Month: December 2001

News from Northwest Ohio, Land of Enchantment: Surgeon uses scalpel to open eyelids Super Glued shut in fraternity “prank.”
Aaron Laser, a junior majoring in political science at the University of Toledo, said yesterday a doctor removed most of his eyelashes, but no stitches were needed. ‘It looks pretty gross,’ he said.
Mr. Laser was at the Pi Kappa Phi fraternity house visiting friends when he fell asleep on a sofa because he was tired from working at a local car wash. While asleep, someone wrote on his face with a marker and glued a receipt from the Student Union bookstore to his head. One of his friends tried to remove the receipt, but couldn

A random recommendation: if you get a chance, take a listen to the last Starlight Mints record, The Dream That Stuff Was Made Of. It’s quite good, and they show up here in Dallas fairly regularly (they’re from Oklahoma).
This random recommendation was brought to you by a chance glance at the web site of their label, Seethru Broadcasting (also home to the marvelous Enon, also a semi-regular Dallas/Denton visitor and whose track Come Into is currently my writing soundtrack). It was there that I noticed that the version of the album that I have is clearly inferior to the alternate cover, which appears to depict a boozy Muppet Joe Cocker.

A new study has tracked what people of different demographics find funny. Their findings (as interpreted by me): people like dumb jokes.
One of the top jokes in Germany: “Why is television called a medium? Because it is neither rare nor well-done.” (Har-dee-har-har.)
Belgians preferred: “Well, you see, there are basically three kinds of people in the world. Those who can count and those that can’t.”
The Swedish fave: “A guy phones the local hospital and yells, `you’ve gotta send help! My wife’s in labour!” The nurse says, `calm down. Is this her first child?’ He replies, `no! This is her husband!”‘ (Okay, that’s one’s not awful.)
Women preferred: “A man walks into a bar with a piece of Tarmac under his arm. He says to the barman: `A pint for me, and one for the road’.” (Sad, really.)
Voted dumbest joke in an accompanying Internet survey: “Why are chickens considered good employees? Because they work around the cluck.”

Ah, cost cutting: Until a couple of weeks ago, my work laptop was a nice Dell Latitude. (Nice when it worked, that is, which was roughly half the time.) Today, I got my new work laptop: a Toshiba Satellite 115CS. (That link is to an eBay auction; the opening bid is $99. No one’s bid on it yet, and that’s likely because it’s not worth it. My Toshiba has its little eraser-nub mini-joystick ripped off, a b&w screen, no CD-ROM — it’s an ancient piece of crap. Oh, and it won’t boot up.)
Which is why today I bought an iBook. (On sale — only $894! That’s a hell of a deal, people.) Color me happy. (And in debt.)

I have an idea for an experiment, and I’d like your help. A lot of you no doubt know about the Blogdex, an MIT grad student’s excellent attempt to quantify the link relationships among blogs and between blogs and other sites. It’s really a nice service.
One of the most useful functions on the site is its list of the 25 most popular links among all the blogs it tracks. Reading the list is a good way to see what everybody else is talking about. I want to see if a little collective action can shove an uninteresting web page into the top 25.
The plan: a bunch of people add their blogs to the list of sites the Blogdex checks, if they haven’t already. Then, on one day, we all link to one exquisitely boring site, with no indication that it’s anything other than a normal blog link. Then, we watch it climb the list.
At the moment, #25 (a Winona Ryder/shoplifting story) is linked from only 12 blogs. So if we can get 12 people in on the project, we’ll have a good chance of getting on the list. (#15 is linked 23 times; #5 is only 20, which must mean that freshness of the link or some other metric must be taken into account somehow.)
I think it’d be an interesting experiment in watching a meme take hold. Will other people start linking to the site? How much will that site’s stats be affected? Let me know if you’re interested in helping test this out. (And I promise, this power will be used for good, not evil.)
On an unrelated note: I hope all my local readers will be making it out to tonight’s DFWblogs dinner. (I initially typed “making out to tonight’s DFWblogs dinner,” which I suppose is a fine option, too.) Important note: I’ll be bringing the mix CDs for the Mix CD Of The Month project, so if you want to trade, bring yours too.

Last minute Christmas shopping left to do? Well, if your friends and/or family like to look raffishly faux-rough hewn while tooling around town in their SUV, eddiebauer.com has a pretty silly deal going on: $20 off orders of $20 or more. (You just need to enter the coupon code 6033059 upon checkout.)
Well, it’s not quite as perfect as that, since their silly policies throw about $10 onto any cheap item there (at least $4.95 shipping, $3.00 “handling,” and tax, at least in Texas). But it does end up cutting the price of anything about $10. Search for something that costs $21 or so and you’ll come out paying only about $12. And there’s evidently no limit on how many times to use it.
Crabwalk.com: I work for you!

Tom Banse (BAHN-see), one of my fellow fellows in Japan last month, has been putting his stories for Seattle-area public radio stories on the web, in both audio and text. Tom is a much harder worker than I am, which is why he produced six stories from the trip and I but one…

The perfect gift for the Potter-obsessed: the Invisibility Cloak Harry Action Figure. Um, but you can see it.

The wonderfully named (and talented) writer Dahlia Lithwick usually reports on the Supreme Court for Slate, but this week she’s turned to a far more pressing subject: taste-testing fake meat.
“I chose to serve up a whole cornucopia of fake meat products to friends at one sitting. As one would at a wine tasting, we served up three ‘flights’ of food groups

Not long ago, Kelly linked to a great, great story in the Washington Post in which its author searched for the worst place in America. (The official title of Armpit of America was at stake.) He settled on Battle Mountain, Nevada, which sounds downright awful. (The author tries to make it salvage something good about the place at the end of the piece, but it doesn’t convince this reader, at least.)
Anyway, one of the people quoted in the story, the local newspaper editor, has evidently been fired for saying the Armpit of America title “sounds about right” for Battle Mountain. Sheesh.