Message from Weird Al Yankovic
Grok Headline matches for Message from Weird Al Yankovic
Weird - really really weird - to see
Belle de Jour in a top ten of most
powerful people in UK New Media.
Slightly crack-fueled dreaming for that
particular journo tonight, I fear
Weird - really really weird - to see
Belle de Jour in a top ten of most
powerful people in UK New Media.
Slightly crack-fueled dreaming for that
particular journo tonight, I fear
07/13/2004 08:23 AMat least according to the woefully
misinformed
media.guardian.co.uk/top100_2004/index/0,14656,1247481,0
0.html
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Weird
Weird
11/02/2003 04:18 PMReading about it being 71
degrees for the NYC Marathon, I was about to go running today (I
did the LA marathon in 1997 and was hoping to do one next year) but
was surprised to find the rain just turned to snow and is piling up on
the roof and streets. New York? 70 and partly sunny. Oregon?
snowing.
That Was Weird...
That Was Weird...
07/17/2004 04:40 PMI just posted a new item, and suddenly there were 22 comments under it
-- all from another posting from more than a week ago. I deleted them,
but this is just bizarre.
Weird science
Weird science
12/31/2004 04:43 PMIt didn't take long for politicized debate to get roiling over the
nature of the tsunami disaster -- some of it rather murky.
Steven Milloy of the Cato Institute and
Junk Science.com is
now blasting environmentalists for "shameless exploitation" as they
"surf the tsunami tragedy" in order to bring attention to the problem
of global warming. Milloy wants to give the impression that he's
navigating through truer waters, but clearly he's looking to ride the
wave in a direction of his own:
News of the Weird... NOT!
News of the Weird... NOT!
01/02/2005 09:23 PM
Though not the web institution of
Jim Romenesko's Obscure Store
or as overexposed as
Dave Barry's
Blog, Chuck Shepherd's
NEWS of the WEIRD
is a fairly good source for news stories that are... well... WEIRD.
And Chuck's the only one who has collected a list of stories that
"now occur with such frequency" that they are
NO LONGER
WEIRD. Quite a resource for judging how our society has changed in
the last umpteen years.
In semi-related news, Barry is
semi-retiring his weekly column, but we still
have
AutoDave, the
automated Dave Barry column generator. Still, I suspect he did it
just to upstage
Dan Gillmor's farewell column, as he gives up the
old-media columnar life in favor of
"Grassroots
Journalism".
To Dave Berry, 'Grassroots
Journalism' is writing about the brown patch in your lawn directly
over the septic tank. Weird-o SMS behaviour
Weird-o SMS behaviour
02/05/2005 09:13 PMOuti sent me yesterday a sweet text message about mice. True to the
nature of these beasts, that SMS started multiplying: for some reason,
T-Mobile (yes, I'm in Germany) has decided to deliver that message to
me eleven times within the past 24 hours. Even though it has been
sent only once.
It seems that every SMS sent from Finland is replaced by this same
SMS message - so if you've tried to contact me, I have only seen a
message about a mouse from Outi. Sorry. You gotta try and resend, if
you had anything to say (or just email me).
Weirdosity++.
The Weird Als of Finland
The Weird Als of Finland
06/30/2004 06:07 PM
Finland has a dance called the humppa, but it's spoken of with the
same disdain that disco gets in the US these days. It's for the
geezers. I have been told it is something like the German polka only
without the lederhosen, which is good since I'm half German and, after
a few Straßenfests where people jump around in lederhosen with
buckets of beer in their hands barely able to stand up, much less
dance, the costumes just don't really add much to the overall
aesthetic. I had a biology professor, a Bavarian who was really into
opera singing, show up for a lecture in lederhosen and dance a polka
for us while we sat there speechless. Everyone thought he was nuts,
but I just thought he was hopelessly homesick and I couldn't imagine
him doing that dance without the full costume in his usually
disheveled professor uniform. I have been spared, so far, the
spectacle of drunk Finns hopping around much like drunk Germans to
goofy music. So far.
While we were off at the lake for Juhannus, my ear picked up
something that sounded a lot like Viva Las Vegas but....not. I
was informed that it was a group called Eläkeläiset [the
pensioners] who are the humppa song gods in Finland and, well,
everywhere else people like to humppa. I fried a few neurons just
thinking about an Elvis tune done in humpaa/polka time. I can't
describe their music except to say that they are the Weird Al
Yankovics of Finland. Sample the Peljätty Humppa [2.2mb] and try to guess the song they are
covering and be very, very afraid. It's like Ethyl Merman singing a
disco version of No
Business like Show Business [yes, she really did...], as it's
so bad that it transcends the badness and is irresistibly brilliant. I
must have more of their music. The guys actually have a regular band,
Kumikameli, but I can't
really tell the difference between the samples on that web site and
the humppa music so it may be just a nuance only a Finn can hear. :)
The lyrics are
very clever and, unsurprisingly, the music is popular with the
polka loving Germans. There even seems to be an OpenBSD-Humppa
connection which does help explain a few things about OpenBSD. Weird
Al has done a polka album so perhaps it is time he teamed up with
Eläkeläiset and did a humppa album. Disturbing thought. *zot* There
went another neuron.
Weird Presents Anyone?
Weird Presents Anyone?
12/25/2003 04:20 PMweird referer
weird referer
01/07/2004 04:31 PMRecently (but I just noticed it today) I started getting HTTP
referers that are a variation of the following:
"XXXX:+++++++++++++++++++++++" (the number of plus signs varies). A google search with
appropriate terms quickly turned up discussions like this one
that suggest that the referer is someone using an anonymizer or
internet security product of some kind. Without that information it
smells like an attempt at an exploit of some kind... but of what kind
(and if so, I've never heard of it)?
Anyone knows about this? Has anyone else seen it? I'm curious.
:)
Weird Swing Bug
Weird Swing Bug
06/22/2004 11:54 PMWe ran into a weird issue with Swing today at work. The small class
below reproduces this. 1 import javax.swing.*; 2 import
javax.swing.event.TreeModelEvent; 3 import
javax.swing.event.TreeModelListener; 4 import
javax.swing.tree.DefaultMutableTreeNode; 5 import
javax.swing.tree.DefaultTreeModel; 6 7 public class Blah extends
JFrame implements TreeModelListener { 8 9 private JTree tree; 10 11
public Blah() { 12 setSize(150, 150); 13
setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE); 14
DefaultMutableTreeNode root... (294 words)
Weird Cats
Weird Cats
05/20/2004 01:13 AM
Feline medical
curiosities. Polydactyly, conjoined-kitty-fu, "freaks of
face," cleft palates, and plain old huge. (Not safe for after
lunch).
Weird Financial News
Weird Financial News
01/16/2004 11:05 AMDid you know West Virginia was auctioned off?
Weird Science & Bad Photoshopping
Weird Science & Bad Photoshopping
01/16/2004 11:02 AM Top 10
impossible inventions that allegedly work.
Includes such
conspiracy-nut favorites as a system
for sending power wirelessly, an anti-gravity device, the cloudbuster
and an electronic telepathy device.
[Snagged from Disinformat
ion.] Weird and wonderful - the year's top ten
Weird and wonderful - the year's top ten
01/06/2005 09:48 PMManchester Online Jan 7 2005 1:48AM GMT
Weird sticker on my DSL modem
Weird sticker on my DSL modem
07/12/2004 07:15 PMI just got my Yahoo! DSL self-install kit in the mail, and the modem
has a red sticker on it that reads:
"ATTENTION To maximize connection speed, leave this modem
on for 10 days after DSL installation is complete. Please Note: You
can use your DSL service during this time. It is not necessary to
leave your computer on, only the modem."
Why do I have to leave the modem on for 10 days? Is something inside
it fermenting?
Email
me if you know.
Weird color problem
Weird color problem
01/05/2005 10:26 PMMark Frauenfelder:
(Click thumbnail for enlargement.) Anyone know why the body copy shows
in gold in IE on OS X? It seems fine on Safari and Firefox. Please
email me if you know the
answer. (Also, thanks to everyone for your great design suggestions.
As you can see, I've incorporated quite a few of them.)
Found, one weird buoy
Found, one weird buoy
01/05/2005 06:31 AMDavid Pescovitz:
This giant
buoy washed ashore in Cocoa Beach, Florida and nobody has any clue
where it came from or who it belongs to. From Florida Today:
"There's no identifying marks on it, so I don't know where
it came from," said Jeff Galliher, petty officer with the U.S. Coast
Guard at Port Canaveral. "It's just a buoy base with a tower coming
out of it."
Link (via Fark)Weird Fields winners
Weird Fields winners
04/04/2005 01:18 PMDavid Pescovitz:
Undergrad Dan Yuan's image here was first runner-up in MIT's annual
Weird Fields contest where students generate psychedelic
visualizations of vector fields. (Last year's winner
here.) The patterns in Yuan's visualization remind me of the
background of a
Tim Biskup painting.
To help students
understand electromagnetic force fields, Professor of Physics John
Belcher and colleagues at the MIT Center for Educational Computer
Initiatives developed a computer applet into which students put the
mathematical expressions that describe a given field. "It then pops
out a visual representation of what the field looks like," he
said.
Link
UPDATE: As the MIT press release and
BB reader Tom Zeller point out, the Weird Fields visualizations bear a
striking resemblance to sections of Gustav Klimt paintings.
LinkTop Tip: W2K weird popups and blocks!
Top Tip: W2K weird popups and blocks!
02/17/2004 01:15 PMI just reinstalled W2K and it all seems to be working just dandy, but
I get about 100 of these pop ups per day saying 'WARNING: This message
confirms your computer is vulnerable to attacks' and 'see
www.MessageHackShield.com to fix this' or some site like that (there
are several different ones as well as several different sized popups).
six apart people have weird names
six apart people have weird names
08/18/2004 02:47 AMmakes me feel right at home
Weird 'net problem
Weird 'net problem
11/26/2002 07:26 PMMy Internet connection went down for a little while, and when it came
back up, all outgoing SMTP and WWW...
Weird books for tinkerers and mad
scientists
Weird books for tinkerers and mad
scientists
04/20/2004 12:34 PMI came across an ad for Lindsay's Technical Books in Popular Science.
The ad reads like a classified that would have been in the back of the
magazine fifty years ago: "Secrets! Melt Metal! Machine Shop!
Hydrogen! Old Time Radio! Tesla! Chemistry! Incredible plans, lost
secrets, forgotten how-to, and strange books!" It looks like these
folks have a lot of fun in their basement labs and backyard foundries.
Link
Deep night weird-o commenters
Deep night weird-o commenters
02/01/2005 09:48 PMOdd.
Outi
seems to have again attracted some weird-o commenters, who seem to be
interested mostly in just mocking her. It makes me wonder why there
are no weird-o commenters attracted on this blog, even though this is
relatively popular for a Finnish blog (something like 800-1000 page
views a day, not including RSS aggregators). Four possible reasons
come to mind:
- I am male (most weird-o commenters seem to haunt young women)
- I am boring (technobabble, not too radical opinions, and little
personal life; not much to mock me about)
- I publish the internet address of every single commenter, so you
can't be anonymous to the general public (go to Recen
tChanges, then click on the "Main_comments_XXX" entry,
then "More Info..." to find this information). Transparency
rules.
- Writing in English raises the barrier of commenting somewhat
I don't know. Perhaps I should just go more for the social porn
aspect of blogging... *grin*
(In order for this blog entry to be not completely void of any
actual content, take a look at the Committee to
Protect Bloggers, a web site which lists and informs about
bloggers that have been jailed or harassed for blogging.)
weird News.com roundup on bl0gs
weird News.com roundup on bl0gs
08/10/2004 03:39 PMi kind of don't understand what they're doing here
Weird cocoon-car art spotted in Turkey
Weird cocoon-car art spotted in Turkey
04/14/2005 10:49 PMXeni Jardin:
Spotted by a
metroblogger
in Istanbul:
"blue beetle wrapped in threads. the sign on the rear pane reads:
'please do not touch or remove the threads. this is an art project by
japanese artists visiting our country and will be here for about a
week.' spotted in kadikoy with no admirers of art around."
Link (Thanks, Sean
Bonner)
amazon's weird pi-based A9 discount
amazon's weird pi-based A9 discount
09/17/2004 04:40 PMi guess pi is to amazon as e is to google
Weird science for the dedicated gearhead
Weird science for the dedicated gearhead
09/24/2004 01:29 PMNational Post Sep 24 2004 4:49PM GMT
Weird and Wonderfull in the Shark Tank
Weird and Wonderfull in the Shark Tank
03/13/2003 10:15 AMIf you are bored, like me, check out these weird and wonderful stories
from the lives of it professionals in...
Weird weather 'set to continue'
Weird weather 'set to continue'
08/09/2004 03:25 PMThe unseasonable weather that has wreaked havoc across the UK recently
will continue well into the week.
I have a question about weird powerbook
behaviour: ...
I have a question about weird powerbook
behaviour: ...
03/13/2003 10:22 AM
I have a question about weird powerbook behaviour: it's making strange
noises. Like, really strange. Every keyboard or mouse event
seems to generate a very, very quiet click from inside the machine;
moving your finger around the trackpad sounds like a geiger counter.
It's not the audio system -- turning the speaker off doesn't stop it
happening. I don't think it's software-related, either (certainly my
iBook didn't make these noises, and neither does the desktop G4 in the
next room). It doesn't sound like the drive seeking. It might
be some kind of electrical interference directly tweaking the
speakers, but I don't particularly want to start opening up the laptop
and snipping wires to find out. Anyone got any ideas? It's driving me
nuts -- I get paranoid when computers do things I can't explain ...
Update: I found other Powerbook owners complaining of the same
thing at Powerbook
Zone, so it's not just my imagination. Weirdly, the noises stop
when the machine is running on battery juice and the CPU is throttled
back. So it appears to be something related to the CPU cooling system
...
Discuss
6:36 AM
| Charlie
Stross
2003 weird news highlights
2003 weird news highlights
01/03/2004 05:56 AMwacked-out ..
wacky
story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=573&ncid=757&e=1&u=/n
m/20040101/od_nm/odd_dc
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Why Smart People Believe Weird Things
Why Smart People Believe Weird Things
06/21/2004 08:54 AM
On Cognitive Dissonance
"As a behavioral psychologist, I have studied people's
reactions to contradiction and inconsistency. We are capable of
convincing ourselves of something, and the more evidence that builds
up to contradict us the more we believe it.
For more than 40 years, social psychologists have studied the
phenomenon of "cognitive dissonance" - what happens when
people have pieces of information on the same subject that are
inconsistent. The presence of contradictions is psychologically
unpleasant, and people do whatever it takes to resolve the
inconsistency."
Many in the field posit that tension between contradictory thoughts
and feelings are what constitutes consciousness. It doesn't seem to
me this qualifies as it appears to be highly dysfunctional and not a
natural and normal tension. What say you who are more qualified?
Great, weird illustrator: Louis Moe
Great, weird illustrator: Louis Moe
05/06/2004 12:53 PM
Awesome early
20th century illustrations by Louis Moe. Here's a picture of a
mosquito-man sucking the blood from a willing victim.
Link
(via Cipango)"Victor Davis Hanson: Our Weird Way of
War - Our enemies know us only too
well."
"Victor Davis Hanson: Our Weird Way of
War - Our enemies know us only too
well."
05/08/2004 02:52 PMWeird context shifts caused by IM on
hiptops...
Weird context shifts caused by IM on
hiptops...
12/22/2004 01:40 AMI'm having a crisis of etiquette caused by what I believe to be bad
user interface design. Basically it works like this. I look at my
iChat buddy list (to the right) and I see a big list of people who are
'green' (indicating availability), 'orange' (indicating absence or
idle-ness) or 'red' (indicating explicitly 'away', but still
contactable if necessary).
Now my expectation of people on my iChat list is that if they are
green they are currently using their computer at this precise moment.
They're actually looking at the screen. Which means that a ping to
them should be incredibly unobtrusive but noticeable and should
involve the absolute least number of keystrokes / interactions to be
able to tell someone you're busy and/or start a conversation with
them. Actually, iChat doesn't really handle that totally brilliantly
in a range of ways, but the aspiration should remain. The ping should
be non-invasive but immediately cognitively recognisable, and a
response should be as simple as possible. It is with the understanding
that the recipient's experience will be something like this that we
are able to ping our friends or colleagues without feeling like we're
being necessarily rude.
Except that this presumptive understanding of the experience of the
person at the other end of the connection is starting to deteriorate.
At least three or four of the people I have on my IM list are now
accessing their IM via their hiptops. This changes the experience
immediately - firstly because the recipient is now not necessarily
engaged in a looking-at-a-screen-like activity. They could be walking
in a fish market. They could be chatting to their mother on a phone.
They could be driving a car. Secondly in order for them to react to
the messages they're receiving they have to physically move the device
to a place where they can focus upon it. The casual ping is
immediately an intrusive one. And then - of course - they have to find
a way to respond to the ping - either by using slow phone-style or
fold-out keyboards, or by changing their presence. None of these
actions are simple or quick enough to make the experience of using a
hip-top and responding to messages on a hip-top comparable with
responding via a computer keyboard.
All of which would be fine if it wasn't potentially difficult to
distinguish between a person being rudely invasive and a device that
encourages potentially invasive attempts at social intercourse... And
if it wasn't - in turn - difficult for the person sending a message to
distinguish between a long silence that resembles some kind of
'shunning' activity and a long silence that is merely a consequence of
circumstances or the difficulties in getting to your messaging. On
both sides there are social problems that emerge because the behaviour
of the interfaces is confused with the behaviour of the people at
either end - the software/interface actually makes the person at
the other end seem rude - and purely because there is a disparity
between the social engagement one thinks one is engaging in and
the consequence it might have.
The software attempts to compensate for this a little bit. Most of
my friends that are using hip-tops use some kind of status message to
convey that they are mobile - which would work more effectively if you
couldn't easily hide the status message to free up screen real-estate.
In the meantime, the signifiers that actually tell you that someone is
online completely overpower the signals that indicate their
mobility.
So what's the solution? Well ideally - since you're looking at
another form of engagement you'd distinguish it from the more
conventional uses for IM. A separate scrollable container at the
bottom of the screen or another buddy-list (a la the Rendezvous
window) would compensate for some of these impediments - although
probably at the cost of adding in more complexity. Probably the
simplest solution would just be to revisit the particular presence
indicators. In iChat then there might be two options: firstly an
improvement of the portable devices to accurately reflect 'available'
and 'idle', and secondly the creation of a new form of presence to go
alongside 'available', 'idle' and 'busy'. Either would be a useful
corrective feature which could alleviate the social clumsiness of
mobile IM.
Do other people have experiences like these? And if so, how do you
resolve them? Do you leave it to social convention to work through
problems like these, or is a simple UI or technological solution more
simple? Any and all thoughts gratefully received...
Read the comments
Space probes pulled in weird ways
Space probes pulled in weird ways
09/13/2004 03:27 AM
David Pescovitz:
The Guardian reports that the old Pioneer 10 and 11 probes are being
subtly tugged around by mysterious forces as they hurtle beyond our
solar system.
"Some researchers say unseen 'dark matter' may permeate
the universe and that this is affecting the Pioneers' passage. Others
say flaws in our understanding of the laws of gravity best explain the
crafts' wayward behaviour."
And still others suggest that the probes' weird trajectories may just
be the result of gas leaking from the fuel tanks.
Link
Akiba PC Watch's Weird Items of 2004
Akiba PC Watch's Weird Items of 2004
01/05/2005 01:45 PM
Akiba PC Watch, a division of Japanese tech
news giant Impress Watch, has posted the results of their "Weird Items
Found in Akihabara" competition. Over 1,000 users submitted a total of
6,305 entries, and exactly 64 products have been labeled "Weird." Many
of the products have been covered here at Gizmodo — such as the
virtual keyboard (1st place), a jacket with solar panels (2nd place),
and even the BACKLIT 82 KEYS (16th place), but many of them weren't
covered by any English speaking site (as far as we know). Highlights
include a 5" drive bay cigarette lighter + cup holder, speakers with
moving eyes, and even a "beef bowl power source." I suggest you try
out Google's new Japanese machine translation on this article, so you
can come to realize it's just as wortheless as every other machine
translation.
Results Announcement of 2004 "Weird Products Found in Akihabara
Competition" [Akiba PC Watch]
Translated
Page [Akiba PC Watch through Google]
Altoids' weird Wario Ware homage
Altoids' weird Wario Ware homage
07/01/2004 01:49 AMWarioWare-like games .. this is so
tight!
altoids.com/index.aspx?area=game&relationID=407&siteGameID=31
5
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Weird Financial News (The Motley Fool)
Weird Financial News (The Motley Fool)
04/16/2004 07:40 AMThe Motley Fool - Lest you be focusing just on the bigger stories in
the financial press, such as Apple Computer's (Nasdaq: AAPL - News)
iPod profits and PepsiCo's (NYSE: PEP - News) boffo first quarter,
here's a brief recap of some recent and weird financial news:
Grok Description matches for Message from Weird Al Yankovic
GrokA matches for Message from Weird Al Yankovic
Message from Weird Al Yankovic
