I can has votes?

I’ve been trying for a while to think of a good caption for a lolcat. I finally came up with one that really amuses me:

For the uninitiated, lolcats are pictures of cats with captions in a form of broken English, called lolspeak. These pics are created by whoever is hit with the desire to create a lolcat and posted to the icanhascheezburger website. Interestingly, a number of story lines have sprung up around lolcats, including their deity, Ceiling Cat, and their devil, Basement Cat.  If a lolcat gets enough votes, it goes up on the main page of the site.

You should *totally* go and vote for my lolcat!

Spam of the Day

Just got this spam in my work email:

I AM A SEAMAN SEEKING YOUR CONSENT TO TRANSFER MY COMMISSION OF ($25,5M) TO YOU FOR SAFE KEEP.I SHALL COMPENSATE YOU WITH 40% OF THIS FUND, WHEN RECEIVED INTO YOUR ACCOUNT, SEND YOUR FULL NAMES,PHONE NUMBERS.AND CONTACT ADDRESS FOR PROCESSING OF THE FUND IN YOUR NAME BY THE OIL COMPANY

SINCERELY YOURS

KARL NEWE

Tee hee. He said “seaman.”

Happy 7/7!

Although not as exciting as last year’s 7/7/7 date¹, today is 7/7.

7/7/8 to be exact. Which just so happens to be my area code².

And this is my blog posting #779.  I noticed the other day that I was on posting #777, which would have been cool to have posted on 7/7, but I have this crazy idea about wanting to publish at least one blog posting every day³, so it just wasn’t possible.

Today’s blog posting has, paradoxically, been brought to you by the number 10⁴.

¹Which, apparently I didn’t think was exciting as the previous year’s 6/6/6
²As I’m not one of the cool kids with their 604s.  And their pants.
³Now at 38 days and counting, btw!.
⁴Why not 7? Because 7 8 9^a, and is currently awaiting trial for the murder.
^aProps to Nancy, Jeff & Madeline for introducing me to the good times that is Snacktime!

I now forgive Stephen Colbert for what he did to the Hockey Night in Canada theme song.  Because this video was made as part of his “Project Make McCain Exciting“:

If you only see one movie this summer…

See Gay Zombie.

Props to Kalev for passing this along!

What Not To Get Your Dad For Father’s Day

Saw this in Shopper’s Drug Mart earlier today:

I don’t know about your father, but I don’t think blush would suit my dad.

I amuse me

Used my Facebook status to play a little April Fool’s joke this morning:

The fact that people use their FB status to announce such things these days made it just believable enough that I actually managed to fool a few friends.  Hee hee.

Fun With Screen Shots

Why does Windows even try to predict how much time is left on your laptop battery? It always fails miserably at it. One minute it will tell you that you have 1 hour of battery life left and 30 seconds later it will tell you have 3 mins. Then it’s 2 hrs and 45 mins. It’s just completely useless.

Case in point, on my recent flight from Edmonton to Vancouver, on my way back from Yellowknife, I was working on my laptop and, because Air Canada sucks as bad as Windows’ ability to predict how much time is left on your laptop battery, the outlet at my so-called Executive Class seat didn’t actually supply any power, so I was working on battery. I get a warning that my battery is low and so I put my cursor over the little battery icon to see how much battery I have left and it shows me this:

Wow! With only 7% of my battery remaining, I can still work for 2 hrs and 58 minutes! Wicked! Best. Battery. Ever.

I also found this amusing:

BlogDesk’s spell check doesn’t recognize “blog” as a word. Awesome.

The other day I Twittered “Why is no one emailing me when I’m desperately wanting a distraction from this work I’m doing?” Well, my friend Dan rose to the challenge, emailing me no fewer than FIVE distractions (thanks Dan!  I knew I could count on you)!  One of the said distractions was this article: “What Will Life Be Like in the Year 2008? (Nov, 1968),” through which I learned that the author, writing in 1968, was able to accurately predict:

• laptops
• web conferencing
• touch screens
• prefab houses
• the US population (predicted: 350 million)
• online shopping

But was a wee bit off the mark on predicting:

• cars that travel 250 mph on cushions of air and are controlled by a “traffic computer,” a system that has eliminated all traffic accidents
• rocket travel between continents
• robots that do the housework
• despite predicting that computers will control pretty much everything, the author felt that, in 2008:”Not every family has its private computer. Many families reserve time on a city or regional computer to serve their needs.”
• work-life balance: “The average work day is about four hours”
• vacations in undersea resorts or on satellites (yes, satellites)
• “steak-like” meals made from seaweed
• “Heart disease has virtually been eliminated by drugs and diet” – as cardiovascular disease is still the number 1 killer in North America, he really couldn’t be more wrong on this one
• an “intelligence” pill given to “slow learners” and forgetful
• and women’s rights:

The housewife simply determines in advance her menus for the week, then slips prepackaged meals into the freezer and lets the automatic food utility do the rest.

Apparently it did not occur to the author that women might have JOBS in 2008. I mean, what with the robots doing all the housework and all. Of course, since the men are only working 4 hours a day, I guess there just isn’t much work to be done.

I don’t need to teach because I have YouTube

The next time I give my students an assignment, I’m going to play this video for them:

Because there really is not prostitute for careful editing of your own work.

One of my new fav blogs is Feministing.com. Usually the stuff I read over there makes me rather angry… things like Canadian doctors refusing to perform pap smears on unmarried women because they disagree with unmarried women having sex, or the US Senate passing an amendment that bans the use of federal Indian Health Service funds for abortion, or, and I’m not making this up, a politician saying that gay people cause earthquakes. I mean, I guess a feminist blog is going to contain lots of things that make me angry because there is so much unbelievably awful shit going on in the world.

But the other day I saw this video over there and I just had to share it with you:

Ms. Pac-Man – you go, girl!

I love the internets because it gives me such wonderful things as this picture.

And Flying Spaghetti Monster bless Flickr user Eric B for having a Creative Commons license on this photo so I can post that here, for your viewing pleasure.

So, I’ve been writing a big long blog posting, but I’m just too damned tired to finish it up today. It’s gonna be good, but I need more time to write it and polish it and make it all lovely and shiny for you to read and right now my brain is fried after a long day and all I want to do is go to sleep! In the meantime, you’ll have to just be happy with this photo of what I did with the “Word Whammer” toy on my sister’s fridge when I was visiting her at Christmas time”:

I can haz Flickr photoz?

While searching through Flickr for some photos with Creative Commons licenses to use in an online course I’m developing, I came across this photo, which totally cracked me up. (Hint: that’s a picture of Ivan Pavlov):

Photo by Naufragio

I also noticed during this search that a hell of a lot of people have named their dogs and cats “Pavlov.” Also, a lot of mofos put up pictures of spiders and tag them with innocuous words like “Pavlov” or “baby.” Which means innocent Flickr searchers, such as myself, end up looking at photos of spiders against our will!

Also, I found this image during my Flickr travels. I can’t remember what I was searching for, but I can assure you it was a totally legitimate search.

Photo by procsilas

Peanuts

So, it appears that my blog will now be an aunty blog¹, at least until I head to Ottawa on the 26th. I can’t help it though – my niece is just so damn cute! I’ll try to throw in the occasional cougar reference, lustful thoughts about the Canucks or snarky comment about David Emerson that “Not to Be Trusted with Knives” readers have come to expect², so as not to lose my readership completely as I oooh and ahhh over my niece’s brilliance.

Today, we baked cookies. In our pyjamas³. These are to be the “best cookies that I ate in the whole world.” I think the secret is that my niece was rolling the dough “back and forest.” Right now the cookies are cooling and my niece is napping, hence the opportunity to do the blogging, although I should be cleaning up the kitchen, which is a right disaster. There was also a pre-baking song and dance – the song went something like “I can do it all by myself! But sometimes it’s OK to ask your parents for help if you need help because sometimes you are too tiny and you can’t do it but it’s OK because you can ask for help to get some milk and you can feed your pets if you have pets at home I have two cats at my home and they are named Pakita and Monkey and I can feed them but sometimes it’s OK to ask for help from your parents.” And the song must be sung while shaking maracas, must be sung completely out of tune and must continue on until Aunt Beth nearly collapses from exhaustion with all the dancing around the kitchen. I have no idea where the hell kids get that kind of energy!

But the really funny thing she said⁴, I wasn’t actually there to hear. She went up to my sister last night and said, “Girls have vaginas. Boys have peanuts.”

¹Not unlike “mommy” bloggers, just with less responsibility.
²I’m on vacation so, much to the disappointment of my email subscribing friend, I won’t be talking about thigh highs.
³My pyjamas are hospital scrubs. They are very comfy.
⁴Are you totally sick of this yet? Is anyone still reading?