Water-filled tyres, five-gallon fuel lines, wafer-thin body panels, nitromethane boiling out of the engine oil and into the air intake, cars that can run just fine when their engine isn't meant to be able to get any air at all, and apparently pretty much everything Smokey Yunick ever did.
If you're not doing something that makes them change the rules next year, you'd better be doing something that at least forces them to clarify them. Angrily.
A short piece from Salon on the debasement of the word "fun", when applied to activities for children which obviously bloody aren't.
(In case you don't know, this URL has, for months now, been the quick way to convince the Salon site that you've sat through the ads that qualify you for a "day pass".)
Herewith, some outstanding video clips (as in, not a whole series of something) that everybody linked to when they were new and exciting (years ago, in one case).
But you, gentle reader, may have missed out on one or more of them. So I don't feel too guilty about this Outside-Scoop blog post.
The title links go to the pages where you can find the big full-resolution versions of each for download.
Buggy Saints Row: The Musical:
Rockfish (soon to be a major motion picture!):
On ruining really expensive lab equipment, from organic chemist Derek Lowe's blog.
I find something very soothing in these sorts of tales of personal disaster. Chemistry ones tend to be juicier than information technology ones; the latter may involve halon dumps but seldom include any gaseous hydrogen chloride.
The chem stories, like metalworking stories, are also usually not so technical as to be incomprehensible to those of us whose chemistry expertise extends not much further than the ability to tell bromine from packaging peanuts.
Lowe's whole Org Chem Horror Stories category is here.
Not The Daily WTF Any More has this piece, which is just the latest in a long string of stories about clothes-less Emperors exposed by nonsense. I think the string started, in the modern era, with the Sokal Affair, or possibly Ern Malley.
(I particularly like "angst-filled gothic gibberish" in the comments.)
See also: Engineers' Disease.
Coincidental parallelism in the online comics pages, from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and Sinfest.
Apropos my previous comments on portentous voiceover dudes in trailers for mere video games, I found the trailer for Battlefield: Bad Company quite satisfying:
You can download the great big high quality version here.
I just had occasion to look at my old piece here about a self-contained water cooling device that did not work very well, and checked to see whether an awful review of the device I linked to was still up.
It was not; the site is now a parked domain. Awwww.
More entertainingly, though, the company that sent me the gadget for review now has a teensy little problem with their home page, which redirects to the entirely reasonable http://yenindustries.com/index.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gif before Firefox pulls the plug on its foolishness. Internet Explorer keeps on diligently trying to load it for a while before giving up with a less informative message.
So I'm leaving death and derangement in my wake, as usual. Jolly good.
