Tag: Burst of Weirdness

Oddities abound!

:: The fine folks at Guinness have weighed in on ten “unbreakable” world records. Interesting reading…when I was a kid, the annual release of the newest edition of the Book of World Records was always an event.

:: Here’s a news item that thrills the “I can’t wait for the future!” part of me. Apparently the airport in San Diego is one of the country’s busier airports, and it has the country’s busiest runway, because that runway is the airport’s only runway. For various reasons, building a second runway on the airport grounds is unfeasible — so one person has suggested building a runway at sea, around ten miles offshore. Wow!!!

:: First, there was the Discovery Channel doing boom de yada. Then, the always-wonderful xkcd did its own version of boom de yada. Finally, someone animated the xkcd version and sang the words. Boom de yada!

More next week!

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Oddities abound!

:: I can’t remember where I saw this linked, and it’s not safe for work! Erotic art for Alice in Wonderland by comics artist Frank Brunner.

:: I wonder if something like this will make it into Guy Gavriel Kay’s upcoming fantasy-China novel Under Heaven: ninth century China was a pretty formal place, with form letters of apology for drunkenness.

:: Wow. Just…wow. There’s some serious crazy! But at least the 101st Fighting Keyboard Commandoes will now be able to do some virtual target practice.

More next week.

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Oddities abound!

:: For your next batch of sugar cookies, consider using the Veggie Tales cookie cutter, featuring Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber. And try not to notice that these two fellows, standing next to each other, in outline only, look not unlike a…yeah, I’m not gonna say it.

:: SamuraiFrog has a cartoon that illustrates one of many unforeseen consequences of the Christmas retail season’s eternal creep backward into the fall months.

:: You know the Roomba, that little robotic vacuum cleaner that you just turn on and then set free in your room? Well, someone was curious about the path it takes, so he made a long-exposure photo, capturing the route the Roomba took. Cool.

(via)

More next week!

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Oddities abound!

:: Like Kerry, from whom the link herein comes to my attention, I don’t do Twitter because I just don’t get the point. (Likewise, I hate the way some folks marry their Facebook and Twitter accounts, so that I’m reading their Twits on FB, which often literally amounts to reading half of a conversation, but that’s a topic for another day.) But this Twit-stream (honestly, I have no idea what you call it) is hilarious. A 29-year-old guy lives with his crotchety, foul-mouthed, and apparently highly verbally creative 73-year-old father. Probably NSFW, and it’ll offend anyone who dislikes coarse language, but I loved it. (Luckily, there’s an RSS feed so I can read this Twit-stream on Google Reader, which means that I still don’t have to set up a Twit-stream of my own. Huzzah!)

:: Via Neatorama, I see 15 strange “Breast Cancer Awareness” products. The pink cement mixer is…amazing.

:: This last is utterly astonishing; I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. It’s a very short home movie, made in 1941, of a German couple leaving home for their wedding. What’s notable is the brief shot of a young girl smiling happily as she leans out the upstairs window of the building to watch the happy couple depart. That young girl is Anne Frank. Seriously.

That is simply amazing.

More next week.

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Oddities abound!

:: Boy, they sure do advertise stuff a bit differently in Asia than we do here.

:: Dan Brown is filthy rich, and I’m not. This article does not make me feel any better about this.

:: Under the auspices of Regis-and-whatshername’s teevee show, the other day saw the setting of a world record in New York City with the world’s biggest pie fight. Of course, as pie fights go, it’s pretty weak tea — just people randomly throwing the pies in any direction whatsoever. It’s certainly nothing like the pie fight from The Great Race, for example…but oh well!

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Oddities abound!

:: I have The Daughter to thank for this. I’ve no idea how she developed such a warped sense of humor.

:: I can’t imagine what the thought process was behind such a thing, other than to see if it could be done, but someone wrote a novel in which a word, once used, is never repeated. (PDF document.)

:: Unfortunately placed advertisements. Heh. Several of these cracked me up.

That’s all. Embrace the weirdness!

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Oddities abound!

:: I think we can officially call the “Coming Up With New Stuff to Deep Fry” craze over, with the advent of deep-fried butter. What else is there besides deep-frying stuff that will literally kill you? Bring on the deep-fried arsenic!

:: If you’ve ever looked around Blogistan and thought to yourself, “Hmmmm, there needs to be a blog that does nothing but contrast the way foods look as prepared versus the way they look in the picture on the packaging”, well, look no further! It’s Food In Real Life. This is nothing new, obviously; I remember my intense feelings of disappointment the first time I got a Big Mac at McDonalds and noted that the burger I got wasn’t the four-inch-tall behemoth pictured in the commercials.

:: Note to self: avoid Jericho, Arkansas. Hoo boy, what a mess they’ve got brewin’ down there!

:: Want to see what a molecule looks like?

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Oddities abound!

:: OK, I’ll admit that I tend to treat this series occasionally as less a repository for weird linkage and more a repository for “quick hits” linkage, i.e., stuff I want to link but not talk much about. It’s a fair cop, but that’s how I roll.

In that spirit, here’s an interesting feature on the concept album in music. I like how the author points out that rock artists claim to have started the concept album idea when Frank Sinatra was doing it in the Fifties, but surely the proto-concept album was the song cycle, which occupied the minds of composers all through the 19th century. Heh!

(And Pink Floyd’s The Wall is a great album.)

:: It strikes me as odd that a tool exists for the aiming of your car’s washer fluid jets. You need a tool for this? When a safety pin, a thin probe, or — if you work that kind of job — the pin of a nametag can do the job?

:: Have I linked There, I fixed it yet? Probably…but this one had me wondering if we’ve just caught a glimpse into Steven Den Beste’s car.

(Actually, I’m not sure SDB even has a car — he seems to talk about walking everywhere as opposed to driving, but he doesn’t use air conditioning and claims that on very hot days, blowing a fan across some blocks of ice actually does lower his apartment’s temperature a bit, to bearable levels. The principle is certainly sound enough; it would provide some cooling, albeit not as much as an actual pressurized coolant inside a compressor-driven cooling system. But the ice will absorb heat energy from the warm air passed over it, and it’ll reduce humidity as well as moist air condenses on the ice. SDB’s method probably works longer, though, given the lower surface area of his giant blocks of ice; all those little cubes in the bag in the car will melt faster. And I know that SDB doesn’t like unsolicited advice, but it’s always seemed to me that he might save some money if he was to keep a few gallon milk jugs around and, when hot weather is in the forecast, fill them and freeze ’em for such use. It would probably be cheaper than buying large quantities of ice blocks — but this also assumes large amounts of freezer space, which he may well not have. Probably just answered my own question.)

More next week.

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Sorry that I didn’t get to this yesterday, but it was an unexpectedly busy day on the home front (a bit of furniture shifting and some cooking, basically). Anyway, I found some great stuff, as always, at the ever-reliable NeatORama.com, such as this clock; an awesome school bus for Hayao Miyazaki fans; and a fountain that would make MC Escher proud.

I’ll try to be on the right day next week.

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