H/T to Gerard Vanderleun who posted it on his Tumblr site.
June 5, 2011
June 2, 2011
It actually does explain why the “prequels” sucked
H/T to Cory Doctorow for the link.
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When menu translators go feral: “Timid and rapidly grown prostitutes”
Victor Mair finds the menu items lost something, but gained humour, in the translation:
The basic Bèn School Method seems to be to look each content word up in a bilingual dictionary, and to pick the most amusing and least grammatical option among the alternatives on offer. The word order of the translation seems to be a semi-random compromise among the various languages involved.
H/T to Tom Vinson for the link.
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June 1, 2011
QotD: “Gender-free parenting”
Earlier this month, the Toronto Star published a story called “Footloose and gender-free,” which sympathetically profiled a young couple trying to raise a child in a completely gender-neutral environment — so gender-neutral that the mother and father won’t even tell people outside the family whether Storm, their four-month-old child, is a boy or girl. “If you really want to get to know someone, you don’t ask what’s between their legs,” says David Stocker, the child’s father.
I wish this well-meaning fellow could have attended my 7-year-old daughter’s birthday party at a pottery and painting studio last week. There, he would have seen 10 little girls, all of them sitting quietly at a table, studiously creating beautiful little masterpieces. The boys, meanwhile, took about 30 seconds to slop some paint onto a ceramic dinosaur or car — and then spent the next hour chasing each other around the facility, occasionally hauling one another to the ground so they could act out professional wrestling moves they’d seen on Youtube.
Not that the boys weren’t “creative.” One of them had been given a cheap video camera from his parents, and spent 10 minutes taking footage of the (unoccupied) toilet in the studio bathroom. This pint-sized Truffaut had a cheering section: The boys assembled around him found the documentary project to be the most hilarious thing in the world, and some became literally incontinent with laughter (ironic, no?) as they took turns passing the camcorder from hand to hand watching and re-watching the footage. Occasionally, the girls would look over at the boys — much as well-dressed diners in a fancy restaurant might gaze out a window to watch hobos fighting over a liquor bottle in an alley — and then sighed and returned to their artistic labours.
As any (normal) parent can attest, such vignettes are entirely typical of parties featuring young boys and girls — who generally are so different in their behavior as almost to compose different species. Stocker is entirely wrong: There is no other single datum of information about a young child that will tell you more about his or her temperament, interests, energy level and maturity level than his or her sex.
Jonathan Kay, “Take it from me — ‘gender-free’ parenting doesn’t work”, National Post, 2011-06-01
May 31, 2011
Colby Cosh tweets
Colby Cosh works for Maclean’s, which is owned by the same corporate entity that provides his cell phone service. He’s not been impressed with his employer’s other line of business:
Tue 31 May 04:28 (On the whole, I would rather buy a mealworm-infested phone from a Somali pirate than deal with Rogers any further.)
Tue 31 May 04:32 (A pirate prob wouldn’t tell me how *lucky* I was to get a refurbished battery to replace the inert one in the phone he sold me 4 wks ago.)
Tue 31 May 04:34 (…which I had to relinquish for 2 weeks in order for the incalculably complex operation of “swapping in a working battery” to be executed.)
Tue 31 May 04:34 (…Not a NEW battery, mind you. I bought the PHONE new, but the replacement battery is refurbished. I am explicitly supposed to be grateful.)
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May 28, 2011
Feeling optimistic about peoples’ common sense?
A few visits to this site will quickly disabuse you of that feeling.
It’s how some folks on Facebook react to stories from The Onion as if it was real news.
May 24, 2011
Forget May 21st: world now ending October 21st says Camping
If you were terribly let down not to ascend on Saturday, don’t worry: Harold Camping has recalculated the correct day of the Rapture!
California preacher Harold Camping is unrepentant following his second unsuccessful attempt to predict Judgment Day, and now says true believers should pack their bags for ascension to heaven on 21 October.
Camping’s first stab at nailing the Rapture advised Christians to get their earthly affairs in order before 6 September 1994. When the world failed to end, due to a “mathematical error”, he reset the clock for last Saturday at 6pm EST.
Christians expecting a rapturous elevation to glory were once again left twiddling their thumbs and their Bibles, but Camping now says he simply misinterpreted the word of God and 21 May “was not really the end of the world but the spiritual beginning of the physical end”, as the San Francisco Chronicle explains.
So the good news is that the world didn’t experience the Rapture on Saturday, and that we don’t get five months of Satan striding among us waving his evil appendages in the faces of the doomed, while those taken up in the Rapture watch us from Heaven, exulting in our pain and suffering while gobbling down popcorn-flavoured Manna bits. The bad news is it all comes to an end on October 21st anyway.
May 22, 2011
May 21, 2011
End of the world playlist suggestions
Because whether you ascend in the Rapture or are one of the ones left behind, you’ll want to have an appropriate playlist on your iPod:
- You’d have to have “The End” by the Doors, of course. And “Welcome to the End” by Bif Naked. Oh, and of course “Rapture” by Blondie.
- @Crystal11: I’m going with “Until the End of the World” & “Last Night On Earth” (both U2)
- @Metz77: “The End” (The Beatles)
- @grahamlavery: “At least (It’s not the end of the world)” Super Furry Animals
- @nightfallcub: Morrissey “There Is A Place In Hell (For Me And My Friends)”
- @neilhimself: (Oh that’s clever) @Gem_Clair: “Easy Like Sunday Morning” – Lionel Richie
- @TrumanAragorn: “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” by Death Cab For Cutie
- @Valya: “The Sky’s Gone Out” (Bauhaus)
- @hmmarcus: “I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire” – The Inkspots
- @MitchBenn: The Byrds: “You Ain’t Going Nowhere”
- @alandhisguitar: got to include “We will all go together when we go” by Tom Lehrer.
- There are just too many appropriate songs by Yngwie Malmsteen to list . . . “My Resurrection”, “Alone in Paradise”, “Like an Angel”, “Seventh Sign”, “Arpeggios from Hell”, “Heaven Tonight”, and so on.
Idea stolen from Neil Gaiman’s @neilhimself Twitter feed.
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May 18, 2011
If you take typography seriously, you will surely go mad
Frequent commenter Lickmuffin sent in this link with the subject line “This is amusing AND SPOT ON!”.
This is freaking me out today. You see, I hardly look at my calendar date on the iPhone. But today I did. I looked at that pixel-perfect, beautiful Retina screen and this problem got instantly into my eye, like a white hot scalpel pinching through my retina until it reached the back of my skull.
See what I mean? Can you see IT? The 1 is off center. Instead of being optically centered, it’s geometrically centered. So it just looks wrong. Really, what happened there, Steve? Where did all that love for typography and attention to detail go? Out the fucking window of your silver Merc, that’s where.
Perhaps this is some kind of cruel April Fools joke from Cupertino. Maybe they are all at the office, hahahing at their clever joke. OK. I don’t find it fucking funny, but I understand your desire to torture your users.
But rather than leaving it there, whimpering, Lickmuffin was suddenly seized with a typographical fit:
Well, the “all phones have it wrong” answer might be correct. [Name] sent me the Gizmodo link through Skype, and I went on and on about why the 1 is off:
[2:10:58 PM] Lickmuffin: The 1 is off centre because they are centering on the width of the entire character — that serif off to the left with no serif on the right of the 1 makes the whole character appear off-center.
[2:13:46 PM] Lickmuffin: The “wrong” version 1 has about 44 pixels on either side of it, measured on the left from the edge of the white box to the serif, and on the right from the edge of the white box to the body of the 1. I say “about” because how you measure depends on whether or not you include the aliasing in the character.
[2:14:26 PM] Lickmuffin: In the “wrong” illustration, the 1 is off-center — it measures 41 pixels from the white box border on the left, and 49 pixels from the white box border on the right.
[2:15:56 PM] Lickmuffin: What the author is complaining about is common — graphical apps tend to base centering on overall character width. For example, when I create callouts in an illustration that have a number in a circle, simply centering the number in the circle will not always look right: the 1 is usually off, especially with sans-serif fonts. The graphics apps center on the width of the 1 as an object, not on the “visual center” of the character that would make it look right.
[2:18:49 PM] Lickmuffin: There are ways to fix this — fonts can carry information called “metrics” that help align fonts when they are placed together. Most often, metrics are used to adjust side-by-side spacing of characters by nudging characters closer together when they fit together. For example: WA Here the app (or the font) would nudge the W and A together. In the case of the 1, metrics could tell apps to center the character on an imaginary centre line, rather than on the actual centre line determined by the character’s width.
[2:19:01 PM] Lickmuffin: Fonts are F A S C I N A T I N G !
Yes, I know that the dongle on the “1” is not a serif — it’s actually part of the “stroke” of the letter. But you know what I mean.
Humph.
After his collapse, I understand that Lickmuffin is now lying down quietly in a darkened room with no visible letters or numbers. Perhaps he will recover, in time.
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May 11, 2011
QotD: The instinctive reaction to progress
I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:
1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.
Douglas Adams, “How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet”, Sunday Times, 1999-08-29
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May 8, 2011
Can you tell the difference between Apple fans and cult members?
An amusing comparison from PC World:
Some tech fanboys and fangirls become so lost in the technology of their choice that it becomes a big part of their identity. Cult members do something similar, only with a spiritual belief system or philisophical concept.
Covering tech for as long as we have (and reading our message boards), we can’t help but notice that tech fanboys and girls sometimes talk like those people who wear purple capes and Nike tennis shoes, or who drink the grape Kool-Aid and then go to sleep.
To make the point, we’ve assembled here a group of quotes, some of which are from tech fan boys and fan girls while others are from real cult members. Can you tell the difference? We’ll give you the answers at the bottom of the page. Good luck (you’ll need it)!
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May 6, 2011
Rookie NDP MPs already triggering change in parliamentary procedure
From an email conversation with Jon, my former virtual landlord:
In other news, you heard about the proposal to change parliamentary procedures to accommodate the new Diaper Dippers? MPs will now be able to vote with —
- Aye
- Nay
- Like OMG, whatever.
I want to be a teenage MP — it’s like winning a lottery! I take it that these kids will get their $150K+ annual salary whether they attend parliament or not, correct? Or is an MP’s pay based on some sort of performance criteria?
I can’t believe I just asked that.
ROTLMAO.
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May 3, 2011
How to referee a philosophical discussion
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April 29, 2011
QotD: The NFL draft is “The Oscars for Straight Men”
Some comedian once called the NFL Draft “The Oscars for Straight Men,” and there is something to that label. While everyone will “grade” the teams’ drafts, and fans will argue and kibitz about who their team should have drafted, there are no definitive winners or losers. One of the more ridiculous aspects of the day is how every team claims to have gotten the players they wanted or rated highest. Just once, it would be thrilling to hear a general manager come out and say, “Look, we know he’s a reach, but all of the guys we rated highest were picked already, the coach and head scout got into a screaming match, the clock was ticking down and so I flipped a coin. Knowing his pain-in-the-tush agent, he’s probably going to hold out most of training camp, anyway.”
Jim Geraghty, “Why Is the Draft So Engrossing to NFL Fans?”, National Review, 2011-04-29
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