The Mechanical Turk

Special Neoconservative Incompetence Cloning edition!

Soulless, chillingly evil US Veep Dick Cheney +

Formerly (and mysteriously) popular war criminal US Sec’y of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,

-( (hair/2) + (war criminality) ) * ( (avg. human sympathy)/10 ) =

Totally on-the-ball Sec’y of the Treasury Hank Paulson?

Fucking hell, where do they get these people? Aside from a petri dish, that is.

So I was reading an article this afternoon & noticed the HP advertisement that appeared right next to it:

And I kept thinking, that’s so familiar…

'Tis the season—to get ready for fabulous gift-giving, of course. From the Ship of Fools, here’s the Walled Nativity Set:

Thank you, Dan Sack, for the best Christmas ever.

This video seems to illustrate something that was mentioned briefly in the last episode of BBC Three’s Singing with the Enemy, where the lead singer of death metal group Amputated (and didn’t he look exactly like a young Murray from Flight of the Conchords?) mentions that sometimes he makes “oinking” sounds while singing. Very metal.

Super-Special Audio/Triplet Edition!

Spotty Interpol croonster Paul Banks

Largely-forgotten Guns 'n' Roses excrescence
Axl Rose, and

Earsplitting lollapalooza Ethel Merman?

Gotta love that warbly voice-over.

I'm pretty sure that I, or at least friends of mine, had at least half of these items when I was an impressionable youth—it all seems so familiar.

But you have to wonder why the humans just keep getting caught. Is this fun?

Steve Ballmer, chair-throwing CEO of Microsoft and

The Creature from Mel Brooks’
“Young Frankenstein”?

Update: Well, this is turning into something of a meme. One of the comments in the Fake Steve Jobs blog has a link to this awesome video:

I am very impressed.

It’s hardly a controversial position, but I don’t like spam. I really hate it, actually. Past email addresses eventually got so clogged that I had shut shut them down & create news just to regain sanity in my life. This approach is perhaps best called the “Slash and Burn” method.

But… you can’t deny that spam has come up with some wonderful things. Well, specifically, one: the spurious names that are appended to the “from” header. They consist of a combination of a couple of words taken randomly from the dictionary & a “middle initial”, all intended to bypass your spam filters. These random couplings sometimes beget glorious results:

• Double O Tedious (Irish, perhaps?)
• Urinate G. Coordinator (this almost sounds like a job title)
• Omens H. Absolutism
• Gunshots I. Senatorial (I’ve received this one many times over the years—perhaps these aren’t as random as I thought)
• Religiously H. Panacea (interesting combination there)
• Stultifies H. Putrescence
• Chuvash B. Residue
• Powering H. Kahlua (for the adolescent alcoholic)

Bloody hell! I pre-posted a few articles in our Typo-based blog & brought the whole blog down. Ian says permissions got munged. Perhaps the pre-dated posts did it, but it’s a bit of a mystery as to why.

I’ve been deep in the middle of fixing CSS bugs on one job & designing another site, so haven’t had much chance to write here. Here are some things which have looked very interesting:

• Under the hood look at the new Backpack—Interesting-sounding changes afoot for Backpack. Interesting to read about “Hover Observer”, which monitors the user’s mouse movements over a page & appends :hover classes on-the-fly as & when appropriate. A great idea, although I’d be worried about excessive memory usage.
• Apple’s new .Mac web gallery uses a 408 KB javascript library. Yikes! Apparently it’s based—at least in part—on Sproutcore. And Prototype. And Scriptaculous.
• “In other words, A = A”—A great Daily Show clip of Bush’s condescending [mis]usage of a stock phrase.

Proposed Japanese MOD logo: let’s hug!

So we’ve examined terrorist organisation logos from around the world. How about their nemeses, those of defence departments from around the world?

As the author notes, the proposed new logo for the Japanese Ministry of Defence is a bit Web 2.0. But we’re noticing common themes here:

• Oak leaves (they taste like victory!)
• Eagles
• Swords
• Anchors
• Creepy associations from the past (Germany)

Now, surely some artist out there can create a tableau of a sword-wielding, oak-leaf-chewing eagle dropping an anchor on a bone-and-gun-laden star. That would be awesome.

We all need logos, it seems. Even your terrorist organisations need to differentiate themselves from one another. But where do you start? What are all the other organisations doing?

The Weather Underground logo

Ironic Sans has helpfully collected a large number of logos from terrorist organisations from the past 30 years or so, helpfully organised thus:

• Stars
• One gun
• Two guns crossed
• Other weapons crossed
• Crossbones
• Animals with multiple heads
• Other (which can also be called “WTF”)

Presumably, a logo consisting of three guns, a machete below crossbones, on top of a star, surrounded by the World-Snake would look as if it were designed by committee.

In the style of Spy Magazine:

Pope Benedict XVI and

The mystery man from David Lynch’s “Lost Highway”?

“Give me back my Latin Mass”

For fear that they''ll look like this: