That's How It Happened

Best question ever for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, (a big fan of orgies):

"...whether you have any gay friends, and if not, whether you’d like to be my friend.”

Best question ever for Google Answers:

"Is Google HQ on fire right now? My wife drove your campus and saw smoke. Are you guys okay? I can probably get a ladder if you need it."

Best question ever for the legitimacy of the Iraq War:

"Whether Saddam can get his ass re-elected (democratically) before having his ass sentenced to death."

(Evidently that last quote is my own, I'm being themic)

Sometime last week I suddenly realised that the incomprehensibilty of cryptic crosswords was eroding my self-esteem on a daily basis. Thus I've decided to become a cruciverbalist. It turns out that cryptic crosswords aren't all that hard. Well actually I'm still struggling with The Times and The Guardian, but Metro, The Sun, and The Observer are all well within my reach. Unfortunately, like gardening, and to some extent sneaker collecting, this new hobby doesn't really lend itself to fascinating blogging. Luckily I have a few of the usual trivial links to keep you all distracted:

Create your own phantom limb, though not the creepy onanistic kind.

At the one time you might want to watch it, The Mount St Helens Cam is having some bandwidth issues, and even when it is working all you can see is smoke.

With Vanilla Ice back on TV, it's great to be reminded of his other masterpiece: The Ninja Rap.

The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club For Scientists.

For music stealing moments when you've only got your browser to hand, mpee3.com, an MP3 search engine that works.

A Stormtrooper with breasts, is scarily alluring. Better even than the world's best Slave Leia costume.

Penguins who are also pirates.

Europe's biggest mushroom, 35 hectares in size.

Greenhouse effect wreaks havoc in Sweden.

Although The Farm is almost acceptable as mind-rot reality TV (Vanilla Ice vs Paul Daniels), Sims Survivor, has a zeitgeisty hipness that kept me glued to my monitor.

Being John Malkovitch the Lego movie poster.

Malkovitch incidentally is a Celebrity Atheist, which presumably will exclude him from heaven when he finally joins the ranks of the Celebrity Dead.

I'm kinda hoping I make it into SomeBlogsAreBetterThanOthers, because all the best blogs get liberally trashed and denigrated there.

Goose Dressing, so radically stupid it's actually cool.

Though I like my Nokia 6600 a whole bunch, now Blackberry has OS X compatibility. Maybe for my next phone.

The archive of Audio Atrocities documents the worst voice acting in the history of video games.

Truly hilarious cybersex transcripts, with one partner who just won't play "ball".

Mexican Coke, so good it's worth smuggling across international borders. (and yes they're talking about Coca-Cola, not cocaine).

The first rule about Fight Club...

Sadly I haven't been bare knuckle brawling again. Just done ten rounds with Apis Mellifera. I guess you could say I'm suffering for my art. Though I didn't look very artful jumping around the garden with bees in my hair, stinging the bejeezus out of my head. I almost had to call in sick today, I just looked so beat up. I took the tube into work, hoping the wrong sort of girls would be secretly smouldering at me. Unfortunately only the kind of burly men who are comfortable with casual violence were able to catch my watery eyes.

The NSFW Louisiana State Quarter.

Strandbeest, is just too cool, mobile ambulatory sculptures, some of which look like the Jawa Sand Crawler.

And on the subject of Star Wars sculptures, Washington National Cathedral boasts a Darth Vader gargoyle

How much is your poo worth? Very little, unless you really have dire constipatory problems.

The Origin of Car Logos. Volvo = I roll, and more.

Ryan McGinness cuts a rug.

Unusual pictures of unusual mailboxes.

Download (if you dare) the ringtone that makes your breasts bigger.

And the hTM Woven gets checked as number one in a list of top ten sneakers. Maybe that's not news, but like I care okay.

I feel totally ill, partly due to an incredible karaoke fest (...in which I won a trophy, duetting with the GF in the 2002 classic Dilemma), and partly due to several stings about the forehead and temples after a disasterous apiary session. Thus no energy for links available, though I have enjoyed the gruesome frying goldfish game.

Standing in a queue for three hours with assorted japanese, HK, and oddly northern "sneakerologists", turned out to be way more fun than expected. People realy rocked some crazy rare shoes. Even a light shower would have caused at least $50k of damage to some of the finest deadstock sneaks ever seen on London's streets. People queued up for more than 24 hours, so I felt pretty lucky just to get my pair of Dunkles at all. However it got better: celebrity sightings (James Lavelle, Collie_27), free beer, free pizza, and incredibly I won a "golden ticket". Concealed in my pizza slice, a ticket inviting me to "..return at 9pm on the last Friday in September. You may bring one relative, and one relative only...", to collect a mystery prize. I truly was like a happy spoiled little Veruca Salt, I half expected squirrels to try and bundle me down a garbage shute.

Michel Gondry's timelapse coast to coast 3 minute road movie

Kershner dishes some of the best ever gossip about SW:TESB: naked wookies, broken R2s, 9ft Yodas.

John Kerry and the Swiftboat: the video game.

I though Checkpoint by Nicolson Baker was his worst book ever, not least because of the stupid fantasy about a giant boulder crushing Bush. But you know what? That really can happen to a person, and on reality TV too.

MyVirtualModel is supposed to be for trying on clothes online, or some kind of consumerist bullshit. I tried to find ways to subvert it, but it won't let you dress up as a girlie (clearly in controvension of European sexual equality rulings), or go pick up other VirtualModels. Instead you can use it to see what you might look like if you really hit the Krispy Kremes. The model on the left is (a near perfect representation of) me at my present weight (no really, I didn't tweak the "muscularity" control more than say a half notch up), whereas the centre dude is me with an extra 50lbs, and my porky buddy on the right is me at double my current weight.

I know I may have over-hyped the Dunkle over the past few weeks, but really it's my sneaker of the year. Things just got way more interesting with the launch at Foot Patrol tomorrow. Pizza, pumps, prizes, all sounds too good to be true. Best of all you can still go queue on Saturday morning at Slam City for "regular" pairs for eBay. Certain people have made it plain that this sneaker stuff has gotten too much, so I promise this is my last sneaker post for like at least a week.

The Shocker, a very rude finger gesture indeed. (SFW)

Scrabble as religion an 8 minute flash presentation, explaining the holiness of the treble treble. Strangely on a ferry in the Stockholm archipelago the GF once managed to play a treble treble against me, which in some ways is one of the cornerstones of our relationship.

The web has no memory as Plush Toy Microbes gets reposted again on Metafilter, then reemerges in the blogdex, despite being the most prolific meme of 2003. Truly catastrophically virulent.

Opium poppies and the war on drugs, though I'm fairly sure somewhere in Richardson (NSFW) there's a more comprehensive how-to article.

A Beginners Guide To Domestic Whaling, soon going to be handy if Japan gets its way with the IWC.

Andy46477 has been seriously subverting eBay. Incredible.

What's inside an iMac G5? Coolness basically.

This maybe a personal repost, but origami stagbeetles rule.

Navy boy murders 28 day old son, sitting on him while playing GBA, and claiming to be practising wrestling moves from the TV.

And somewhat familiar flash fun: The Tightrope Sim, made harder by pesky vultures. I managed 102 Schrittes, whatever they are.

I'm stuck attending a course in "Family Planning" this week. Usually these courses for junior doctors are just mundane hoops we have to jump through for the requisite CV points. Today though I learnt something really surprising:
If you're in a bind, with no access to conventional emergency contraception, various products of the Coca-Cola corporation make reasonably effective post-coital vaginal douches.
You'd expect this would be a topic for locker room speculation and teenage mallrat debate. Actually there are three Medline papers examining this thorny issue. The conclusion of all this frenzied research, is that while Diet Coke has superior spermicidal properties to New Coke, Classic Coke, or Pepsi, for emergencies we should all keep a bottle of Krest Bitter Lemon in our bedside cabinets:

"...it has great potential as such a contraceptive among the poor in the densely population developed countries since it is readily available and inexpensive."

Sadly Krest is only available in Ghana and Nigeria. I kinda have to take the responsible doctor line and warn you not to try this at home. Extremely effective alternatives are available in the UK at least. But if you were swept off your feet by passion in distant West Africa...

Ways in which Slovenia was like Kazakhstan
1. Bears, definitely some bears, and the drink "bear's blood", as well as a popular local dish, the "bear's claw", consisting of pork stuffed with ham, and wrapped in bacon. Mmmmm...a magical animal.
2. Schnapps and beer chasers, drunk any time from breakfast onwards, for any reason.
3. Disco dancing, to the macarena, and many other fine western hits of the early nineties.
4. A huge sum of danger money payable to Hertz in Austria for being foolish enough to take one of their precious cars across the border. Worst drivers ever in Slovenia, probably because of all the schnapps and beer chasers.

Ways in which Slovenia was not like Kazakhstan
1. Jaw droppingly beautiful alpine scenery; endless rolling vistas of mountains, lakes, and cows with bells.
2. Jaw droppingly beautiful women. Since the GF reads this slavishly, this may be a little unguarded, but the girls of Ljubliana make London look like Ugly Town.
3. Captain Hook cocktails, (unavailable in Kazakhstan), but traditionally drunk by revellers in Slovenia, on Talk Like A Pirate Day, to ward off the cursed scurvy aaaah!
4. Just being an idyllic place for a long weekend away. None of the stress of modern life, no gypsy catching, nor parrying the "jew claw", just extreme relaxation.

Britain makes its bid for world's most powerful sandwich: The Manwich

P2P file sharing for Nokia 6600 unlikely to be a hit at the extortionate £5/Mb O2 charge me.

Boris Johnson starts blogging, at what he amusingly calls his "blogsite".

Meet Klayco. brandalism + animals = branimalism?

Slate get hold of a copy of the letter used by Ali G producers to dupe guests/suckers, and snooping (by me) reveals fake website to back up the con.

Best. Wake. Ever.
So the third of four Ramones is dead. Some pretty diverse hipsters attended the deathbed. Gleaned from various sources: John Frusciante, Vincent Gallo, Eddie Vedder, Rob Zombie, Lisa-Marie Presley, Pete Yorn, and Talia Shire. I'm sure there are some others I've missed. You have to be pretty damn cool to get Rob Zombie and Vincent Gallo to come to your party. Urban Outfitters somehow broke all records for bad taste by following Carson "Fashion"'s stupid recommendation by piling the shelves with fake "vintage" Ramones t-shirts yesterday. I was so shocked by the idiocy of this "corpse still warm" cash-in, that I actually forgot to take a photo.

Catching large snakes by hand. Africa shows up Steve Irwin as a wuss.

Hadley Freeman reports her tips for surviving fashion week:

"While the rest of the audience waggle their heads, Wimbledon-style, watching the models, yours is pointed dead at the curtain from which the models emerge, and never budges. This is because by the time the model walks down the runway, the whole look is passé and not worthy of your attention."

What google looked like in 1999. Incredibly they seem to have run off less hardware than exists in Rob's study. Best of all is the custom drive case made from Duplo.

How serious LEGOphiles store their bricks.

The GLAT, the google labs entrance exam. Tough and yet friendly.

Robo-pike has a name: "Wanda". What is it with nerds and Monty Python?

How to do the Crip Walk, a beginner's course from C-Walk Master Yama-G. You never know when you might be stranded in Compton, and need to C-walk your ass out of there. (Though I'm unclear, if the Bloods catch you doing this dance, are you as good as dead?)

Work may suck, JT, but probably not if you are Ken Sunshine, quoted in the Mirror: "Ken Sunshine, who is employed by Timberlake to comment on his personal life, said last night: "We never comment on his personal life.""

Larry David has a thing for indecision. Best NYT, Op Ed, Ever?

Update: Somehow I got busy yesterday and failed to find any other linkage. However I did run into an old friend in Soho, and she told me of her recent encounter with Larry David. The story doesn't quite bear repeating, unless you are a big Curb Your Enthusiasm fan. If you've never seen it, the vague premise is that Larry's bounteous levels of indignation and affront always get in the way of polite sociability.
Anyway, my friend Annie had just returned from L.A. While she was out there she played a round of golf with her father. They immediately spotted Larry David teeing off just ahead of them. As they played each hole, Annie vacillated, unsure whether to approach him and do the whole "I'm such a huge fan" spiel. Eventually her nervous indecision started to interfere with her game. Her father, not having seen Curb, ill-advisedly recommended that she go and introduce herself, then get on with play. Bravely she approached Larry on the next tee, and literally said "I'm a huge fan of the show", and Larry, king of charm as ever, said "That's great", and turned away to concentrate on his swing. Life/Art who knows what's imitating what when it comes to the enigmatic Mr David?

Participatory democracy was never meant to be this much fun.

First Batman storms Buckingham Palace, then the entire press dances a little jig around the unmentionable "Blair Family Secret", and finally today a pitched battle takes place in and around parliament. I thought the Batman stunt was unbeatable entertainment, but then the family crisis story was yet more enjoyable. It's just great watching the press squirm. They know the secret, every dinner party in Islington knows the secret, Melvyn Bragg obviously knows the secret, but everyone has to demonstrate tact and restraint in their calls for Blair to stand down. I passed by Parliament on my way home and was rather intimidated by the massed ranks of riot police. However the TV footage of the floor of the House of Commons was just pure comedy. Six country rugger-buggers, bursting through the "No" door, zooming around the woolsack, and being unsuccessfully tackled by portly chaps in penguin suits. It's all almost engaging enough to make me want to vote.

Do you ever get the feeling that rich people really are having more fun? (Like Ron Howard and the "special zoo" for rich kids). First there was the cool story about Oliver Sacks, George Lazenby and the iridium, and now a story about Penn Gillette and Billy Gibbons, hanging out in the vomit comet.

Black Table get the interview with Hate Beak (Surely you remember the world's only death metal band with an avian vocalist? Aren't you keeping up with these all important nerd-memes?)

The Moonshine Conspiracy have a new surf-movie out called Sprout. If their previous flicks are anything to go by, it will be uber-cool.

Google buys a picture of the google homepage. I'm wondering why they didn't just sue the artist, and take the picture. I'm also wondering whether it's Larry or Sergey who has such bland taste in conceptual art.

Ever wanted to be a Lego pirate? Then Lego Treasure Hunt is for you. Awesome "live action" Lego RPG. And incidentally don't forget Talk Like A Pirate Day on the 19th. I shall be in Slovenia but I will try to submit a moblogged shanty or two.

Great jp photoblogs, stereophonic and GME.

Retrocrush review deadly toys of days gone by, somehow omitting that famed toddler strangler Stretch Armstrong.

Borat Competition
I will shortly be spending a long weekend in Slovenija. Though I'm quite sure it will be charming, and that my hosts (the family Nixta) will be gracious and accommodating, I am planning a little performance art satire. Ever since Nick threatened to dress as a bear and attack my bee-hive, I've been in need of a counter prank. Journeying to deepest Eastern Europe my thoughts turned to Borat. Via your submissions I plan to do as many surreptitious Borat-like activities as possible, without Nick ever realising. Since Mr Nixta is already in Slovenia, which clearly has no internet access, or probably even telephony, the competition starts today without fear of discovery. Based on Daniel Radosh's hilarious interview with the Kazakh Embassy Press Officer, and the ever brilliant Borat Online, I have a few starting suggestions:
1. Request wine made from fermented horse urine.
2. Tell everyone (male or female) they "Are a real man!", (and possibly ask to touch their khrum.)
3. Disco Dance to "Everybody Dance Now".
Please submit your craftiest suggestions via the comments. The winner (judging criteria yet to be determined) will receive a bottle of "Bear's Blood". (which I'm told is a foul tasting local liquor, not actual large mammal plasma).

BlogBites give you daily chunks of good writing from various blogs. Like Kinja without the nerdiness. A really great way to find new blogs.

Jealous of all the fake Clippies produced to honour Memogate? Make your own.

George Bush punches innocent man in head! (40 years ago sadly, in a Yale rugby match). He kinda goes up in my estimation after seeing the photo though.

Huge Scandy mechanical digger made from Lego, with tiny, to scale, Lego eco-protesters and "photo story".

Pajama Blogging so hot right now. (I'm wearing blue scrubs, does that count?).

Nerd crashes giant B-52 model, with video.

Lovely Japanese flash loopiness: help an 8 pixel high Hello Kitty rescue gems while balanced on a precarious see-saw, over a choppy sea, in glorious monochrome.

Tinker Hatfield buzz: Freshness have used his hTM Woven (colorway 261) in their new logo/banner, and have a video interview concerning his Air Trainer Mid; and Business Week Online have been allowed into his Nike Innovation Kitchen (which ordinarily says on the door: "Nobody gets in to see the cooks. Not nobody. Not no how.")

The French for blog is blog, who knew? (Both excellent Frog blogs)

And finally today marks another milestone in the history of That's How, because you lot exceeded my alotted bandwidth again. I'd like to thank all those that made this bandwidth blowout possible by sending visitors my way: Scott Saltwater, script-o-drew, one simple question, Brambled Ramblings, one more robot, Go Vacant, What Adam, Hulegu's Campaign, and assorted delightful strangers.

Pet Shop Boys Vs Battleship Potemkin
The Pet Shop Boys played live in Trafalgar Square yesterday. They had written a new score for Eisenstein's propaganda classic, Battleship Potemkin. It was cold and damp, so we opted to sit out most of the movie at the Rockwell Bar, nipping out only for the famous Spanish Steps Massacre sequence. The movie was so-so, mostly incomprehensible, and the score was OK too, if you like the 1980s synth sound. However the cocktails at the Rockwell were ecstatically good. Most memorable was the Passionate Buffalo Trace: lychee and passionfruit juice, half a passionfruit, Buffalo Trace bourbon, apple schnapps, and a ginger beer top. Beverage heaven.

Excellent stop motion animation, demonstrating the evolution of Nike basketball shoes. (via)

I don't know why NEC have a giant green animated interactive tree of messages, but I like it. (via)

I'm offering a bounty of $1 (and rising) for the first person to ask Kim Jong-Il: "Since when did hydroelectric power cause two-mile radius mushroom clouds, Mr President?".

The girl who "invented" movieoke, now points out on her site that ""Movieoke" and the Movieoke entertainment format" are apparently under her copyright for 2003 and 2004. Well that sucks. Maybe downhill battle will get on her case.

Your search engine called. Their idiot is missing.
After the run away success of just fucking google it, comes can't find on google. Ostensibly it's a serious site, to explore the limitations of current search tools; however to my jaded eye, it's just another opportunity for tech-savvy nerds to laugh at intarweb idiots.
Hira falls into the classic "add a .com trap"

Really looking for: i am looking for makeover online games, just like in barbie.com. there are many games there wich you can play online, making over the girls.
Queries tried: makeovergames.com
Comments: please help me to fine this type of site. thnx in advance. bye

I'm not even confident that "Asiya" can spell her name correctly, which is where her query falls down.

Really looking for: definition of commercial geography(at least three)
Queries tried: dictioneries

Michal is desperately seeking Jimmi, but fails to advance to "two search term" queries.

Really looking for: e-mail adress of jimmi page (guitarist of led zeppelin) i want to write him something... but i don't know e-mail thanks
Queries tried: mail

Ali seems unlikely to graduate med school.

Really looking for: Multiple choice Questions for Gynae.
Queries tried: What is Gynae? 1. something 2. something 3. something

Amanda has long term google issues.

Really looking for: What does "mina gebedjosee" mean? I have no idea what language that is. Years ago a friend wrote that in the front of a book she gave to me and I forgot what she said it meant, if I ever knew.
Queries tried: Typing in "mina gebedjosee" Trying typing the words into a translation site with Dutch, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Rusian, Spanish, Greek. Typing "gebed" and "josee" and "mina" separately to see if I could find any leads.
Comments: I have been asking people about this for years and typing it into Google for several years (when I think about it) with no matches. Gebeden" means "prayed" in Dutch

Aniline needs the kind of help google just can't provide:

Really looking for: The Smurf equivalent of that website that gives recipes for cooking space aliens.
Queries tried: "smurf fritters"

Harvey introduces unfathomable depths of recursiveness with his query.

Really looking for: I would like to find any literature in which the "village idiot" is a character; also the mythic origin of that character.
Queries tried: AOL & MS

The desperately sad part of "can't find on google" is not just the hopeless submissions, but the entire rationale in setting up the site. Google answers, already does a fantastic job of answering difficult queries, and teaches you to be a better googler in the process. Unless of course it is just a hilarious web "Diner de cons".

Two "professional" blogs with good titles: from a law student "three years of hell, to become the devil", and from an honest doctor, "kill as few patients as possible".

Saltwater Pizza Blog is good enough to go into my ailing sidebar, and links to this Map of Muffler Men, similiar to the giant Paul Bunyan from the movie Fargo.

Lingerie links two days in a row? Agent Provocateur get political with BDSM in the Oval Office (NSFW at all), featuring a cameo with Blair as a Pulp Fiction gimp.

The Invisible Library is a devoted catalogue of books that only occur as books in other works of fiction.

I've set aside two weeks in November for a trip to Tokyo. Trying to plan things to do, other than freak out in the sneaker shops of Harajuku, I found Tokyo Damage Report. It's the blog of "an american jerk" in Tokyo, who has an incredible knack for finding the sleaziest most "challenging" Japanese entertainments.

My sidebar is profoundly sick...
...and is not entirely expected to recover. When I started this blog , oh a good 10 months ago, I expected to be riding the crest of a wave of micro-journalism. I thought I would be immediately entrenched in a community of like minded narcissists and self-publicists. From the outset I have had a little panel of links to "Friends" blogs, including only those I have actually met in person. Now 10 months later the list has hardly grown. Despite the fact that Technorati is now tracking 4 times as many blogs as it was last year, no-one I know has started a website. And of those in my "Friends" list, something is seriously amiss.
While The Ambassador, and CoolNina are still actually updating, all the others have fallen prey to broken servers and apathy. (And I feel for their tech headaches having suffered an outage all week, heck amazon crashed this morning.) Tartley even boasts of "recent photos", having not updated since March. Of 10 on the list, just 2 could still be considered to be blogging. And of the 90 odd other people on my Sim card, only a handful even bother to maintain one of those "homepage" things that went out of fashion in 1998. (Though of particular note is Matt B-M who at the cleverly titled Colondot.net, points out that his "life revolves around electrical appliances". Here's hoping it's not a Toolbox F*cking Machine hey Matt.)
Was it so naive to think I would become a clever little Kottke, with a blogging GF like Megnut? Instead of being the centre of an online social whirl I feel like the last practitioner of an unfashionable hobby. I expect that no-one will hear my rallying cry, not even the GF, but I wish more people felt like they had something worth saying.

Brandalism = vandalism + branding, e.g. Above who likes to paint arrows.

You know those hot Elle McPherson ads, with the naked chicks, the knives, and the attack eagles? Yeah they're hot, and they're online. (with bonus deleted scenes).

An eBay scammer double-scammed in the tale of the p-p-p-powerbook.

The customisation game comes to snowboard boots with JB x Ride.

Chair surfing is the new extreme ironing, or something, yeah, the new something.

Craigslist classic: hood humping.

// posted by Rufus @ 4:05 pm 0 Comments

Cartwright's guide to scalping sneakers
Some people say reselling sneakers on eBay deprives "true fans" of sneakers at retail prices. I say that the (sneaker deprived yet wealthy) people of South East Asia and the Mid-West need rare kicks just as much as those of us in the metropoli of NY/LON/TOK. There are rich pickings to be had this month in London, so I present three Lock's 'O' The Week.
1. Pharrell and Nigo bring us the Ice Cream, arriving at Harvey Nicks, Microzine and The Busy Ape Work Shop this month. So ugly, so hotly anticipated, so unavailable to the slavering masses. So demands grossly inflated eBay prices.
2. Lavelle x Futura x Nike SB...The Dunkle. My hook-up in Singapore has been begging me for a pair for months. They hit Slam City and Cide on the 19th. Of 400 pairs approximately 0 will be on sale east of Berlin, so every £65 pair will sell for $300.
3. The Hiroshi Fujiwara designed Orca Dunk High never hit stores in the UK. The whole Hiroshi connection makes these a very sweet collectible. His shoes usually appear under the hTM tag, which now attracts sneaker fanaticism. (As a little tidbit for JP culture fans: Nigo means "Number 2" in Japanese, because Nigo used to be Hiroshi's assistant.) Somehow the nice people at Slammin Kicks sold me the last pair in the whole world. Unfortunately I already wore mine. But at least in theory they would be a good investement.

Bad Fortune Cookie say: "You will have difficulty finding creative outlets for you minor talents". How true.

Save Nasa's Solar Capsule flash x game 'n' watch emulation x airwolf music x topical = best.

$1700 bounty (and rising) to ask George: "How many times have you been arrested Mr President?".

The "Name that Old School Video Game Sound" Game.

If you like giant manga robots styled on AT-ST walkers, photoshopped into Japanese street scenes you'll love Izmojuki.

Dance Brent Dance.

Two separate stories of horrific beekeeping/blowtorch accidents, and an upcoming motion detection based beekeeping sim.

It is Sept 11th, so it's probably extra tasteless to link to the The Suicide Bomber Sim, oops, perhaps you should enjoy this Test Cricket (with extra badgers) Sim instead.

// posted by Rufus @ 10:52 am 0 Comments

Anne Robinson: In the words permatan and permafrost, the prefix 'perma' is an abbreviation of which word?

Contestant: Permaracious.

Overheard at a petrol station in deepest Devon, (reading aloud from the cover of the Sunday Sport in a deepest Devonian accent): ""MANIACS GUN DOWN TODDLERS", that's awful that is, just awful". I offered no comment, only impolite sniggers.

Fimoculous is back, after a long hiatus from blogging, and is completely worth getting reacquainted with.

Cooking For Engineers is the blog/cooking school for the Asperger's generation.

Treehugger is an eco-interior design blog, but its obsessional consumer lust is by definition grossly un-ecological.

Cargo Biking a paean to the joys of carrying really large loads by bike, seem to have forgotten about the small problem of hills.

Comics + Mosaics + Candy + Robots = Best thing ever.

Another ant game, and incidentally I read that the guy who made his millions from Sim City and The Sims, is hugely into ant farming, which figures really.

"Learning about Cuba, and having some pizza", said Spicoli. This site offers no pizza, but you can get your ass quizzed off about Central American geography.

Giant german mechanical pong , is the nerdiest thing ever, since like Unix for Game Boy Advance.

Ever since my frustrations trying to load games from tape to my BBC Electron, aged 7, I've been conditioned for maladaptive responses to flawed technology. Over the weekend something at Blogger broke, which is why you're reading this here, not at howithappened.com. I've practically killed myself trying to figure out the complexities of bizarre error messages conveyed between incompatible web servers. Now I've given up trying to fix it. I'm just waiting for it to fix itself. Instead I've expended my anger in a flurry of consumerism. I now present eight things we all ought to invest in, instead of saving up for a deposit on a postage stamp sized flat:
1. Upper Playground Vs Ricky Powell Sneaker.
2. Supreme Vs Kate Moss 10th Anniversary Tee. I picked mine up on the 'Bay, where prices have considerably cooled after an initial bubble.
3. The Personal Ski Machine, an $11k jet boat, that you can drive while wake boarding behind it. Rad is the word.
4. Spy Robot is a remote control claw, with a voice recorder. An undeniably essential purchase.
5. You have to order Sneaker Freaker from Australia, environmentally unfriendly but dammit, it's by far the best sneaker bible out there.
6. I recommended them only on Friday, and Sock Darts are already selling out. Buy buy buy!
7. Is it illegal to include two Supreme things in one list? Because Arkitip 024, The Supreme Issue looks fricking tigs.
8. A giant secret underground cinema/bar/restaurant in an ancient Roman quarry hidden below a major metropolis. So you can't just pop out and buy this, but I seriously want one anyway.
If all that cool stuff makes you feel guilty, assuage your conscience with a community benefitting political act: petition Apple for an iPod firmware update that enables gapless playback. Every aspiring Pod-DJ needs it so bad.

Playing with my dongle.
I'm not dead, I've just been at a charming wedding in a pocket of South Devon entirely unblessed by post-war communications tech. No internet access, no mobile reception, barely a hand cranked phonograph for entertainment. In a desperate effort to prevent my brain atrophying to 1995 levels of incuriousness, I tried to find something fun to do with Bluetooth.
The so-called "Queen of Bluejacking" is a 13 year old girl called Jellie-Ellie, which is some indication of how innocuous bluejacking actually is. I couldn't find anything fun to do via bluetooth at a wedding. However having purchased a rather smart dongle, which links my iMac to my phone, and done a little research, I see there are several entertaining bluetooth possibilities:
1. Make a kick-ass bluetooth micro helicopter. So beyond my tech prowess, but drop-dead awesome.
2. Use your phone to control your iMac remotely, a little less ambitious, but still cool.
3. Pick up anonymous strangers for casual sex, not that you need to do this via Bluetooth.
4. Control your iMac really remotely (without leaving it hooked up to broadband) via SMS and Bluetooth. (Or just manage your SMSs on the desktop).
5. This is my own visionary imagination, but surely you could make an Ocean's 11 style Bluetooth "EMP" Virus Bomb? The Economist have sent Bluespam, so it can't be impossible to widely distribute SymbOS.Cabir in a viral explosion using a modified BlueGun to corrupt phones across a wide area. Obviously I'm not really au-fait with Symbian virus programming, but if this does happen, I so want credit for the idea.

No sooner had Scott Stereo-G checked Go Home Productions as his favourite bootleggers in his 'sclusive Gothamist interview, than I discovered they were DJing Bastard 60 last night. The Bastard crew had arranged a "Strictly Rockers" soundclash; a rock only DJ battle between Go Home and Ultralase; it did not disappoint. My attempts to audioblog it failed, after the 500w bass speaker overwhelmed my tiny phone mic. You'll thus have to trust me when I say that Madonna's Music overlaid on Kravitz's Are You Gonna Go, was a seminal moment in the history of bootlegging. You can sample many of the delights here.
The night was also legendary for the performance art interventions of Jo-Jo Hydro. She dressed the entire club in "Bastard Olympic Committee" numbers, then proceeded to "drug test" the "athletes", before slapping them with stickers saying "smack", "cake", "diet coke", and "meth". Best ever, since Edward Dildo-hands organised live girl-on-girl dildo jousting.

Kill Bill Vol 1 in ASCII.

The definitive guide to animals in space. (First animal in deep space? A tortoise, returned to earth alive!)

The definitive guide to anti-Bush flash games.

An excellent meshing of tiny URL and multimap. Can't think what to do with it, but it's brilliantly done.

Ant City the only game worth playing on a lazy friday afternoon.

And finally a little gem of sneaker newz: the Nike Sock Dart x Beams is coming to Foot Patrol this week, some say the new Air Woven?

The launch party for my father's latest book, The Promise of Happiness, was last night at Bloomsbury in Soho Square. I think it's a truism that free alcohol gets you twice as drunk, for truly I was the very model of insobriety. This month Vice made talking about your job at parties a big DON'T. After last night I think I'm in agreement. You know how it is; you meet a nice girl at a party, she starts talking about her career modelling, and in the movies, conversation turns to your career, and suddenly you're having a discussion about vaginas again. It's an occupational hazard I never foresaw when I entered obstetrics. To paraphrase Steve Redgrave, if you catch me talking about my career at a party again, "you've got my permission to shoot me".

Deeply satisfying and bloody, stickman archery game.

How the Underground would look if South London had won.

Unlike all the fake celebrity blogs, Dave Navarro's blog is real. Why would someone so overexposed as Dave have a blog? Other fans have wondered that too: "Q: By the way, what is up with all the media whore celebrity crap? A:It's a long story, but Paris and I made this bet and, well, so far she is in the lead."

Dawn of the Dead (2004 isn't on DVD for a whole month, but you can get in the mood now with an excellent zombie meme.

Vending Machine Prizes Spectacular, including a really creepy machine that lets you feed a live cricket to a baby quail for 25c.

Me, Osama Bin Laden, and a man called Hash

On Monday I reduced my "degrees of separation" from Osama Bin Laden, down from 2 to just 1. I met a man called Francis Witt at a party, who actually interviewed Osama in Saudi in 1996. On a similar "interconnectedness of everyone" theme, I made a most unlikely reacquaintance today. Back in 2000, I spent 3 months living in Cape Town. As far as I could tell, the funnest guy in all of CT, was called Hash. True to his comedy moniker he was always loaded with primo "dagga", and perpetually the aggressively extrovert life and soul of any party. I hadn't thought of him in almost 4 years, however looking up from a particularly tedious operation today, I was shocked to see him anaesthetising my patient. For reasons of professionalism I shan't reveal his new "serious doctor" name, but rest assured he doesn't go by "Hash" any more. Conclusion: "It's a small world after all" (Turn down volume if at work).

Booing, so hot right now:50 Cent and The Rasmus booed and bottled off stage at Reading, so best, Babs, Jenna, Alexandra, and Vanessa booed at the VMAs, and unsurprisingly Michael Moore booed at the RNC.

Zvezdochka: The name of a crazy new nike trainer, a cosmonaut dog, and the world's leading nuclear sub shipyard.

Please can someone tell me whether Opera for phones, is better than the regular Nokia browser, before I invest in a bluetooth adapter for my iMac, in order to upload it.

Good to see Kim Jong-Il getting the recognition he deserves, condolences as regards the death of your wife/mistress sir.

Complex Magazine interview tons of sneaker-boutique owners and headz about the new new sneaker boom.

Win the new Meth kicks: Nike Blazer Vs Khmer Rouge custom, some say oddest collab ever.

Lucy Pinder (NSFW) is the new Kelly Brook, and that's like official.

Win an internship in the viewaskewniverse in time for the legend ruining atrocity that will be Clerks 2.

Mini graffiti round up: native weapon, buff monster, and overtime and understand.

Yeti Sports 6

What happens when cartoon characters mate, meet, or just plain fornicate.