Tag: Burst of Weirdness

Two items this week, snagged from MeFi:

:: First, an apparent call to customer service (warning: salty language) of Jimmy Dean Sausage regarding their apparent execution of the old “reduce the package size but keep the price the same” retail maneuver. I say “apparent” because some folks on MeFi seem to think this may be a viral marketing kind of thing. Assuming it’s a real guy voicing a real complaint, I kind of see his point, but geez, breakfasts in his family consist of fried eggs, T-bone steaks, and sausage? With what else?

:: Second, remember the kindly Grandpa Joe character from Willy Wonka? Well, according to these folks, he’s less than kindly. Hmmmmm.

:: And from TNH, we have action figures of Jesus, in the act of performing in…I’m not making this up…extreme sports.

This reminds me of a lame joke I once heard:

Jesus, Moses, and an old man are playing golf. Moses tees off and plops his ball right in the water, so he walks over, parts the water to where his ball is and putts out of it. Then Jesus tees off and also lands in the water, but he merely walks across the surface of the water until he gets to where his ball is, where, finding it quite shallow, he putts it out and onto the green. Now the old man tees off and hits his ball toward the same water. But the ball bounces off the shell of a swimming turtle, and then arcs wildly toward the woods, where it caroms off the back of a bird in flight back onto the green, where it rolls the rest of the way to the hole. Moses grunts, turns to Jesus, and says, “You know, I really hate playing golf with your father.”

I know, I know. But tip your waitress anyway, folks.

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Items of note:

:: Great. The temptation to do this at work may prove irresistible.

:: And I really wish this was a real poster.

Well, that’s about it. Not a whole lot of good weirdness, this week.

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This will be kind of a link-dump of some stuff I’ve found this week, combined with some stuff I’ve had sitting in my “Blog Fodder” bookmarks folder for a long time. In the case of the latter stuff, I may well have linked some of this stuff in the past and not remember it. Also, I can no longer credit where I’ve found a lot of this.

:: Fellow gripers about For Better or For Worse will enjoy April Patterson’s real blog.

:: Thirty-nine questions for Charlie Daniels upon hearing “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”. I’ve probably linked this before, come to think of it, but here it is again. I’ve never liked that song; frankly, both the Devil and Johnny are crappy fiddlers. If Natalie MacMaster or Joshua Bell walked in there, they’d both wipe the floor with both of those idiots.

:: A magical pet adventure, that isn’t safe for work. Hmmmmm.

A few links from Stephen Frug:

:: The twelve devices of Peanuts. I’ve previously commented on that second Schroeder strip in this space myself.

:: A do-it-yourself open letter.

:: Star Trek fans remember that before Kate Mulgrew was cast as Captain Janeway on Voyager, the role briefly belonged to Genevieve Bujold. Some of Bujold’s clips have surfaced, and man, she was not cut out for that role.

:: Not really weird, but quite cool actually: Twenty-five photographs taken at exactly the right time. I suspect that a bunch of these are of the “take lots of repeated shots and pick the best one later” variety, but who cares — the photos are all very interesting, and across many different subject matters to boot.

:: Finally, because I love me some Pac-Man, here are two odd variants: Steampunk Pac-man and Text-adventure Pac-man.

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Not much to report, weirdness-wise — I wasn’t on the Net as much as usual last week, which cut into the looking-for-oddities. Here are a few I snagged from MeFi:

:: Re-enacting iconic photographs from the twentieth century — with old people.

:: Top your next pizza with the contents of a Happy Meal.

Sadly, that’s about it for now. Lame, I realize. Oh well — we’ll try harder next week.

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OK, here we go with this week’s oddities of the Web. Fair warning first, though: both of the first two are kind of gross. In fact, these are all kinds of icky. Proceed at your own risk!

:: Guy who claims to have very little tolerance for spicy food decides to take a swig of the hottest hot sauce he can find at the store. I’m not sure if this video is real or not, but his reaction is intriguing. He seems to have come prepared with lots of stuff at hand to stem the heat. I’m surprised that’s the hottest sauce he can find, also — I’m not familiar with that stuff, but it can’t be hotter than Dave’s Insanity Sauce, can it?

(via)

:: This is even ickier. It’s exactly what the URL says it is. So don’t say I didn’t warn you.

(via)

:: This isn’t icky at all; for fans of the departed series That 70s Show, it’s just Red Foreman issuing a number of variants of his favorite threat: his foot in your ass.

OK, that’s it. Sorry for the ick.

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And away we go!

:: It always interests me how many times a pretty obvious idea just never gets acted upon, until someone finally realizes, “Hey, no one’s ever actually done that, even though everybody’s thought of it!”

I mean, really: who hasn’t opened up a fortune cookie and thought that it would be funny if the fortunes were pessimistic?

:: A bad disco arrangement of the Main Theme from Star Wars. Bad interpretive dancing. Bad trumpet playing. All together in one moment of awful goodness. On some kind of meta-level, this is certainly George Lucas’s fault. Curse you, Miss Douglas, for making me doubt The Flanneled One!

:: This is clearly an example of plucking the low-hanging fruit, but I’m always a sucker for news anchors who lose their composure and start giggling uncontrollably on the air. (The slow motion of that model falling is priceless, though — especially the second time, when she gets all wobbly before finally going down.) Of course, for the ESPN lovers among us, the canonical instance of this sort of thing is Charlie Steiner’s reaction to Carl Lewis singing the National Anthem before an NBA game. (Actually, Steiner lost it a bunch of times on air, but the Carl Lewis one was the best.)

Tune in again next week.

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OK, we’re finally back on track here at Byzantium’s Shores. Here’s some weirdness for you all!

(Several of these links were pointed out to me by readers, but I can’t remember who directed me to what, so feel free to take credit in comments, if you recognize something you sent me.)

:: Does your seventh grader have to dissect a frog and is getting all squicky over the procedure? No problem! Those clever Japanese have harnessed the power of genetic engineering to create a frog with see-through skin. Just don’t kiss the thing; the resulting Prince might well be…a bit creepy.

:: For some reason, apparently the Keanu Reeves/Patrick Swayze cops-and-surfers movie Point Break has become something of a cult favorite. I’ve never really understood why; it’s not a very good movie. But anyway, a theater troupe is now doing Point Break LIVE!. I kid you not:

Point Break LIVE!, the absurdist stage adaptation of the 1992 Keanu Reeves/Patrick Swayze extreme-sports blockbuster, tells the story of former college football star Johnny Utah (Reeves in the film), as he pursues the surfing, bankrobbing, skydiving, bare-hand-fighting, adrenaline junkie cum Zen Master, Bodhi Sattva. The Brechtian blockbuster, which garnered a “Seattle P-I Best of Seattle 2004” award during its run in the Northwest, features armed robbery, big-wave surfing, car chases, explosions, and no less than two extended skydiving sequences. Best of all, you could be the next Johnny Utah… the starring role of Keanu will be selected at random from the audience each night, and will read their entire script off of cue-cards. This method manages to capture the rawness of a Keanu Reeves performance, even from those who generally think themselves incapable of acting.

What could be better!

:: Returning to the original roots of the Sunday Burst of Weirdness, a couple of Cthulhu links. Those of you who are flummoxed by the popularity of LOLCat photos might find LOLThulhu amusing — I sure did. And it seems axiomatic that any good Lovecraft fan should include these as any kind of proper table setting for a dinner party.

:: This was pointed out to me by a reader. I have absolutely no idea what it’s supposed to be.

:: Scotty sent me this (I only remember that he sent it because I still have the e-mail): a bunch of rocket hobbyists have constructed a flying scale model of an X-Wing fighter. And we’re not talking about some small, handheld model or something the size of a typical model airplane. Their model is 21 feet long, which, using the measurement of 12.5 meters for a real X-Wing, is roughly a half-size scale. The planned maiden flight of this ship is apparently scheduled for this week, so let’s be safe, folks, and make sure your thermal exhaust ports are properly shielded!

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Hey all, sorry for the recent lack of posting. Nothing disastrous going on, I’ve just been busy and not feeling too much like blogging.

Anyway, some weirdness and funny stuff:

:: Our local PBS station often airs movies on the weekend evenings. Since most movies won’t fill a two-hour timeslot exactly, the station is usually left with some remaining airtime to fill before the next hour or half-hour, and they generally fill this time with short films or other kinds of short programming. Such is how I first encountered, some time ago, a British parody of cooking shows called Posh Nosh. Only nine episodes were made, and each one is about nine minutes long. Here’s the list, with links to the episodes I’ve managed to find online:

Fish and Chips
Birthday Parties
Paella
Beautiful Food
Bread and Butter Pudding
Leftovers
Sauces
Comfort Food
Grilled Sole

Enjoy! I love this little show, with its subtle wordplay and nifty comedic chemistry between the two leads.

:: Some guy followed every rule in the Bible for a year. I don’t really see the point, but there it is. (And by the way: it’s Gandhi, not Ghandi. It’s disheartening to see that mistake in a professional news magazine.)

:: Aieee!

An error in paperwork sent a man in Venezuela, who was knocked unconscious in a road accident, for an autopsy.

The confusion occurred after ambulance workers reached the scene of the accident, between a lorry and a car.

Officials completed a form requesting an autopsy rather than one requesting treatment for injuries, and the man was sent to the morgue.

Venezuela’s highways police confirmed that the two hospital forms look almost identical and can be easily confused.

(via)

:: Given previous rants about cell-phone users that I’ve posted on this blog, I suppose it will therefore seem like quite the Burst of Weirdness that…I now have a cell phone. It doesn’t play MP3s or videos, it doesn’t make a mean cup of coffee, and it doesn’t wash my car, pick a lovely bouquet of wildflowers and baby’s breath, keep my plants watered, or cook a nice dish of Clams Casino. It does, though, make calls and take pictures of stuff.

Here’s something I wonder about cell phones: had Star Trek not depicted its communicators as such, would “flip” phones ever have been invented?

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Some video goodness for this Sunday!

:: Star Wars? Singin’ in the Rain? Two of my absolute favorite movies. What a mash-up!

Thanks, Shamus!

:: I recently remembered that goofy song “In the Summertime” by Mungo Jerry, and I wondered if it had any kind of proto-video from back in the day. Sure enough, it does:

What a gloriously un-PC song this is, from its advice that you should “have a drink, have a drive” to its notion that if your date is rich you should “take her out for a meal”, while if she’s poor, you should “do what you feel”.

:: This isn’t actually “weird”, but another fun exercise is the “then and now” thing with various singers or pop bands. Here’s the Starland Vocal Band with “Afternoon Delight”, back in the day:

And here they are again, more recently:

I always find something a bit endearing about one-hit wonder groups who reunite years later to perform that one hit again.

(I also seem to remember that I loved that song when it was the hit of the day, back when I was all of five or six years old. I wonder how much amusement my parents derived from this, since I never realized what the friggin’ song was about until I got a copy of it on a 70s hits compilation CD sometime in the mid-90s. I played it the first time, actually listened to the lyrics for the first time in my life, and suddenly realized, “Hey, this song is about teh sex!”)

:: In a non-video vein, Belladonna points out that if you have old 3.5 inch floppy discs sitting about, you can make stuff out of them, like your own starship Enterprise. Now that‘s useful! In a similar vein, some folks actually collect AOL cds.

:: Germany wants your dead.

:: I have seen my own future…specifically, my future clothesline….

:: It bums me out that currently, I can’t find a video online of Marv Levy singing the fight song he wrote for the Bills in the mid-90s. “Go Bills, for we are here to cheer for you!”

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OK now….

:: Want to hear some simulated version of “sexy” women “moaning” your IP address? Sure you do. This is definitely weird, even if as a joke it’s only funny exactly once. The second time, it’s amazingly lame. (Click “refresh” if you don’t believe me.) This probably isn’t work-safe, by the way.

:: A wall clock my mathematics professor father would love.

(Both these links via Making Light.)

:: A month or so ago, Lynn Sislo sent me a link to I-am-bored.com, as a possible source for all manner of weirdness. I haven’t checked it out yet, but I will do so right now. In the future I’ll look through it for the stuff that most catches my fancy, but for the purposes of this post, I will click the “Weird” tab at the top of their page, and then link the fourth item on the list that results. OK?

[clicking…clicking again…counting down five links…clicking….]

And here it is: a cautionary film about LSD, made in the 1960s. Watch this and tell me you weren’t waiting for the inevitable walk on by Troy McClure!

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