Wow! I got linked from Pop Culture Junk Mail on February 4. I can’t believe I missed that!
Category: Random Links
Links that I’m reading/watching/listening to/thinking about
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Shuttle Columbia
I’ve always been a fan of political cartoons, and I found these ones commemorating the Columbia disaster very moving and powerful. It’s interesting to see how so many different artists around the world still centered on the same themes: parents and children, the shuttle as a constellation, the flag on the moon at half-mast, and the crew going home to heaven. I especially liked how many of them included a Star of David for Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut. Definitely worth checking out…
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Psychological Test
This is a story about a girl. Her mother dies and while she’s attending the funeral she meets a man. She’s never seen him before in her life, but she feels an instant connection and falls head over heels in love with him. A few days later, this happy girl kills her own sister. What was her motive?
If you said “She was hoping the guy would appear at the funeral again”, congratulations! You’re a psychopath. The Snook, I am happy to report, is not a psychopath. My own results were inconclusive, as my manic tendency to speed read and skip ahead meant that I read the answer before I’d even finished the question. So in other words, even if I am a psychopath, I’m a crappy haphazard one. 🙂
(Yeah, yeah, I know the whole thing is crap. I did find it on Snopes. I just thought it was amusing though.)
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The Little OS
The Little OS. A charming picture story for children and Mac zealots. (Link courtesy of John.)
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Phil
Prince Philip did it again. This guy is hilarious. He’s, like, the English version of Dubya… except he was making embarrassing verbal faux pas years before the Bushes took office.
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Graph paper
It’s not a particularly fun link or anything, but here’s a site with lots of graph paper that you can print out at home. It came to my rescue today when I was trying to lay out the quilt I’m making. (Yeah, you heard that right.) Anyway, it’s a useful site to have bookmarked.
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iPods
iPods can be used to steal software. Well, duh. So can a friggin’ floppy disk. The real point of this article is that Apple machines were being sold in an environment where none of the sales staff had any clue how to secure them. And that’s the whole argument for the Apple retail stores, and why Apple has such a small market share anyway. CompUSA sucks.
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RIP Spike Milligan
R.I.P. Spike Milligan. Did you know that he was Roald Dahl‘s first choice to play Willy Wonka?
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Wine
The Snook is a bit of wine connoisseur, as is his brother-in-law Smithy. (Smithy actually has a purpose-built wine cellar with all kinds of crazy high-tech gadgets measuring the humidity and temperature and stuff.) Next to those two, I feel like a complete Philistine. I can’t tell the expensive stuff from the plonk. Anyway, that’s why I found this article so amusing. It’s about a scientist who did a study on taste, especially in regards to wine. He basically concludes that all “professional tasting” is hooey, and that the experts are just making it all up. One of his particularly cheeky tricks was to serve them all a white wine, and then serve them the same wine dyed red. Everyone fell for it. See? Maybe I’m not the uncultured rube I thought. (Link via PCJM.) -
Olympics
Cathleen is whinging about the BBC’s Olympic coverage in England. Hey, if all they showed was the British curling victory, I’d be pissed too. Luckily the Australian coverage has been excellent. Throughout the Games we got two or three hours of coverage a night, all of it highlights. But to Channel Seven’s credit, there seemed to be an effort to cover a bit of everything. So not only did we see the two Australian victories, but we also saw most of the winning performances in everything else. I was also relieved that the Aussie coverage seemed relatively free of the sappy glurge that the American networks cram down your neck. It was mostly just sports.
And, of course, The Ice Dream! Last night was Roy and H.G.’s last show. They have been so funny over the past two weeks. Who else would dare to make fun of the idea that “Old Man Shea” was standing beside his son and grandson with the torch? Who else would show every skating routine from the Hugentoblers, a sister and brother team that finished near the bottom despite some very flashy home-made outfits? Who else would award medals to the worst “Hockey Bastards”? It was the perfect antidote to all the sentimental Olympic crap you get in America.