I saw the ad above for the Bird Richard law firm at the Ottawa airport on Sunday and had to snap a picture. What you can’t see at this resolution is some text at the lower right-hand corner that says the photo comes from iStockPhoto. They’ve got a picture for everything!
I showed the photo to a friend who then dubbed the guy in the ad “Douchey McFrostips”.
To all my Jewish friends – and their Filipino help, who are probably doing an extra-long shift tonight – Happy Hanukkah!
If you’re looking for a good Hanukkah comedy and really can’t take any more Adam Sandler, I recommend The Hebrew Hammer. It’s about an orthodox Jewish blaxploitation hero (Adam Goldberg as Moderchai Jefferson Carver) who saves Hanukkah from Santa Claus’ evil antisemitic son, Damian Claus (played by Andy Dick). It also stars the gorgeous Judy Greer as Esther Bloomenbergensteinenthal of the Jewish Justice League and Mario Van Peebles as Mohammed Ali Paula Abdul Rahim of the Kwanzaa Liberation Front. If you liked Shaft and wished it featured “a complicated man, but no one understands him but his mother”, you’ll want to watch this movie.
Someone kindly uploaded The Hebrew Hammer in six parts to YouTube; I’m sharing it below. Enjoy!
Here’s twelve and a half minutes of hilarious-yet-painful lunchtime viewing for you: The Best FAILs of 2011. It’s a compilation video of mishaps caused by poor judgement, dumb luck, bad driving, shoddy construction and all those other things that lead to FAIL.
Be warned: if you’re the particularly sensitive type, some of these videos have rather painful-looking, “Ow, My Balls!” moments, particularly at the 6:11 mark. You should have already inferred that there will be cuss words aplenty, and in many languages too!
Watch this video, which features some of the brightest lights in programming (a couple of whom I’ve been privileged to meet), to the very end. You’ll see someone familiar:
That’s right, after some serious programming luminaries — Matz, Guido, Linus, DHH, Bill Joy, James Gosling, Sir Tim, Marc, Woz, Rasmus, The Gu, Sergey, Dries and finally Zuck — whose face and accordion do they close with at the 1:04 mark? This guy’s:
I laughed when I saw Mark Zuckerberg’s photo fade out and mine fade in. “Zuck’s my opening act!” I exclaimed.
My photographer friend Adam P. W. Smith (my old business partner; together, we were datapanik software systems and we worked on some pretty interesting projects back in the late ‘90s) took the picture back in August when I was visiting him in Vancouver. I’d arrived a day early for the HackVAN hackathon and was sitting in his kitchen getting some work done when he decided to get a couple of shots. He poured me a glass of scotch, set it on my accordion, which I’d set down on the chair beside me, and staring taking pictures.
I’d like to thank New Relic, a software performance monitoring service based in San Francisco, for picking my face to represent the developers out there. I’m honoured!
Upon hearing of Kim Jong Il’s death and looking for news about it, my first thought was: "How will that wacky Taiwanese animated news channel cover this story?". Luckily, I didn’t have to wait too long for an answer:
I love that Next Media Animation don’t consider the "missile as phallus" gag to be too old and cliched to use. As far as I’m concerned, it’ll always be funny, and doubly so since the North Korean missile name sounds like the phrase “Type O’ Dong”. You can’t pass up comedy gold like this!
In case you haven’t yet seen the video yet – it’s making its way around the internet as I write this – here are Kim’s mourners (remember, Kim is his last name) weeping openly in the streets:
It’s difficult to tell whether all this outpouring of grief is the real deal or done at gunpoint. While this video was produced by their Stalinist state media, Kim did establish a cult of personality and there are indications that for many North Koreans, he truly is the beloved leader that his own hagiographies make him out to be. As B.R. Myers, author of The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves point out, Cold War-era Russians and East Germans who escaped did not get homesick and try to bribe their way back into their respective hellhole countries, but many North Koreans who managed to leave actually do just that. Myers points out that the ratio of police to ordinary citizens in Pyongyang is probably lower than Chicago’s, which suggests that it’s not just repression that keeps them in line – it’s their belief in their moral superiority and that their way is the best way.
Click the picture above to watch the video.
If you’d like to get a better understanding of the average North Korean’s perspective, you should watch Myers’ presentation, The Cleanest Race, which he delivered early last year at the World Affairs Council of Northern California. He talks about the North Korean worldview, which is an oddball mix of Japanese fascism, fanboyism inspired by Hirohito and especially Mao (to the point of plagiarism: the Chinese had the Long March, so the North Koreans came up with the Arduous March), a bizarre form of Oedipus complex and a sort of geopolitical nice guy syndrome.
If you’d rather not put in the hour to watch Myers’ presentation (your loss, it’s quite enlightening), you might prefer this little ditty from Team America: World Police…
Had a killer time at the Shopify Christmas party. Photos forthcoming.
You’re trying to say “Merry Christmas”, but all I’m hearing is “Involuntary celibacy”.
