5 slices of bread and an enormous amount of peanut butter. He ate almost the whole thing.

• KANA KANA HAK-LIHA!

  “These ads are all for regular, unbranded items to keep spirits up in Soviet Estonia. They are always unintentionally hilarious. This one is quite disturbing, though. You might find yourself yelling KANA KANA HAK-LIHA! for the next couple of days…”

• Flight of the Conchords – Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros

  “Sometimes when I freestyle I lose confidence…”

• Cell Phone Headsets

  

• Skeeter’s Branch Newsies: 1910 from Shorpy – the 100-Year-Old Photo Blog

  

  
  

  Those newsies would mess you up.

• Bzzzpeek

  This is the most ridiculously cute website ever. You can listen to how little kids from all over the world make animal sounds in their country. Don’t miss the tiny arrow on the right that takes you to the next page.

• Wires – on Flickr

  

  
  

  I saw things like this all the time in venezuela. People would just hijack power by splicing into the power lines on their own.

Did NancyPants and I just win $50 cash on Blingo?

Yes. Yes we did.

Have my friends and I won $100 worth of iTunes gift certificates, 2 movie tickets, a couple $25 Amazon certificates, and $50 cash on Blingo?

Yes. Yes we have.

How can you sign up for Blingo?

Sign up here for free

Should Josh Callaway take this opportunity to vent about how he has never won on Blingo ever?

No. No, he shouldn’t.

Time: 9:24 am, ten days late.

Weight: 9lbs 8oz.

Length: 22 inches

This Burger King gets my award for the consistently worst customer experience on the planet. I am not exaggerating when I say that 80% of the time they mess up my order. Not minor mistakes like forgetting to put cheese on a cheeseburger or giving you the wrong kind of drink. I mean that 80% of the time they will forget to put an entire hamburger or two in the bag. I have started to wonder if this is a cost cutting measure, like how insurance companies just default reject your first claim knowing that a large percentage of people will never push it further.

Speaking of insane cost cutting measures, have you noticed how so many places won’t give you ketchup unless you ask for it? This is America! We ALWAYS want ketchup with our fries. For you Europeans, imagine them not giving you mayonnaise! Or picture an American with out a 10 liter cup of soda. I know, insanity!

The really dumb part is that as soon as the fast food worker has done his duty and default-denied you ketchup, they will cave into your request by reaching into the bin of ketchup packets and giving you as many as fit in their hand. As you can see from the picture here; I was helped by someone with an 11 packet hand. Yes, that is ELEVEN packets of ketchup for my SMALL order of fries. If Shaquille O’Neil worked at Burger King my car would have been buried and crushed by ketchup packets.

Luckily, he remembered my 10 liters of soda.

I am not sure this imagery really gives the message the designers were looking for, unless of course that message was, “In Case of Fire Accept Fate Stoically.”

I would prefer something more along these lines. “In Case of Fire Move AWAY from it! Stairs Might be a Good Choice, but Seriously, Get Away from the Flames!”

I had a meeting today with our creative services team and as a part of it they had a creativity exercise where we had to rip a magazine ad out and then try to come up with a better one. Though my job is website user interfaces and user research, I thought I would give advertising a shot and I am glad I did because I have found my true calling.

I ended up with an ad for VESIcare, a drug that helps people with overactive bladders. It is hard to beat their advertising, what with their little people made out of pipes and their talk about problems with “internal plumbing”, but I took a shot at it.

Mind you, this is just one of a dozen quick concepts I did, but this was clearly the winning concept.

“That crazy astronaut lady wore a diaper when she drove across the country to kill that other astronaut lady. How embarrassing! Next time she should use VESIcare.”

I drove by this a while back and made my wife take a picture of it with my phone. She gets bored easily and I try to have little activities for her to do like, “Take a picture of that truck piled high with rotting deer carcasses; It will be fun!” “Come on, quit pretending like you are going to throw up and take the picture.”

Where do I live that I see things like this?! Just having this truck drive by within 5 miles of my house will likely have lowered my property values for the next ten years. Unless these are not actually road kill being collected, but are the aftermath of a deer slaying robot running around in the mountains. In that case my property values just sky rocketed.

I have been taking my camera to work every day waiting for some good lighting and weather on the mountain. It had been really bland weather and weak light but when it snowed heavily this morning I was sure I would get somethign interesting.

My 5 year old boy and I watched the NBA dunk contest highlights together and here is his take on the event:

“Why did that guy win? His dunk wasn’t that heroic!”

“What would be a ‘heroic’ dunk?”

“Like if he did flips or something in the air.”

So there you have it NBA, step it up.

I went to Olympia Washington over the weekend to visit my twin brother Joe and his family. Olympia was very wet and very beautiful and very wet and also very wet. I took a lot of photos, most of them include some form of moss or hippies, and sometimes mossy hippies. Joe is an artist, and I helped him set up a show at the Blackfront gallery

I will include his artist statement here so you get an idea of what he is up to:

My work explores the relationship between time and space. By “painting” a shadow in tape I turn a moment in time into a physical object. The tape shadow is left behind, stuck in place, flopping over a curb or bending up a wall, as the actual shadow continues on its path. Some shadows are captured from people or objects that are only temporarily filling a space. They move on leaving their presence recorded.

The blue shadows created with painters tape are reminiscent of the shadows in Monet’s paintings of haystacks. Whereas Monet painted idealized scenes of agrarian life in expensive oils, my shadows are cast by urban ephemera and recorded in a common commercial product. These shadows are a form of temporary public art. They are removed as easily as they were put in place.

It is a coincidence that this show corresponds with Groundhog Day. I can make no promises that my work will bring an early spring.

One thing I didn’t suspect was that by the time we got to the last shadow, the plant, it would be midnight and I would be so tired of kneeling on hardwood and painstakingly tearing tape that I would want to tape Joe to the wall and leave. I pushed through that phase and finished up the taping and was glad. It looked great and the show went really well.

PS- I bought a new camera (Nikon D80) and will likely be tormenting everyone with hundreds of photos.

My wife is 7 months pregnant and it has been very difficult. Here are just a few issues:

1. She has to sleep with so many pillows to prop her in a comfortable position that I am left with only two inches of bed.

2. Sometimes she is hormonal and grumpy and gets mad at me for things like refusing to help with anything ever.

3. She makes pained noises when she bends over to pick up things and it bothers me when I am playing on my laptop.

4. She gets heart burn so badly that I can’t order the spicy food I want to eat. Tonight she ordered our thai food “extra extra mild”. If you are ever tempted to do that just know that instead of the masaman curry you ordered you will get some gray potato water and your husband will have to pout for hours because you ruined dinner and then he will have to go write on his blog and tell everyone about it.

Pregnancy is really hard.

I found this on a Honda dealer’s website as I was looking to get a quote from their internet department.
I have not often seen a more brilliant use of the web.

• Robots think we taste like bacon

• turn signals

  “For a few years now, I have been fascinated by a very odd automotive accessory,….. the add on turn signal / Stop light…… Mainly because of the seemingly endless variety of styles and companies that made these things from the teens through the 40’s. I seem to come across a different one at least every month, and they just keep getting stranger and stranger.”

• Diplomatic Impunity

  “What makes officials corrupt? Disentangling law and culture is a tricky business, but a pair of economists have come up with an ingenious way to do it: studying the frequency of parking violations committed by diplomats in New York City.”

  You will have to scroll down a bit to find the article.

• Awesome Kung Fu from 1964

• Jokes Made by Robots, for Robots.

  “Waiter! Waiter! What’s this robot doing in my soup?”
  “It looks like he’s performing human tasks twice as well, because he knows no fear or pain.”

When you leave your laptop out and your 5 year old figures out how to open and use Apple Photo Booth, you will come downstairs to find this on your computer.

View Animation