Zombie Hazard Road Sign

This is some funny shit. And since 30 Rock ended at 10pm, I thought I was all out of funny for the evening. Good one putting off going to bed to trawl the internet on a school night!

Apparently some hacker dudes hacked into road signs in Austin and got them to read, Caution! Zombies ahead! Run for cold climates! The end is near!



Most people would laugh at that, except some officials are putting on their Big Person's Hats and talking about potential criminal charges. Yawn.

According to people in the know, hacking into those road sign thingies is not that hard. Most of them have a basic default password that doesn't require much manipulation [what, no dictionary attack? Didn't think I'd get to talk about that twice in one day!] and once through the meager defense the sign is ripe for naughty word play.

Imagine, what if someone put up stuff like, Free fried chicken! Or, Fastest to the next toll plaza gets a blowjob!

Yep, I could have fun with that.

1,000 Things Everyone Must ... Before You Croak!

This sort of thing is a popular list with people. There's one for wines, foods, places, films, music, and I'm sure some enterprising chap somewhere has penned 1,000 Hookers You Must Bone Before You Die. You know it's probably true.

So The Guardian, that poster paper for liberal self-righteousness, has come up with its own list for novels. Are any of the books you've read on there? I've read quite a few; there's also more than a few I've never heard of. The shame!

But that's a good thing. It's always good to see what rates as an essential novel so you can dash out to your local Barnes & Noble and buy them. And once bought you can read them. And once read you can agree or disagree over the quality of the writing and appear more cultured than you really are.

Bubble Bobble

So I was listening to Kids by MGMT today, and parts of that synthy goodness reminded me of Bubble Bobble. Now upon closer inspection it's not even close but it's amazing how one snippet of a sound can bring back a memory from years past. Huh?

Anywho, here's what the Bubble Bobble soundtrack sounded like on the C64.

This was the main theme, but if you hit shift or something when it loaded it changed to the alternative soundtrack. I think. But Bubble Bobble was cool, just get a read of that introduction:

Now, it is the beginning of a fantastic story! Let's make a journey to the Cave of Monsters! !Good luck!

Fuck yeah! Who wouldn't want to play after reading that? Pipe in the awesome computer synth music from 1986 and you're flying, esse. And I played a lot of Bubble Bobble. A lot.

I'm a Baby Daddy

Get the fuck out of town! No, seriously. My wife and I are expecting a stork delivery sometime in mid-July. This will be out first child, so it's naturally very scary and exciting and scary and awesome and scary.

Needless to say I'm looking forward to the child being embarrassed by me in front of its friends.

Notice I say its, as we're not sure of the baby's gender. The ultrasound just shows ... something. The doctor assures me that the child will evolve into an entity resembling a human in the next month or two. Cool!

So there we go.

Ate Me a Whole Lotta Balls Today

Meatballs. With spaghetti. What did you think I was talking about you dirty minx. Actually, in all seriousness, is it possible to speak about balls and not think or make a joke about testicles? I'm sure it is, so I'm going to try...

...nope, can't do it. It always goes back to the juice factory.

My wife makes means balls. She gets them all moist and salty, using a recipe from Wolfgang Puck no less. Then you drop those bad boys in the sauce and simmer for 45 minutes. Boil your pasta and presto, you're a fucking culinary genius. Tasty tasty.

Funny Ha Ha Fanboys Poster

This picture is a classic, especially if you recognise that it's a riff on the 40-Year-Old Virgin poster. Simply delightful.

Oh, Yeah. I'm One Year Older

Well, that was two days ago. Now I'm one year older plus two days. Then it will three, then four and finally, on Jan 27th 2010 I will be another year older. And so on, forever.

How old are you now?

31

How does it make you feel?

Like I want to stab someone with a soiled toothpick. I mean, meh.

What is it about birthdays?

I don't know, you tell me fucker.

You're the one asking the questions, cocklips.

Oh, right. Well, birthdays are these odd little things that pop up every so often. It's weird, I was thinking the other day as I lay in bed listening to the sounds of the Pacific ocean as its waves crashed upon the shore of some tranquil little island that, you know, it's weird. We mark our birthday as 12 months after the day we pop forth from the womb, and go from there. But, just think, what if we mark our life anniversary from the day we were conceived. Imagine, I was born in January 1978. Yet, by counting back 9 months that brings us to April 1977. If everyone knew their conception date we could scrap birthdays and celebrate lifedays instead!

Lifeday? You realise of course the Star Wars universe celebrates lifeday?

They do? Lucas surely is a god among men, for he has the answer!

Hold on, Geek Boy. I'm just getting started. Lifeday was celebrated by Wookies.

Chewbacca is a Wookie.

Was a Wookie. They killed him by dropping a moon on his head. It's complicated. Anyway, Lifeday was analogous to our birthday and Lucas slid this little nugget into his 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special.

Holiday Special? I'm not familiar with this work of genius.

Here's a link to YouTube.

Thanks. Oh, oh my lord! What have you done! What have you done!

It's fucking horrid, eh?

I ... can't feel my legs. It's so cold.

So there's one strike against having a lifeday. The other strike is mathematics. If you're already 9 months old when you spring from the vag of life, that means in three months time you become...

... 32.

32.

Yeah, let's just stick with birthdays.

A Dictionary Attack? They Throw Dictionaries At You?

Wow, the dictionary attack! It sounds really cool and primal. I imagine these fat, bound editions of the Oxford English Dictionary launched from a trebuchet or some great siege engine, sailing through the air to strike the illiterate and the unenlightened.

You imagine the dictionary attack as the definitive weapon of last resort, sitting atop a stockpile of nasty shit like hydrogen bombs and the crunchwrap supreme from Taco Bell. "Don't make me get my dictionary out" would be the ultimate threat. The only thing that could possibly counter a dictionary attack would be a thesaurus defense. But now we're just getting silly.

Turns out a dictionary attack is brute force attack hackers use to defeat a cipher by figuring out its password. I guess that's why they tell people not to use shit like "qwerty" when setting your password. Hm. Excuse me for a second while I just log off...

Twitter on the Shitter

I don't have a Twitter account. But I imagine it's terribly useful if you are on the go and need to tell someone you're on the go. Or on the job. Or on the shitter. I can't blog from the shitter, as there's no room to set up the desktop in there.

Plus, when you think about it, you really wouldn't want to. Unless you're like some of our Barnes & Noble customers who do everything on the shitter, like hold really personal conversations on their cellphones while their bomb bay doors are open and dispensing their payload on the porcelain below. So fuckin' gross, dudes.

Speaking of Barnes & Noble customers, why do they insist on asking you for a book when you're taking a slash? They're like, "Hey, I'm looking for this book and I don't know the author or the title. Can you help me?"

And I'm like, "Can I shake off first?"

Irritating.

No Ziggy? Poppycock or Poppyvag?

Aw, man. Here I was all amped over Bowie resurrecting Ziggy Stardust and it turns out to be one of those unsubstantiated-thingy rumours that bounce around the internet machine and people believe them because if it's online it's on the button as far as truth goes, right? Right?

Wrong, mofo! It's not true, so back into the wardrobe goes my limited edition sequined jumpsuit that's tight in all the right places. Off goes the Ziggy from the iTunes. And off go my dreams, sniff sniff.

Actually, I'm not that cut up about it. I was thinking it would be kinda cool in some way as yet undefined by the cool spectrum, but Bowie has come out on his website and put the kibosh in any future Ziggy shenanigans. He even went so far as to label the rumours as "poppycock!" and was certain most of us would have realised it was poppycock.

Um, gotta admit I was sucked by the poppycock. I guess me get too excited for my own good, but where did the word poppycock come from? How come we don't have the saying poppyvag? I did some half-arsed investigating on Dictionary.com and discovered something wonderful. Apparently the word poppycock means "senseless talk" and probably originated from the Dutch who have a similar word pappekak which means "soft dung". Pappekak is used in those situations where us English speakers will call bullshit! when someone is talking out of their arse.

Well, if I found that on the internet then it must be true.

Dutch Cookie Monster. No Translation Necessary

Found this little nugget of audio/visual wondery on YouTube. Cookie Monster transcends language and culture [except for those cultures that don't like cookies] and the UN should appoint him as their special envoy and send him into the world's trouble and hot spots. He could bring peace and cookies, because everyone knows if you eat a cookie you feel good. If everyone felt good and ate lots of cookies we'd all get along better. Plus we would be really, really fat.

Watchmen Looks Awesome. But Will We Ever See It?

Just finished watching the journal featuring the Minutemen group photo and I couldn't stop thinking how right the adaptation of Watchmen looks. Obviously it's not a literal adaptation [from what I can see] but it's all in the details, and thus far it's impressing the hell out of me. It really is the shit.

Yet ... will it ever see the light of day? Both Fox and Warner Brothers have agreed to let a judge decide whether the film's release can be blocked by Fox, with the judges ruling expected on January 20 [a week before my birthday, whoo!]. Watchmen is scheduled to appear in March, but we'll just have to wait and see what El Judgey has to say.