ye gods and little fishes
22 February 2007
16 February 2007
Here's a little video we created for Chinese New Year... the Year of the Golden Pig is upon us! Course, we had to be sensitive to the whole Muslim thing, and the whole Chinese government's ban on advertising featuring pigs, and still make it gwailo friendly... sigh. At any rate, it's kind of cute.
05 February 2007
29 January 2007
In Washington DC - RealScreen
Okay, it's been a year. Last time, we were the only ones here from Asia, this year, there are at least two or three other companies from our patch who have invaded. Grrrr.
27 November 2006
12 March 2004
A chuckle at tax time...
The back page of the business section of the Guardian features a op/ed column, often humorous in tone. Last autumn, it featured a very funny piece written by comedian Chris Addison, a fictional response from a bureaucrat in the UK's Inland Revenue Department to a letter he'd sent them. It was fake, but it went around and around this wonderful thing I like to call "the Internet."
Guardian Unlimited Money | Tax | How Jobs & Money fooled the world: "That the fake letter has found so many believers suggests we'd rather prefer it if the Inland Revenue wrote to us in this way. Even the Adam Smith Institute, bastion of right-wing economics, fell for the letter."
The original letter can be found here, and it is very funny. But it is, alas, a fake.
08 March 2004
Problematic IKEA translations
Despite the universal success of its flat-pack approach to everything, not all product names translate well from the original Scandihoovican. (You'll have to click the link below to get the punchline. via geekpress)
IKEA | home | children's furniture & accessories | children's highchairs, tables & chairs
06 March 2004
Don't Go, Mojo..!!!!
Holy shit! Mojo says he's gonna retire! Damn... what's wrong with this world!
Mojo Retiring: "'I have nothing more to say,' says Nixon. 'Not only am I empty, but obviously nobody gives a rat's ass about the things I have been saying for twenty years. The masses are just as blinded by the light of stupidity, prudery and the shiny objects of hate.' "
03 March 2004
The One That Didn't Get Away...
Apparently, my namesake was busted last summer in a town in East Texas. Bummer. At least he showed good taste by trying to steal sound equipment.
Three Arrested In Longview Burglary And Car Chase: "The men allegedly stole heavy sound equipment speakers, then led police on a short car chase, eventually called off by officers in the interest of public safety."
20 February 2004
Not Just a Great Pun...
Might have escaped notice, but there have been apparently enormous queues of gay couples outside San Francisco courthouses, waiting to get married. The legal aspects of this are still a bit lost on me, but apparently it's a municipal legislature vs. state legislature jurisdictional thing, gay marriage legal in SF, illegal in CA. Like I say, I haven't been following it all *that* closely.
However, what I've started to follow a bit more closely is a grassroots movement to support the couples who are standing on line to get married. Total strangers from across the US and all over the world are contributing to this site to buy bouquets of flowers and distribute them to random couples waiting outside the courthouse. I love it.
Flowers for Al and Don
19 February 2004
Barcode...
Dehumanizing, but amusing. Apparently this says I'm a fat 39-year-old white guy living in Canada.
Barcode Yourself (via boingboing)
18 February 2004
Onionism...
The Onion is, as the masthead says, "America's Finest News Source."
The Onion : Fox News Problem Solvers In Way Over Their Heads
14 February 2004
Pynchonalia...
So apparently, part of the reason I come to India is to read books that confuse the hell out of me. Just finished another Thomas Pynchon novel, "The Crying of Lot 49" (this time last year I struggled through both "Mason & Dixon" and "Gravity's Rainbow"), and I'm utterly mystified. But apparently, that's the idea.
Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 : "The text is almost completely 'open,' and readers who are looking for a single interpretation are setting themselves up for failure. Even after several readings one finds that the novel deliberately evades solutions -- indeed, this is one of the hallmarks of Pynchon's unique style."
Don't get me wrong, I liked the book. It's supposed to be his most "accessible" and I have to say that it's reasonably straight-forward, as Pynchonsmanship goes. For that matter, even though they were both heavy slogs, I enjoyed the hell out of both "Mason & Dixon" and "Gravity's Rainbow"... and got just enough of the references and was clued into enough of the shifting timelines and managed to keep track of enough members of the casts of thousands to understand that I was missing an absurd amount.
As with most things, it's mainly just a question of effort. I'm willing to expend enough of an effort to read 'em, just not to really dig into 'em. But I can definitely see how others get completely stuck into him. I just don't understand all their jokes.
Color me stupid...
I only found out about this at Christmas, trying to pick up some salmon for Shelley. Never having been much of a fish-fancier, but always conceptually supportive of aquaculture as an industry, the whole color controversy might have passed me by had we not encountered it at King Soopers that fateful Thursday.
Wired:The 15 Colors of Salmon : "...as the COLOR ADDED labels cropping up in supermarkets suggest, the aquacultured fillet's pinkish hue is a testament to engineering, not nature. The labels refer to the food additives canthaxanthin and astaxanthin. Without them, the flesh of farmed salmon - which don't eat the krill that colors the wild ones - would be gray."
13 February 2004
World66
Okay, pretty naff... the online version of comparing passport stamps. But here you go... 20 countries, 8% of the world.
World66, the travel guide you write:
12 February 2004
Skills Found Only In China
Dave Garcia sent me these... have the feeling they've been making their way around the Internet for quite some time. Based on personal experience, these are exactly the sort of thing you see all the time in Zhongguo... just never when you have a camera handy.
Skills Found Only In China : eight photos
Rajasthan Taxi
My pal Sanjit (who was driving) described this picture as capturing the situation in which India finds itself today, "...stuck between the Middle Ages and McDonalds."
It was a lucky snap, actually.
Rajasthan Taxi
11 February 2004
Look and Feel Canadian... Instantly!
Very droll pharmaceuticals from Canadian artist Dana Wyse's cleverly-named Jesus Had A Sister Productions ("Helping you to create your own reality since 1789"). Hosted on the website of a Brussels art gallery with an equally clever name... but apparently Wyse also sold these on a rack at a pharmacy in Biel, Switzerland.
In an peculiarly-translated interview posted on the website at Vancouver's Third Avenue Gallery, Wyse says she prefers a "graffiti" style delivery of her artwork: "Sometimes, I get up at 5 a.m. and place flyers on the dashboards of cars with slogans like 'Sell Your Soul!', 'You Shall Receive Everything You Desire', or 'Filtering Isn`t Necessary'."
aeroplastics contemporary: Dana Wyse - Jesus Had A Sister Productions
10 February 2004
Unclean... unclean...
Occured to me on the way in to the office this morning that at least some of the random disfigurement I see on the streets of India isn't simply the result of the casual brutality that's just part of life in the third world. It's not merely attributable to a higher incidence of accidental maiming in a highly accident-prone society.
Nope. It's leprosy.
We took a slightly different route this morning, and passed a leprosy clinic as we came to work, and the penny finally dropped. Leprosy... how very 21st century.
Which means that when Stumpy and his feculent cousins come knocking at the car window at stoplights looking for a handout (err... stump-out), there's as good a chance as any that they're not just run-of-the-mill filthy beggars -- they're actually run-of-the-mill filthy leper beggars.
Turns out that India has the world's largest population of lepers worldwide -- in 2002, about 473,000 of Asia's total number of 520,000 leprosy cases were found here. Last year another half a million people were apparently infected with leprosy.
Okay, a lot of it is simple mathematics; if you start with more than a billion people, working on a simple percentage basis, the numbers get very big very fast. But still... in India, the equivalent of entire city of Denver was infected with leprosy between 2002 and 2003. Holy shit.
Not sure what to do with this new-found piece of information. Requires a lot more mulling over.
08 February 2004
An Itch for Collecting
Something about the universality of dorsal pruritus inspires all manner of insipid, annoying, and just plain twee artistic efforts. However, in some cases, it causes an itch that only obsessive collecting can scratch.
Back Scratcher: Gideon Weiss`s Private collection
Philosophistry
...so apparently, I'm a Kantian (100%) with strong Millist tendencies (99%) and an Aquinian outlook (94%). Nietzsche can kiss my 'nards (68%), and Augustine doesn't even figure (37%). But then again, neither do the Cynics (34%), which I guess sort of surprises me. Now we all know.
ETHICAL PHILOSOPHY SELECTOR: "These questions reflect the dilemmas that have captured the attention of history’s most significant ethical philosophers."
I suppose it's fairly easy to game a "selecter" like this, simply by writing the fields so that they will point to a certain result most of the time. But then again, that wouldn't really be terribly ethical, and for an exercise intended to explore issues of ethics and morality, that would certainly be a hypocritical twist... creating a "deus ex machina" would be worth of at least a couple hours musing on the concept of free will, anyway.
A Softer World
Softer, maybe, but also a darker, more cynical, and slickly hipper world. This weekly "comic" strip has been going for about a year now, and they've put together some very funny and creative panels. Check out the archives.
A Softer World: I'm sorry I took your beauty for granted...
05 February 2004
Eastern Standard Tribe
Cory Doctorow of boingboing fame is making his just-released second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, available for free download. Talking the talk, walking the walk.
Eastern Standard Tribe: "Here's the deal: I don't believe that there's any market-demand for teasers or for 'Digital Rights Management' technology: none of you woke up this morning and said, 'Damn, I wish there was a way I could get less of the books I enjoy and a way I could do less with them once I have them.' "
You can also buy a paper version, too. (I heartily endorse both his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kindom, and his short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More.)
01 February 2004
Some Casual Menckening...
Reading The Skeptic, a biography of H.L. Mencken, and enjoying it thoroughly.
Scoured from the Web... some classic Menckenisms...
Democracy is the theory that holds that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
Nature abhors a moron.
Jury - A group of 12 people, who, having lied to the judge about their health, hearing, and business engagements, have failed to fool him.
Dachshund - A half-a-dog high and a dog-and-a-half long.
No one in this world, so far as I know ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.
Notes on journalism, Chicago Tribune, [19 September 1926]
The iconoclast proves enough when he proves by his blasphemy that this or that idol is defectively convincing - that at least one visitor to the shrine is left full of doubts. The liberation of the human mind has been best furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe - that the god in the sanctuary was a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.
A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone may be looking.
Puritanism - The haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
I believe it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than to be ignorant.
30 January 2004
Biting the Hand...
Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris is a genius, pure and simple. And he's a very funny man, too...
Errol Morris: Why It Makes Sense to Bite the Hand that feeds you:
1. Hand bound to betray you eventually. Preemptive strike. Get it before it gets you.
20 January 2004
Dispensate Keith Babel
I've noticed a new trend in the spam I've been getting lately. Instead of the usual "Extend your penis by inches" and "Natural Canadian Viagra" and "Earn millions working from home", most of the spam that's been wending its way to my inbox has featured random strings of words in the subject line. Must be designed to crack through the spam filtering service I've recently started paying my ISP an extra five bucks a month to use for my account. Since I signed up for it, I have to admit, I've been getting a hell of a lot less spam... from somewhere around a hundred and fifty to two hundred pieces daily (I've had my email address for a l o o o o o n g time), down to something like ten. Worth an extra couple bucks a month? Sure... what the hell.
Lately, though, more have been sneaking through, like I say, with random strings of words in the subject. A sample:
bluster psychiatrist silo
instill baroness
alternative twee
And today, the grandaddy of 'em all... this entire thing was the subject line.
dispensate keith babel kilohm pencil directrix grantee credent pneumatic spiegel arbitrate flatbed crabapple ally defensive businessman chub defendant mcconnell terre cockroach carrot strict parochial gro
Best of all, on the bottom, this nonsensical string of random logorrhea...
residual econometrica lineprinter grievance bismark childbear oneida berea embargoes mid pleat diary fabulous slick agrimony parliamentarian abysmal century effusion cowlick postage conduct ouch complementation swirly charta radium belle ultimatum doric ecumenic m 8 hangman biotic exhibitor shuddery tina schoolhouse dole benchmark detour bash spyglass intemperance monochromatic delight lefty bryn doyle chromium caryatid 9 8 exchangeable barrington winnie diluent gainesville delicate adult kenya accretion fetal wrong somnolent dredge caviar bock gay molybdenite valparaiso acquire sauterne frosty celanese pergamon surgeon loeb cypress heterodyne wry blackbody absentminded country malone ala karol bayonne houseboat filth hemorrhoid
Break it up a bit, and it takes on an entrancing sort of poetic rhythym...
residual econometrica
lineprinter grievance
bismark childbear oneida
berea embargoes mid pleat diary
fabulous slick agrimony parliamentarian
abysmal century effusion
cowlick postage
conduct ouch complementation
swirly charta
radium belle ultimatum
doric ecumenic m 8
hangman biotic exhibitor
shuddery tina
schoolhouse dole
benchmark detour
bash spyglass intemperance
monochromatic delight
lefty bryn doyle
chromium caryatid
9 8 exchangeable
barrington winnie
diluent gainesville
delicate adult kenya accretion
fetal wrong
somnolent dredge
caviar bock
gay molybdenite
valparaiso acquire sauterne frosty
celanese pergamon
surgeon loeb
cypress heterodyne wry blackbody
absentminded country
malone ala karol bayonne
houseboat filth
hemorrhoid
Oh, and the actual message itself? Of course...
Viag r a 60% off. Limited supply. FREE shipping, no prior prescription required. U.S. Doctors. Click here and start saving today !
Just goes to show, I guess.
11 November 2003
On the Fridge...
The following faux headlines from The Onion, magents courtesy Andy Chworowsky... thanks again for hours of amusement.
Surgeon General Halts Production of Freakish Robotic Governor
President Bush Has Huge Crush On Obese Kazakhstan Senior Citizen
The Golden Girls Linked To Naked McGyver
Pope Coughs Up Fat Hamster (so far the all-round crowd-pleaser...)
Controversial Magic Cheddar Sandwich Apologizes For Nightmarish Fish Tragedy
Dirty Minister Announces Porn Party Without All The Breasts
Back Pain Mom Suddenly Better
Hippie Stoner Homosexual To Revolutionize NRA
Inflatable Dad Explodes Under Pressure
Landfill Assistant Manager Makes Plea For More Waste
Horrible Children Trucked To St. Louis
Sexier Kitchen Staff -- Shittier Portions
Study Reveals Nation Of Americans
National Congress Masturbates On Bus
Senate Cracks Bathroom Grease Trap
White House Declared Insane
Successful Lesbian Crack House Used To Be Gas Station
Islamic Magazine Reports: Bacon Leads To Bleeding
Area Man Evidently Boring Lutheran
Six Year-Old Discovers Black Hole On Local Pastor
Angered By Tia Carrere, God Ends Universe
Green Bay Packers Suck
Local Secretary Breaks Up with Asshole Claymation Puppet
Clinton Purchased Condom For Girlfriend, U.S. Department of Hell Reports
08 November 2003
Men in Skirts...
Yes, it's all about putting dresses back on the boys. But a truly great line tucked in there amidst all the campy comments about bony knees and gladiators...
Design Review | 'Bravehearts': In the Land of the Free, Who Wears the Skirts?: "I was pleased to share this special moment with him. Discovering that you are ancient history is like losing your virginity. It happens only once. My friend was lucky. Like many who came of age in the 1960's, I saw my youth preserved in aspic before the decade was even over."
19 October 2003
It's as if Ms. Currie and her Kiwi comrades were following a script written by Chris Morris for The Brass Eye.
Wired News -- Moms Battle Genetic Engineering: "Alannah Currie, the group's founder, said she designed the ads to provoke an ethical debate. 'Just because science can, should science? And how far will they go?' said Currie, who is a former member of pop group the Thompson Twins."
15 October 2003
China Was First... As Usual
Nice to know that even though it's more than forty years (!) late, China was first.
China Sends Man Into Orbit, Entering U.S.-Russian Club: "The Chinese assert that they were actually first to try to send a man into space. A 16th-century Ming Dynasty artisan, Wan Hu, held kites in each hand and strapped himself to a chair equipped with rockets, according to some historical accounts carried in the state news media."
Oh, and a colleague here tells me that Chinese media has reported that "thousands of Western spies" have come to China to spy on this morning's launch. Shocking.
06 October 2003
Saving Private Lynch
Hilarious. Simply hilarious.
Saving Private Lynch From Misinformation: "In actuality, I was never influenced by anybody in terms of the truth, because the truth, as we knew it, changed every day. For the first three months I was handing in a rewrite every two days. An article would come out and the network and the legal department would have me rewrite it based on the new truth."
29 September 2003
A Chuckler from Dowd ...
You have to admit, it evokes an amusing image.
Drunk on Rummy: "Mom has written a love ode to the 71-year-old 'studmuffin' defense secretary so palpitating it recalls the clip of a teenage Judy Garland singing 'You Made Me Love You' to a picture of Clark Gable."
28 September 2003
Lana, eat your heart out...
It's not exactly the most flattering of comparisons, but it's nice to see John get a mentch in the NY Times (I think the link requires registration).
On TV, Men Are the New Women "The oldest brother, Garrett (John Carroll Lynch), the mayor, had an affair with a neighbor and is being blackmailed for his transgression -- he agonizes like a latter-day Lana Turner."
25 September 2003
Somebody's pissed off...
A long-standing bit of internecine crankiness once again rears its head.
'WSJ' Union Boycotts CNBC Appearances: "Most reporters appearing on CNBC, however, are not paid for the additional work of going on air; they are paid only if their appearances reach a certain monthly threshold or if they appear well outside normal business hours, the union said."
22 September 2003
Brazen spam scam...
Move over, Nigerian fraudsters... and you newly-minted Liberian scamlings, watch out. Fidel and his boys are looking to eat your lunch...!
Found this little gem among the scores of spams in my inbox today... simply astounding. They're obviously starting from the premise that there are some staggeringly stupid people out there... how dumb would somebody have to be to actually give them their credit card details?
Even I am not cynical enough to actually wish them luck, although I do harbour a curmudgeonly suspicion their initial premise is probably pretty close to the mark. Would love to find out their eventual hit rate.
21 September 2003
Gibson's through with blogging...
Haven't been glued to this, but I've dropped in periodically, and enjoyed it every time. But he makes an excellent point, and having enjoyed "Pattern Recognition" as much as I did, I guess I'm glad he's getting back to damn work!
William Gibson: "I’ve always known, somehow, that it would get in the way of writing fiction, and that I wouldn’t want to be trying to do both at once. The image that comes most readily to mind is that of a kettle failing to boil because the lid’s been left off."
More on The Man...
Sort of gushy.... but great.
Guardian Unlimited | Arts features | Alone with the Man in Black: "So there I was, sitting in Johnny Cash's front room in Hendersonville, Tennessee, about 10 or 12 years ago. He'd been with journalists most of the day and I was the last. A couple, I knew from chatting to them, were hacks with less than no interest in country music. I was worse - I was a fan."
20 September 2003
Howling with laughter... simply howling.
What a great name for a blog, too...
Trepanning For Fun and Profit: "An Open Letter to the Homeless Guy Who Keeps Shitting Behind My Garage"
The Man Rides On
Found this online at a wonderfully-named blog...
Opposable Thumbs: "A moment of silence..."
The Accordion Guy
Joey "AccordionGuy" DeVilla is a very funny man.
The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century :: Main Page: "'What's the definition of a WASP? Someone who steps out of the shower to pee.' "
16 July 2003
"Creation Science" for kids...
Amusing as hell.
OBJECTIVE: Creation Education: Creation Science Fair 2001: "1st Place: 'Life Doesn't Come From Non-Life'
Patricia Lewis (grade 8) did an experiment to see if life can evolve from non-life. Patricia placed all the non-living ingredients of life - carbon (a charcoal briquet), purified water, and assorted minerals (a multi-vitamin) - into a sealed glass jar. The jar was left undisturbed, being exposed only to sunlight, for three weeks. (Patricia also prayed to God not to do anything miraculous during the course of the experiment, so as not to disqualify the findings.) No life evolved. This shows that life cannot come from non-life through natural processes.
"Improving" Billboards
Love it. The latest "action" is their best so far.
Billboard Liberation Front: manifesto: "Each time you change the Advertising message in your own mind, whether you climb up onto the board and physically change the original copy and graphics or not, each time you improve the message, you enter in to the High Priesthood of Advertisers. "
15 July 2003
Snarky overheard conversations...
Haven't laughed like this at a website in ages...
In Passing...: "'Let's go see the Tom Hanks one. Whassit called? 'Road to Permission'?'
'Perdition!'
'...Or 'Road to Preventive?''
'Perdition!'
*(Continued ad naseum, with options such as 'Road to Redemption' and 'Road to Partition.')*
--An oblivious guy talking on a cell phone in the security line, and the crowd around him, at the Oakland airport. "
14 July 2003
Software defined radio...
A very cool idea... even if the Guardian did steal the headline from the name of our old project at [V]. (More proof -- if it was needed -- that there is no such thing as an original idea.)
Guardian Unlimited | Online | Radio active revolution: "Instead of specialist radio hardware, a software radio uses a simple receiver to throw the entire contents of a range of frequencies into computer memory, where software - and not hardware - does the signal processing. Vanu Inc, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, took an ordinary, off-the-shelf Hewlett-Packard iPaq personal digital assistant and, using only a simple radio receiver and an upgrade to the Linux operating system, was able to demonstrate the device working as an FM radio. "
13 July 2003
Onion: New Zep
Jim Anchower is my favorite Onion columnist.
The Onion | Here Are Reviews Of Some New Shit: "I didn't think it would ever happen, but there's not just one but two new Zeppelin CDs out. Actually, one's a video. The CD's called How The West Was Won, and it isn't just one CD, it's three. That's right: three CDs' worth of gettin' the Led out. And, get this, it's got a 25-minute live version of 'Dazed And Confused.' Whenever I listen to the original version or see it on The Song Remains The Same, I wish it wouldn't end. Now, it almost doesn't! I always hate it when I go through a whole album before my buzz wears off, but now there's so much Zep, I have to light up again midway through."
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