Tag: Burst of Weirdness

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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome!

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Oddities and Awesome abound!

::  The greatest insults of musicians, by musicians. Wow, some of these are vicious. How vicious? Well…Anton Newcombe says this of Eric Clapton:

“People talk about Eric Clapton. What has he ever done except throw his baby off a f***in’ ledge and write a song about it?”

Wow…and that one is only number two on the list.

::  Things Organized Neatly. I don’t much go in for high degrees of organization, myself, but I would like to be a bit more organized — especially in the bookshelves department. But that would require (a) more bookshelves, and (b) more space to put the more bookshelves in.

::  Not a link to anything, but an observation from the past week as the Star Wars Blu-ray release takes hold: it amuses me to note the percentage of fans who rip George Lucas for doing anything other than releasing the films in their original theatrical versions, and then go on to insist that Star Wars Revisited is the definitive version anyway. “Fan edits” are great, but “edits by the guy who actually made and owns the films” are BAD BAD BAD!! Sometimes I note my relative lack of cognitive dissonance regarding Star Wars, and I wonder if I’m doing it wrong.

More next week!

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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome!

Oddities and Awesome abound!!!

::  What a great picture:

(via)

::  The tomato fight to end all tomato fights. This is an annual event in Spain, apparently. Looks kind of gross to me…but then, if it was a pie fight, I’d be booking air fare tomorrow. I prefer my tomatoes on pizza, pasta, sandwiches or salads.

::  Earth and the Moon, as imaged by the Juno spacecraft, from Jupiter:

Via. Why is this important and amazing? No one has said it better than Carl Sagan:

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Sunday Burst of Weird and AWESOME!

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Brilliantly sarcastic replies to completely well-meaning signs. Some of these are actually not that funny at all, but those that are, are worth scrolling past the ones that aren’t.

:: This comic is in Korean, but you don’t have to read Korean to get the gist of what’s going on. Be warned: this is unnerving. It certainly got under my skin.

:: Happy Belated Birthday, Sir Connery!

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Sunday Burst of Weird and AWESOME!

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: In the “Awesome” camp, we have this righteous rant by Neil deGrasse Tyson, on the subject of NASA and our apparently scaled-back ambitions as a society.

Great stuff. I could not possibly agree more.

:: Here is a fantastic set of wedding photos. Kudos to this happy couple! (Scroll down slowly for best effect. Don’t stop after the first four or five photos.

::: Not that I had a burning desire to go there in the first place, but I really don’t think I’ll be touring the islands of Indonesia any time soon. AIEEE!

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Sunday Burst of Weird and AWESOME!

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: After Harry Potter and friends win the war, how do they win the peace? I prefer my version, where all the Death Eaters surrender and either repent or go off to Azkaban and that’s that.

:: Fascinating BuffNews article about how it’s sometimes difficult to sell houses where notorious murders took place. The subject matter might sound like a “Well, duh!” kind of thing, but it’s an interesting story.

Sorry, but that’s about it. I wasn’t online as much this week. Stupid productive writing week!

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Sunday Burst of Weird and AWESOME!

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Cracked.com’s 5 Biggest Promotional Disasters lists five promotional offers that companies ran that ended up backfiring badly. They left out my favorite, which happened to Pizza Hut back when I was working for them. In 1997,the PH’s in the Baltimore area (which I assume to have been franchised) ran a promotion connected with the Baltimore Ravens, in which for every sack the Ravens recorded, they’d knock $1.00 off the price of a large pizza. (This was a few years before the Ravens’ defense developed into one of the best defensive units ever.) Well, along came a game against the Philadelphia Eagles, against whom the Ravens racked up nine sacks. Honoring the deal meant that you could get a large pizza from Pizza Hut for under two bucks. They made more than 15000 large pizzas (not sure over how many locations) in a four-hour period, and I assume that many of those were sold for either pennies over cost or at an outright loss. Whoops!

:: I never once thought about how slugs mate in all my life, until yesterday, when PZ Myers posted this video. It’s one of the most fascinatingly wonderful things I’ve ever seen.

:: Astronaut Suicides. Your mileage may vary, but I found this to be a near-perfect blend of black humor and goofball absurdity.

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Sunday Burst of Weird and AWESOME!

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Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Back in the day — and maybe even now, I wouldn’t know — Marvel Comics had a character who was inspired by the 1970s disco craze. She was a mutant who went by the name “Dazzler”, and she was basically a human disco ball: her mutant superpower was the ability to absorb sound energy and convert it to light. In her first appearance, she was singing at a disco and using the throbbing beat and ambient noise to create her own psychedelic laser light show. Interesting idea, actually, and Dazzler had her own title for a few years. (I read it for a while. It was really pretty “Meh”.)

But apparently Dazzler was created with the intent of putting her in a movie — a movie that might have been one of the most whacked-out, grandly weird superhero movies of all time. The movie would have co-starred KISS (yes, the rock band at the height of its painted-faces fame) and Rodney Dangerfield playing multiple parts. Read about it here — it’s so insane that I can’t help but be sad that it never came to pass.

(Thanks to SamuraiFrog, who posted this on Facebook.)

:: Minor leaguer throws no-hitter, but it is later — two days later — officially ruled not to have been a no-hitter. And yet, the very fabric of baseball’s space-time continuity would have been destroyed utterly if the reverse had happened last year for the guy who did throw a perfect game but was not credited one because the umpire screwed up. Sure. Whatever. (I still think that folks who think that baseball would have been thrown into chaos if we for one second considered that maybe, just maybe, umpire decisions shouldn’t be treated as Sacred Writ even when they’re wrong were full of crap.)

:: Greatest video ever!

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Sunday Burst of Weird and AWESOME!

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: What happens if you eat that little packet of stuff that says “Do Not Eat”?

:: In general, 62 percent of people like spicy food. But among those who think flag burning should be illegal, 78 percent like spicy food. How do we know this? Correlated.org, that’s how!

:: I did not know that the Taco Bell chihuahua ads actually led to decreased sales at Taco Bell. The things you learn.

:: I’m of mixed mind on this super-patriotic paint job on a Camaro, which a friend e-mailed me last week. On the one hand, yes, that’s a really impressive bit of car painting. But on the other hand, I’m really tired of the brand of patriotism that seems to only define national greatness in terms of wars we’ve fought.

More next week!

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Sunday Burst of Weird and AWESOME!

Oddities and Awesome abound!

I actually don’t have a lot this week, as I’ve been busier with other pursuits than nosing about my usual haunts on Teh Interweb. But I’ve got to share this:

I am so boiling some eggs to give this a try!

UPDATE: I got this from MeFi, where I saw the best comment to anything I’ve seen all day:

Am I the only person who likes peeling eggs? I mean, first you get to smash it all around and then you pick and peel; humans love to pick at things! It’s like picking a scab but you end up with a snack instead of a bloody knee.

Getting humor out of scab-picking is a big damn gift, I tell you what.

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