Archive for March, 2009

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Monday Demotivators: The “Toss A Cat For No Reason” Mystery

[ 2 Comments ]Posted on March 8, 2009 by admin in Editorial & Opinion

Sunday, March 8th, 2009

Why Do Game Designers Enjoy Torturing Kittens?

Getting up and going to work on Monday morning is extremely over-rated, which is why every Monday, we bring you the Monday Demotivators that are meant to make you late once you do get up. To add insult to injury this week, here are Ten (probably useless) Geeky Tricks for Getting Out of Bed in the Morning, courtesy Wired.com. The list includes ingenius tips like “Go to bed when you’re tired” and “Pick out clothes the night before“. If those do work, here are 5 Reasons Why Sleeping In Every Day Will Boost your Productivity. Just go back to bed, will ya? Whenever you’ve managed to wake up, sit your butt back down here and enjoy the wonderful hand-picked games we never really try, but then eagerly recommend to you anyway. First up: after trying Don’t Look Back, well, I won’t. Designed with a slightly eerie, pixelated style and a moody synthesized cello soundtrack, at first I was a little intrigued. I gave up after about ten attempts at the first obstacle though. Nothing more demoralizing than getting killed by a pixelated snake ten times in a row. For a little pick-me-up, try the annoyingly loud Atomic Racer. Kind of like that “Easter Egg” Spyhunter game in Excel or something, except you have to get used to driving a car moving horizontally across the screen to blow up a nuclear transport. Not sure why that’s something one would want to do, but I guess these game developers don’t always have a grownup around to troubleshoot their concepts. Which would explain games like Kitty Throw, which although not quite as pointlessly brutal as the classic Kitten Cannon, still involves throwing a cat around for no particularly good reason. And they wonder what’s wrong with kids these days. Finally, if you at last ARE awake, and more amazingly still reading, try Electric Box, which actually requires that you do a little reading and thinking. Which is probably more than you would have accomplished by now if you’d gone to work. And cetainly more than I’ve accomplished by finding this crap for you. Happy Monday!

What’s Drunk, Green, And Probably Not Irish?

[ 2 Comments ]Posted on March 8, 2009 by admin in Holidays

Sunday, March 8th, 2009

St. Patrick’s Day 2009


Is he Irish? He mitre he might
not be. But I bet he’s drunk.

I must confess, I’ve never really understood St Patrick’s Day. According to Wikipedia, typical St. Patrick’s day celebrations include: attending mass parades, wearing shamrocks, wearing green, and drinking alcohol. Which, except for the shamrocks, sounds like a cast and extras reunion for the movie Elf or something. Back when I DID drink, I certainly didn’t need a holiday, and although I did dye my hair green once, it was really an accident. In the 80′s, you see, they hadn’t perfected that whole blue hair dye thing yet. And parades? Please. It mostly strikes me as odd that an Irish religious holiday is mostly celebrated by hard-drinking atheists who aren’t even Irish. So if you’re Irish, go ahead, get your blarney on by kissing stones and whatnot. Well, maybe avoid THIS whatnot (NSFW). And if you’re neither Irish nor religious, you might enjoy this secular jab at the holiday. Here at Dissociated Press, we’ll be treating March 17 like so many other sacred days: as an opportunity to gratuitously link to Amazon product pages that never seem to make us any money. For those of you who are trying to be classy about the whole thing (and failing), we have this stylish St Patrick’s Table Centerpiece. For those who have abandoned all pretension, read on. To compliment your Simulated Cleavage “Irish Miss” Vest Costume or your Adult St. Patrick’s Day Sassy Leprechaun Costume, you’re going to need a pimp, and they’re going to need a hat. For me it was a tough decision, but the St. Patrick’s Green Boa Pimp Hat finally won out over the Shamrock Fur Trim Fuzzy Pimp Hat. And of course nothing says “Irish” like “aloha”, right? Which is why we bring you the St. Patrick’s Green And White Flower Lei And finally, proving that we’re not the only blatantly opportunistic bastards around, we have the St. Patrick’s Day 7 Inch Flashing Green Beacon Light. Which I’m pretty sure is just a green flashing light the other 364 days of the year.

New Improved GOP: Rush Limbaugh And Teenager Jonathan Krohn

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on March 8, 2009 by admin in Politics

Sunday, March 8th, 2009

With Ann Coulter For Vice President!


Watch the creepy little Mr. Krohn
Channel Michael J. Fox’s Alex Keaton

Some of my friends are a little suspicious of my support of Rush Limbaugh as the GOP presidential candidate for 2012. Well, let’s get realistic for a moment. I voted for Barack Obama, and am mostly trusting my gut that he has a little more integrity than the average politician. I’m still tracking the ObamaMeter though, and if Washington continues on its self-serving path of enrichment and protectionism of the already-wealthy, my faith in the two-party system will finish its long, downward spiral with a catastrophic impact into the metaphoric Mount Rushmore in my head. At that point I’ll be voting more for sport than actual results, and what could be more fun than watching the latest darlings of the GOP – Rush “Bonehead Gangster” Limbaugh, Bobby “Mr Rogers” Jindal, and the 13-year-old punk in the clip featured here, Jonathan Krohn – duking it out for dominance of the party base? If Obama is miraculously able to provide the inspirational leadership to keep the country moving forward during these difficult economic times, it will be no contest. If he can’t, this should prove to be the biggest free-for-all since Smokey and the Bandit or the Sack of Rome, and I’d rather have a front row seat to the spectacle and lose, than be sitting in the winner’s circle of of the victors-by-default Democrats. Read the rest of this entry »

Time Is An Illusion, Lunchtime Doubly So

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on March 8, 2009 by admin in Editorial & Opinion

Sunday, March 8th, 2009

Who’s behind the daylight savings time conspiracy?

My concept of time was destroyed at a relatively early age, first by reading Ray Bradbury short stories like A Sound of Thunder, and later by being exposed to Zen and eastern religion by reading pop philosopher Alan Watts. That headline of course is quoting a Douglas Adams character, Adams being another individual who apparently took an early disregard for the concept of time. All of which has something to do with my mild contempt for daylight savings time and the fact that I felt somehow cheated out of an hour this morning. So who’s behind this grand conspiracy to give us travel-free jetlag? Well, most recently the change was rolled into the Energy Policy Act of 2005, signed by George Bush. I still don’t understand why changing the dates of daylight savings time saves energy, and in fact, if you read this explanation on Wikipedia, you might end up concluding it only benefits wealthy golfers. But before all you ranting Liberal Elitists start blaming Bush, understand the trail goes back MUCH further, to 1884 and the International Meridian Conference, which was requested by U.S. President Chester A. Arthur, the guy we always forget because he only became president when Garfield was assassinated. Which I think makes it clear that there was indeed a conspiracy. An assassination, an international plan to modify TIME ITSELF….I’d follow up this morning but I’m short of time.

You Look Like A Million Dollars, But What Does A Trillion Look like?

[ 3 Comments ]Posted on March 7, 2009 by admin in Editorial & Opinion

Saturday, March 7th, 2009

Putting Things In Perspective


Yeah, you look like a million dollars,
but this is a hundred million…

All the casual conversation about trillion-dollar budget issues lately reminded me of how poorly most of us understand numbers as they relate to reality. For instance, ask a person how far away the moon is: 24,000 miles? 240,000 miles? 24,000,000 miles? Don’t feel badly if you don’t know yourself. To put things in perspective on that scale though: if the sun were a beach ball about 2 feet in diameter, the Earth would be a pea 215 feet away (about a small city block), and the nearest star would be about 11,000 miles away. To put a trillion in perspective, the MegaPenny Project uses an image of a trillion pennies next to some familiar architecture. If you’d rather see examples using hundred-dollar bills, see this PageTutor.com page which utilizes Google Sketchup. Another way to look at things is to ponder what you could buy with large sums of money. For instance, WhatWarCosts.com tells us that with their estimate of $323 Billion spent on the war, you could hire 577,648 teachers for 12 years, or bribe every member of Congress 6,037 times. Which, on reflection, has probably in fact happened over the last couple of years. There are hundreds, if not thousands of sites out there with examples like this; one of my favorites is that with a trillion dollars we could pave the entire U.S. interstate highway system with 23.5-karat gold leaf. If you’re tired of bailed out bankers having all the fun, and you’d like to try spending trillions of dollars yourself, try The Three Trillion Dollar Shopping Spree. And if you missed it when you were a kid, check out the classic kid’s book How Much Is a Million

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