That's How It Happened

My greatest regret about reaching my mid-to-late twenties is the inevitable failure to acquire new slang. I'm insanely jealous of Uncle Grambo, the "Wizard of Obvs", and Nick Catchdubs, the Jawn-Meister. They each rock some of the choicest slang terms this side of the Urban Dictionary. Not only does it make their blogs stand out from the usual crowd, but it makes them seem cool too. It's clear to me that I need some new slang for this site, both local fresh lexicographic cuts and a few tasty neologisms. After the success of the last competition, I am therefore announcing: The That's How It Happened Neologism Fest. I invite you to submit favourite unusual slang terms and cleverly crafted neologisms via the comments. The winner(s) (judged on quality and quantity) will receive a gmail invite, or a prize of equivalent value. You have until next week to feed my linguistic needs. All entries will remain the intellectual property of the author, but with unlimited licensing rights granted gratis to me. Good luck!

I kinda ignored this story about harvesting energy from thousands of subcutaneously implanted thermocouples, until I remembered that's what the robots will need to feed on us Matrix-style. I say "Stop this dangerous research now!", and I hope the Daily Mail will be behind me on this issue of pressing public concern.

The Freedom of Information Act rules: read the FBI's complete files on Charles Bukowski, including the details of his secret wife. On the same note Bukowski: Born Into This needs an immediate UK/torrent release, because the preview buzz is James Flames.

A little round-up of gmail developments:
GMailo v1.0 only works for XP, but redirects HTML mailto links to open the gmail compose window, instead of the default Outlook/desktop email client. Neato.
GCount is for OS X. It sits in your menubar, and monitors the number of unread messages in your gmail inbox. Especially impressive is the fact that it's only a 42Kb download. That's still too large for my old Acorn Electron, but tiny by modern standards.
Hotmail blocks gmail invites. I knew that Yahoo mail automatically treated gmail invites as spam, but Hotmail actually just munches them undetected. That's so grossly anti-competitive and unethical, it could only have come from Microsoft.

At first it was just the entire world population who were sick of the "I'm Rick James, Bitch!" catchphrase, but now Chappelle's ubitiquitous monster is getting to him too. Enraged by hecklers taunting him with his own catchphrase he stormed off stage at a stand-up gig last week. He returned to berate the crowd with this lecture about "how comedy usually works: I say something. You mull it over and decide whether you want to laugh or not, and then you do or not. Then I say something else, and you think about that."

Last week I pointed out that boingboing has a declining readership, and this week I've discovered that beloved metafilter is waning too. Could this be the death of blogging? The beginning of the end for the internut?

This guidebook to window seat views from US flightpaths looks like my cup of tea. Sounding themic, but not: Cloud Atlas is an incredible work of fiction. I haven't finished it yet, so I'm still unsure if is a collection of related short stories, or a fiendishly complicated novel. Either way it's all killer, no filler (and not much scrilla?).

Eric Harshbarger may be a polymath genius. Not only did someone pay him to create an office desk from Lego (an idea ripped from Microserfs), but he's charted his dogged rise into the US Scrabble Top 50, prompted by nothing more than thinking that he needed a hobby apart from Lego. I am officially inspired again on both counts.

These floating houses may be tres eco, but the designers can't have seen The Day After Tomorrow yet. The wake from a passing turtle might capsize them, let alone an apocalyptic tsunami.

If you want a chic housing solution as espoused by hip interior designers Smithson & Rink you need to bid now for this collection of retro computer junk. The Smithson & Rink design method is to strew odd bits of outmoded electronics throughout every room of the house in an artful fashion. As they say on eBay: "don't sleep on this auction".