Dick in a Box

Somehow I missed this on SNL.
Thanks once again to jaz for producing another gem.

Mind Games Day

No, this isn't a day you should spend playing games with the heads of others. Mind Games Day is a day of mind puzzles, games and skill. Brainteasers, Rubik's cubes, puzzles, Sudoku, Kakuro, interlocking metal thingees...you get the idea.

Merry Christmas 2006

Merry Christmas. Whether you are traveling from house to house delivering presents or staying home playing with your own, enjoy the day.

My 5 all-time holiday films, in no particular order:

• A Christmas Story
• Elf
• It's a Wonderful Life
• Scrooged
• The Santa Clause

R.I.P. James Brown

On a day mostly affiliated with the joys of morningtime gift giving and recieving,
sad news comes out of Atlanta as James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, has died at age 73.

Rest in peace, Mr. Brown.

Brainworks: Spelling is for kids

I got this in an email once from AL-9000.

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid is aamznig. Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and you awlyas thought slpeling was ipmorantt!

R.I.P. Joseph Barbera

Joseph Barbera, half of the famous Hanna and Barbera, died of natural causes yesterday at the age of 95. This duo is responsible for some of the most famous and beloved cartoons of all time: Tom and Jerry, the Jetsons, Yogi Bear....the list is pretty long. There have been several movies made based on Hanna-Barbera cartoons including Scooby-Doo, Josie and the Pussycats, and The Flintstones (the Flintstones, for the record, was the first cartoon ever aired in prime time). They made tons of other cartoons we all loved as kids, spread over half a century. In going over the long list of characters they created in preparation for this post, I found several I had no idea they'd made, including the Smurfs and the Snorks (sorta the same, I know). They'd even made one of my all-time favorite non-animated shows from my childhood: the Banana Splits.


My personal Hanna-Barbera favorites are:

• Captain Caveman (Captain...Caaaaaaaavemaaaaaaaaaan)
• Huckleberry Hound (one of my favorite shirts as a teen proudly sported Huckleberry)
• The Herculoids (what were the names of those glob-guys?)
• Jonny Quest (Haji! Bandit!)
• Superfriends
• Jabberjaw (who can resist a big funny shark?)
• Top Cat
• Hong Kong Phooey
• Quick Draw McGraw
• Great Grape Ape (the song sticks with me mostly)
• Birdman
• Space Ghost (who can be seen even today on The Cartoon Network)

Which were your favorites?


Rest in Peace, Mr. Barbera.
 

Happy Agnostica

Happy Agnostica! This holiday, celebrating Science, continues for an indeterminate amount of time, as dictated by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (duh). What I didn't know until today was that it is a holiday placed in the holiday season with specifically a non-religious nature. The definition given at agnostica.com is decidedly less, well, agnostic in tone:

Agnostica is the only truly secular winter celebration. It is a celebration for the scientist in all of us, celebrating not some contrived story written thousands of years ago and translated seventeen times over until the Hebrew word for "rope" gets turned into "camel," and then inexplicably the whole deal is replaced by consumer-frenzy dictated to us by a fat child-labor mogul in a fur-lined red suit, but rather of ourselves, the perfect self-defining nature of the universe, and of being proud of the human intellect.

I guess Atheistica didn't sound as good. Other links of interest include the Nukees cartoon strips and the all-in-one Agnostica page.

Time Waster: Bubble Trouble

This is maybe time waster of the year...
for the larger, more official version, click here.

...I'm a VAIO???

The "I'm a PC. I'm a Mac" campaign is no doubt one of the most popular on TV right now. It's also one of the most successful...for Apple anyway. For the rest of the computer companies out there (i.e. those who make "PC"s), it's proven to be fairly destructive to any kind of image they promote for themselves. It should be no surprise, then, that at least one company has tried to distance itself from that boring, pudgy, and uncool visual metaphor. Sony Australia is pushing their new VAIO laptops as "The non-pc pc" and their website sports a small Flash app that asks "Who do you want to play with?" and has likenesses of both the "PC guy" and the "Mac guy" along with a new character: the "VAIO girl". The app itself does nothing more than make sounds when you roll over the characters (they give no love to the PC guy), and leads me to believe that Sony couldn't beat 'em, so they're trying to join 'em.

Somebody should tell Sony that the VAIOs still run on Windows.

Day of the Ninja

Yes, folks, it's true. Today is the "Day of the Ninja", though I'm not sure why it's today. Actually, I can't even really think of a reason why this is a holiday to begin with other than the fact that Ninjas around the world were jealous that Pirates, their arch-nemeses, had their own day. Eh...pirates are better (with the possible exception of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello and Rafael, of course).