Instant Rimshot is a single serving site (Previously.) that features a big red button. When pushed, that button makes that "pada-chk" sound of a drumset rimshot. Unlike the red button above, it actually works.
Use it to punctuate jokes, but only when near a computer. With speakers.
(From Justin who found this via kottke.org via smarterware.org via Felicia Day via Twitter.)
You Suck at Craigslist is a website that shows spectacularly sucky or unintentionally funny/sad Craigs' list posts. Mostly it's just gross mis-spellings. "This started when I was trolling our local Craigslist in my continuing attempts to find interesting additions to our furnishings. I’ve decided that people suck at Craigslist, and I decided to provide illustrations to demonstrate this fact."Yeah. Also, the one below is especially frightening. I mean, must you really add "INCOMING?" Insult, injury, etc.
The Speech Accent Archive is an audio database of different accents maintained by Steven H. Weinberger of George Mason University."Native and non-native speakers of English all read the same English paragraph and are carefully recorded. The archive is constructed as a teaching tool and as a research tool. It is meant to be used by linguists as well as other people who simply wish to listen to and compare the accents of different English speakers."
"One of my actor friends showed me this website and I am now in love! It's this really awesome site that displays accents from all over the world! And every person says the exact same thing. It also tells you how long they have been speaking English, their age, male/female, and what they say is translated into IPA so you can see the sounds they use. It's just a really awesome linguistic and accent page!"
Enjoy listening and immitating, I sure did. Thanks to this website, I am just now beginning to understand what I sounded like in 3rd grade. It's too bad I still can't immitate my parents' accents, thereby foiling all hopes for stand-up comedy. *Sigh.*
(From my actor friend Justine, pircutre by zippercut)
Drunk People Yoga Positions is an entry on Fun Tuna that has side-by-side comparisons of yoga positions and drunk people passed out in remarkably similar positions.Auto-Tune the News is a YouTube series that takes television news media clips and melodifies them with auto-tune. (Yes. Yes I did just verbify that noun. Agains.)
This particular episode (#6) deals with a jobs bill, Sarah Palin's resignation non-speech, and Michael Jackson's death.
From my friend Stef:"This reminds me of those songs you posted a while ago that used auto tune. I think these guys are pretty talented! It's interesting to see how regular speech has such musical rhythm! Check it out."
Love it. Enjoy!
Bonus: The Auto-tune entry to which Stef refers. Happens to be one of my all-time favorite links!
I Am The Anonymous Model is an essay by Jezebel's TatianaTheAnonymousModel, who quit modeling, took up writing, and finally reveled her identity.Jenna states, "the problems of the modeling industry are not in fact personal, but structural." Nice. I hope she gets to eat as many (veggie) burgers as she wants now.
"They were all 16 and 20 and 23, and most were amenable to staying up late and talking about Lech Walesa and the problems of teaching post-WWII history in a country where 15 years ago neighbors turned each other in to the secret police for having an extra chicken. Or they would trash talk creepy clients while drinking white wine out of 7UP bottles in the street because none of us had the money for a bar tab and the apartment was too hot. That was good, too....
I spent three nights in a models' apartment near Wilshire and La Brea with no electricity; my three roommates and I removed our eye makeup by candlelight....
When we were talking about mutual acquaintances, my Madonna lookalike friend told me a story about a fellow model, a teenaged scenester I'd been hanging out with in Los Angeles and New York earlier that year. The girl rolled with a musician boyfriend who was fucking my friend when she was 16, and she had a momager who lived off her earnings, which included at that time $25,000 for a major global campaign. And, said my friend, the teenager had actually just entered rehab in Arizona because the whole time I had known her, she was shooting heroin. The story -- with the stage mother, the influence of one of the many dudes who fuck 16-year-olds, the money jobs, the intravenous drug use -- all seemed at the time like a giant neon sign flashing Get Out Of This Industry Now. I still can't believe I didn't even realize she was strung out. Perhaps that contains a depressing message about the kinds of connections this business fosters between people. Or about how I coarsened as a person during my time wandering this earth selling the rights to my image for a living. Or both. I don't know....
My last job -- "Oh, if only we could be shooting film," exclaimed the photographer, as he put in his memory card -- was for a bridal magazine, and I wore, among other things, a dress that cost $29,000 and was largely constructed of ostrich feathers. Before the job, the photographer had found an old personal blog I used to write, under the name I'll now be writing with for Jezebel. He wanted to know why I'd given up on that blog; I was good and kind of funny, he said. I told him I'd gotten bored, which was more or less true.
At the very end of the shoot, as the assistants were striking the set, undoing everything they'd jerry-rigged so convincingly the day before, as the stylists were packing up the couture gowns and the art director was looking at potential layouts with her boss, and as I was putting on my jacket and heading for the door, the photographer called out to me, "Jenna! Please just keep writing."
My name is Jenna Sauers.
I smiled, and told him that I would."
Palin’s Resignation: The Edited Version is a Vanity Fair piece where the magazine's editors wield their mighty pens in efforts to salvage the mess that was Palin's resignation speech."Just how poorly constructed was the governor’s holiday-weekend address? We asked V.F.’s red-pencil-wielding executive literary editor, Wayne Lawson, together with representatives from the research and copy departments, to whip it into publishable shape. Here is the colorful result."
"So, in what some could consider a passive aggressive attack, Vanity Fair has edited Sarah Palin's most recent speech. While the grammar and style corrections may seem humorous, the gregarious factual errors are simply shocking.Word.
Moreover, it seems that Palin--or whatever ho-dunk kid with a working computer and printer wrote this speech--never learned the basic principles of good writing: be concise."
Ten Things You Don’t Know About the Sun is a Discover Magazine article by Phil Plait with 10 factoids that, among other things, clears up common misconceptions about the sun.
Creepy Faces is a blog about the art of ruining a picture. It's okay. They feature normal pictures ruined by people in the background, with some exceptions. Okay a lot of exceptions. It seems like a good chunk are just pictures of people making faces on purpose. The best ones live up to the orginal intent of the blog. According to them:
"We're here to showcase you, Mr. and Mrs. Normal McNormalface, ruining a seemingly normal picture with a distorted, twisted, bone-chilling face that would make your Mama sad to have ever born you.
We obviously accept user submissions - in fact, we encourage them. But please remember this site is not about being malicious, it's all about being funny. So please keep this in mind when you're sending us your photos. Otherwise, creep on."
Back on the bad tattoos theme, which I'm rather fond of, there is a whole blog devoted just to that. (Oh Interwebs, what *don't* you offer!). Ugliest Tattoos, The Gallery of Regrets is a blog devoted to mocking awful tattoos. In their own words:
"Some tattoos are great. Girl in martini glass? Sexy! Giant swimming koi? Appreciative of other cultures! A well-executed tree, branches to the sky, roots to the earth? Nice. Very tasteful. Symbolic, yet understated.The winners here were all from the winning page 3.
But some tattoos are . . . less great. In fact, some are brain-explodingly terrible. The butterfly tramp stamps, NASCAR emblems, and Star Trek commemorative plate–style back pieces that walk this earth are an assault on the eyes and an affront to all who encounter them. Thank god you don’t have one of those. Oh wait, you do?
Can I see?"
Why chicks cry is an entry on John Glenn Taylor's Easily Mused blog, which shows women crying in DC romance comics (1957 to 1968), each figure carefully captioned with rationales for the tears. As Metafilter points out, it's snark-tastic fun. 
(From Metafilter)
Gauging Your Distraction is an online New York Times game by Gabriel Dance, Tom Jackson and Aron Pilhofer that tests how well you mutitask by having you change lanes while driving and texting.According to the authors: "New studies show that drivers overestimate their ability to multitask behind the wheel. This game measures how your reaction time is affected by external distractions. Regardless of your results, experts say, you should not attempt to text when driving."
Except for me, apparently. See results above.
(From The Gray Lady)
Great Tweets of Science is a PhD comic about what it would be like if the great minds of science had Twitter accounts. Very, very nerdy. 
Spotify is a desktop-based streaming music service, currently only available in Europe. It's in beta, invitation-only mode... (Unless they *think* you're in the UK, tehee!) You download their widget thing, register, and start listening.
I would say it's less like Pandora and more like unlocking the iTunes music store. You can skip with abandon (including to the middle of songs!), repeat segments of songs, make playlists, listen to radio stations stratified by decade, etc. etc. etc.
"Spotify offers you legal and free access to a huge library of music.
Why do I have to install Spotify?
By installing Spotify as a stand alone application you get a much better user experience and audio quality compared to web-based sites.
Do I need to pay to use Spotify?
No, the advertising-funded version of Spotify is free of charge, however, for now it requires that you receive an invite to register unless you are in the UK. Visit our invitation page to sign up to the waiting list. Alternatively, you can pay for an ad-free premium subscription to Spotify.
What countries is Spotify available in?
Spotify is currently available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France and Spain. We hope to launch in more countries in the future.
Can I scrobble the music I play to Last.fm?
Yes, Spotify has built in support for last.fm that can be enabled from the preferences menu. For more details have a look at this blog post.
How do I get new invites?
Getting invites is one of the benefits of being a Premium subscriber in one of the countries where Spotify Free is available. You receive two new invitations each time your Premium account is renewed (yearly or monthly, depending on your payment method).
(From Slate)
World's Fastest Everything is a Youtube video stringing together clips of various World's Fastest record holders performing quick feats. Including but not limited to: cup-stacking, gun shooting, gun re-loading, clapping, and a 100 meter dash.
The undressing one is pretty funny. Because he looks like he's stopped, and then WHOOP, he's done. Very kitsch.
Also sadly, this is not also the world's fastest video. Can't wait until someone pares this down to 0.1 seconds. Go interwebs, go!
Why are we so fat? is a New Yorker article by Elizabeth Kolbert. She talks about the global fat epidemic, as evinced in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."The World Health Organization has come up with more than three dozen actions that governments could take to encourage better eating and fitness; these include imposing a 'fat tax' on caloric snacks, improving health education, regulating food and beverage advertising, limiting the foods available in public facilities, and insuring access to sidewalks and bike paths."
Click through for the article, which has actual paragraphs and makes more sense. (Having been edited by a proper editor, and all.)
DEALBREAKER. is a tumblr blog about relationship dealbreakers and how they are capable of ruining everything. Some relationships are over before they start.The entries include an eponymous dealbreaker, and a paragraph from the perspective of the dumper explaining to the dumpee why the dealbreaker ruined all chances of true love.
Featured dealbreakers include "You're cheap," "You Love Strip Clubs," "Your Infatuation With Children’s Literature," and "You Chew Tobacco." Pretty spot-on, I say. The blog comes with pretty pictures as well. Ace.
(From KS)
"When the Grand View Topless Coffee shop in Vassalboro opened in February 2009, Lisa Beaudreau and Star Cunningham both found jobs there. 'Yes, I am a topless waitress, but I'm just a regular normal person in society,' Cunningham says. 'I honestly don't think in this economy right that there is a job out there that would pay roughly the same.'
In June, the shop burned down in a suspected arson and reopened in tent."
I showed my friend EP, just to see what he thought. His reaction was, "OH GOD THESE ARE NOT PRETTY BOOBS." I had suspected as much, but not being a guy, I wasn't sure.
The tragedy.
Hammer Pants Dance (HD) is a Youtube video from A&E TV where a "group of dancers wearing Hammer Pants flashmob a trendy store and surprise hipsters in skinny jeans." It's basically a promo for the upcoming A&E show, Hammertime, which "follows the life of rapper and dancer MC Hammer, his wife of more than 23 years and their family of seven. The show takes an unprecedented look behind his larger-than-life personality and into his life as a devoted husband, father and business entrepreneur".
Gimmicky, sure. But I like that they found so many talented and different-looking dancers. I mean that accountant guy gets down.
HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK? is an essay by Lera Boroditsky, assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems at Stanford University."To test whether differences in color language lead to differences in color perception, we compared Russian and English speakers' ability to discriminate shades of blue. In Russian there is no single word that covers all the colors that English speakers call 'blue.' Russian makes an obligatory distinction between light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). Does this distinction mean that siniy blues look more different from goluboy blues to Russian speakers? Indeed, the data say yes. Russian speakers are quicker to distinguish two shades of blue that are called by the different names in Russian (i.e., one being siniy and the other being goluboy) than if the two fall into the same category.(From Metafilter)
For English speakers, all these shades are still designated by the same word, 'blue,' and there are no comparable differences in reaction time.
Further, the Russian advantage disappears when subjects are asked to perform a verbal interference task (reciting a string of digits) while making color judgments but not when they're asked to perform an equally difficult spatial interference task (keeping a novel visual pattern in memory). The disappearance of the advantage when performing a verbal task shows that language is normally involved in even surprisingly basic perceptual judgments — and that it is language per se that creates this difference in perception between Russian and English speakers.
When Russian speakers are blocked from their normal access to language by a verbal interference task, the differences between Russian and English speakers disappear."
(Every Episode of) Cowboy Bebop is a website with links to just that, including the movie. If I were more of a nerd, I would have already seen all these. 
'Sit! Stay! Snuggle!' is a story from the Wall Street Journal about a new sort of service dog--one for the psychologically afflicted. It's very interesting."NEW YORK -- Like any other golden retriever seeking a treat, Tuesday nudged his owner's hand with his snout one recent morning and waited expectantly.
Luis Carlos Montalvan got up from a chair in his small Brooklyn apartment and walked to the kitchen. Tuesday followed close behind, eyes fixed on a white cabinet. The retriever sat alertly as Mr. Montalvan, an Iraq war veteran with severe post-traumatic stress disorder, reached for a vial of pills, lined a half-dozen on the table and took them one by one.
The dog had gotten what he wanted: When the last pill was swallowed, he got up and followed his master out of the kitchen, tail wagging.
Tuesday is a so-called psychiatric-service dog, a new generation of animals trained to help people whose suffering is not physical, but emotional. They are, effectively, Seeing Eye dogs for the mind....
Tuesday, now 3 years old, listens to the daily alarm on Mr. Montalvan's wristwatch, his cue to make sure he takes his pills. Wearing the red harness of a work dog, he accompanies Mr. Montalvan to Dunkin' Donuts and the movie theater, to Veterans Administration group counseling sessions in Manhattan, and to Columbia University, where Mr. Montalvan is studying journalism and communication.
At Mr. Montalvan's apartment -- decorated with his Purple Heart and Bronze Star certificates, and pictures and paintings of Tuesday -- they sleep in the same wooden sleigh bed.
On a recent afternoon, Mr. Montalvan and Tuesday walked to a nearby subway station. The platform was crowded. Mr. Montalvan began to look agitated. Tuesday, who had been lying at his feet, jumped up and stood between his master and the nearest cluster of people, creating a buffer. Mr. Montalvan's breathing noticeably stabilized.
The train approached. Mr. Montalvan bent down to tie his Army combat boots, scratched Tuesday behind the ears, and they made their way aboard."
Margaret and Helen is a personal/political blog by some very old ladies, that have been friends for a very long time. In their own words: "My name is Helen Philpot. I am 82 years old. My grandson taught me how to do this so that I could “blog” with my best friend Margaret Schmechtman who I met in college almost 60 years ago. I have three children with my husband Harold. Margaret has three dogs with her husband Howard. I live in Texas and Margaret lives in Maine.
Are you for real?
Why is that so hard to believe? Now I know what Santa Claus must feel like.
Have you really been friends for 60 years?
Some friendships last a lifetime. We just seem to be living a hell of a long time.
Why doesn’t Margaret write more?
She prefers to pick up the phone and call. I guess I am more the writer, but she is a wonderful artist. I have some of her paintings in my house. My grandchildren set me up on this computer, but Margaret always has problems getting on the Internet and says it is too slow. Maybe it is a Maine thing. She reads all of the comments and calls me when she sees a comment that she wants to talk about. Sometimes she offers witty lines that I add to my stories."
Valerie Atherton's Playgound and Intellectual Department is a website about movies and movie reviews. Facts:
I was born in Malibu, California.
I was a successful tween model for a few years.
In school, I was voted best smile.
I took some acting classes before, but the teacher was English and thought he was all that. La-me.
My heros are my parents, poor people who work hard or win a lottery and can live the American dream, famous women who struggled and did important things and made a difference.
Why the Blog?
I grew up being told by my parents and teachers and friends that there was something special about me, that I would go on to do big things. So here I am! I have decided that I want to be a writer because I think I have a unique perspective on things (a young, hip perspective from today’s generation) and can offer intelligent things to be read.
I call it Valerie Atherton’s Playground and Intellectual Department! Why? Because sometimes it’ll be silly like playing at a playground and sometimes it’ll make you stop and think about stuff.
xo -Val"
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| End Times | ||||
| ||||
Given that “The Daily Show” is dependent on other news media to provide you with your fodder, is it counterproductive to help bring down an organization that supplies your content?
I think the point of the piece is, really, if I could be serious for one moment, that without institutions like yours, the news would not exist. I think everyone has a genuine love of your institution here, because it’s the first paper that almost everybody reads here in the morning. You guys aren’t doing a bad enough job for us to make fun of on a constant basis. Every once in a while you slip up, and then you’re lambs to the slaughter. But you should really be more [terrible]. You’re doing too good of a job.
Why do I get the sense you’re just buttering me up, and your actual report will be much more scathing?
Exactly.
