I am dumbfounded. And they even have competition.

Do not, under any circumstances, click this link. And if you accidentally do, ABSOLUTELY DO NOT CROSS YOUR EYES.

(for more things you should never click on don’t click here)

The new Futurama DVD has the best special feature of any DVD ever in the history of human achievement: an entire episode of Everybody Loves Hypnotoad!

And as if that wasn’t enough, there’s also a lecture on the math of Futurama by Dr. Sarah J. Greenwald. a²+b²=c² ? THINK AGAIN!!!!!

Remember this? Scientists are now beginning to unlock the secrets of cockroach zombification:

Researchers have worked out the neurological trick used by a species of wasp to turn cockroaches into ‘zombie slaves’. The discovery explains why, once stung, cockroaches can be led by a much smaller master towards certain death. Researchers have proven their theory by replicating the effect, and by using an antidote injection to release the cockroaches from their zombie state.

This YouTube video (embedding disabled) shows the view from the cockpit (with HUD) of the last 7 minutes or so of the Space Shuttle Atlantis landing. You can also hear the running chatter back and forth from the shuttle to ground control. The pilot is enjoying himself exactly as much as you would expect, I mean, he’s ACTUALLY FLYING THE SPACE SHUTTLE.

The video seemed to originate from this somewhat broken site which has some other videos, but I haven’t found any that are as good.

And if you want to try this landing for yourself, you can! Just install X-Plane.

This is only a test Originally uploaded by minutillo

Sunshine buddy!

One of my friends suggested over email that maybe our circle of friends should form a book club. She even proposed a book that we could try. Reaction ranged from complete apathy, to violent emailed screeds against book clubs, and finally culminated in a horrible photoshop defacement of the proposed book’s cover.

That idea rejected soundly, the next time we got together we realized that now that there are no shows on TV anymore that anybody could possibly care about (Lost and Battlestar being both on hiatus), we need some other excuse to get together once a week. Remote control helicopter club? Nintendo DS club? Badminton club? Shaw Brothers movie club? Sitting around and rotting club? All good ideas, but finally I came up with an idea that everybody immediately agreed on: CHEESEBURGER CLUB!

Tonight was the inaugural meeting! Jenny made incredibly thick and juicy and RARE cheeseburgers, with caramelized onions and sauteed mushrooms available as special toppings. She followed that with home made french fries (I called them that at least, I guess they were really baked potato wedges). And then to finish it off, A CAN OF BEANS. What could possibly be better? I guess maybe some local corn on the cob might have been nice, but it’s not quite the season yet. Oh, and for dessert: chocolate cream pie! The “classic cheeseburger” has now been knocked out of the park, and the other members of the club are considering more exotic styles. And by exotic I mean really radical stuff like maybe seasoning the meat or using non-american cheese.

Despite my complete lack of cooking ability (I did help Jenny set the table) I think cheeseburger club is one of the better ideas I’ve ever had. I’m assuming local chapters will start cropping up all over the country - wait, what am I saying, I mean THE WORLD, and will look to me as a sort of spiritual leader, a role I am ready to graciously accept… as long as it means I get more cheeseburgers.

I think this is the song that will be stuck in my head this year, just like the Picard song was a few years ago.

(*Also known as “Bob from Bob’s Furniture, you know, ‘COME ON DOWN!’” and “the lady from Cruising Connecticut”)

Their status of non-wedded-bliss is confirmed by a source no less authoritative than Eastern Connecticut State University Magazine:

Easily recognized by television viewers in the Northeast, many people believe that the woman who has rocked, reclined, and lounged her way through numerous TV and radio commercials for Bob’s Discount Furniture is Mrs. Bob Kaufman. In reality, Bob’s sidekick is Cathy (Horan) Poulin ‘89.

She first met Bob Kaufman while working for a cable advertising company in Manchester. The company had launched a new local access channel and needed to develop its programming. In 1992, Poulin created the half-hour show “Cruising Connecticut” in which she drove around in a Corvette with a male cohost and visited the company’s local clients.

Poulin resides in Hebron with her husband, Paul, and one-year-old daughter, Madison, who she acknowledges is her “greatest accomplishment by far.”

This has been yet another public service announcement from messy-78.

And for the record, the official editorial position of messy-78 is that Bob is awesome, and his commercials are not so much annoying as they are… “memorable”.

It’s by now a well established fact that there is an opera singer on the Minutillo side of the family. OK, that may be an overstatement. What I meant is that there exists an opera singer named Hana Minutillo, and as far as I know, I’m not related to her. But, get this: new on the opera scene is Tsu-Ching Yu — Jenny’s cousin! We missed her debut solo concert, but through the magic of YouTube we (and you) get to see at least a few parts of it.

We went to a restaurant called “Machu Picchu” in East Haven. I ordered a steak, and was presented with this:

That’s a steak with two fried eggs on top, sitting on a mountain of rice and french fries, with a hunk of fried cheese, some fried plantains, salad, and finally just almost as a garnish, a HOT DOG.

Jenny’s “potato stew” was almost as surprising:

It was cold! Sliced potatoes! With sauce! What!??

(need a hint? 誰在一壘 - Shei2 Zai4 Yi1 Lei3 - Who’s On First Base)

Outpost.com: Free delivery. Overnight.

I worked there for two years, from the time when shooting gerbils out of cannons and losing money on every order (but making it up on volume!) seemed like a good idea, to the time when being able to pay the electric bill was considered a luxury. I got out just before the buyout by these Fry’s folks, who seem to have been pretty much igoring the web site. I’m amazed it’s still up and running and being updated after all this time.

I was horrified today to see that the famous picture of Taiwan Girls has dropped out of Google’s image search results! So here’s a new one, taken of the same four just today:

Oneaday posts Chinese sayings, one a day. I know another site like that but it isn’t anywhere near as good.

Fact one: Grady Hendrix apparently went on one of those shows where idiots scream at each other, and sometimes reasonable people get screamed at. Fact two: From the sound of comments at his site, apparently he said the sort of things that make idiots scream. Fact three: I am currently the number one result on the web for Grady Hendrix weblog.

I’m wondering if the comments on this post are about to get very busy…

UPDATE: Grady’s story.

Best wasp ever!

As an adult, Ampulex compressa seems like your normal wasp, buzzing about and mating. But things get weird when it’s time for a female to lay an egg. She finds a cockroach to make her egg’s host, and proceeds to deliver two precise stings. The first she delivers to the roach’s mid-section, causing its front legs buckle. The brief paralysis caused by the first sting gives the wasp the luxury of time to deliver a more precise sting to the head.

The wasp slips her stinger through the roach’s exoskeleton and directly into its brain. She apparently use ssensors along the sides of the stinger to guide it through the brain, a bit like a surgeon snaking his way to an appendix with a laparoscope. She continues to probe the roach’s brain until she reaches one particular spot that appears to control the escape reflex. She injects a second venom that influences these neurons in such a way that the escape reflex disappears.

From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach’s antennae and leads it–in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex–like a dog on a leash.

The zombie roach crawls where its master leads, which turns out to be the wasp’s burrow. The roach creeps obediently into the burrow and sits there quietly, while the wasp plugs up the burrow with pebbles. Now the wasp turns to the roach once more and lays an egg on its underside. The roach does not resist. The egg hatches, and the larva chews a hole in the side of the roach. In it goes.

The larva grows inside the roach, devouring the organs of its host, for about eight days. It is then ready to weave itself a cocoon–which it makes within the roach as well. After four more weeks, the wasp grows to an adult. It breaks out of its cocoon, and out of the roach as well. Seeing a full-grown wasp crawl out of a roach suddenly makes those Alien movies look pretty derivative.

Update: ALL LIES!

This story is just too perfect to be true. A student at UMass Dartmouth was working on a research paper and did an interlibrary loan request for Mao’s Little Red Book. This triggered a red flag in some comptuer buried under Washington DC, and soon enough the student was visited by two agents from the Department of Homeland Security.

Once you pick your jaw up off the floor, get this: the class the student was taking was Fascism and Totalitarianism! I guess they learned a little more than they expected.

I took a bunch of pictures at Sleeping Giant today, but you’ll never see them unless you rummage through the archives of the Mobile section. There really should be a “today’s pictures” thing or something. But until then, here they are:

Surprising possible future of the day: A world populated by infinitely intelligent AIs, with a crippling flaw: they only know things you can learn by looking at public domain works!

Prompted by two things. First, this quote by a Googler on Google Print:

We are not scanning all those books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an AI.

Then, this blog post today by Google:

The world’s libraries are a tremendous source of knowledge, much of which has never been available online. One of our goals for Google Print is to change that, and today we’ve taken an exciting step toward meeting it: making available a number of public domain books that were never subject to copyright or whose copyright has expired. We can show every page because these books are in the public domain.

This is my new favorite optical illusion. Slowly back away from your monitor… stand on the other side of the room if possible.

Just about everything that could have went wrong on our trip did go wrong! However, in all cases, the problems didn’t actually hurt us. In fact, mostly, they HELPED us! Allow me to expound:

1) When we got to Budget in San Jose to pick up the compact car I had reserved, the nice lady at the counter saw that there were two of us and said “Would you like a nice passenger van instead of your compact?” I said “No.” She said “How about a mini-van?” I said “No.” She said “Would you like to upgrade?” I said “No.” She said “Well we’re out of compacts, you’ll have to take the van or upgrade.” I said “I just want the compact that I reserved.” A stare down ensued, I waited her out, and eventually she said “Fine, I’ll have to give you a Sebring.” It turned out to be a Sebring convertible, which came in handy a few days later driving around on Mt. Tam! Jenny and I had a lot of fun with this one, asking each other repeatedly “would you like a nice passenger van?” and making the standard jokes about being able to take the reservation but not being able to hold the reservation.

2) When we got to the Hayes Mansion, where we were supposed to stay, they told us that they had somehow overbooked the hotel and we’d have to go elsewhere! I guess they felt bad about turning us around immediately and sending us someplace else that late at night, so they let us stay in some super fancy room in the actual mansion that night (the normal guest rooms are in other buildings). The next day they sent us to the Sainte Claire in downtown San Jose, which is clearly where we should have been staying all along. The room wasn’t as nice, but was fine, but more importantly it was in walking distance to just about everyplace we wanted to go, and also was right near a VTA stop. Plus: for all our “trouble”, the entire stay was FREE, paid for by the Hayes Mansion!

Nothing at all went wrong during our actual trip (except maybe for one critically poor choice of places to eat: Zyng? More like 髒!) But on our trip home, things started going wrong again:

3) After flying back home, I looked at the big board to figure out where our luggage was eventually going to spit out and stood and waited at the carousel. It hadn’t begun to move yet, so I was occupying my time by watching a pretty girl on the other side of the carousel that Jenny had thoughtfully pointed out to me. The strange thing about this girl is that she was standing next to a suitcase that looked exactly like ours! Or was it ours? I went over to her and confusedly asked “Is that your suitcase?” She probably thought I was crazy, but said “No.” I then asked, sort of to no one in particular, “Then how did it get here?” She decided I definitely was crazy, and moved away. I checked the tag, it really was ours, so I muttered “I’m just going to take it” and took it. The question is: How did it get there? It was there from the time we arrived at baggage claim, and we got there pretty fast. Could it have been on our plane, and got some sort of special handling? Or had it gotten lost, got on the wrong plane, and ended up there BEFORE us? And if so, why weren’t we on THAT plane? Strange. Anyway, we walked out with suitcase in hand while everybody else was still waiting for the carousel to even start moving.

4) Still in a daze trying to figure out what had happened with the luggage, we arrived at the car. I remember when we arrived at the airport the shuttle bus driver was waiting for us and I remarked to Jenny that that sort of thing makes me nervous and I start to forget to do important things, like lock the car. I remember making a point to lock it and then double check to make sure the door was locked before leaving… but I apparently FORGOT TO CLOSE THE WINDOW! Amazingly, the car was still in one piece, started right up, and apparently had no ill effects, except for a slightly damp driver’s seat. Incredible!

Good news: The construction at the first area where I get stuck in traffic every day is almost done. They think they’ll finish at the end of this year!

Bad news: The construction at the second area where I get stuck in traffic every day will not even start until 2009… and complete in THE AMAZING YEAR TWENTY FIFTEEN which barely even sounds like a real date.

For the pilot episode: Wil Wheaton, Puff Daddy, Michael Madsen, and Lindsay Lohan.

I guess if you don’t see the total perfection in a dimwitted starlet who’s already washed up at the ripe old age of 19 playing Dungeons and Dragons on TV, I can’t explain it to you.

UPDATE: Truth is awesomer than fiction:

From: Wil Wheaton <wil@wilwheaton.net>
To: jwz@jwz.org
Subject: Celebrity D&D

Hey,

No joke: I helped some guys from Upright Citizen’s Brigade pitch this to Comedy Central. We did a live version for them at the Comedy Central Workspace earlier this year.

It was AWESOME, and hilarious, and I got to sit close enough to Paget Brewster to pretend that she was in love with me, but CC didn’t pick it up.

There’s a tape of it, that should /really/ find its way to the internets.

Have you noticed the ongoing arms race among local news broadcasts, trying to outdo each other with new generations of doppler radar? One station started out with plain old Doppler Radar. But that wasn’t enough. The station across town decided to make it sound better by calling it Super Doppler, or Mega Doppler. Then the numbers started coming in: Doppler 2000, Doppler 3000, (and Power Doppler 3000, Super Doppler 4000, 5000, 6000, 7000, 8000, 9000 even DOPPLER 10,000… but it doesn’t stop there… it goes all the way up to DOPPLER 13,000!!!

That is, until now. WCBS in New York may have just hit on the final solution to the Doppler Wars, inventing an utterly unbeatable, unstoppable, and unmatchable Doppler Radar technology:

DOPPLER TWO MILLION!

Welcome to the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism.

The Bush administration is retooling its slogan for the fight against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, pushing the idea that the long-term struggle is as much an ideological battle as a military mission, senior administration and military officials said Monday.

In recent speeches and news conferences, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the nation’s senior military officer have spoken of “a global struggle against violent extremism” rather than “the global war on terror,” which had been the catchphrase of choice. Administration officials say that phrase may have outlived its usefulness, because it focused attention solely, and incorrectly, on the military campaign.

Jenny’s new enemy:

BEETLES! Who do this:

before	after

They seem to especially love her newly grown marigolds. They skeletonized two of them in just a few nights! We think these beetles are really tricky, too. After Jenny realized what was going on, she decided to bring her potted marigolds in for the night so they wouldn’t get eaten. We checked the plants very carefully for any bugs before bringing them in the house. That night, we were watching a movie, and suddenly Jenny’s spider senses began tingling. “I think they’re eating my plant!” We ran over and Jenny found, to her horror, that TWO beetles were happily chewing away! Did they hide somehow until night time? Under the dirt maybe? I grabbed both bugs, threw them outside, and squashed them. Usually we have a live and let live attitude with bugs, only transferring them outside peacefully when they bother us. BUT THIS IS WAR.

Later on a THIRD beetle got revenge by starting to FLY AROUND THE HOUSE, driving Jenny nearly into hysterics! She really really really REALLY hates bugs. I executed a kung-fu style mid air beetle grab, and killed that one too.

Next night, the same thing! Checked the plant for bugs, brought it in, then late at night, THERE THEY ARE EATING AGAIN! How are they so smart? Where did they hide?

We tried to buy some poisony stuff from the home store and spray it on the plants, but it doesn’t seem to have any effect on these beetles. Should we move up to the higher grade stuff? Or is there another solution?

And now for the latest installment in our ongoing series: “Famous Gradys Who Have Actually Had A Weblog For Quite A While But Steve Is Just Finding About Now (Despite The Fact That His Friends Have Repeatedly Emailed Him Saying “Hey Steve! Did You Know That Grady X Has A Weblog?”)”:

OMG! GRADY BOOCH HAS WEBLOG!

Why am I last to find out these things? GRADY HENDRIX HAS WEBLOG!

61! Sometimes. In particular, the last minute of 2005 will have 61 seconds. Unfortunately, it’s the last minute of 2005 in the UTC time zone, so we don’t get to see the ball in Times Square go haywire as time misses a beat right as it’s about to hit bottom.

Pass it on.

Are you in the US? Do you have cable? Do you get AZN? If the answers to all three questions are YES, then starting tomorrow, and on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays at 8 PM for the next month or so you are watching Rooftop Room Cat! Congratulations!

UPDATE: Uhhh…. the website said it was supposed to start today, but actually they’re just showing the last episode of Hotelier again. Try again Tuesday!

Time Traveler Convention!

May 7, 2005, 10:00pm EDT (08 May 2005 02:00:00 UTC)

East Campus Courtyard, MIT

42:21:36.025°N, 71:05:16.332°W

(42.360007,-071.087870 in decimal degrees)

Some good commentary at the Slashdot discussion, like, why didn’t they set the date in the PAST so we don’t have to wait a week to see if it is a success?

Pig.com is for sale! I sent them an email several years ago asking if I could buy it, got not reply, but noticed that “this domain is not for sale” was posted there a while later. I guess they get lots of inquiries.

I wonder if you have to pay extra for “pig.gif“?

Katamari Damacy Lyrics - Translated!

Apparently this guy tried to get to the top of Taipei 101 - by stairs! But they nabbed him at 60f and sent him down the work elevator.

And because these assorted links things should always have three things in them, I also mention with some embarrassment that I am the last person on the internet to get a del.icio.us account.

The Food Porn photo pool at Flickr.