Tim Danner

del.icio.us is a great source of funny stuff, like these E-mail Addresses It Would Be Really Annoying to Give Out Over the Phone.

Today, we have pictures of monkeys, Hummer cologne, and a funny picture of a sign on a gas pump (via Boing Boing, Autoblog, and Gordon Weakliem).

A few months ago I linked to a Flash animation of some of the stuff in the Book of Revelation. Lore “Brunching Shuttlecocks” Sjoberg has written a new set of ratings about the various orders of angels, as seen in the Book. Part I, concerning the more exotic types with extra wings and so on, and Part II, concerning the angels with a somewhat more mundane appearance.

“The Morning News” this… um, morning, featured a collection of pairs of photos of rooms. The first photo in each pair shows a room in its “natural” state. (I put quotes around “natural” because the rooms all look to me a bit too sparse to be real, though the photographer claims in the brief interview that they are all actual rooms he found in Berlin.) For the companion photo, the artist has taken all the stuff in the room and made it into a nice, neat stack in the center of the room. It’s a cool effect! I think I’m going to try it at home.

Maybe if the Olympic security detail in Athens spent more time investigating actual threats and less time policing the labels on bottled water, they would have noticed the “giant wooden horse that had been wheeled to within meters of the Olympic stadium.”

Note: in case you were confused about what was satire and what was actually happening, the “giant wooden horse” part was a joke, but the “required to wear their T-shirts inside out” part is the real deal.

“Both smaller and lighter than a Buick Regal:” The Apple Product Cycle (via Stanton).

An awesome music video Flash thing for an acoustic recording of Radiohead’s Creep and the Fool’s World Map, which should not be relied upon for navigation (via Boing Boing).

Too late for The Deluxe Election-Edition Bushisms: The First Term, in His Own Special Words, the president let fly with another probably-not-what-he-meant-to-say: “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” (via The Daily Kos)

Will Ferrell as the president in a funny, over-the-top SNL-style, anti-Bush ad (via Miguel de Icaza).

On a more serious political note, the much-linked Electoral Vote Predictor is probably a better way to track the changes in the political fortunes of Bush and Kerry than national polls. The Electoral College Graph shows (some) important political events to help you guess at what might have contributed to poll swings.

After you have amassed a collection of Nintendo game consoles, what’s the best way to display them? A trophy case would work, but that takes up a lot of space. Plus managing the cables would be awkward. How about a custom wooden contraption? (via Boing Boing)

Alternatively, if that’s just too classy for you, you could always build the game console wrapper out of Legos. “Don’t worry if something goes wrong R2D2 is in there to fix stuff, along with a shark.” (via Engadget)

A couple of guys playing ping pong Matrix style. No camera tricks, either!

Enter The Meatrix, which is sort of like a Flash-based PETA commecial, except with “Moopheus” played by a cow. (Via Matthew McGlynn, who is my new hero.)

Paul Lamere gives a glimpse into the complexities of doing real text-to-speech in English. The 60,000 word dictionary in FreeTTS is just for the exceptions that aren’t handled correctly by the 13,000 states in the letter-to-sound state machine! But the cool part of the post is a poem that illustrates the problem. It reminds me of a silly sentence I heard years ago: “The tough coughs as he ploughs the dough.” (via Tim Bray)

Dan tells a tale of his helplessness in the face of the evolution of language at Starbucks, where whole thoughts like “Would you like for me to leave room in your coffee cup so you can put cream in it also?” are reduced to “Room-for-cream?” Of course, this is nothing new in food retail—anyone wishing to order fast food in Boston must first decode “fuh-heah-tuhgo?”

John “Winter” Smith has a mission: to visit every Starbucks in the world. Because he’s a huge fan of their coffee? Nope. “It doesn’t taste good at all—I’m not enjoying drinking it.”

He’s doing quite well; in seven years, he’s been to almost 90% of the nearly 5,000 stores worldwide. Starbucks is opening new ones at the rate of about 10 per week, but he’s going faster than that. Will he catch up, or will he lose his mind first?

Today I received an email at work reminding us of the process for dealing with features requests that come in from customers via tech support. As I imagine happens in most software shops, these requests go into the same system as regular bugs, but they have the “enhancement request” flag set and don’t generally get implemented until they’ve been explicitly added to a release schedule. That’s all good and well, but through a typo/spell-checker snafu in the email, these were referred to as “enchantment requests.” Cool.

One of the small pleasures in life - accepting a free ticket in exchange for a later flight, only to see the original flight be delayed.

How to hide a valuable laptop - in a (”genuine Italian-style”) pizza box. This would be more realistic with grease stains. Also note, as Cult of Mac points out, this will be more convincing if you carry it horizontally - it always looks suspicious when you carry a pizza tucked under your arm.

Saddam Hussein had, among other items in his tacky collection, a gold-plated AK-47.

If only the accident signs were always this humorous. (Via Dave.)

I’ve started reading Fafblog (”the whole world’s only source for Fafblog”), which is the most off-the-wall political satire site I’ve ever encountered. Sometimes it’s so off-the-wall it’s not even about politics, as in this entry about bananas and the new Garfield movie.

A recent Boing Boing post caused me to browse around NationalLampoon.com, where I was entertained by How To Assemble An IKEA Computer Desk. …because you’ve been drinking beer all night, and therefore will have no need to go to the bathroom.

Edmunds reports that Lexani Wheels of Yorba Linda, California, is now selling “a line of custom wheels that are available covered in various leathers or imitation leathers.” Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any pictures of these wheels at the manufacturer’s website.