Author: Joey deVilla

In the above poster for the movie John Tucker Must Die, you can see a lower back tattoo, often referred to by its colloquial name, the tramp stamp. According to Wikipedia, there’s a German slang term for lower back tattoos — Arschgeweih — which means “ass antlers”, which is probably derived from the fact that these tattoos have a barbed style and look like anters when they stick out from underneath low-rise jeans, which the young ladies seem to favour these days.

One of my favourite quotes from Wedding Crashers is what Vince Vaughan’s character said upon seeing a tramp stamp at the wedding:

“Tattoo on the lower back… might as well be a bullseye.”

It’s funny because it’s true.

Another bit from Wedding Crashers that I liked was when Owen Wilson’s and Vince Vaughan’s characters were placing bets on what the reading at the wedding would be:

Priest: And now for our second reading I’d like to ask the bride’s sister Gloria up to the lectern.

John Beckwith (Owen Wilson): 20 bucks First Corinthians.

Jeremy Grey (Vince Vaughan): Double or nothing Colossians 3:12.

Gloria: And now a reading from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians.

If you’ve been to a couple of Christian weddings, you’ve probably heard the excerpt from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. Not only have I heard it a zillion times, but because I’m a performer at heart and my extended family knows it, I’ve been called to do that reading on at least a half-dozen occasions. There’s really nothing wrong with it and the message is so universal that I’ve seen it used at non-Christian weddings, but it’s become clichéd from overuse.

I stumbled across a photo — a preview of which appears below — where the tramp stamp meets First Corinthians, which is like having two Wedding Crashers jokes in one. I have no idea of the origins of this photo — maybe the Bible Belt is going through a Girls Gone Wild phase.

You’ll have to click the photo to see the full photo. The young lady in the photo is wearing pants, but they’re low-rise jeans. You don’t see anything you wouldn’t see at the beach, but there’s a little bit of “plumber’s crack” in the photo and it may not be safe for your workplace. But hey, there’s a Bible verse!

I’m at a geek workshop today — the “How We Built Flickr” workshop — so I’ll be posting later today. Now get back to work!

In an earlier entry, I talked about one of my favourite presentations from the RailsConf conference, Paul Graham’s The Power of the Marginal, a talk about the upside of being on the outside.

I linked to the text of his keynote earlier, and now I’ve got something better: the video of his keynote, recorded by ScribeStudio.

While the talk was delivered to an audience of programmers who use the Ruby programming language and the Ruby on Rails web programming framework — both of which are small, “indie” and “outside” compared to commercial offerings like Java and Microsoft’s .NET — it is applicable to anyone who creates, whether it’s by entering code into a computer, making music, painting, making buildings, and so on. The drummer for the Thirsty Cups (a band who performed after Paul’s keynote) isn’t a programmer, but he found that the keynote relevant to him as well.

Here’s an excerpt from the transcript of his keynote:

One reason so many good ideas come from the margin is simply that there’s so much of it. There have to be more outsiders than insiders, if insider means anything. If the number of outsiders is huge it will always seem as if a lot of ideas come from them, even if few do per capita. But I think there’s more going on than this. There are real disadvantages to being an insider, and in some kinds of work they can outweigh the advantages.

Imagine, for example, what would happen if the government decided to commission someone to write an official Great American Novel. First there’d be a huge ideological squabble over who to choose. Most of the best writers would be excluded for having offended one side or the other. Of the remainder, the smart ones would refuse such a job, leaving only a few with the wrong sort of ambition. The committee would choose one at the height of his career– that is, someone whose best work was behind him– and hand over the project with copious free advice about how the book should show in positive terms the strength and diversity of the American people, etc, etc.

The unfortunate writer would then sit down to work with a huge weight of expectation on his shoulders. Not wanting to blow such a public commission, he’d play it safe. This book had better command respect, and the way to ensure that would be to make it a tragedy. Audiences have to be enticed to laugh, but if you kill people they feel obliged to take you seriously. As everyone knows, America plus tragedy equals the Civil War, so that’s what it would have to be about. Better stick to the standard cartoon version that the Civil War was about slavery; people would be confused otherwise; plus you can show a lot of strength and diversity. When finally completed twelve years later, the book would be a 900-page pastiche of existing popular novels– roughly Gone with the Wind plus Roots. But its bulk and celebrity would make it a bestseller for a few months, until blown out of the water by a talk-show host’s autobiography. The book would be made into a movie and thereupon forgotten, except by the more waspish sort of reviewers, among whom it would be a byword for bogusness like Milli Vanilli or Battlefield Earth.

It’s a great presentation. Go check it out.

When providence provides you with a theme, you run with it. Since the two previous posts have been about evil cats, I thought I’d see if I could carry on with an “evil animals” theme today. With that in mind, here are some clever ads I found for Knaz chocolate-covered peanuts:

[Found at NeedCoffee.com]

Blogging about your cat is an act that’s stereotypically bloggy that Ross and I managed to make a little mini-event out of it called “Blogacatmas” (traditionally celebrated on the first Friday of October). What Jeff Killed is a blog that takes cat-blogging to the next level: it chronicles the kills made by Jeff, a large orange cat from Shadow Hills, California.

What’s interesting is that Jeff isn’t the blogger’s cat. The “about” page explains:

Jeff has adopted our back porch and yard as his home. He uses our dog’s house when it rains, but mostly he likes to sleep on our patio chairs and keep watch over his domain.

Though he doesn’t really belong to us, we provide Jeff with food and water; however, this does little to lessen his killer instinct. To humans, Jeff is an exceptionally good-tempered and friendly cat; to rodents and other small animals, he is death itself.

It could be that Jeff likes to bring us gifts to repay our hospitality. Perhaps he is simply a hardwired killing machine. All we know for certain is that he hunts down a wide variety of small animals and disembowels, decapitates, and dines on them. Often.

The expected birds and mice appear on his list of skills, but what is truly extraordinary is the rabbits that Jeff captures, kills and ate, save for the hind legs. Jeff isn’t that much bigger than the rabbits, which makes the feat rather impressive (if gruesome).

If you’re the squeamish type, you’re not going to like this site. It’s got plenty of gore, what with pictures of Jeff enjoying his grisly meals, and the heads and entrails he leaves behind. The only exception is the entry about the steak that Jeff attempted to steal from their barbecue.

If you’ve got a cat unfortunate enough to the wrong combination of white fur and of black spots, perhaps you can submit its photo to the Cats That Look Like Hitler site. Mind you, your Hitler-lookalike cat — they call them “kitlers” — will be up against some pretty stiff competition, like this furry fuhrer:

Some of the cat pictures on the site have been Photoshopped, which probably means that the site is probably responsible for creating the largest group of people who aren’t white supremacists or Mel Brooks who are dressing things up to look like Hitler.

In case you’re looking for a new idea for a cat-based website, may I suggest starting Cats That Look Like Tojo? I thought that he and Hirohito never got the full level of vilification they deserved. In case you need a reference photo of ol’ Toe Jam (as I like to call him), here’s one:

I checked — as of a couple of minutes ago, catsthatlookliketojo.com is still available…