Valentine’s Day Gift Ideas To Win Back Your Ex-Girlfriend
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 15, 2011 by admin in Holidays
Five Valentine gift ideas that may help you rekindle the fire of love. Because boyfriends are easy to come by, but girlfriends have to be earned. Strangely, most of these gifts are for yourself.
  Wherein we finally explain why pink roses were chosen to express unrequited love. |
For many of us, Valentine’s Day is a time for candlelight dinners, champagne, and romantic gifts to express our undying passion for our loved ones. But for some of us, Valentine’s Day is a time of composing and re-composing bizarre love letters to people who had no idea we were stalking them, or obsessing about the one who left us over a year ago, by pounding a 12 pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon while playing video games with our dorky friends who are still virgins at twenty-six. We’ve previously shared lots of off the wall Valentine’s Day gift ideas, but this year, we thought we’d take a look at the still suffering love-a-holic, and offer suggestions for how to win back that ex-girlfriend who was probably your last hope for any kind of healthy connection with humanity and a normal social life. First up, if you want to keep it classy and send roses, don’t send red or white ones. The traditional color for “unrequited love” is pink. I think I finally figured out the reason for this tradition. First of all, although roses are a beautiful flower, pink ones are somehow just, I don’t know, PINK. Their beauty pales in comparison to a bold red or crisp white. Pink was probably established for this purpose for two reasons. First, they prove that a guy really means it. Unless you’re a classic romantic, buying pink flowers are a sure sign that you’re GAY. And second, the second rate beauty of a pink roses makes it MUCH easier for a woman to chuck over a hundred dollars’ worth of flowers in the wastebin, which is almost certainly where the majority of pink roses end up. So you’ll probably want to skip the whole “unrequited love” thing. It’s pricey, and probably ineffective. Below are a few gift ideas to really help you win back that lost love. Strangely, most of them are gifts for you, because probably the only way you’ll win her back is by being the man you aren’t. Read the rest of this entry »
How I Ended Up Living In Brazil
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 14, 2011 by admin in Politics
The thing I love most about America’s slow slide into a totalitarian police state is that it means I get to live in one of my favorite 80′s movies.
BP Makes Ugly Oil Spill Stains Disappear With Magical Corexit
[ 3 Comments ]Posted on January 13, 2011 by admin in Clean & Green
No one knows the long-term effects of Corexit, the toxic dispersant used to clean up the Deepwater Oil Spill, but one short-term effect seems to be invisibility in the media.
 This is part two of our Gulf Oil Spill Weather Report . The forecast still calls for widely scattered blamestorming, with high-pressure greenwashing continuing through 2050. |
After spending about an hour looking for information on the long-term effects of Corexit, the dispersant used during the BP Deepwater oil spill in the gulf last year, I’m convinced that it not only does a great job of making oil disappear from sight, it also magically leaves few traces of itself in the media. The unfortunate thing about the fact that it does such a great job of making oil disappear from sight is that it apparently accomplishes this by just shoving it underwater, making it nearly impossible to ascertain its effects on human or sea life. Which in my view, makes it more of a public relations tool than an oil cleanup tool. I’ve been perplexed for some time about why – after being told to stop by the EPA to stop using it – that BP chose to dump over a million gallons of a substance known to be horrifically toxic into the gulf, especially when there were more effective, less toxic options available. Well, the fact that the company that makes Corexit was started by Exxon, meaning the shareholders of both the energy company that caused the spill and the company tasked with cleaning it up would profit certainly explains part of it. But another critical part of why BP was probably so emphatic about using it was simple PR. No one seems know what the long-term effects of Corexit are, nor do they seem to know what the long term effects of oil on the ocean bottom are. I guess we’ll be finding out in the coming years, because that’s where a lot of it remains. I can’t imagine oil on the ocean bottom is a good thing; last I knew, the bottom of the ocean was still directly connected to the top of it by a bunch of water. Part of Corexit’s disappearing act was made possible by the fact that Nalco, the company that makes it, was way ahead in the PR game, plucking the best of DC’s revolving door lobbyist talent way back in June. And it’s interesting to note that one of the key points in the government’s Oil Spill Commission report on the disaster highlights one very significant fact – not only do the agencies assigned to regulating oil drilling lack the teeth to enforce any useful safeguards, they’re out-gunned and out-financed by an industry that is magnitudes ahead of them in technology and knowledge as well. The first video production from the commission’s report is below; it views a bit like a damage control piece for US regulatory agencies. Read the rest of this entry »
Habitrails For Inhumanity
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 12, 2011 by admin in Technology
For about a hundred grand, you can train for combat or engage in misanthropic virtual reality gaming in the Virtusphere “human hamster ball”. Or, you could go analog and Zorb in a Mega Ball for just a few hundred bucks.
If the time you spend Facebooking, watching Keyboard Cat on YouTube, and buying real estate on Second Life haven’t satisfied your need to completely isolate yourself from humanity, fear not – technological innovation will continually bring you new methods to embrace your inner misanthrope. The Virtusphere isn’t all that “new” in tech industry terms; it was first broadly featured in 2009 (see a Reuters video here), and received more exposure at last years’ tech shows. But somehow, it hasn’t grabbed as much press as one might expect. We suspect this is a result of an elaborate stealth marketing campaign the company has put together, using Zhu Zhu Pets
Ah. The Old Triple Trumpet Trombone Tap Dancing Trick
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 11, 2011 by admin in Music
The multi-talented Gunhild Carling and the Carling Family seem to be keeping big band and vaudeville alive. I don’t speak Swedish, but thanks to Google Translate I can assure you that they provide “hours of musical binge”.
Ages ago, we answered the question we knew had been gnawing at your mind for ages, i.e.: What Has 14 Legs, 30 Strings, Bad Teeth, and No Soul? Now we’re here to answer another of life’s burning questions: What has three trumpets, a megaphone, a set of bagpipes, a clarinet, a trombone, a blues harp, tap dances, sings jazz standards, tells jokes, speaks Swedish, and can balance a trumpet on its nose while it plays upright bass? Well, actually “it” is a “she”, and her name is Gunhild Carling. I must admit I was left with a strange mixture of admiration and sympathy when I saw this video compilation of just a few of Carling’s talents. My first reaction was “wow, that’s what they mean by multi-talented instrumentalist”, then I was like “wow, but does the world really need a person who can play three trumpets at once?” and then I was like “Aw jeez, I bet the poor thing had one of those miserable showbiz childhoods like Michael Jackson” and then I was like “Ugh. What a tragicomic display of a bizarre desperation to please or impress”. But in the end, I got a grip, stopped psychoanalyzing and prefacing my personal observations with the word “like”, and realized that Gunhild Carling and her family are just fun-loving and talented in the old-school style of vaudeville, jazz, and other ages-old forms of traveling theater. Watching the video clips of Carling is probably a lot less fun than the live show must be; I think this would be a fantastically fun evening of live entertainment. If you don’t enjoy the clips, and you don’t speak Swedish, be sure to at least Google Translate her website for a magical poetry treat that still probably conveys the vibe of a Carling Family show. An example: “Hours of musical binge! Love-game makes people happy. Car-spawn, as an artist family Carling offering, pulling together. The difference is that the Carlingford-game all the time is packed with humor. And it is not always what love succeed.” Hours of musical binge indeed. Check out some vids below. Much more fun – and much less opportunistic – than slowing down to look at car crashes. Read the rest of this entry »