#silliness

There's no answer that's really going to be satisfactory, so just enjoy this video of homemade lava being poured onto a sheet of ice.

Via

In fact, I assumed that they were a joke, they were so weird and creepy. I assumed that the web site would be a big put-on.

But as far as I can tell, it's not. It's a real ice cream place.

Now normally, this would not be enough for me to blog this. But I know people in Philadelphia. I am more or less demanding that you go check this place out and let me know if it's as much of a nuthouse as the commercials suggest. Please. I have to know.

Via

to suggest that it's ridiculous to learn to play "Flight of the Bumblebee" at 600bpm. And yet, I cannot escape the sense that it is just that.

The payoff, such as it is, is at 5:23.

The only sad thing is that this is a cross-stitch pattern, not a T-shirt, otherwise I would totally be buying this.

Check it out.

Ummmm…yeah.

The Axe Cop comic strip is deeply, deeply weird–as you might expect given the author is 5. The movie is astonishingly good at capturing that weirdness–that sense of things just happening one after another with no actual, err, plot–and even a lot of the visual style of the original.

Look at it this way, it couldn't possibly be worse than the upcoming Green Lantern film is likely to be.

I mean, seriously, how could there not be

If so, I give you, Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock-Friends-Pie

And yet, the fact that he hasn't yet mentioned Bacolicious to me suggests that maybe he hasn't.

Mmmmmm, bacon.

Now, it's 11pm, I need some fooking sleep.

We were in class earlier, and several people were talking about this clip.

Mind you, the way she's doing it, she's only able to do most of that stuff because she's really young. It takes skill to do it (and I can do most of it except for the bits involving the actual bow) when you're twice her age. :)

From Sci-Fi Wire:

Vin Diesel told reporters that it's still his ultimate goal to produce and star in a live-action film based on the life of Hannibal, but that in the meantime he's producing and directing Hannibal the Conqueror, a children's animated series about the third-century B.C. Carthaginian general who rode an elephant across the Alps in order to attack the Roman empire.

This sounds cuddly as all hell. I'm sure there will be lots of funny elephants, and probably a second-in-command who's just a little bit dumb, but is always amusingly abashed when he figures out he's gotten things wrong. And a moral for each story. And probably lots of stabbing and trampling and people falling off the sides of mountains.

No, wait, instead it'll be:

So it's Hannibal as a boy. So it's like the boy and an elephant.

The mind boggles, or, more properly, keels over in exhaustion.

I, on the other hand, am mostly going to laugh and laugh and laugh: RFID-activated retrieval system brings urns up for viewing

1. One police car had rear-ended another police car.

2. What I thought might be a badger, but, upon looking at some pictures,

was obviously too thin to be one. Anyway, crossing the road, whatever it was.

It amuses me to think that clusters of very fast machines are being used, in their idle time, to produce universal solutions to Rubik's cubes

But label aside, I cannot help but be amused at the existence of a hot-sauce-that-is-too-hot-to-use (they go so far to say it's not a condiment, it's a "food additive"–or, apparently a decent anesthetic that is named Chet's Gone Mad

Which was my initial reaction to this video of a man making farting noises with his hands to perform along (horrifyingly accurately) Iron Maiden's The Trooper.

You. Must. Love. The. Internet.

It includes the guitar solo. That happens at about 1:45 left. It is indescribable. And he's just so into it.

Via

A law professor's story about Microsoft.

Laughing at this, that is.

I'm sure it's been blogged hell-and-everywhere, but this plot of US housing prices in the last century realized as a (literal) roller-coaster, is just too good not to note

or maybe you were lucky and sustained a blunt-force trauma to the head that swallowed that memory.

For those of you who remember it, though, you can catch an absurdist stage production, and, if you're lucky, you could play Keanu's part because the lead is selected from the audience each night, to:

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.

Oh, yeah.

The idea of Frank Zappa on a mainstream game show is pretty much incomprehensible from the start. I wonder what his mom thought.

Tech support through the ages.

I was just present for a discussion of a production of A Streetcar Named Desire.

With zombies.

Heh.

Anthrax pays a surprise visit to the set of Battlestar Galactica.

With tracks paying homage to comic books (Judge Dredd, horror novels (Misery in "Misery Loves Company"), and movies (Blue Velvet in "Now It's Dark"), can a track dissing Cylons be far behind?

Davyd Madeley hacked together a small GNOME applet to measure and rate his contributions to the GNOME Bugzilla and set boudaries for levels and such.

Heh.

Paintings designed by committee. No, really. Admire their unrepentant badness.

It's really quite scary how well this little scene is done

But I did some googling around as part of a conversation I was having with someone on YM, and came across a transcription of the Harper's article that I'm fairly certain is where I first read about it.

It seems pertinent that the conversation was of the "Why are men so damn stupid?" variety.

Incidentally, I did not piss my pants re-reading it, but I came awful close.

then you would surely not understand why there would have to be an entire web page devoted to Iron Maiden album covers with Spongebob Squarepants inserted into them?

But rest assured, there must be such a thing.

Not because it's not as funny as it used to be ('cause really, it is), but because it's just harder to get me to laugh now–I look around and sometimes think things have truly come off the rails.

But their bit of commentary on the attacks on Christmas is great. I especially liked:

"On Secularmas, they do not exchange presents," says Giblets. "They exchange identical cardboard boxes filled with rocks and mold and broken childhood dreams and nothing!"

You might then think that at this time more than any other, I would be able to make a distinction between those things that I think I might want want–largely because they're "neat"–and those things I need.

But damn, it sure does feel like I need a nixie tube clock that looks like an H&K amp head

Jim MacDonald has a non-comprehensive list of Things I've learned from British folk ballads. It includes such gems as Avoid situations where the obvious rhyme-word is "maidenhead."

Heh.

A play that derives from Brecht and features Emacs, the RIAA, Bill Gates, Slashdot and various others as characters. I mean, wow.

Need something to help keep the kids in line, since you don't have access to Satan, Hell, or even the milder "making Baby Jesus cry?".

Steve Loughran has the answer: Cthulu for three year olds.

I especially liked the caveat, though:

The hard part is striving a line between providing the minimum of lies necessary for total obedience, without reducing the child to having a deep fear of darkness, docksides, attics, cellars and the wind rattling the shutters.

SNL has sketches built around the premise. And, having lived in Germany for five years, I would tend to agree, though I would also add that they also allow nekkid people.

Anyhoo, Jerry forwarded me this fairly absurd clip from some popular-music show. Since Anne was home sick, and I had no idea what it might turn out to be, I viewed it without sound. I suspect it is better that way–less painful, but no less strange.

An 'infinitely' zoomable image

Safe for work, but you must be familiar with things that are not safe for work for this picture to be as funny as possible.

It's a MIDI sequencer–really, it seems more of an interactive instrument to me–that uses six hamsters to control three channels of pitch and rhythm.

There are wav and mp3s of the output. I wonder if you could get the base MIDI files for use as a ringtone?

"A good woman is like a fine cheese," says me. "Or a large hat. Or an aggrieved sasquatch. Or an elephant made outta trees an ropes an lotsa smaller elephants."

What more do you need to know?

Heh.

I'm not sure that there is any response to the state of the world that is more sane than Fafblog!

…but this one was different. I was taking a course in writing Humorous Essays, but most class discussion consisted, perhaps unsuprisingly, of one-liners. I was concerned that my work was too bitterly ironic; I wanted it to be a little more generously funny. And Tina Fey was in the class. And she had a habit of standing uncomfortably close to me.

There was more, but I couldn't remember it by the time I actually got up.

Now, I wouldn't encourage anyone to invest in DVDs of Tom Clancy movies, but pudge notes Ben Affleck's negaive value in terms of such things.

Just go read it for yourself.

via Matthew.

(can one imagine having any other sort with her, and then being derided mercilessly for at least 18 hours on the site?), I imagine I'll have to restrict myself to being amused by her use of such amusing phrases as

…but that's why the baby Jesus invented mixers, buddy.

When you know people who work at, or have worked at, some large company, like, say, eBay, or Amazon, they always seem to get hooked into the "wierd shit" list for whatever the purveyor is.

Thus, Alex Yan brings to my attention both weaponry and mascot costumes.

Furries, anyone?

The inimitable Fafblog succeeds in making a pointed commentary about an ideology that focuses on 3500 fetuses and yet pointedly ignores the suffering of millions.

What did Philip K. Dick know?

Will Shetterly rebuts Patrick Neilsen-Hayden's alternate-world scenario in which Bush won the 2000 election.

No, we're not talking about sharks, or Osama Bin Laden, we're talking about the tendencies of your coworkers.

I'm guessing that this is why there are people with enough time to do wild and silly things with Bento.

I wish I could read what I presume to be the ingredients used for each of the pieces.

The scary part? Two words: Bento porn.

After a moment's disorientation–what, we're in Italy now?–we decided that Virginia's Po river had to be a teletubby reference.

We became suspicious, tough, when we noticed the Ni river a couple of miles later. I mean, could they be that obvious? A Holy Grail reference?

Then we put it together.

I would hope it would come as a suprise to no one that one of our local bakery/restaurants would have a sense of humor about some of its wares.