Toilet Training In Japan

I’m just not sure what to say about this. It’s definitely potty humor, but it’s work safe … I think?

Thanks to Husky Ted for the confusion.

Time Is Relative, and the Scale Is Arbitrary

I’ve beeing seeing emails and posts – and hell, I think I might have even seen some skywriting – about this sequential date thing.

…the time and date, for the first time in all of humanity, will be 01:02:03 04/05/06.

It’s usually preceded or followed closely by an important-sounding “This will never happen again,” as if to say, “Stop, and pay attention to the one-second passing of something amazing.”

Enough already! First of all, time is relative, so this is merely a localized phenomena. And even if Einstein had somehow totally boned us, our scale of time begins completely arbitrarily with the approximate birth of a major religious figure, and has been modified and changed so many times over the last two thousand years that nobody really knows what date it is anyway. Have you been keeping track of your leap seconds? Neither have I.

So just stop with this – it’s stupid and annoying and I’m tired of the spam. Or maybe I just really need my morning coffee.

Accredited Witness

It’s official. I am an Accredited Witness of the Toast Game.

Check out the rules for yourself, and play to win!

Is It A Chalice Or…

It’s like that old optical illusion, except for real. I’m sure their real fans will be getting them made of Mary-Kate or Ashley Olsen.

(via Gizmodo)

A Meditation on the Speed Limit

Totally awesome. Via HuskyTed, check out what happens when everybody drives the speed limit. This is a fantastic example of how our laws are made to be broken.

I also dropped this over on procastinators.org, since it seemed appropriate.

Mike Furibundo’s Doppelgänger

I think there are still some Orangers who read my ramblings, and they might get a kick out of this. Everybody else may want to wander off.

Tim O’Reilly posted a link to an advertisement by Microsoft containing photoshopped O’Reilly books. First, check out this picture. Now take a look at these photos I snapped a few years back at Avanade‘s Quickstart: photo 1 and photo 2.

Somebody has stolen Mike’s DNA, created clones, and started up a male modelling business.

Smart Car Crash Test

Europeans have a different idea about automobiles than we do. For many years, the price of gasoline across the pond has been higher than even the so-called high fuel prices over which the country has been fuming. That’s not even mentioning the utter lack of parking available in a city as old as Rome.

It’s not that surprising, then, that the Smart Car is very popular over there. Indeed, when Heather and I were in Italy, you could hardly turn around without seeing one. They really are very cool vehicles, and there are some rumblines that we may see them on this side of the Atlantic. While it doesn’t seem likely to happen during our tenure in DC, perhaps a Smart Car could persuade us to own a car again after living without for over a year now.

So anyway, with that preamble out of the way, let’s move onto something more interesting – say, something involving a speeding automobile and a large concrete wall. A car smashing into something always makes for entertaining video, don’t you agree? Check out this awsome video of a Smart Car running into a wall at high speed.

Coolest Christmas Lights in the Entire World

Wow. I am stunned. These are absolutely the coolest Christmas lights in the entire world. (If you prefer, here is a direct link to the video.)

The sheer nerditude of somebody to create such a display must be astounding. I am humbled.

Thanks for the link, Hedda.