Category: Uncategorized

(The links in this article are slightly racy, so be warned.)

In the comments for the entry titled Exciting New Doritos Flavour!, a commenter going by the name of “manfire” explains that these characters (in the right column of Japanese writing on the Doritos bag pictured to the right):

read as denki anma.

As “manfire” says and a little Googling confirms, “denki anma” translates roughly as “a crotch noogie done with the foot” and it seems to be popular in the strange world of porn from the Land of the Rising Tentacle.

Doing a search for the term “denki anma” is an act for the brave, as it will lead you to many disturbing sites with even more disturbing imagery. Here’s one of the tamer images I found; I find it oddly reminiscent of the customer service at the Bell Mobility store at the Eaton Centre:

I still have no idea what those Doritos taste like.

Jason Kottke recently linked to a poem by Joan Murray about the old white-guy-voting-Republican demographic, titled We Old Dudes:

We old dudes. We

White shoes. We

Golf ball. We

Eat mall. We

Soak teeth. We

Palm Beach; We

Vote red. We

Soon dead.

…and I thought: Wait a minute. That sounds familiar. A little Googling for a half-remembered line of poetry from a high school English textbook got me the poem I wanted, Gwendolyn Brooks’ We Real Cool. It’s about pool-playing dropouts, often presumed to be black and from Chicago, like Brooks herself:

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We

Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We

Die soon.

…and then I thought that maybe Asian dudes like myself might be feeling a little bit left out, so I decided to compose this poem just for us — We Real Smart:

We real smart. We

Science, not art. We

Not on TV. We

Hack Ruby. We

Eat rice. We

Polite and nice. We

No fool. We

Soon rule.

(While writing the poem, I discovered that the English language doesn’t have enough rhymes for “black Honda Civic“.)

The deadline for requests for squshy cows has passed. I’m afraid that due to demand, I can’t fulfill any more requests, but keep in mind that this won’t be the last time we have such an offer!

Thanks to everyone who participated — your cows will be in the mail soon!

Due to the demand for squishy cows (see this entry), I have to impose a deadline. If you want me to send you a squishy cow free of charge, you must:

• Email me your mailing address before 12:00 a.m. Eastern (GMT – 4), Wednesday, July 12, 2006
• Promise to take a picture of the squishy cow in some interesting locale and post it online

Hurry up, because the clock is ticking!

Never mind “Cool Ranch” or “Black Pepper Jack” Doritos — all the cool kids eat “Swift Kick to the ‘Nads” Doritos!

But seriously, if any of you can read Japanese or know what’s going on with the packaging, please leave a note in the comments and explain what’s happening here.

[Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele]

At Saturday night’s exclusive-to-bloggers gathering where we got to have a one-on-one with David Cronenberg, guest curator for the Andy Warhol “Supernova” exhibit, Rannie “Photojunkie” Turingan took this photo which captures Cronenberg at his Cronenbergiest. I couldn’t help adding a caption:

A deliciously eeeevil photo of David Cronenberg, taken by Rannie “Photojunkie” Turingan. Click the photo to see it on Rannie’s blog.

(This article also appears on Tucows Farm.)

Let’s consider Tucows’ most prized swag: the venerable squishy cow:

The squishy cows I took to Railsconf.

Although t-shirts, baseball caps, stickers and USB keys with the Tucows logo are nice, our most asked-for piece of swag remains the foam rubber squishy cow. In my nearly 3 years here (it’ll be exactly three years this Friday), I’ve given away more of these creatures than I can recall — the number should be in the hundreds. I believe I last gave one away to Damian Conway just before his Fun with Dead Languages presentation last week.

The squishy cows I took to Railsconf, taken from a slightly different angle.

One idea we’ve been bouncing about the office is to try and get squishy cows photographed in interesting places or with interesting scenery as a backdrop, not just in our head office city of Toronto or in Starkville, where our other office is located, but all over the world. One of my standing orders is to make sure I get squishy cow photos with interesting scenery whenever I’m travelling on business, whether it’s for a meeting or attending a conference.

While I do manage to travel quite a bit, there are more scenic spots for squishy cow photos than I could ever hope to travel to. However, a squishy cow is a pretty small and light thing, and it travels far more easily than a Technical Community Development Coordinator could ever hope to. And that’s where you come in.

“I can see my pasture from here!” Taken on the flight to RailsConf.

If you’d like to have a squishy cow of your very own, I have a proposition for you: send me your mailing address and I’ll send you a squishy cow. All that I ask in return is that you:

• Take a photo of the squishy cow, preferably in an interesting place where you live, work or play.
• Either post it online — on your personal page, blog or photo-sharing site like Flickr or BubbleShare — or send me a copy of the photo to post online.
• If you posted the photo online yourself, send me a link to your photo.
• If you posted the photo to a site that supports tags, such as a blog or Flickr, give it the tag squishycow.

That’s all there is to it. If you want a cow, email me with your mailing address and get ready to post some photos!