This is another thing that would have made milk come out my nose had I been drinking it. McSweeney’s lists are always worth a few chuckles. This one is excellent. Jokes Made By Robots For Robots.

And as long as we’re at McSweeney’s again, here are a couple more lists for your pleasure:

Errors in Communication Between My Hairdresser and Me, in the Form of What I Said and What He Heard

The Extended Family of Thespian Rip Torn

Eleven Lunchmeats I Have Invented

From the Prog Rock Ice Cream Shoppe: Flavors Inspired by a Certain Canadian Power Trio (Rush fans only)

Just clicked on a random installment of the web comic Cat and Girl by Dorothy Gambrell (took me forever to find her name.) This episode made me laugh out loud. I dunno why.

Matthew Inman over at drivl.com gives voice to what lurks in every movie-goer, especially those of us with computers, as a common gripe. Why can’t Hollywood get the cinema of code right?

Here’s the link.

I always notice when FX designers take special liberties in designing computers in the movies. Sandra Bullock, for example, uses a terminal in the film The Net that bears less resemblance to a real world computer than a loaf of banana bread bears to Pope Benedict. And Scotty, in Star Trek IV, calls up a remarkable, rotating molecular model for “transparent aluminum” with just a few strokes of what he deems a “quaint” keyboard. At least the tech on duty tried to get him to use the mouse.

But it’s such an easy target. It’s fine to swing the flame throwers on Hollywood when it comes to computers, but while we’re at it, let’s get on their case for putting people through plate glass without a scratch or chasing heroes down the hallway with a grenade blast or dusting them off after a building collapses on them.

They take liberties for two reasons. Ignorance is the obvious one. Sometimes these people just don’t know the limitations of the computer and they imagine that nine-year-old Joseph Mazello can slip behind a UNIX machine and gain root access to the computer system running an entire island. The other reason is the oldest one in pictures. What happens up on the screen has to be cinematic. It has to entertain. Drama is the goal, above all else. And the basic truth is that movies move. Coders do not.

Check out the article. It’s a good read.

Jane Espenson reminds me in a recent post about illustrator and cartoonist Scott Bateman. he publishes these curious, oddly-captioned panels that, while peculiar, never fail to elicit a chuckle. I visit his site for the first time in a while this morning. Check it out. It’s a “Dry William,” courtesy of comedian Bobby Tisdale.

Link to Scott Baseman’s site.

And hey, it’s my first non-Nightmare post in a while!

This has been chasing back and forth across the Internets. Alaska senator Ted Stevens is an outspoken opponent of Net neutrality, supporting a problematic idea wherein Internet pipeline providers (such as Comcast and AT&T) can charge big internet companies who use a lot of bandwidth for that privilege, a policy which makes as much sense as plumbers who lay pipe charging homeowners for the right to use that pipe. Recently, he explains why he voted against an amendment containing provisions to protect net neutrality.

Blah, blah, blah. What’s so great about this is the way he articluates his understanding of the web, which is uninformed at best.

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

…

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.

It’s a series of tubes.

And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?

Do you know why?

Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can’t afford getting delayed by other people.

Now I think these people are arguing whether they should be able to dump all that stuff on the internet ought to consider if they should develop a system themselves.

via BoingBoing

Dogs Dressed As Bees.

The Internet is such an odd, interesting place.

Via blast radius.

I don’t know that it’s such a bad thing. It’s hard to imagine a cat would have the wherewithall to juggle complex matters of state. And we might see a flurry of anti-dog legislation (you know, dog parks abolished, mandatory dog-diapering, a proliferation of kennels at Guantanamo Bay.)

But if a cat were in the White House we could probably do without a Presidential chef. We’d save a bundle that. In fact, depending on the rodent population of the building, we might not even have to spring for Science Diet.

And when generals walk in the Oval Office with their tassels and shiny medals you’d hear things like, “Wow, Mr. President, you went straight up his leg! Very nice, Sir. Now let go of that Bronze Star.” Could be awkward.

And at dinner with Chinese dignitaries it would not do to have the President cough up a hairball. It’s just not proper protocol.

And there could be some uncomfortable minutes when, in the middle of tense negotiations with warring Mideast countries, the President climbs into a litterbox and scratches about for half an hour.

Yet there seems to be no shortage of cats who’ve run for higher office:

Metrocat

Morris

Gramalkyn Katchamouskie

Here’s a link to an NPR item about Mr. Katchamouskie.