Stats Mania

I just discovered the wonder that is my Stats page. Some of the exciting things I found:

•  The most popular search term for getting to my blog, by far, is "the radium water worked fine until his jaw came off." Who knew there was such an untapped need out there to learn about Radioactive Quackery?
• Two lucky people, however, have found my blog by searching for "urinal spinny things." I don't know, and I really don't want to know.
• People have also found my blog searching for "habitat of the radish" and "band names that start with 'the holy'" (which I do not understand why I am a result for, and which also apparently happened today).
• I was visited a couple times by someone searching "if you can't tell if its potato borscht, there might be children working in the mines." I'd like to think I helped them out.
• Apparently I also get a lot of hits from my pathetic animation of a stick figure doing the Macarena. Because of this, this is also my most-viewed post of all time, which I feel is a little unfair to all my other awesome posts.
• People have viewed my blog from iPods, iPads, and iPhones. In fact, more people have visited my site on an iPhone than using Linux. (However, far more people have visited using Other Unix operating systems, which I find very interesting indeed. I guess I really do attract nerds.)
• My blog has been viewed three times from a fucking PSP.
• I have gotten hits from Iran, Brazil, Ukraine, Malaysia, Georgia, and Latvia. In fact, I got views from Latvia, Georgia, and Malaysia on this very day, which makes me feel very international.
• My grand, all-time total of page views as of right now is 8,859, which is about 8,850 more than I expected it to be. Thanks, random people!

Guess What?

I am posting from my math class! Cool, huh?

We're making a graph of trout populations. Seriously. I'm not missing out on much.

Wikipedia Flotsam

One of Banacek's verbal signatures was the quotation of strangely worded yet curiously cogent "Polish" proverbs such as: "If you're not sure that it's potato borscht, there could be children working in the mines"; "Though the hippopotamus has no sting, the wise man would prefer to be sat upon by the bee"; "A wise man never plays leapfrog with a unicorn"; "If a wolf is after your sleigh - throw him a raisin cookie, but don't stop to bake him a cake"; and "Just because the cat has her kittens in the oven doesn't make them biscuits."

-from the article on Banacek, a 70s detective TV show set in Boston

Memes from Other Countries

...are actually really awesome.

Take Makmende, for example. His name is from a corruption of "make my day," as in "go ahead, make my day." He is the Kenyan Chuck Norris. (I'm serious- according to the infallible Wikipedia, "only Makmende could do or attempt to do the impossible.") He can appear anywhere, and he will fuck your shit up.


You will want to make this full-screen.

I have to admit, this is more badass than any English-speaking meme I've seen yet. Apparently "Makmende Amerudi!" is Swahili for "Makmende is Back!"

Also, "I feel really, like, engaged in this active process." Now, is this Engrish or the worst pick-up line ever? I don't know, but I find it really funny. This is probably because of the time. I also love how whenever he takes off his sunglasses, you know that shit's serious.

WOO SPINNY

Question: Has a video ever been banned from MTV for something other than being offensive/graphic?
Answer: Yes.

"The promotional video made for this was banned by MTV after being played on 120 Minutes due to its nature, in which the camera zooms in and spins so fast around the band, who are playing in a subway with a harmonica player, that it would induce dizziness within the viewer."
-Wikipedia article on Rattled by the Rush, a single by Pavement

Not-As-Popular Slogan: "Freedom Is In Peril"

Not only is this possibly one of the most amazing posters ever, but it has an interesting history too. If it wasn't for a stroke of good luck, this brilliant slogan might have been lost forever. Check it out.

Random Wiki

Did you know there are some languages that don't distinguish between blue and green?

So Many Attractions...

Breaking News! A tourism press release from Massachusetts reveals that there are, in fact, not 1,000 places worth seeing in the state. There are 996- and some of them no longer exist. Well, I know where I'm going for a day trip this weekend!

Burning Question of the Day

What would happen if you put a lightbulb inside a mirrored sphere? The light would have nowhere to go, wouldn't it? What would that look like?

Thank God we have crazy people on the internet to test these things out for us.

The Amen Break

This is a video about a 6-second drum break that changed music. The narrator's voice is possibly the most boring thing I have ever heard ever, but the content is fascinating, and I have faith in my readers to at least make it to the halfway mark. (Seeing as all my readers are figments of my imagination, I'd even expect a few to make it all the way through the discussion of copyright law.)

Interesting Topic of the Day: Polaroid Manipulation

Today's interesting topic is Polaroid Manipulation.

Polaroid Manipulation is, in short, a sort of old-school, analog Photoshop. You know those old-style Polaroids that come out wet, start black and then develop into color, and that you apparently aren't supposed to shake to dry? Well, if you do shake it while it's still drying, you'll come out with a surreal, wavy, wiggly, painting-like picture, that looks almost like a reflection in water. Shaking it different ways results in different patterns of waviness. People have turned shaking the little pictures into a sort of art, telling how you have to shake just the right way to achieve just the desired effect.

The fall picture is a good example of a photo that was truly "shaken like a Polaroid peec-tchah!"



Another way people can manipulate Polaroids is with a toothpick or something of the sort, scraping the dye off in places to achieve another kind-of painting effect. They can outline things, shade things, make things look like snow, make random borders... This way of manipulating Polaroids requires slightly less practice and slightly more creativity and drawing talent. Even though it may at first sound inferior to the wiggly-wobbly picture produced by shaking a Polaroid, you can do some really awesome stuff to your photos that way, too. A good example of a scraped Polaroid is the picture of the lamp.




(photos from here and here, if you check out the Flikr pools they're in, you can find some other really cool manipulated Polaroids, too)

Subject-O-Matique

After pasting something random again today:

"Anachronistic Antidisestablishmentarianism: A Case Study"

I noticed a pattern. It always happened in Yahoo Mail, in the subject line. So I googled this strange phenomenon (after googling Anachronistic Antidisestablishmentarianism: A Case Study and turning up a Wordpress blog post about a teen searching for Jesus) and guess what!!!

It's a Yahoo Mail Easter Egg!!!!!

This has to be my favorite easter egg ever. Yes, even more favorite than the one in the last post. I then proceeded to go through them all. I love them. I am SO using some of these phrases for posts in the future.

Earworms

So the song Log got stuck in my head today. You know, from Ren & Stimpy. The video completely cracks me up, and of course I'm most obliged to share the earworm so you can enjoy it too.


I wonder who came up with the term earworm? I mean, it's not a nice term. It's slightly strange, actually. It makes me think of some fat white writhing beast, a little like a maggot, that crawls across your pillow at night, enters your ear, latches onto your brain with its mouth thing like on a tapeworm, sucks it out during the night, and turns you into a zombie. (Feel free to hold me responsible for putting that lovely image into your head.) They should call it ear-itch, or repeater, or something like that.

And speaking of which, did you know there's a science to earworms? Nobody knows exactly why they happen. Apparently, though, it is because they cause some sort of cognitive itch, and the only way to get it to go away is to scratch it. And the only way to scratch it is by playing the song in your head... over and over and over again... until you want to scream. And repetitive songs or songs with sudden twists seem to be more likely to cause these cognitive itches. So, you learned something new today.

Me, too.

Two rather odd (but what did you expect from me?) PostSecrets I can very much relate to me.

Now you will know two pretty weird details about myself.

Aaaaaaugh!

The slightly annoying, amazingly melodramatic Wilhelm Scream, screamed by the guy famous for doing the song Purple People Eater- that's right, the one-eyed, one horned, flyin' purple people eater song- has been being used in films for 56 years now. It's something of a tradition (or, given the hilariously overexaggeratedness -wow, is that a word?- of it, maybe it's more 0f a very long-running joke in the film industry). Maybe it's kind of like the guy saying "My leg!" I hear in every single disaster scene in SpongeBob episodes. I found this awesome compilation of slips from films containing the Wilhelm scream on YouTube.

Can you hear The Scream in every clip?

One Random Fact About Moi

(which I really don't know if you want to know)

I've been told I'm naturally trippy. Sometimes I wonder if this is a good thing or not.