these.  You can't make this stuff up.

zack

Self-Evident Health Report

Soda ups risk of obesity, but isn't sole culprit

The more soda kids drink, the more likely they are to be obese, researchers conclude.

Are these HUMAN researchers or what? 

zack

Enormously Charitable Friends

I have enormously charitable friends.  Friends who see that my grasp on the zeitgeist is slipping away by leaps and bounds.  Friends who lob me gimme quotes, like 'I'm Rick James bitch!', only to watch me fumble with it until taking it back out of my hands and telling me to sit down and keep stirring my Maalox. 

One such charitable friend at work keeps telling me to check out Homestar Runner.  Actually, TWO friends tried this on me, but one gave up.  The other mentioned it again a moment ago, so I wrote it down on the margin of today's WSJ article on the competitive Italian bottled water market and thought I'd get to it later.  Actually she stood over me waiting but I told her I really wanted to see how the story ended so she left. 

I paused my Debussy for Daydreaming in the iTunes and checked out the site.  I lasted about 20 seconds into the first cartoon and closed down my browser.  It was too loud!  And the colors were bright and the angles of the characters were very unpleasing to the eye.  It's so awful.

I sometimes think these friends keep me around, because like it or not I have officially become 'Him'.  As in, 'I may be bad, but at least I'm not as bad as Him.'

Back to Clair de Lune (and happy),

zack

Harajuku Girls

Remember when saying Not! suddenly ground to a halt when parents everywhere started saying it?  And it continued for years in that painful state?  (Any parents of Gen-Xers out there still saying Not!, please stop now.  It's so painful to see.)

This new HP/Gwen cobranded camera does the same thing for Harajuku Station/Tokyo style.  It's a dead horse so please stop flogging it.  Something tells me Mark's been reading his daughter's magazines again.  Please give them back, Mark.

And by the way, while we're talking about clueless parents, can somebody out there please tell me exactly what a Hollaback Girl is?  I have no idea.  But then I still can't put Bootylicious to rest either, given that Snoop first used it as a dis and then Gemini's Twin used it as a choice descriptor of the butt.  No clue. 

zack

Guess-The-Google

The latest way to kill time with Google, play here while it lasts.  I scored 146.

zack

Elvis Impersonators

Sitting here drinking morning coffee and playing with the laptop while telling Mar to go wash his hands, and I found a killer database of Elvis impersonators.  Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.

Go wash your hands, Mar.

zack

edited: We also need the link to the PEIA, The Professional Elvis Impersonators Association.  And I told Marcel I had found this Elvis stuff and he must be feeling the Elvisness, as he immediately launched into this song 'Sardines' which goes 'sardines, sardines, sardines, sardines, sardines, sardines, sardines, sardines, sardines, sardines, sardines, sardines, sardines, sardines, sardines' and then my verse 'Mar!  Knock it off!'. 

It's a catchy tune.  You might try it yourself around a loved one.

Schnappi das kleine Krokodil

At dinner with Adam and Nancy the other night (which we're still talking about!  Thanks again A/N), Nancy played her favorite song for us: "Schnappi das kleine Krokodil".  Schnappi is apparently very big in Germany right now, and after Saturday night we can see why.  Jen found a good Schnappi site with a Schnappi video (which begins in the Fertile Crescent, of course), Schnappi remixes, Schnappi ringtones, et al.

zack   

The Somerville Gates

Read about the Somerville Gates in this NY Times article. 

Edited to include a boing boing link to more Christo parodies.

Paragraph of the week

"The suit says the two women, who never did undress, also worked unpaid overtime and faced unsanitary conditions, including gorilla urine stored in the refrigerator where they kept their lunches, rodents in the food preparation area and exposed wires."

Mo' Koko.

zack

Gizoogle

One, two, three and to the four

Big Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin are at the door

zack

BrainyQuote.com

The law is an adroit mixture of customs that are beneficial to society, and could be followed even if no law existed, and others that are of advantage to a ruling minority, but harmful to the masses of men, and can be enforced on them only by terror.
Peter Kropotkin

Huh??!?

I like my coffee like I like my women. In a plastic cup.
Eddie Izzard

Eh?!?!?

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.
Salvatore Quasimodo

Say whaa?!?!

I found BrainyQuote.com just now on some right-wing yahoo's blog.  I don't really think these qualify as quotes, though.  These read like random chunks of one's thesis or sermon -- maybe except for the Eddie Izzard.  Quotes are like, " I love you", "All recipes need a hambone", "My bowels go loose when I drink that juice"...not 'the revelation of a feeling' blah blah. 

Geoff and I have our tech rehearsal tomorrow night at the theatre.  Geoff has never acted at Hyde Park Theatre before, so he's amped on getting a feel for the stage.  I've never acted there either (duh) but I have taken a couple of writing workshops there (one headed by the Great and Powerful Erik Ehn, whose advice still makes me daydream at the drop of a hat).  Geoff is gonna nail it; I'm convinced we'll get Best of Fest.

Off to take Marcel to Shaolin Do.

zack

Edited to change 'left-wing yahoo' to 'RIGHT-wing yahoo'!  I had a mid-day epiphany as we were at Pearlevision, getting Jen's new glasses.  "These make me look like Egon from Ghostbusters...these make me look like Skippy from Family Ties...these make me -- A REPUBLICAN!  Agh, typos will be the death of me..."