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Saturday, November 29, 2003 |
Most amusing referral of the day.11:22:14 PM  leave/read comments []
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Dept. of Messy Kitchens and Disturbed Toddlers Hey, don't blame me if your kid gets all moody and starts acting like William Petersen.
DNA sequencing for children. I'm not sure it actually does anything, tho'. The description is a bit, shall we say, fuzzy, on the details.
Realistic lab equipment transforms the kitchen into a forensics lab, where your breakfast-bar biologist can extract clumps of real DNA from fruits and vegetables or solve "crimes" by revealing DNA "fingerprints"--telltale blue protein stripes in a gel mixture. Those scare quotes are never a good sign.
Dial a toll-free number, punch in the bear's code, and leave a message in your own voice. An unobtrusive base station plugged into your phone line retrieves the message and delivers it to the bear, which can be up to 150 feet away. Wabi giggles when it receives a communication; your child presses a button to play your message back. You can also purchase pre-fab stories and songs through the service for less than 50 cents apiece. $70 "Hi kids, this is Wabi and I just wanted you to know YOU SUCK!!!!"
Oh man, the hours of fun you could have. By the time you were through you'd have a kid that makes John Lithgow's character in Raising Cain look positively serene. |
OK, so a glorified chemistry set is cool and all, but, speaking of fuzzy, for real high tech kiddy creepies and fun you've got to go with the next item on Popular Science's list: "Wabi," a mix between teddy bear, cell phone and moblog for parents and toddlers.|
"Saudi Arabia is bogged down by deep-rooted Islamic extremism". In the New York Times, of all places, Mansour al-Nogaidan of the Saudi newspaper Al- Riyadh acnowledges what the rest of the world has known for quite some time: that the House of Saud is now reaping what it has... [Jihad Watch] Jihad Watch casts a wary eye on the House of Saud.
Interesting, if a bit reactionary. |
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Dept. of OY! Current Editorials: "Liberal" Media Tells Us Gay Rights is not a Civil Rights Struggle. Thanks, liberal media, for providing a megaphone for those who claims gay rights isn't about civil rights and that any parallels to the black civil rights movement are invalid. But who do you believe? [Morons Dot Org] Spatula has at more media morons:
One of our readers submitted this Fox News edit of a real Associated Press story about how some conservative blacks dredged up from the bottom-feeding Worldnet Daily object to parallels drawn between the black civil rights movement and the current struggles for gay civil equality. I say it's the "Fox News edit" because it's fun to compare it to the original AP article so that you can see how "Fair and Balanced" Fox made their version (they basically removed all the references that balanced out the extremist conservatives, thereby making it "fair" and "balanced"). Fair, as in:
Fair Fair, n. [OE. feire, OF. feire, F. foire, fr. L. fariae, pl., days of rest, holidays, festivals, akin to festus festal. See Feast.]
Truth for sale! Truth for sale! |
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Dept. of Nostalgia I don't get what the big deal is; didn't everybody do this?
Eroticising trademarked batllemechs. Ohhhh! It's positions from the Kama Sutra! Jeeze, we'd just make Ewoks act out "Letters To Penthouse." This is obviously so much more, um, upmarket.
"Dear Penthouse, I am a furry sophmore at a major Midwestern university and I never thought this would happen to me......." ::squeak! squeek! squeek!:: |
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Dept. of Launch Anomalies
It was a banner day for the Range Safety Officer, also known as "The Guy Who Makes The Rocket Blow Up REAL GOOD."
However, the Japanese space agency JAXA reported that one of the vehicle's two SRB-A large solid rocket boosters failed to separate from the booster's first stage about 100 seconds after launch. The added mass of the booster [~] the SRB-A weighs about 10,000 kg without propellant [~] prevented the H-2A from achieving the velocity needed to make orbit, even after the first stage itself was jettisoned. Controllers issued commands to destroy the H-2A ten minutes after liftoff, when the vehicle was at an altitude of 422 kilometers. [ Spacetoday.net ]
Dang ole strap on not unstrappin' tellyawhut. |
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P2Pnets: where deleted documents are reborn. Matt Jones posted a strategy document he'd written for the BBC, his then-employer, on his blog. They asked him to take it down. As is inevitably the case when this happens, people are coming by and posting to the comments section, asking where the document can be had. Turns out, it's circulating on Kazaa. Link [Boing Boing Blog] After spending entirely too much time on Gnutella, I've come up with bubkis for Matt Jones, but I did find a BBC documentary, a bunch of Christina Aguilera songs (?!?!) and an MP3 of a news quiz programme.
The documents may have been reborn, but it looks like they've entered the Witless Protection Programme. |
Last update: 9/21/07; 1:42:56 AM .
