Turn up the sound on your computer and then just let this go for a while... the unattainable is unknown at zombo.com, you know.
posted by AR Ross at 12:07 PM

The real kicker with this scheme is that employees are still expected to work for eight hours a day. Although, one could argue, 'How can you be sure that I haven't worked eight hours, if you haven't been using a clock?' Ah, the reign of relativism.
posted by AR Ross at 12:46 PM

A certain sister of someone close to us (anonymity granted for her own protection) tried to convince us to sink some money into this. In typical MLM-woosy-with-the-gobs-of-cash-coming-your-way fashion, she insisted that Bigsmart wasn't a scam. I'm just glad that she'll get some of her investment back. (Pray that it doesn't go to Equinox or Amway this time.)
posted by AR Ross at 11:51 PM

I imagine we'll soon see newswire photos of Pikachu and Jigglypuff being burned in effigy...
posted by AR Ross at 12:34 PM

The instant that we become aware of the real locus of violence in our society, we block it out of our minds, shuttling that fact down into the root cellar of our consciousness. How can we ignore it though? We can't. We shouldn't.
posted by AR Ross at 11:29 PM

While sorting the archives of my inbox this morning, I ran across a link to a very special sort of cookie-- one that packs a caloric wallop worth noting. If you click this link and look in the right-hand column, you'll see the suspect treat; it delivers an oleaginous 750 calories! To put that into perspective, eating about 1/2 cup (yes, cup) of butter will give you the same output.
posted by AR Ross at 10:49 AM

When I lived in Chicago and Washington, I would sometimes forget to bring anything to read on the subway. This of course led to watching as train cars passed, to see if someone had left something interesting behind. Some very clever people in London have come up with a really innovative solution to this problem: now you can purchase a single short story for £1 from a machine in the Tube. Better yet, they're good stories. *If you click here, you can download one of the stories for free.
posted by AR Ross at 12:32 AM

Ever need to settle an argument about how to pronounce a word? Microsoft's Encarta Dictionary lets you hear words spoken, online (assuming you've got a sound card). So now you'll have conclusive proof that 'prolix' rhymes with 'glow pics' and not 'frolics'.
posted by AR Ross at 3:16 PM

When is a check for $95,093.35 not a check for $95,093.35? (Warning: unsatisfying explanations for strange behaviour ahead.)
posted by AR Ross at 1:07 PM

I might miss certain things about living in the US (all-night grocery stores, inexpensive clothes, driving through miles of empty terrain), but I absolutely shed no tears for W. I prefer foot-and-mouth disease and rain, thank you.
People here consider his presidency to be akin to our having elected a grapefruit to lead the nation. Why? Well, it has something to do with his complete inability (discapability, as he might say) to put together a lucid sentence. Salon's got his vocabumalations dead to rights.
posted by AR Ross at 2:10 PM

While I don't think we should use just 8 adjectives to describe wine, I agree wholeheartedly with this article.
posted by AR Ross at 1:11 AM

Thanks to Dean (whose name is red and orange), I've been jolted back into my awareness of my synaesthesia. Reading up on it several years after the last time I did so, I found a few websites that gave me a very strange, prickly frisson... migraines, poor sense of direction, etc.-- it sounds frighteningly like me. Here's a diagram of my number-colours, which you'll probably just think is odd, but it's me...
posted by AR Ross at 2:15 AM

It only works on US addresses, but The Globe Explorer has a creepy degree of accuracy in its ability to produce a high quality image of any place you desire. The picture of my mother's house is in colour and clearly shows her red car in the driveway... makes you think that the crazy neighbour who thinks the government is watching her might be right.
posted by AR Ross at 12:39 AM

No doubt, Boontling will die out just as the passenger pigeon did. In the meantime, you can read this SF Gate story, which is interesting not for its writing, but for the story it tells about a dialect cum shibboleth that took on a life of its own.
posted by AR Ross at 12:08 AM

I'm no fan of petitions, but this one seems primed to actually translate into some success. Nominate your favorite American poet to be portrayed on a stamp. So far, it appears that Wallace Stevens is in the lead (which is fine with me, as 'The Emperor of Ice Cream' is one of my very favourite poems) with Sylvia Plath (ditto 'Sow') not far behind. I'd love to see Anne Sexton's likeness stuck to millions of letters, but she's not in the top ten yet. That is, unless you vote for her...
posted by AR Ross at 11:50 PM

When newspapers go online, they very often just port their paper-and-ink product to the web, pixel for pixel, letter for letter. The New York Times has decided to shake things up a bit with its 'Most Frequently E-mailed Articles' feature. With it, readers can get a quick snapshot of the items that others have found most interesting and worth passing on. Try doing that with the soggy pile of pulp that arrives at your doorstep!
posted by AR Ross at 1:05 AM

If I were a design student, I'd be foaming with jealousy at the guy who created an 'is it a website or is it art' project like little-eskimo.com. As it is, I'm only a little bit envious.
posted by AR Ross at 7:07 PM

I thought about how much money I'd saved by shopping online, and realised quickly that I've just been lucky with coupons. Well, methodically lucky... I always check Flamingoworld to see if they've got a coupon for the online vendor I'm using. Very frequently, they do.
posted by AR Ross at 5:58 PM

Who decided that the world's sweetest candy needed its own website? And does a bar of soap really need to establish web presence, for that matter?
posted by AR Ross at 5:43 PM

At least two of my loved ones are petrified of flying. Stepping on a plane with them involves painfully watching them sit in their seats, silently giving themselves Last Rites. So when I found a website that allows users to calculate their chances of dying on a particular flight, I thought I'd keep the URL to myself.

That is, until I plugged in the numbers for Dan's upcoming flight to the UK. Apparently, he has a 1/105,195,458 chance of playing the harp on a little fluffy cloud this Tuesday. To put that into perspective:
   --that is a 0.000000095% chance of death
   --there is a 1000% better chance of choosing 5 letters
    at random from a hat and spelling 'nexus'
   --he's 316 times more likely to be the father
     of Billie Jean's son (0.000003%).
posted by AR Ross at 11:43 AM

While reading this site, I found myself thinking how dry my lips were... I think I need a hit. Man, do I need a hit.
posted by AR Ross at 12:20 AM

Where the visual and the ideological meet.
posted by AR Ross at 12:13 AM

For a site dedicated to teaching people about blending structure, form, and harmony in creating the 'built world', patternlanguage.com certainly is an ugly site. Clearly, they see nothing wrong with preaching about 'supportive surroundings' while erecting the virtual equivalent of a shanty town on the web.
posted by AR Ross at 12:24 PM

Although it's located a few hundred miles away from the epicenter, the USGS Seismographic Post in Digger Butte (I know, it sounds like the name of a character from 'Boogie Nights') recorded this seismogram of the magnitude 6.8 earthquake that happened on the 28th in Seattle. Click the link and then scroll down to see the image.
posted by AR Ross at 12:47 AM