Someone has collected bad paintings of Barack Obama:

Possibly my favourite example

It’s a site that does exactly what it says on the tin!

So Microsoft has been churning out lots of really crap stuff recently—as well as really good stuff like the ongoing work on IE9. But this post is about the crap stuff. A prime example is “Songsmith”, software that helps you create the most banal music based on how you’re singing.

We’re going to place Songsmith within the context of a big joke. First:

The Wind-Up

Then:

The Pitch

“Running with the Songsmith”, based upon the old Van Halen song. Seriously? That’s what it came up with to accompany the singing? I laughed until I cried.

Culled from my Facebook posts:

Back in the 1990s, Comedy Central did a series of fantastic interstitial ads called “Think Positive” with the Buddy Scott Trio. It was filled with the ironic 50s nostalgia that characterised so much of the US in the late 1990s.

The subject in each ad’s focus was always in a dire, impossible situation (my favourite was with the man on death row) and, when things seemed their darkest, the Buddy Scott Trio would strike up the song “You’re Gonna Win!”.

This song is frequently in my head, particularly if something is going spectacularly wrong.

And the drummer: he is awesome.

It seems that GTD, that favourite of serial procrastinators, is being supplanted in people’s affections.

That should be reversed, so he could see it in a mirror.

From the ever-fantastic Photoshop Disasters blog, someone from the Globe forgot to replace that trust standby placeholder text with the real content.

That the makeup department did something horrible to that dog.

It quacks like a duck: it’s a duck.

So Obama makes a speech at the University of Cairo (an excellent speech, in fact). You can always control what you say, but you can’t control who attends to your saying it:

Palestinian militants from the Popular Resistance Committee watch the televised speech of US President Barack Obama in Gaza City, Thursday, June 4, 2009.

Click on that link. You’ll not be sorry.

Well, I may like to dabble in the occasional Separated at Birth series, but Totally Looks Like has some particularly incredible juxtapositions:

Totally Looks Like nails the uncanny resemblance between Quentin Tarantino & Squiggy from Laverne & Shirley

Alas, poor Quentin. It’s been hard to take him seriously for a long time now, but this may be the final nail in the coffin.

Could humans at any point in history, given the right information, construct an electronic communication network? To test this hypothesis, Substitute Materials will attempt to build a functional electric battery and telegraph switch from materials found in the wilderness, using no modern tools except information from the internet. The telegraph will be a first step towards an ahistorical internet.

What the author doesn’t say is that he’s doing this in the wilderness while wearing a business suit.

And that he couldn’t find any flint to make a good ax—he had to order it from the Internet.

I foresee much time spent reading this site.

There are moments when I’m really happy not to live in the US any longer. This is one of them, because I simply know that if I lived & worked there, I’d have to make an eagle-based logo for a consulting company. Because, as I’m sure you’ve twigged, they’re keen-eyed consultants who know what’s what.

And not because they’re nearly extinct.

Well, I do love logo design, but this one is unfortunate on so many levels. From the Shipment of Fail:

1973 Logo: The Catholic Church’s Archdiocese Youth Commission

How times have changed! Any priest holding this logo today would face some an angry throng of pitchfork-bearing laity.

Are HDR images the new velvet paintings?

I recently Tumbld upon this somewhat festive oddity:

Each one is a single unicode character being rendered differently as indicated. The last one is Firefox on OSX.

This isn't really my area, but from what I saw in the markup I'm assuming it's different systems/browsers using different fonts.

As I quipped at the time, I'm surprised that Safari 4 (beta) does not look more like a slimmer relation of the Chrome snowman sporting a back-to-front baseball cap, neon mittens and disco snow.

Fashionably late “a week is a year in politics” edition!

Erstwhile Presidential hopeful John McCain; and,

Erstwhile World Conqueror hopeful Dr Evil?

Bonus points for a video comparison between McCain’s acceptance speech at the RNC & Dr Evil’s reminiscences of his childhood.

Update: It’s already been done! Awesome (audio only):