A great photo from Satan’s Laundromat, a New York City-based photoblog:
Pondering
over the conundrum of the sign will prepare you for many things,
including dating, quantum physics and trying to make both marketing and
engineering happy.
The Clarke Axiom — named after the guy who coined it, science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke — is well-known to geeks:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
You may remember seeing the Clarke Axiom mentioned on this blog before. I quoted Maciej Ceglowski, who remixed it to become:
Any sufficiently advanced society is indistinguishable from Canada.
(I can already hear the whining coming from the bloggers at the Western Standard. All I can say to those folks is: if you take your meds, the voices will stop.)
I don’t know how I ended up looking at a page in Everything2 (imagine a less academic Wikipedia written by LiveJournalers), but someone has come up with a geek lament treatment of the Clarke Axiom:
Any sufficiently nice person is indistinguishable from someone who likes you.
Bonus bragging point: This blog is currently the number one Google result for the phrase “Clarke Axiom”.
I’m a little on the busy side today, so may I suggest:
The one
thing I could always do
the one talent I could always fall back
on, ever
since I discovered it at nine years old with
a half-rack of Schlitz in my grandfather’s
basement,
was that I could drink like a son-of-a-bitch.
Keep or Skip uses your iTunes library as source material. It chooses a
song at random and takes a sample of that song. It then cuts that
sample into two or more pieces and plays those pieces in random order.
Your job: state the correct order of those pieces!
Keep or Skip uses the built-in speech system to prompt you with
instructions and read the names of the song it’s about to play at you.
The game works best if you have a sizable iTunes collection and if most
of your songs have lyrics and aren’t full of long, repretitive
sections. This game is great for rock, pop, folk and country tunes; I
suspect that an iTunes library full of nothing but Phillip Glass would
make this game a nightmare.
Come to think of it, an iTunes library full of Phillip Glass tunes is a nightmare, game or no.
[ via Eschaton ] The Las Vegas Sun has this story about John Kerry:
Former U.S. Sen. Chic Hecht of Nevada is a staunch
Republican, but he thanks his lucky stars for Democratic presidential
hopeful Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.
On July 12, 1988, Hecht was attending a weekly Republican luncheon when a piece of apple lodged firmly in his throat.
Hecht stumbled out of the room, thinking he might
vomit but not wanting to do it in front of his colleagues. Sen. Kit
Bond, R-Mo., thumped his back, but Hecht quickly passed out in the
hallway.
Just then, Kerry stepped off an elevator, rushed to Hecht’s side and gave him the Heimlich maneuver — four times.
FARK has a
hilarious thread in which they ask readers to Photoshop what Nintendo
games would’ve been like had they been owned by Microsoft.
Some of my favourites:
Oh, how we used to play this game for hours back at Crazy Go Nuts University!
Zelda meets Clippy!
This
one made me laugh out loud. The suggestions in the dialog box are
actual fixes for a Nintendo cartridge that refuses to work.
This one’s been doing the rounds for a while, but if you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the Tombstone Generator, which is similar to the Church Sign Generator from last fall.
My favourite one is the one that someone made for Biz Stone:
Tomorrow night (Tuesday the 10th), I’m going to catch my friend and longtime accordion collaborator Karl Mohr at his show at the I.V. Lounge (326 Dundas Street West, across the street from the Art Gallery of Ontario) for some raunchy moody darkwave songs. Karl goes on at 11.