Category: Uncategorized

As you can see, I’m in the middle of renovating The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

The ol’ blog badly needed a little sprucing up, and I thought that this

weekend would be the perfect time. There’s still some work to be done

over the next couple of weeks, and I hope the end result will be both

usable and pleasing to the eye.

The renovations have given me a chance to trying out some ideas that

have been percolating around my head for a little while. Many of these

are Blogware-centric, so if you have a Blogware blog, resell them or both, I’ll have some goodies for you over the next couple of weeks.

I found a full copy of the Lois Lane comic I Am Curious (Black), which was recently referred to on BoingBoing and am sharing it with you, since:

a) I love cheese

b) I’ve recently rediscovered my old love for comic books

Here’s the whole comic, stored as a set of JPEGs in a zip file [5.1MB zip file]. If you

have one of those programs that can read .cbz files (like CDisplay for Windows or FFView for Mac OS X), change the filename extension of the file to .cbz.

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Why can’t we all just get along? Lois Lane decided to do a story on

what it’s like to be black in Metropolis in 1970 (that’s when the comic

was published). She goes to Metropolis’ black neighbourhood, “Little

Africa”, where she finds that everybody steers clear of honky.

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Oh, that whitey!

Back in the seventies, before we had blogs, you had to find a nice

concrete block, stand on it and start ranting. “Look at her, brothers

and sisters! She’s young and sweet and pretty!” This guy says the exact

same thing Tony Pierce says in his blog!

(Of course, like me and unlike the dude above, Tony doesn’t mind the miscegenation thing.)

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Because we aren’t the woman for whom Superman has the super-hots, we

would probably have to take the boring tack by say, phoning up a

community leader or civil rights activist and schedule a phone

interview or invite them down to the Daily Planet and ask them about

the black experience. Or perhaps ask a black reporter to go cover the

story (assuming the Daily Planet had black reporters in 1970).

However, Lois Lane is that woman, so she has Supes take time out of his

busy schedule to fly her to the Fortress of Solitude (his base in

Antarctica) and put her in the race-changing machine that he oh-so-conveniently happens

to have.

You must remember that this was 1970, and we didn’t have the skill for

technobabble that we do now, several Star Trek televsion series later.

“Plastimold” and “Transformoflux Pack” just don’t have the same ring as

“Warp Core” or “Structural Integrity Field”.

Wait a minute…a machine that turns you black, invented by a scientist

named “Dahr-nel”? Did he have an assistant named “Mont-el” too?

This is just too painful. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say the Wayans Brothers scripted this comic.

(The “El” surname is popular on Superman’s homeworld, Krypton. His birthname is “Kal-El” and his father’s name is “Jor-El”.)

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Supes takes black Lois back to Metropolis. She tries to hail a cab

driven by her friend Benny, but he passes her by, preferring to pick up

a white fare. One can imagine a young Lenny Kravitz reading this comic

and getting inspired.

(I think Lois looks much prettier as a black woman.)

Here’s a cute little toy that Charles Watson pointed out to me. It forms random “You are a…” statements [Warning: Some profanity. Don’t show it to your mom].

Hey, that sounds like Wendy!

It would appear that today’s entries are following a “fast food” theme

today. I hadn’t planned it that way, but I’m on a roll now.

You may have seen these already — I downloaded the videos last week and planned to post them, only to be beaten by BoingBoing and MetaFilter — but in case you haven’t, check out these ads for a new Japanese McDonald’s burger, the Tomato McGrand. There’s one with a sexy female model [690K Windows Media video] and one with a sexy male model [710K Windows media video], both done up like Ronald McDonald.

You can find all the ads on this page.

If all this talk about fast food is giving you uncontrollable urges to

sink into a fatty burger and extra-large fries, you might be please to

learn the existence of

N-piperidino-5-(4-chlorophenyl)-1-(2,4-dichlorophenyl)-4-methylpyrazole-3-carboxamide,

also known by the generic name “rimonabant” and soon to be marketed under the brand name “Acomplia“.

This drug is known as “the munchies drug” because it acts like

marijuana in reverse: it blocks the brain circuits that get triggered

whenever you smoke pot. Christian “The Facts About Fitness” Finn has written a quick summary about Acomplia, citing some test results:

Dr. Jean-Pierre

Despres of Laval University in Quebec City enrolled 1,036 overweight volunteers.

All had large pot bellies that put them at especially high risk of heart

disease. They were told to cut their daily calorie intake by 600 calories

a day and randomly given either rimonabant or a dummy pill.

After one year, those who got the higher of two doses of rimonabant had

lost an average of 20 pounds and trimmed three inches from their waistlines.

By comparison, those using the placebo lost just five pounds.

He also points out the observed side effects:

The most common side effects where incidence was higher with rimonabant

than placebo were nausea and dizziness. And more of the people using rimonabant

dropped out because of the side effects. The drop-out rate due to side

effects was 6.9% in the rimonabant group versus 3.8% with placebo.

And not everyone is convinced that rimonabant will be safe to use.

Dr. Gareth Pryce, who has conducted research into cannabinoids at the

Institute of Neurology, London, is concerned that the drug might not be

safe for some patients to take.

“My group has carried out animal research that showed interference

with the cannabis receptor in the brain may have a damaging effect on

the progression of multiple sclerosis,” he says.

“There are also concerns about the possible impact on people who

have a stroke, or head injury while taking the drug. My other concern

is it could exacerbate neurological diseases that had previously been

clinically silent.”

In the end, it still boils down to the laws of thermodynamics: in

order to lose weight, you have to expend more energy than you consume.

I found this in a collection of images in a file collection site that I’m not allowed to talk about (“The first rule of {site X} is that you don’t talk about {site X}“). I thought it might be interesting in light of the previous entry…

Maybe it’s all those Dukes of Hazzard shows and Three Stooges movies I saw as a kid, but I find the video of this dumb guy, his ’69 Mustang and a shovel [3.3. MB Windows Media] high-larious .