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Whatever, I want to try my new stylus now

Hitler gets banned from iSketch.

I laughed pretty hard on this one. Clip is from a movie called Downfall about the last days of Hitler.

It helps to know that iSketch is an online version of Pictionary.


- 1/26/2008 9:56:35 AM | link


867-5309

Via Gizmodo:

If you really want to screw with someone, put this Wrong Number Generator on their landline. When your victim (wife) tries to make a call, it’ll screw up some digits and randomly dial someone. Better yet, it only does this 75% of the time, meaning that it’ll let them dial the right number 25% of the time—which allows them to think that they’ve got the sloppiest fingers in the world.

Of course, when I clicked on the product link, it says "Access Denied." Random URL Generator!!! Could this too be a hoax?

There is a Disconnected Number Generator that looks to do the inverse of the Wrong Number Generator. This routes all incoming calls to a disconnected message so the receiver of the calls never knows people aren’t calling them.

All of this brings to mind the old Avenger’s Handbook. Does anybody remember that? There are some downright evil pranks in that sucker.



- 1/26/2008 9:40:17 AM | link


Cloverfield was a rip-off, man!

I’m adding to my New Year’s Resolutions.

4. Respond to all eVites with a quote from H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu.


Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for the Vigilant sailed over the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places.


Try to imagine this in between "Yaayyy! I’m bringing cookies!!!" and a half-dozen "Can’t wait!!!"


- 1/23/2008 6:07:27 PM | link


The world really wasn't black/white

Time waster of the day:

These vivid color photos from the Great Depression and World War II capture an era generally seen only in black-and-white. Photographers working for the United States Farm Security Administration (FSA) and later the Office of War Information (OWI) created the images between 1939 and 1944.


There are over 1600 photos in the Flickr set. Some of them are amazing.



- 1/23/2008 3:37:13 PM | link


The White Whale (from chapter 4)

Wherein Ishmael relates his waking up with Queequeg’s arm stretched across him to a troubling incident in his childhood. Queequeg is a harponeer (would you say that "harpooner?") with whom Ishmael must share a bed with in the Spouter Inn. Yeah, really. I’m only on page 38 and Moby Dick is already exploring gender issues.


But she was the best and most conscientious of stepmothers, and back I had to go to my room. For several hours I lay there broad awake, feeling a great deal worse than I have ever done since, even from the greatest subsequent misfortunes. At last I must have fallen into a troubled nightmare of a doze; and slowly waking from it - half steeped in dreams - I opened my eyes, and the before sunlit room was now wrapped in outer darkness. Instantly I felt a shock running through all my frame; nothing was to be seen, and nothing was to be heard; but a supernatural hand seemed placed in mine. My arm hung over the counterpane, and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phantom, to which the hand belonged, seemed closely seated by my bedside. For what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay there, frozen with the most awful fears, not daring to drag away my hand; yet ever thinking that if I could but stir it one single inch, the horrid spell would be broken. I knew not how this consciousness at last glided away from me; but waking the morning, I shudderingly remembered it all, and for days and weeks and months afterwards I lost myself in confounding attempts to explain this mystery. Nay, to this very hour, I often puzzle myself with it.

Now take away the awful fear, and my sensation at feeling the supernatural hand in mine were very similar in their strangeness, to those which I experienced on waking up and seeing Queequeg’s pagan arm thrown round me. But at length all the past night’s events soberly recurred, one by one, in fixed reality, and then I lay only alive to the comical predicament. For though I tried to move his arm - unlock his bridegroom clasp - yet, sleeping as he was, he still hugged me tightly, as though naught but death should part us twain. I now strove to rouse him - "Queequeg!" - but his only answer was a snore.


Ishmael is starting to seem like a cheap prude at this point. He picks the Spouter Inn b/c it’s closer to the water and it’s inexpensive to the point of being free and then he grouses to the landlord all night about having to share a bed with a cannibalistic, tattooed, African savage, who simply wants to get some sleep after having tried to sell shrunken New Zealand heads all day. Can’t a harpooneer (I swear I don’t get this harpooner vs. harpoonEEr thing...I’m Googling it) catch a break?

I’m introducing another aspect to my blogging of Moby Dick.

Words and/or phrases I have never heard before and also could not guess the meaning: tenpin, chimney jamb, Eurocyldon wind

And...

Words and/or phrases I have heard and will add to my arsenal: palsied, chest like a coffer-dam