Nubbins

  • Breaking news from the Onion: Radical Islamic Extremists Snowboard Into U.S. Embassy
  • It’s rather too late for a Valentine’s Day entry, but if you feel like poking a little fun at your favourite new-age sensitive guy this strip from Pearls Before Swine is kinda cute.
  • Okay, so this season’s Top 12 guys on American Idol are almost all appallingly bland and have wussy voices (God I miss Elliott, no one there sings like a man), but my heart still goes out to Phil Stacey because no one deserves to be compared unfavourably to Chris Daughtry. Which is why Idolatr’s well-spotted screencap from the iTunes store amused me. Coincidence? Or the DIVINE WRATH OF RAAAAAA?

Flo’mission

This New York Times article about the thoughtless racism of describing a black person as “articulate” (prompted by a US Senator’s cringeworthy tribute to fellow Democrat and presidential contender Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”) was done funnier by Black People Love Us, plus it fails to highlight the incomparable contribution of black people to the oratory art of having flow, but it’s still an interesting read.

Salton Sea, Someday

Via Metafilter, this fascinating Flickr set of a road trip to Salton Sea, a 60s resort destination in Southern California where holiday and watersports facilities developed around a giant salt lake but fell into abandonment and disrepair as salinity and toxicity in the lake increased. It’s got derelict buildings, cannibalistic wild dogs, a phantasmagoric man-made edifice called Salvation Mountain built by one guy in the desert with no electricity and no running water, and dinosaurs which are apparently part of some bizarre creationist fantasy agenda that dinosaurs roamed the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve.

Apart from promising me weirdness and kitsch on a level surpassing even Haw Par Villa, it’s also a fairly short drive from where the Coachella music festival goes on. I MUST GO.

Baaargain

Possibly the most awesome Ask Metafilter question ever: How many camels is my girlfriend worth?

Over here, we’re still trying to figure this whole wedding thing out, or at least figure out what the usual conventions are before we decide whether to follow them or not – who pays for what, who gives what to who, etc. Now although I understand there is a Chinese tradition that the bride’s family gives a dowry to the groom’s (to thank him for taking their worthless daughter off their hands, no doubt), this Middle Eastern custom definitely seems much better. Adapted for the Irish context, I believe I am worth at least ten sheep but will settle for five if they’re extra fluffy.

Spoons, Forks And Sculpture

For Nabokov fans, this random gem from a Craig Raine article in the Guardian about Ron Mueck’s current Edinburgh exhibition:

Vladimir Nabokov once asked his protégé, Alfred Appel, how academe was weathering a period of widespread student unrest in the 1960s. Appel reported that things at his university were quiet: a nun had complained that couples were “spooning” at the back of lectures. Nabokov pounced: “You should have told her to thank God they weren’t forking.”

I’d love to go to this exhibition. There were only a few Ron Mueck pieces in the Saatchi Gallery when I went, but they captured my attention more than skanky beds and stuffed sharks.

He Was As Long As His Song Names

While I try to find the time to write about the Bangkok tranny who laughed out loud at the immensity of my hips, and the go-go boys who played soccer with their dicks, you may wish to partake of some rather more refined knob jokes. I present to you hipster erotica:

“Sufjan Stevens and I sat on the edge of my bed and talked for hours about everything. It sounds dumb to say it, but he actually gets me. He said that I was one of the most genuine people he’d ever met, and that I was actually cool, not like one of those people who obviously wants to be cool, but who just is, like a coolness that comes from deep within and is as much a refutation of cool as an embrace of it.”

Eat Pretzel. Invade Iraq.

This is possibly the funniest, most original thing I have ever read at Defective Yeti. Which, in the context of the last couple years’ worth of funny, original Defective Yeti posts, is really saying something.

> WEAR FLIGHTSUIT
You put on the flightsuit.

> SAY “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED”
“Mission accomplished.”

> EXAMINE MISSION
The mission is not accomplished.

[Note: I don’t know if this will be as funny if you’ve never played text-based computer adventure games.]

Portrait Of Michelle As A Young Dork

I had high hopes that Gizmodo’s Portrait Of The Reader As A Young Dork contest would yield a significant amount of amusement for me, but unfortunately after only 3 entries it appears that an unbeatable contender has already emerged.

(I should clarify that I had no intentions of entering this competition. Sadly, it’s 11 years too late to photograph myself at 14, surfing the web on Lynx and brandishing my self-customized “Internet notebook”, into which I had cut tabs for email addresses, various bookmark categories, a definition page for terms like URL and TCP/IP, and Windows programs I wanted to install in a distant and hallowed future where I would no longer have to dial-up through MS-DOS and surf with green words on a black screen.)