That's How It Happened

Sometimes the web exceeds my wildest dreams as a pure conduit of unfettered information and collaboration. I briefly mentioned yesterday that I was enamoured of Swedish electro-duo The Knife, and this morning I found this Gonzalez Vs The Knife mash-up in my inbox. Thanks Mike!

The Lenovo Tapes. Fantastic fun SFX work for extremely odd (I'm guessing) viral campaign.

I'm so impressed by some spam I got today that quotes liberally from Bulgakov:

"Monsieur Woland that his act this evening starts after the second interval.' 'Very good. Of course. At once. Immediately. Certainly. I'll tell him,' came the staccato reply from the earpiece. 'Goodbye,' said Varenukha, in amazement. 'Please accept,' said the telephone, ' my warmest and most sincere good wishes for a brilliant success! It will be a great show--great! ' 'There you are--I told you so! ' said the house manager excitedly. ' He hasn't gone to Yalta, he's just gone out of town for a drive.' 'Well, if that's the case,' said the treasurer, turning pale with anger, ' he has behaved like an absolute swine!' Here the manager leaped into the air and gave such a shout that Rimsky shuddered. 'I remember! I remember now! There's a new Turkish restaurant out at Pushkino--it's just opened--and it's called the " Yalta "! Don't you see? He went there, got drunk and he's been sending us telegrams from there!' 'Well, he really has overdone it this time,' replied Rimsky, his cheek twitching and real anger flashing in his eyes. ' This little jaunt is going to cost him dear.' He suddenly stopped and added uncertainly : ' But what about those telegrams from the police?'. How to increase your penis size, read on. http://shipmen.net"

They defeated the gmail spamfilter, and increased my knowledge of Russian literature. Best. Spam. Ever.

Tags: heartbeats, lenovo, spam

Amazing Mark Ronson video, shot in London, featuring animated graffiti, including this Banksy balloon girl. On a related note, Banksy suggests in The Guardian that 2012 will be bad for East London street art, such as this Neckface, outside my pal Marina's "so slummy it's cool" Hackney flat.

This is vieux chapeau to MP3-scenesters like Mike, but the original version of The Knife (scroll down), is actually awesomer than the more famous Jose Gonzalez cover version.

I am a little too into pork products right now. I made a monstrous 3kg pork pie, which I estimate as containing not less than 20,000 calories. My pork research so far has uncovered: The Bacon Show (ultra-niche blog of bacon recipes), bacon x transformers Danish bacon ad, gummi bacon, and unbelievably The Bacon of the Month Club ("12 artisan bacons to your door each month"). I guess I wouldn't be true to my sneaker roots if I didn't namecheck Nike's only pork themed shoe.

Tags: bacon, streetart, MP3

People should be more worried about click fraud. With these incredibly high adsense keywords rates it's bound to get more common, not less:
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My sneaker sense is tingling.
Coming home from work I had a sudden intuition that I should stop by "Size?" and see if anything had changed since I was last there 48 hours ago. They had taken a delivery of three pairs of Foot Patrol Air Max 90s, including one pair in a UK 10. Somehow I'd missed the drop at Foot Patrol, but "Size?" came to my rescue. I especially enjoy buying an ultra-exclusive pair of kicks on a rainy day. There's something extra awesome about knowing that climactic conditions force you to ice them in the back of the closet, not rock them right away. Now I have them safely stashed, I feel confident to declare that the upcoming Polka Dot Pack is the sneaker sensation of the summer.

Tags: nike, polkadot, sneaker

Forbes 20 Great Martinis, with some interesting historical anecdotes.

Books We Like, is a taggable, shareable online booklist. The list linked is for food hacker Marc Powell.

Brain Age in English for the DS is getting mad hype. It's already uber-popular with Japanese Seniors.

Meth and your veins, a handsome guide to "safe" meth use, complete with handsome mustachioed meth models.

Would you like to buy a vowel?

The Empire Brokeback (Is there no end to remixed movie trailers?)

Yogurting...er I don't get it.

Tags: meth, remix, yogurting,

"Who is your preferred character from The Simpsons and why?
The fast-food guy with the cracking voice. That was me from 13 to 30."- Douglas Coupland

Coupland's new book jPod is out in May. Although I'm a Coupland completist, I haven't totally enjoyed one of his books since Microserfs. I hope this marks a return to form. The official website, does some neat things with AJAX, and is well worth checking out.

Tags: coupland, jpod,

Makin' Bacon

I've spent most of the day being enterprising with odd bits of pork. I purchased an entire pig back from The Ginger Pig. The main meaty part would correspond to filet on a cow. I am curing that bit (pictured) with the intention of making smoked back bacon. I used a recipe from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, whose gung-ho enthusiasm for home made charcuterie makes you forget all your fears of botulism. When you buy a pig back you get the back ribs and the spine thrown in for free. I am sugar curing the ribs, in order to have gooey BBQ spare ribs tonight, and the spine has gone into a delicious pork stock. It's plainly my least vegetarian day ever.

I'm messing around with using ecto to post today (hence the groovy technorati tags). In honour of that, top link goes to:

Star Wars Name or Web2.0 app a challenging quiz. (31/40 for me)

Pelpet an old school style new school flash game.

Two neat bits of recursive machinima: Playing billiards inside GTA, and playing DDR inside Counter-Strike.

Two kinds of bad food: Steve, Don't Eat It (tries "meat food products" "dairy cream" etc), and eating (most bits) of a whole cow, including the bits that are shortly to be illegal in the US if BSE spreads.

Two neat movie trailers: High Score, one man tackles a 20 year old Missile Command world record, and at last Snakes on a Plane.

Technorati Tags: badfood, eyezmaze, machinima, ecto, snakesonaplane

I wish I never had to go to work again. Everyday I would just get up and go "cave exploring". For no particular reason I thought I'd compile a list of lists of lists I like:

List of Guardian Lists of the Day.

Listible a Web 2.0 collection of taggable sharable lists.

Kevin Kelly's list of interesting email lists. (To which I would definitely add Monkeywire)

Amazon's List of Books of lists.

Another list of assorted (mostly trivial) lists.

Fimoculous's list of "best of 2005" lists.

Wikipedia's list of lists of fictional things.

Timothy McSweeney's list of his many fine lists.

The List of Bests list of best lists. (I'm getting dizzy).

Grow-a-Brain's list of assorted lists.

And I supoose I should include the motherload: Wikipedia's entire list of lists.

9 things you ought to know before you catch a ferret in the street.
1. Ferrets bite and scratch like crazy, hence the implicit difficulty in ferret legging.
2. If you are in continental Europe or in fact anywhere except the UK, ferrets may carry rabies.
3. The combination of Items 1 and 2 is potentially dangerous, since rabies is really really fatal.
4. Assuming you have spotted a tame ferret, go right ahead and pick him up (see picture).
5. Ferrets smell incredibly bad. You will now need to wash all your clothes, and every inch of your skin about a hundred times, just to be rid of the awful musty odour. Perhaps that should have been Item 4.
6. Ferrets can be kept as household pets, by the anosmic. They are charming and inquisitive, and really fun to have around. Did I mention that they smell bad?
7. Ferrets can also be used for hunting rabbits. Equip your ferret with a special collar, and purchase the Deben Ferret Finder Mk 3 for hours of subterranean fun.
8. Assuming you are already fed up of the stench of your ferret, it is handy to know that most continental domestic ferrets are chipped, so you can find their real owners.
9. While you try and track down a vet or SPCA who can check your ferret for a chip, do not let the ferret run wild in your apartment. They will bite, chew, shred and generally trash everything. And make it stink.

Normal blogging service isn't due to resume anytime soon. I've got harsh non-blogging deadlines to work towards.
Today's WOTD is carabeef, discovered in this fascinating comprehensive article about taboo meat.
Today's niche blog of the day is weirdmeat; one man's attempt to eat all the oddest things in Shanghai.
Today's lab animal of the day (the first in a very short series) is the minipig.
Less thematically, my favourite link of the day are these redubbed GI Joe cartoons.

Word Sandwich: the best MMOWG (massively multiplayer online word game) since Weboggle.

isolatr, a field leader in anti-social networking.

Silly Walks Generator, a flash diversion.

The Chris Bliss Diss: A five-ball response to the recently promulgated Chris Bliss Beatles Routine. Update: how awful, I've accidentally committed the greatest blogger faux-pas, by reposting something that was on boingboing yesterday. Must catch up to the meme zeitgeist.

This always happens when I get back from holiday. I have some amusing vacation scrapes that I intend to blog about in a jaunty manner. Then I return to work, get deluged in mindless jobs, feel crushed and depressed, and fail to blog about my amusing adventures.
Instead here's some curious recent ask.me's and goog-answers:

How long would it take before a zombie's muscles were no longer functional?

Do dogs always sleep parallel to a north-south axis?

What
causes dark hair to turn light in a shower drain?

Men's Swimsuit
This hi-tech new swimwear represents a technological breakthrough unmatched by our competitors. This swim suit will give you, the customer, the edge that you need.

$7,246.18 Out Of Stock

(I'm back from holiday)

I'm away skiing near Chamonix for a week. Using a shared computer in the hotel has alerted me to a horrible security flaw in the combination of Firefox and Google. Firefox on this computer is set entirely in French, and Google likes to default to the local language too. This includes the pop-up and the check-box when you signing into your webmail that asks if you would like your details "remembered on this computer"(Mémoriser mes informations sur cet ordinateur). Obviously this is a bad idea on a computer in a hotel lobby. Someone has been suckered though, perhaps because they don't read french. This person's Google login name and password auto-complete, and I can't figure out how to turn it off (in French). I could change their password, read their personal search history, or even post obscenities in their name. I've always been fairly casual about signing in and out, but what with all the information Google store about all their users, this is frankly terrifying.

I've accidentally deleted almost a year's worth of pictures hosted on my server, in an ill-timed hosting overhaul. I have managed to manually rescue this week's posts, but I fear for the previous 12 months. Anyone have any bright ideas for recovering things that aren't backed up elsewhere? Google cache and archive.org have already proved useless. If I can't think of an automated solution, it will be a long haul, trawling through various discarded hard drives, inboxes and ancient servers looking for the snaps individually.

Corysucks.com is the definitive resource for Doctorow haters:

"I’ve read Boing Boing for a long time and only recently realized that I wasn’t really interested in it at all. And Cory’s posts are the worst. It seems like everything he writes is either about his DRM crusade, his book signings or Disney."

Every Cory post ever on boingboing ranked for suckiness. I'm sure Cory will blog about this too, based on his belief that there's no such thing a bad remix.

Edward Caraballo is the hardest man alive (if he is still alive). Arrested in Kabul for running an illegal private prison, for terrorist bounty hunters. He has so far survived 5 days in the Taliban prison riot without giving up his mobile phone.

American caviars taste tested; Swiss caviar cultivated in a sewage works.

JP Live action / CGI Katamari Ad.

£50million in used notes on eBay. Best auction evs?