Tim Danner

One thing the web is generally pretty good for is product reviews. People will try just about any product, and they aren’t afraid to post their opinion of it. Here’s a guy who dropped $16.95 on a little USB hotplate. As one of the commenters informs us, the power you can draw from a USB port is about 2.5 Watts. That’s enough for a little white LED reading light or an optical mouse, but that’s about it. Don’t forget to visit the product’s page in the catalog and notice the green LED they stuck in the USB plug!

Before posting this link to a BBC story about an auspicious and expensive phone number in China, I though about using “867-5309″ as the title, that being the phone number used in some old cheesy song (by Tommy Tutone, as it happens). Before I used that for the title, I wanted to make sure I had the phone number right, so I searched google for it. The first hit was not at a lyrics site, as one might expect, but at “primes.utm.edu.” Can you believe it! 8,675,309 happens to be a prime number, and that’s the first hit! Is the Internet a dork’s paradise, or what?

And here we have an Australian news site posting a report from “a correspondent in Paris” about notation used by London doctors for various conditions you won’t find in the PDR. It’s great - British humor meets a physician’s detachment, plus they’ve been acronymized for that added dose of silliness. I think my favorite is GPO.

When Xeni at BoingBoing sent me to this website hawking amphibious motor coaches, I was sure this was just a silly site made by someone with good Photoshop skills but no actual amphibious vehicles. But ABC news actually picked up the story! Could this really be for real?

Here’s how you know they’ve really run out of ideas for good: they start making sequels to remakes.

One of the first things I think when I see a website like this is, “How many potholes are going unfixed because they spent the taxpayers’ money on a stupid Flash intro?”

From David Chess, we get this non-Lego version of the Holy Scriptures. What’s next? Scantily-clad women on the cover?

As frightful as “Manx Shearwater Caterwauling” sounds, I think I’d prefer it to some of the strange tunes I hear people using for their cellphones. Or that one guy at work whose phone sounds like a quiet version of a fire alarm.

Thanks to Caesar at Ars for reminding us that you can find a Lego re-enactment of just about anything, and it will probably be pretty funny, too. Personally, I think the Daily Show should start including a Lego overview of the day’s news.