Archive Category: Blog & Internet
Tanks A Lot

Businesses all over look for memorable names. Many go with puns, since a funny play on words will stick in your mind. Tanks A Lot is a blog full of punny business names, like restaurants named Beau Thai, Thai Ranosaurus, Thai Foon, or Tongue Thai’d (wonder what kind of food they serve?) or eyeglass stores named Specs Appeal or You and Eye. Link
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Cluebert: New Website for Money and Time Saving Tips
Hello
everyone! I'm happy to announce that we've just launched Cluebert,
a new website about time and money-saving tips, useful news and practical
knowledge and hacks for everyday living.
We know that there are a lot of "how-to" websites and blogs on the Net. But we're confident that we can bring a unique and fun spin in this crowded field.
We'll be adding new posts daily to Cluebert - Please take a look at these:
- Unusual Uses For Lemons
- Stop A Baby From Crying ... Instantly!
- The No Sacrifice Money Saving Tips for Washer and Dryer
- Unusual Uses For Ketchup
- Using Your Hand as a Ruler
Links: Cluebert | Cluebert's RSS Feed | Cluebert on Twitter
American Gothic Parodies

Image: McGlinch
American Gothic Parodies is a compendium of images based on Grant Wood’s iconic painting “American Gothic.” It was assembled by an illustrator named McGlinch from his grandmother’s collection. That’s all of the information that I can find about him, other than that he is a contributor a blog called Bad Spock Drawings, which is also a hoot.
Link via J-Walk Blog | Collector’s Blog | About American Gothic
Amusing Real Estate Listings

Lovely Listing is a collection of user-submitted finds in the the real estate world. Sometimes you just have to wonder what people were thinking, whether it be the agent’s choice of photo, the seller’s interior decor, or the builder themselves, as exemplified above:
Dude. Check it out. The weirdest thing ever is going on here. You see? You see it? So bizarre: the toilet paper is hung on the shower stall door. Crazy!
There might be something else wrong here, too.
(Photo: Netti Asunto)
Surprise Apartment Inspection
Personally, I can’t imagine signing a lease that would allow a landlord to conduct a surprise apartment inspection when the tenant is out. That’s what happened in this scenario from David Thorne, the writer who brought us the picture of a spider and the coffee cup cleaning chart.
Thankyou for the surprise inspection and invitation to participate in the next. I appreciate you underlining the text at the bottom of the page which I would otherwise have surely mistaken for part of the natural pattern in the paper. I was going to clean the apartment but had so many things on my ‘to do’ list that I decided to treat them all equally and draw pictures of sharks instead. I have attached one for your honest appraisal.
I have read through your list of chores and intend to rectify the situation by wrapping my entire body in eighteen rolls of super absorbent Thick’n'thirsty® paper towels, hosing down the apartment, then rolling around on the floor and rubbing myself up and down walls. I will cover the more stubborn marks with Liquid Paper. I will also get back to you in regards to the premises being inspected in another two weeks, my agreement to do so will depend on availability and not wanting to.
The string of correspondence between David and Peter the manager gets more surreal from this point. Link -via reddit
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Art Inspired by Craigslist "Missed Connections"

Image: Sophie Blackall
Sophie Blackall is a Brooklyn-based artist who is fascinated by the Missed Connections postings on Craigslist. She finds them to be bite-sized insights into the human experience. Jenna Wortham writes in The New York Times:
Currently, Ms. Blackall is only putting her spin on listings from New York City, where she says “people are colliding with each other constantly, criss-crossing paths all day, every day and yet the interactions are so fleeting and transient. It’s really just an un-choreographed mess of colliding stories.” Eventually, she says, she might branch out to other cities. “It would be interesting to see how the listings differ in California, for example.”
Link via Fast Company | Artist’s Etsy Shop | New York Times Post
Twitter User Served Writ...By Tweet!
A lot of Twitter users are impersonating celebrities, using the social networking service to send bogus tweets on behalf of someone else. That is against the site’s policies, and a ostensibly a crime. Now, for the first time, Britain’s High Court is setting precedent by ordering one anonymous perpetrator to cease and desist. They simply sent him a tweet.
Andre Walker at Griffin Law said the anonymous Tweeter targeted by the writ will get a message from the High Court the next time they open their online account.
“Whoever they are, they will be told to stop posting, to remove previous posts and to identify themselves to the High Court via a web link form,” he said.
Magic Dots

Make your own fractals with just a mouseover on these magic dots. Other interactive toys on the same site are just as fascinating, or should I say, addicting. Link -via Gorilla Mask
What's Worse: Windows or the Cult of Mac?
The argument of Mac vs PC (or more accurately, Mac vs Windows) is as old as time itself – that is, if time started in 1984, the year that the Mac was introduced.
Sure Windows is bad. Awfully bad (I’m looking at you, Vista) but according to Charlie Brooker of The Guardian, there is something worse than Microsoft’s operating system: the cult of Mac worshippers!
Consequently, nothing pleases them more than watching a PC owner struggle with a slab of non-Mac machinery. It validates their spiritual choice. Recently I sat in a room trying to write something on a Sony Vaio PC laptop which seemed to be running a special slow-motion edition of Windows Vista specifically designed to infuriate human beings as much as possible. Trying to get it to do anything was like issuing instructions to a depressed employee over a sluggish satellite feed. When I clicked on an application it spent a small eternity contemplating the philosophical implications of opening it, begrudgingly complying with my request several months later. It drove me up the wall. I called it a bastard and worse. At one point I punched a table.
This drew the attention of two nearby Mac owners. They hovered over and stood beside me, like placid monks.
"Ah: the delights of Vista," said one.
"It really is time you got a Mac," said the other.
"They’re just better," sang monk number one.
"You won’t regret it," whispered the second.
But never fear, dear Mac lovers, Microsoft is trying to brew its own cult by using Windows 7 Launch Parties propaganda: Link
BookFail: A Gallery of Bizarre Books

Image: Book Fail
Inspired by the now famous FAIL Blog, BookFail is a gallery of book covers of strange, absurd, and improbable books. It’s somewhat similar to the Judge a Book by its Cover blog, except that you can submit your own suggestions. Above is the The Zen of Farting by Reepah Gud Wan.
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Klosterman on Facebook/Twitter
Do you use Twitter or Facebook?
I really get the most out of Twitter when events like the Iranian elections went down. (the only reason to like Twitter, aside from this).
Chuck Klosterman has a seriously cool interpretation. Enjoy.
I’m more of a Facebook type that just shares links. Have a nice weekend.
Hit Play or go to You Tube
Cake Wrecks: Interview with Jen Yates

Take cakes that are so bad they're good, mix in a great sense of humor and what do you get? A madly popular blog phenomenon, and now, a book as well! Jen Yates, the founder of Cake Wrecks, one of my all time favorite blogs, has graciously agreed to do an interview about cakes, the universe and everything.
But first: the book. As I'm sure you all probably already know or can
guess, Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes Go Hilariously Wrong is obviously about cake carnage. It chronicles some of the weirdest,
silliest, creepiest and downright fugliest cakes ever made professionally
(in order to be featured in the book and blog, each cake has to be made
by a professional baker). There are over 150 cake wrecks included (3/4
of them never-before-seen material).
But there's something very subtle about the book that made me appreciate
Jen and Cake Wrecks even more. This is something I came to realize only
after I read the advance copy of the book (I know, I know, the perks of
being a famous blogger). Cake Wrecks is actually the celebration
of having a bad cake. It's an homage to Murphy's Law asserting itself
over flour, sugar, egg and shortening mixed together
and popped in the oven.
Think about it: how many birthday parties have you gone to and not remember a whit of what happened? Now, if you had one where the cake was horribly wrong (but still very yummy) - wouldn't that stick in your memory forever? (I can imagine the conversation - Q: "Hey, remember that party with the foot cake?" A: "Yeah ... good times!")
'Nuff said. Let's get on with the interview:
Neatorama: Before we talk about cakes, I'm curious about what you wrote for the "About the Author" portion of Cake Wrecks, and I quote "Jen has been a clown, a cash office accountant, a Jungle Cruise skipper, a business owner, a children's book inventory expeditor, and a house painter."
Now, if you don't mind - a clown? Really? What's that like? Did you come up with your own Jungle Cruise skipper jokes? And just what the heck is a children's book inventory expeditor? Sounds like a smuggling ops.
Jen Yates: Hah! Yes, I do have some interesting "work" experience. Ok, let's see...being a clown? That can be surprisingly difficult, on account of your not being allowed to retaliate while being kicked in the shins by a horde of candy-seeking 9-year-olds. Heheh. Other than that it was a blast, though. I learned to juggle, make balloon animals, and perform funny skits. This was during my teens, so that's also where I first learned public speaking skills, believe it or not. We visited hospitals, shelters, expos, churches, you name it.
Jungle Cruise was also fabulous, and yes, we got to ad lib a bit. That's where my love of puns truly blossomed. There's this crashed plane on the ride, and I made a game of fitting as many plane puns as possible into the few seconds we had before it passed out of sight. (I think I got up to 8 or 9.) I wasn't happy until the whole boat was groaning in agony.
My other jobs were less glamorous. The expeditor gig? That was me in a cubicle calling various national warehouses to see if their shipment had arrived yet. Lots of spreadsheets. :)
Neatorama: What's the very first cake that got you thinking of creating Cake Wrecks - the cake that started it all?
Jen: Yes, that cake really and truly DID start it all. My friend Abby e-mailed it to me, and the idea for Cake Wrecks just hit me. I think I started the blog that very night, just for fun.
Neatorama: What's your favorite cake wrecks?
Jen: My favorites are usually the ones with the communication breakdowns. The literal stuff like the Under Neat that cake, and then the garbled phone order ones.

Cake submitted by Elizabeth R.
Remember the flash drive cake? That's the one where the customer wanted a photo cake, and so brought in the picture they wanted on a portable thumb drive for the bakery to print out. Instead, the bakery drew an exact replica of the flash drive on the cake! Heh, I LOVE stories like that.
Neatorama: Let's see some geek cred - what are the geekiest cake wrecks you've ever gotten?
Jen: Game console cakes are really popular, especially for grooms cakes, and I've seen some doosies:

Cake submitted by Monique B.

Cake submitted by Diane B.
Here are a few more geeky Wrecks:

Cake submitted by Maggie G.

Cake submitted by Kelly J.
Cake
submitted by Gretchen W. (That's supposed to be Luigi, believe it or not)
And this one's not a Wreck, but I thought it was funny:

Cake submitted by Amy L.
I *think* that says happy birthday in binary. Am I right?
__________
Jen has kind enough to offer a free copy of the book for a giveaway - got any question for Jen? A lucky commenter with the most interesting question will win the book (I'll post Jen's reply as an update).
More wrecktastic blogger interviews with Jen Yates about her new book:
- Blogher with Julie Godar
- Serious Eats with Erin Zimmer
- The Pioneer Woman with Ree Drummond
- Geek Dad with Doug Cornelius
Links: Cake Wrecks | The
Book at Amazon: Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes Go Hilariously Wrong
Update 10/3/09 – Jen has picked the question to answer. Find out more here: Link
Woofer: The Anti-Twitter

For those of us who simply don’t get Twitter or are tired of the Web’s fascination with the 140-character microblogging platform, here’s the anti-Twitter. Introducing macroblogging wonder Woofer, where each post has a minimum of 1,400 characters!
(And yes, the entire thing is a spoof/homage of Twitter, made by Join the Company)
Link – via InventorSpot and Rue The Day!
VaroCMS-Powered Upcoming Over at NextRound.net

I’m happy to see that VaroCMS, the engine behind VideoSift and Neatorama Upcoming Queue, continues to gain wider use on the InterWeb. Rommel Santor, the brainy genius and all round nice guy behind VaroCMS has just told me that NextRound.net now has its own “upcoming” feature: Link
A Surfing Photography Legend

Brian Bielmann
51-year-old Brian Bielmann has been photographing surfers for over three decades, and has quite an impressive portfolio. Some of his greatest shots are featured today at the New York Times Lens, including one depicting other surf photogs diving for cover, which effectively communicates the strange, dangerous world these people work in.
From Daniel Slotnik’s article:
Getting the shot in surf photography is “all about reacting and having confidence, and not thinking too much,” Mr. Bielmann said. He’s had many close calls, and has drowned 10 cameras by his own count.
An episode at Pipeline, an infamous break off Oahu, stands out. Mr. Bielmann ran out of film and signaled for a water patrolman to tow him to shore on a boogie board behind a Jet Ski. It was the water patrolman’s first time pulling a photographer out of large waves. Instead of waiting for a break in the set, he charged forward into a head-high wall of whitewater. The Jet Ski hit the whitewater and went vertical, meaning it was perpendicular to the boogie board — and Mr. Bielmann.
Link to article | Link to Brian’s website
Translating Moby Dick Into Emoji

Image: Fred Beneson
Emoji are pictographs and emoticons common to text messaging in Japan. The scale of this language has grown so much that Fred Beneson of Creative Commmons wants to translate Herman Melville’s Moby Dick into emoji. The novel has 6,438 sentences, and he hopes to crowdsource the translation project out to people interested in completing at least one sentence of the novel.
Link via BoingBoing
The New Literacy
New technologies are often blamed for the “dumbing-down” of new generations, but it’s hard to see that any generation is “dumber” than the one before it in a historical context. Professor Andrea Lunsford of Stanford University studied college students’ writing and how it changed from 2002 to 2006.
The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.
It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.
On the one hand, you may look at YouTube comments and chat rooms and think literacy is going into the dumpster. On the other hand, those are millions of people who would otherwise never communicate a thought in public if the internet were not available to them. Writer Clive Thompson says the new technology has changed the meaning of writing for younger people.
The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see.
Of course, not every young internet commenter will go on to be a Stanford student. Do you see the internet as an aid or a hindrance to literacy? Link -via Metafilter
(image credit: Mads Berg)
Authors as Drawn by Artists

(L) Neil Gaiman by Leigh Gallagher (R) Jules Verne by Ted McKeever
Steven Gettis of Hey Oscar Wilde! It’s Clobberin’ Time!!! website has been collecting artists’ interpretation of their favorite literary figure/author/character since 1998. So far he’s got over 300 drawings done (wow!). I particularly like the drawings of Neil Gaiman and Jules Verne above.
Not to be missed: Link
Keyboard Cat Art Auction

Image: Rick Watson, Kitten Rescue
Kevin Pereira of G4’s Attack of the Show solicited contributors to a Keyboard Cat-themed art show and auction. Proceeds will go to the no-kill cat rescue shelter Kitten Rescue in Los Angeles:
In July, G4 sponsored an art competition, asking amateurs and pros alike to come up with their best masterpiece based on Fatso and his song. After selecting 18 winners, the network turned the works over to Kitten Rescue, who’s auctioning them on eBay this month to raise money for their animal rescue efforts. Ranging from New Yorker-inspired covers to Warhol-esque shots, the works of art are definitely unique – and adorable!
20 Strangest Craigslist Advertisements
The Daily Telegraph has assembled what it considers to be the twenty strangest ads ever placed on Craigslist. These include a chair that Ralph Nader once (possibly) sat in, a drunk clown, and a woman who would like to rent out her bathroom. Here’s one for a vast collection of papal mitres — Pope hats:
“Because of this terrible economy, I’m having to shut down my business. I have OVER 1300 Pope hats (replicas) that I REALLY need to get rid of. The pope hats came from China and are a little too small for most adult heads and are also irritating to the skin, so you would need to have long hair or wear a smaller hat underneath (just like the REAL POPE). Dogs do not like to wear these pope hats, but maybe a large cat or maybe a nice dog would wear one.”
Image via flickr user Beechwood Photography used under creative commons license.
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The Five-Word Acceptance Speeches at the Webby Awards
(YouTube Link)
The Webby Awards have been given by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences since 1996 for achievement on the Internet. Winners are limited to five-word acceptance speeches. The above video is a compilation of some of those concise and occasionally funny speeches. If you had only five words to say to the world, what would they be?
Via The Presurfer
Old Robots Website

This is just about the coolest thing I’ve seen today: a giant online collection of vintage educational and toy robots from the 1980s. It made me miss my old Tomy Omnibot … Link – via swissmiss
If you like that, don’t miss the Old Robot YouTube channel.
If You Printed the Entire Internet

Printing the entire internet is a ridiculous idea, but in the event that you actually wanted a printout of the entire internet today, then you would have to have started printing back in 1800BC. And if you wanted to read it all it would take 57,000 years, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, non-stop! A series of infographics at Creative Cloud gives us even more statistics about the mind-boggling size of the internet.
Link – via geeksaresexy
From the Upcoming
ueue, submitted by Arby.
Modern Observations of Young People
Bang It Out posted this list of 55 “Random Thoughts of People Our Age” that contains a lot of true, yet funny things about the age of blooming technology, and the social awkwardness of living in that world as a blooming person. A few gems:
#11. I think everyone has a movie that they love so much, it actually becomes stressful to watch it with other people. I’ll end up wasting 90 minutes shiftily glancing around to confirm that everyone’s laughing at the right parts, then making sure I laugh just a little bit harder (and a millisecond earlier) to prove that I’m still the only one who really, really gets it.
#25. While driving yesterday I saw a banana peel in the road and instinctively swerved to avoid it…thanks Mario Kart.
#29. Shirts get dirty. Underwear gets dirty. Pants? Pants never get dirty, and you can wear them forever.
#32. Whenever I’m Facebook stalking someone and I find out that their profile is public I feel like a kid on Christmas morning who just got the Red Ryder BB gun that I always wanted. 546 pictures? Don’t mind if I do!
#44. I like all of the music in my iTunes, except when it’s on shuffle, then I like about one in every fifteen songs in my iTunes.
All people have little truths about modern life they like. Any of these strike your funny bone, or any to add?
(Image: Wikipedia) Thanks, Jared!
Website Exposes Fake Hotel Photos

Have you ever gone to your hotel room and thought "hey, this rinky dink room wasn’t at all like the photo on the website!" (I’m looking at you, Boston Omni Parker House Hotel). Well, a website named Oyster has stepped up to the task of taking actual honest-to-goodness (not photoshopped for brochures) photos of hotels. Surprisingly, a lot of the hotel rooms – especially the expensive ones I never stay at – are really nice looking, so it’s kind of a fun way to gawk at hotels you’d never stay at …
So far Oyster only has a limited number of hotels in just a few cities* but photos of the one I’ve stayed at, the Embassy Suites Hotel on Paradise Road in Las Vegas looked exactly like what I remembered. They should step it up a notch and maybe accept user submitted photos (this being Web 2.0 and all).
Link – Thanks Leah!
*Too bad they didn’t have photos of the rinky dink room I stayed in at the BOPH – it was literally the size of a closet! And actually the experience is quite useful: whenever I read reviews of a hotel at TripAdvisor, Expedia or similar websites, I always look up the Omni Parker – that way, I can gauge how much of the review is plain BS.
Psychologist Says: Facebook Makes You Smarter, Twitter Makes You Dumber
Or to be more precise, Dr. Tracy Alloway of the University of Stirling in Scotland says that in a study, Facebook users showed increased working memory, whereas Twitter users showed decreased working memory. She concluded that Facebook has more mentally intensive activities, but Twitter’s communications are too brief to require substantial brain activity:
Dr. Alloway has developed a working memory training programme for slow-learning children aged 11 to 14 at a school in Durham, and she found out that Facebook did wonders for working memory, improving the kids’ IQ scores, while YouTube and Twitter’s steady stream of information was not healthy for working memory. Also, playing video games, especially those that involve planning and strategy, can also be beneficial.
Link via The Presurfer
Image: U.S. Department of Energy
How Google Street View Works
(YouTube Link)
Google’s Japan division released this stop motion film explaining (in a rather fanciful way) how Street View works. It features a cute little robot puttering around town, taking film photographs and painting over license plate numbers with a marker. The video is part of an effort to make the practice less appear less invasive of individuals’ privacy.
Via Boing Boing
The 10 Funniest Cat Videos Of All Time
If you are not thoroughly familiar with the history of cat videos on the internet, this collection of funny cats will get you up to speed. If you are, it will be a walk down memory lane. Either way, you’ll get a laugh on a day (supposedly) without cats! Link
Fifty Things Being Destroyed By the Internet
Matthew Moore of The Daily Telegraph has a list of fifty technological or cultural features being eroded or eliminated by the Internet. Here are a few samples. What would you add to the list?
1) The art of polite disagreement
While the inane spats of YouTube commencers may not be representative, the internet has certainly sharpened the tone of debate. The most raucous sections of the blogworld seem incapable of accepting sincerely held differences of opinion; all opponents must have “agendas”….3) Listening to an album all the way through
The single is one of the unlikely beneficiaries of the internet – a development which can be looked at in two ways. There’s no longer any need to endure eight tracks of filler for a couple of decent tunes, but will “album albums” like Radiohead’s Amnesiac get the widespread hearing they deserve?…22) Enforceable copyright
The record companies, film studios and news agencies are fighting back, but can the floodgates ever be closed?…
Image via flickr user William Hook used under creative commons license.
11 Firsts In Internet History
Have you ever wondered what the first item sold on eBay was? Or who ran the first banner ad on the internet? Or what the first spam massage tried to sell? 11Points has those firsts and more, including this picture, which was the first image on the internet in 1992. It was uploaded by programmer Silvano de Gennaro in Geneva at the request of World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee.
Berners-Lee asked Gennaro to scan some photos from a CERN party and post them on that page. Gennaro didn’t really get what he was talking about but scanned in the photos, FTPed them to the server and linked them to a page. The picture of the four women, complete with their early ’90s “Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead” fashion sense, was the first one ever viewed in a web browser.
Link -via Unique Daily
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