I was this close to ordering the Ub Iwerks Collection on Amazon when I found this on You Tube (right after watching “Christmas Comes but Once A Year” and getting nostalgic about all the 30s cartoons I use to watch over and over again when I was a kid). The Pincushion Man is my favourite cartoon in the whole wide world. The villain is a giant safety pin with arms and legs, and the pin part of his body is essentially a giant phallus with which he intimidates the balloon people in Balloonland. I seriously did not notice this until last year when I read this review of the clip.
The version here has different audio from what I remember, which suggests that I might have first seen it dubbed into German. No telling anymore, as I think the tape was accidentally overwritten with Rain Man or something else lame. Either way, it’s a fairly surreal 7 minutes that probably wouldn’t be a greater waste of your time than, say, masturbating to the picture on a box of Walkers shortbread.
Could you imagine a baby whose first word was “pimp”? They should at least learn to spell it before they wear it. In conclusion, 50-cent should release a speak-and-spell.
Researchers have now developed a program that automatically organizes a collection of digital music files into a virtual landscape. Instead of digging deeper and deeper through categories and subcategories of songs, you fly over an archipelago of sound-specific islands.
The software analyzes certain features from the audio signal, such as how much bass or treble exists and sound patterns that have to do with rhythm and tempo. Then the program clusters similar-sounding pieces into regions of music.
Here’s a neat bit of e-commerce: Religious organizations in Pakistan are using the Internet to help Muslims in Western countries buy and sacrifice animals for an annual festival.
Eid al-Adha marks the end of the Haj pilgrimage each year to Mecca and is known as the feast of sacrifice. Muslims who can afford it buy and slaughter animals and distribute the meat among the poor and relatives.
Muslims in Western countries unable to perform the ritual can now buy an animal over the Internet, and even watch it being slaughtered, before its meat is given away.
The most interesting part of this article is right at the end, where they report that some Muslims don’t practice e-commerce because it involves payment of interest (I’m assuming to companies like PayPal) or on their credit cards. According to a Wikipedia article on Islamic banking: In particular, Islamic law prohibits usury, the collection and payment of interest, also commonly called riba in Islamic discourse. Generally, Islamic law also prohibits trading in financial risk (which is seen as a form of gambling).
In response to JTL’s recent findings on male-female relationships, I would like to introduce an invention that I thought up on Tuesday when I was at a country bar. It is called the non-engagement engagement ring, and you wear it on the ring finger of your left hand when you’re going out to a club and you don’t want to get hit on. It’s kinda like one of those celtic heart ring thingies, only repurposed without the new age religious overtones. Also, it’s way less lame.
One of the benefits of the non-engagement engagement ring is that you can personalize the ring to fit whichever kind of club you’re going to. So if you’re going to a classy bar it would be a diamond ring or maybe one of those lockets where you keep your cocaine, and if you’re going to a punk club it would be filled with anthrax. (Do not confuse the two when you leave your house to go to the bar.) If you’re going to a rave, it would be day-glo pink and in the shape of a soother, or in my case at a country bar you could wear a stylish bit of rope or a ring with “my baby’s mama” or “born cuntry” engraved into it. Of course, if you’re going to a gay bar there’s a whole other system to adhere to. The possibilities are endless.
If you are a boy you may not think this invention is necessary, but a girl gets VERY TIRED of having to use the “oh yeah, I do that with myboyfriend” line every time a guy flirts with her, especially in situations where it feels very ditzy to do so. (Boy: “I agree that it’s a slippery slope from the weak AI hypothesis, but I wouldn’t call the The Chinese Room Experiment bullshit.” Girl: “My boyfriend has big muscles.”) A non-engagement engagement ring would solve this completely. All the girl would have to do to get her point across (subtly but unambiguously and without embarrassment to the boy), is to take a drink with her left hand. If the guy is too nervous to make his interests known, the problem is taken care of, and if he’s actually sincerely interested in the conversation, there’s none of the awkwardness involved in a pre-emptive strike. It’s win-win!
