tidbit

Time Cube. Words fail me. This guy occupies the center of a Bermuda Triangle that has Buckminster Fuller, Lyndon LaRouche, and Emilio Lizardo at the corners.

This Italian coffin maker knows that it takes a little something extra to make you choose their coffins, even if death is inevitable. What’s that? Cheesecake. Scroll down to the bottom and view the photos linked under the heading “Cofani funebri e fascino.” They have il sexy calendario to boot!

via Plastic

What are the odds: N.Y. Lottery Draws 9-1-1 on 9/11. Well, we know exactly what the odds are: one in a thousand. That won’t be good enough for a lot of people, who will be inclined to find some deeper significance in it.

I just received the following e-mail

This mail, I know may embarrash you. By embarrashment, I mean coming from somebody you never know or met before, even coming from a country – (Nigeria) noted for dishonest and Fraudalent practises.

Well, this is not one of those Scam letters from Nigeria, but from a group of who are in distress and require your assistence. I am Mr. Ahmed Idris the credit controller of ZENITH BANK PLC, LAGOS – NIGERIA I am contacting you basen on your specialisation – PROPERTIES ALLOCATION…

What was this guy thinking? “Oh, if I say I’m different from all the other scammers, then I’ll have credibility!” The mind reels.

What makes this exhibit of flowers so interesting, apart from their beauty, is that the flowers were neither painted not photographed–they were scanned directly.

I need to go get a scanner and play with this technique.

From time to time I’ll see a cryptic string of numbers and letters in the signature line of someone’s e-mail. This, I have learned, is a “geek code,” denoting in highly compressed fashion the degrees and dimensions of one’s geekiness. Well, I just ran across the equivalent for bloggers. Apparently I’m a B4 d+ t+ k s- u- f i o+ x e+ l c

Not sure who’s running this site, but he’s done a good job tracking The HisTory of Michael Jackson’s face as well as that of Britney’s boobs.

I know you’ve been thinking your little rat-dog looked a little underdressed. I know you love all things cute and Japanese. So how can you resist these yukata for chihuahuas? If that’s not bad enough, the same company offers even more demeaning outfits for chihuahuas (and to demean a chihuahua…that’s quite a feat).

BlogTree is a project that attempts to create a family tree of blogs. You register your blog, and indicate which other blogs have influenced yours.

Not sure whether to laugh at this or not.

Top Twenty Blogger Insults

If you get two-thirds of these, you qualify as a major web-fiend and geek.

And you thought Dr Evil was kidding in Austin Powers. Apparently not. Check out Hats of Meat

For the bride who is a little too proud to be an American: the American flag wedding dress that I sighted today. I apologize for the crappy picture.

Something Awful reviews a “hentai game” from Japan called X-Change.

I’m really not sure who this game’s target audience is, although if it’s the average Japanese teenage male I need to start being a lot more afraid of Japan than I have been lately.

And I’ve got to say, there are some things I’ve never understood about Japan–this is a perfect example.

Roundtrip Translation Script from staggernation. Lots of fun: you give it a web-page URL–it runs the page through a machine translator and back. Hilarity ensues. The round-trip to Korean is especially surreal.

Bumper stickers spotted side-by-side on the same car:

My child is an honor student at Bowie High and Follow me to the Yellow Rose (a well known strip club).

File this one under “Things I don’t understand” (that file-folder is very thick, yes). I don’t have anything against strip clubs or high schools, but the juxtaposition is pretty weird.

One of the lines from 2001 that sticks in my head is when Dave gasps “Oh my God, it’s full of stars!”

That’s my reaction to the new Hubble photos. One of the images shows 6,000 galaxies in the background, and if I recall correctly, the field of view in that image is equivalent to that of a dime viewed at 70 feet.

Follow-up time:

Turns out the blogger I mentioned in this conundrum never asked for the offensive website to be removed, he just mentioned it to the index’s, uh, curator.

The amazing Jenster (who doesn’t have a web page, otherwise I’d point a link at her), who tipped me off to the dating-hell story believes the story to be a fake. She points out in particular A) the time-zone problem in international chat sessions; B) the extreme improbability that the guy would be able to meet her in the baggage-claim area after they had both taken international flights from two different points; C) the improbability that someone who hopes to have any credibility as a tech writer would have ever fallen into a situation like this in the first place. I think she’s on to something, which raises the question (if you’re a linguistic pedant like me, it does not beg the question): why invent such a story?

The kind of conundrum only a blogger could face: Blogdex recently removed a hate-speech website from its index. A discussion ensued, in the course of which the person who originally complained about the website in question accidentally outed himself. Now, here’s the thing: I really want to dislike this guy for being such a cringing pansy that he promotes censorship to protect his delicate sensibilities, but the thing is, he’s got a good blog.

Now this is what I call a bad date. Not to be cruel, but the clue-phone was ringing for a long time before this woman got around to picking it up. I’m signed up on nerve.com too, and I’ve gone on some bad dates (including a comically bad one this past Wednesday), but I haven’t had any experiences remotely like this one.