No link for this post, just an amusing anecdote from last night. I stopped in at Ben & Jerry's for some Coconut Almond Fudge Chunk, where inside I found a gaggle of about 25 very chatty teenagers hanging out (with no ice cream in hand). They just stood around laughing and snapping cameraphone pictures of each other (kids these days...) for at least fifteen minutes, as I wondered what the heck they were up to.
Finally, one of them goes up to the counter and orders THREE Vermonsters. A Vermonster, if you don't know, is an enormous ice cream sundae (served in a bucket) consisting of TWENTY scoops of ice cream, hot fudge, four bananas, three cookies, one brownie, whipped cream, and four different toppings. Retail price: $38.99 - each.
This order immediately stopped all employees in their tracks as they set about constructing this triple monstrositiy. Of course, the first issue at hand was: "So - um... what flavor?"
There was an immediate wave of laughter as all these kids pondered the utter futility of trying to getting 25 people to agree on 20 types of ice cream. Although it was clearly inevitable they'd be going with the "little bit of everything" option, one level-headed youngster decided to shout out one important question:
"Is anyone here allergic to anything?"
Up piped a voice from the back of the crowd: "Yeah, cats!"
First, Rockstar Games had to fend off the publicity-hungry laywers, now a prostitutes' trade organization (of sorts) is calling for a ban on Grand Theft Auto games. Apparently, they don't like so much violence with their sex.
Girl #1: Is that a real fur coat? Girl #2: Yes, oh my god and this woman started yelling at me this morning. I was like, "Please don't throw blood on me or something. I don't hate animals; I have a dog!" Man: Not around your neck.
Find this, and other gems, at OverheardInNewYork.com, where people can go to post snippets of conversations and chronicle their inadvertant but laugh-inducing eavesdropping.
OK, I finally got around to checking out the Burger King "Whopperettes" site, and it's pretty funny, in that slightly disturbing way for which BK ads have become famous. It's a very slickly produced Flash, uh, thing, in which you select your toppings and the famous(?) Whopperettes stack themselves up much like in the Superbowl ad, with camera angle changes, voice-over commentary and everything. The best part is that it doesn't prevent you from doing the utterly ridiculous, like my first attempt - nothin' but ketchup! And then the monstrosity shown here.
The parasite Toxoplasma gondii alters a rat's mind, and thus its behavior, to benefit the parasite (rats normally avoid the smell of cat urine, but when infected, they don't avoid it, and may even seek it out). Apparently, there are some connections between Toxoplasma and schizophrenia in humans... and this article claims that 3 billion people are infected with the parasite.
Vice Hunter-in-Chief Dick Cheney shot his fellow hunter this past weekend. The veep and his companion were hunting for quail (not to be confused with Quayle), and although Dick's 78-year-old millionaire companion was wearing his safety vest, Mr. Halliburton didn't see him. Fortunately, Cheney has an ambulance on call, so the guy was taken to the hospital quickly, and he's okay.
I constantly occasionally check my name on Technorati and Google to see if anyone's talking about me out there in the crazy World Wide Web. Today, I spotted my last name in a "splog" (or spam blog). In case you don't know, splogs are entire blogs of gibberish content designed to screw with Google's search results. In any case, here's what the splog, simply titled "Stomach", had to say about me (or, more accurately, my children):
Suborned machinery-shops have o'erpassed to rise the desire for master-educator on the question of the dish-washing of personality ; but Zoll-strasse sows told us how, being here, we may sessile our buy propecia online and rise into the full freedom and reddish-gray of the children of Chausse.
I had no idea about this until today but apparently, in Poland, movie posters rarely use the American studio-designed artwork. Rather, Polish artists run hog-wild with their own artistic interpretations. And it would seem a lot of Polish poster artists are heavily, HEAVILY under the influence of drugs. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing in this case. There is some cool stuff here.
First, check out this article about Bush visiting the "super-secret" NSA headquarters. In particular, check out the accompanying picture of the NSA's director showing Bush some super-cool NSA technology that must have cost us billions of tax dollars.
For the first time, I got to Tivo the Superbowl, thus avoiding all that pesky football, and going straight to the ads. As almost everyone else is saying, the ads were kind of lackluster this year, but there were a few clever moments. If there was an underlying theme to the ads this year, it seemed to be "random violence".
Google has most of the ads in a nice clean format here, but it seems to be missing a few, including the Sprint "Locker Room" ad - the funniest example of the "random violence" trend.
I think the user-hostile iFilm has the entire bunch. I highly recommend viewing:
(on iFilm - no linkies, stupid JavaScript popup silliness)
Sprint: Locker Room Michelob Ultra: Touch Football (more random violence) CareerBuilder: Practical Jokers (a twist on their getting-old "I work with Monkeys" campaign) Ameriquest Mortgage Co: That Killed Him (Continuing their hilarious "Don't Judge Too Quickly" campaign) Mastercard: MacGyver (Clever, but without the mullet, I didn't quite catch on fast enough)
Tuesday, Jan 31: "Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling, or patenting human embryos" - Bush in his State of the Union Address
I'm not going to bother bashing on Bush's State of the Union address. There's nothing to be said that hasn't been said for the past 6 years or so. Instead I have a completely apolitical comment about one thing he said: Anyone else have a "holy crap, it's the future!" moment when he condemned the creation of "human-animal hybrids"? (CTRL-F that term here) if you didn't catch it. He's got a point, with all that's going on in Iraq, Iran, and the Gaza strip, the last thing we need is to have to start fending off Centaurs and Minotaurs. (by the way, there really are some freaky things going on in this area).
