3E Presents: Worst Crap on the Internet #1 Part 1: These Drawings.

3E Presents: A Top 21 Things on the Internet: #17 The Helmet Project

One thing I like about the internet is that it lets everyone get their obsessions out in the open. Sometimes the results are just weird, but occasionally it produces a thing of usefulness and beauty. The first such site I can remember finding, from way back in the day, is The Helmet Project. It is old-school; a surviving, still active website from the 1990s is always a nice find. And none of that fancy flash; it still has the same clunky frame design it had when I found it.

The Helmet Project has inspired about a million imitators, including some very direct inspirations, which I think attests to its magnificence. What makes it so outstanding is that it is not limited to simply the current or historic NFL, or the major conference college football teams, or to particular region. It is as much as it can be universal, as the author Charles Arey throws around with oddly placed square quotes, an "atlas" for college and professional football helmets.

Take a look, for example, at the most recent updates to the site (N = new helmet, H = historical helmet, C = current helmet). It contains, by my count, two D-I teams, a D-II team, a D-III team, one NAIA team, and seven junior colleges:

JUN 29 - Illinois College (H) (NCAA Division III Midwest Conference)
JUN 25 - Michigan Tech (C) (NCAA Division II Great Lakers Intercollegiate Athletic Conference)
Blinn (C) (NJCAA)
Iowa Western C.C. (C) (NJCAA)
JUN 21 - Culver-Stockton (N) (NAIA Heart of America Athletic Conference)
Fond du Lac (C) (NJCAA)
Harper (C) (NJCAA)
Holmes C.C. (C) (NJCAA)
Pearl River C.C. (C) (NJCAA)
JUN 20 - Joliet J.C. (C) (NJCAA)
JUN 18 - New Mexico State (N) (Western Athletic Conference)
Hampton (C) (Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference)

The site has become in its way as much an official institution as YouTube or Google. In less than a month (July 27, to be exact), the site will be celebrating its ten year anniversary, and may it celebrate many more decades.

If any ADs or NFL owners read this blog (they don't), please, contact this guy about your next uniform switch. Or at least devote an afternoon to his site to see what you shouldn't do. Tasteful football fans everyone appreciate it.

Psychopaths

Hare arrived at UBC in 1963, intending to follow up his doctoral research on punishment. Certain prisoners, it was rumoured, didn't respond to punishment, and Hare went to the federal penitentiary in New Westminster, British Columbia, to find these extreme cases. (He found plenty. In his chilling 1993 book on psychopathy, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, he quotes one specimen's memories: "[M]y mother, the most beautiful person in the world. She was strong, she worked hard to take care of four kids. A beautiful person. I started stealing her jewellery when I was in the fifth grade. You know, I never really knew the bitch -- we went our separate ways.")

For his first paper, now a classic, Hare had his subjects watch a countdown timer. When it reached zero, they got a "harmless but painful" electric shock while an electrode taped to their fingers measured perspiration. Normal people would start sweating as the countdown proceeded, nervously anticipating the shock. Psychopaths didn't sweat. They didn't fear punishment -- which, presumably, also holds true outside the laboratory. In Without Conscience, he quotes a psychopathic rapist explaining why he finds it hard to empathize with his victims: "They are frightened, right? But, you see, I don't really understand it. I've been frightened myself, and it wasn't unpleasant."

In another Hare study, groups of letters were flashed to volunteers. Some of them were nonsense, some formed real words. The subject's job was to press a button whenever he recognized a real word, while Hare recorded response time and brain activity. Non-psychopaths respond faster and display more brain activity when processing emotionally loaded words such as "rape" or "cancer" than when they see neutral words such as "tree." With psychopaths, Hare found no difference. To them, "rape" and "tree" have the same emotional impact -- none.

Hare made another intriguing discovery by observing the hand gestures (called beats) people make while speaking. Research has shown that such gestures do more than add visual emphasis to our words (many people gesture while they're on the telephone, for example); it seems they actually help our brains find words. That's why the frequency of beats increases when someone is having trouble finding words, or is speaking a second language instead of his or her mother tongue. In a 1991 paper, Hare and his colleagues reported that psychopaths, especially when talking about things they should find emotional, such as their families, produce a higher frequency of beats than normal people. It's as if emotional language is a second language -- a foreign language, in effect -- to the psychopath.

"Psychopaths Among Us"

We're going to be presenting a proclamation and then we have cake in the back

Okay, so, the Alabama legislature is pretty awful, but this makes me feel a little better. Your tax dollars at work, ladies and gents:



It gets really fun about the 5:30 mark. I look forward to these people introducing additional life-changing legislation.

It's not too late to sell Louisiana back to France.

Info

Transformers:RotF review

Michael Jackson follow-up

1. Is Michael Jackson Alive or Dead?

2. The Ultimate Warrior [!] weighs in:

I imagine all the crying about the death of this recent drug-soused entertainment freak has most to do with the unfortunate inconvenience that the other drug-soused entertainment freaks now face. They will have to look for another local, safe and reputable babysitter. No longer will they be able to drop their kids off down the street at Jacko’s to be watched for the afternoon and spend some play time with his own kids.

I hate the paparazzi, and think they should all be shot for the obsessive invasion of privacy. But I’m really going miss ALL those TMZ and Entertainment Tonight video clips of Jacko’s and other celebrity kids playing together. You ever see any of those? Weren’t they great? Didn’t they make you feel all warm and fuzzy on the inside? Worked for me. Every time I caught one it made me believe maybe he wasn’t a pedophile. After all, famous and rich entertainers, with all kinds of money to go to any expense to have things accurately checked out for themselves, wouldn’t let their own little babies near a pedophile…would they?!

Well, you gotta give him credit for one thing. He spent all his money (and then some) before he died. And that’s not an easy thing to calculate. Go ahead, ask your financial planner if he has a plan to pull it off. For all the horrific mismanagement of millions and millions and millions of dollars, here at the end, Jacko did a pretty damn good job at balancing the books in his favor. Sorry, at my new age and with the way the Obama economic plan is going, I couldn’t help but recognize this stunner.

Your Founding Father of Intense Sarcasm…

Always Believe, Warrior

3. Is Michael Jackson a Zombie Yet?

4. "Thriller" is such a great song, I will ruin your face if you disagree. Related. Also, I imagine that if I were old enough to remember when it came out, I would enjoy it less; running a thirteen minute video twice an hour is a lot of coverage. On the other hand, pop music in the early 1980s wasn't exactly peaking. You all should hope that you're on the news 24-7 when you die twenty years after you do anything meaningful.

5. Is anyone really surprised that he died at 50? It reminds me of Norm MacDonald pointing out that, actually, 44 is pretty old for a Crocodile Hunter.

6. Music videos and racial equality

7. Is Michael Jackson still alive?

8.

This guy has a pretty cool job

Six years ago, I spotted a guy in his late forties in a bookstore in New Jersey. He was buying books about offshore banking and a travel guide to Costa Rica. He paid with a credit card. Afterwards, when he sat down in the bookshop café, I decided to talk to him. “I bet you want to buy a condo in Costa Rica and bank your money in Belize,” I said. “But if you’re running from someone, you’d better avoid paying for those books with your credit card.” We talked for a while. Before I left, I gave him my business card. He was the first person I helped to disappear.

Since then, I’ve helped more than 30 people vanish – people who had problems with ex-spouses, with business partners or with criminals. Normally, it takes me between one month and three to make the necessary preparations. Depending on the case, I charge between $10,000 and $30,000, but I work free of charge for women who are being stalked.

People who hire me are usually afraid for their lives. The guy in the bookstore was a whistleblower who had worked as an accountant in a mid-sized company with government contracts. He had testified against his employer in a fraud case. Somehow, information about him had leaked and former colleagues had threatened him. He could have gone to the police, but he didn’t trust them any more.

Before I started helping people disappear, I had worked as a “skip tracer” for more than 20 years. Skip tracers are private investigators who specialise in finding people, and I was good at my job. Over the years, I located more than 50,000 people. Helping a person to disappear required reverse engineering: I asked myself how I would have found a person, and tried to smear the leads.

More

It seems to me (although I'm certainly not an expert in the field) that this is exactly the kind of story you would not want in this particular line of work, particularly if I was a client of this guy.

3E: UNITE!

it will look something like this

oh my god so toats true

www.toothpastefordinner.com

toats true.

you'll eat your kids (yeah you'll eat 'em)

1.

2.

Real breaking news

Did you see Mark Sanford's confession? Talk about a meltdown on camera.



Rough.

The important political impact will be that the only remotely libertarian Republican with a chance to win the 2012 nomination is now out of the running. Hooray!

Breaking news

story

thursday morning post-metal face-melt

this is important.

This wasn't a lucky win. The US deserved this. Spain is a far, far better team, but this afternoon the US played a far, far better game. This doesn't mean the US is going to go krzy at the World Cup (if they qualify), all it means is that today the US was measurably better than the largely undisputed best team in the world.

I hope you understand whatever language this is.

Four words to describe myself: handy with the steel

It's weird to me, at least

Does it seem odd that policemen are given more leniency than other people? It seems backwards to me. I think the police should be held to a higher standard than others, but I can't off the top of my head think of a situation where that's been the case.

Language

Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space.1 This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like " Southsoutheast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello."

The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English).2 Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them — in fact, forces them — to do this is their language. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities. Because space is such a fundamental domain of thought, differences in how people think about space don't end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build other, more complex, more abstract representations. Representations of such things as time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions have been shown to depend on how we think about space. So if the Kuuk Thaayorre think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time? This is what my collaborator Alice Gaby and I came to Pormpuraaw to find out.

To test this idea, we gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression (e.g., pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. If you ask English speakers to do this, they'll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards from right to left, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role.3 So what about folks like the Kuuk Thaayorre, who don't use words like "left" and "right"? What will they do?

The Kuuk Thaayorre did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left, nor more toward or away from the body. But their arrangements were not random: there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that already (usually much better than I did), but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.

How does language shape the way we think?

Top six Hellraiser films, a countdown!

So many to choose from, our editors have narrowed it down to these six. Drum roll...

Number Six: Hellraiser VI: Hellseeker. You may recognize Dean Winters from the television program 30 Rock. He'll always be whatever his character's name is in this movie to me, though.


Number Five: Hellraiser V: Inferno. That's the guy from The Program and A River Runs Through It. Those were stepping stones.


Number Four: Hellraiser IV: Bloodline. Now we're getting to the rarified air.


Number Three: Hellraiser III: Hell On Earth. Blasphemy and an actress from Deep Space Nine? That's sweet enough, but the best news of all is that it's available FREE on youtube!


Number Two: Hellbound: Hellraiser II. What do these clowns know? One's fat and one's dead.


Number One: Hellraiser. Delicious.

man do I love classic country

She never tried to buck

513.32

That's how much (in US dollars) Tha Captain spent on his schooner, the SS Cunt-Thumper, today. I would be so good at twitter.

Things not on Google Maps

51 of them, in fact. My favorite part: "In April 2008, the country's government claimed that the ban stemmed from a dispute between SLA (Singapore Land Authority) and Google over copyright issues. SLA alleged that the satellite images on Google Earth are direct copies of real geographic features in Singapore and infringe upon the organization's copyrights." Direct copies of real geographic features infringe on copyright? Also, did you know that William Hurt lives in Paris?

I hope my black brothers feel the same like me

That's right. C'mon. Yee.

From the YouTube description: "It's not meant to be a joke!!!!!"

get ready for another six months of changing underwear at lunchtime

It's the first day of summer, that humid bastard. Yes, believe it or not, despite weeks of 80+ degree days across the Southland, it is only beginning. I hope you're all celebrating the solstice the traditional way:

Winter solstice got all sorts of cool holidays in ye olden dayes: Saturnalia, Yule, Kwanzaa. What does the summer get? Midsummer? St. John's Eve? Bah. I'll be inside until September.

Post-its

Today's Big Thing.

This would actually be kind of cool

Sometime in the early 1980s, when I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I received a postcard with a name and return address I didn’t recognize, bearing a cryptic image on the back. Every few weeks after that I received another card. There was one with holes punched in it, one with a symbol that resembled crosshairs, one with a picture of a man in sunglasses and a hooded sweatshirt, and one with a string of binary digits. The return addresses and postmarks kept changing. Assuming a friend from college was trying to get me to play some sort of puzzle game—a recreation for which I have no patience—I threw them in a drawer, a little guilty that he was going to all this trouble.

Then I received an article reciting details of the unsolved "Zodiac murders" that had unfolded in Northern California more than a decade earlier. In an episode that has since been recounted by countless journalists and Hollywood filmmakers, the killer had ambushed and slain five people. (The murderer has never been identified for certain, although numerous people have claimed to pinpoint the culprit—including a San Francisco woman who held a press conference in April declaring her father was the Zodiac killer.) He then sent letters to Bay Area newspapers threatening to kill many more unless they published a series of cryptic symbols, an act that created widespread panic. Included in the article I received were descriptions of the symbols, which sounded just like the ones on the postcards in my drawer. "Holy cow!" I said. "I’m getting mail from a mass murderer!" I called the local FBI branch, and a nice young woman with an FBI badge came to my office, picked up the collection of mail, said thank you, and left.

A week later, another agent came by with everything in a plastic envelope, gave it to me, and said, "Don’t worry, he’s harmless."

"He’s what? What do you mean, harmless?"

"Don’t you know about this guy?"

"I don’t know what you’re talking about. Do you mean the murderer?"

The agent then explained that the mail was from an amateur sleuth in California named Gareth Penn, who had been trying for some time to interest the police in the idea that I was the Zodiac killer.

Confessions of a Non-Serial Killer

So like us

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

3E Presents: A Top 21 Things on the Internet: #18 The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny

Better version


When Godzilla gets mad at about :56, it is the best. Also: the way Godzilla looks at the very beginning of the video is how I act every day. You know what, don't watch that. It is going to be stuck in my head for the next three or four days, and I wouldn't want that to happen to anyone.

Some people I would like to have seen in this video: Doomguy, Voltron, Coolio, Jeffrey Lebowski (either), a hydralisk, and Vincent Vega.

Somebody has waaaaaaaayyyyyy too much free time.

Top teams of the 00's

Dr. Saturday links to a top teams of the decade poll at the Orlando Sentinel and gives his own list:

1. Texas (2005)
2. Miami (2001)
3. USC (2004)
4. Auburn (2004)
5. Oklahoma (2000)
6. Florida (2008)
7. LSU (2003)
8. USC (2003)
9. USC (2005)
T-10. USC (2008)
T-10. Texas (2008)

I don't disagree too much with that, although I would probably move 2005 USC ahead of 2003 LSU and give 2002 Ohio State the 10th spot instead of USC/Texas. Also, the best team that doesn't deserve to be on the list, if that makes any sense: the schizophrenic 2001 Florida Gators, who were very talented and drilled almost everyone they played, but lost to a pretty good Tennessee team and a pretty bad Auburn team (I was at that game!).

The 2004 Auburn team is ranked as the best SEC team of the decade, which I think is correct; it's difficult for me to imagine even the Tebow-monster moving on that defense. Ooh, the injustice of that season is hitting me again; I need to lie down.

The only reason I post this is that the Orlando Sentinel shouldn't be running this poll. There is still another year left! Let's see what Florida, USC, or whoever else is going to be good this year does.

Adorable

The Secret, reviewed (II)

Second best review of The Secret:

"Greetings, friend. Do you wish to look as happy as me? Well, you've got the power inside you right now. Use it, and send one dollar to Happy Dude, 742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield. Don't delay! Eternal happiness is only a dollar away. "

Jal Sparks: Day 33

Looking good, little buddy.

Are you going to send one in?

My friend, Jørgen, doesn't believe I can collect one million hand drawn giraffes by 2011. I'm gonna prove him wrong. So far I've got 1912 giraffes, so I need 998 088 more! And I have 563 days left to get them.
Let's show Jørgen how amazing the internet is.

OneMillionGiraffes.com

Why I love Mike Leach, part 258

Graham Harrell’s pass to Michael Crabtree with eight seconds remaining has become one of the greatest plays in college football history.

“It was definitely a good win,” Leach said. “But, I coached a 13-year-old all star team and we beat Cheyenne one time and I thought that was a bigger win.”

heah

3E Presents: A Top 21 Things on the Internet: #19 Boxhead

The is the first of a few games to be on our list. To me, the sequels really throw off the balance, introducing the devil character, and the Halloween prequel isn't quite there, but the original Boxhead is a great casual game. It is easily my favorite zombie shooter flash game. Once you figure out how to use barrels correctly, you can almost play without fear of ever being killed, which is why I usually make it a rule not to create barriers.

And the rest of the series is still pretty good.

A close second here: Bum Lee's De-Animator.

there's a little girl jacking Grover off, for butt's sake.

When Cookie Monster lets it all out, I can't help but laugh. a lot.

PfP to start your week

Try to keep up.

3E's official CWS prediction was: Fullerton vs UNC in the final with the Heelz pipping the Titanz for the title. Note that Fullerton lost yesterday as the SEC brought the ruckus. North Carolina grips it and rips it this afternoon.

I really want to paint a room in my house like this

Friday links -- why do these even exist

1. Goths in hot weather

2. Missouri trailer trash

3. Asian poses

4. A pronunciation guide for everything Wisconsin

The internet: is there anything it can't do?

See? You're not even listening to me!

Movies I should be ashamed of owning

WARNING: Misspellings.

Speaking of Bruce Lee...

Note: Bruce Lee is not in this film.

3E Presents: A Top 21 Things on the Internet: #20 Real Ultimate Power

Real Ultimate Power is where I learned three facts:

1. Ninjas are mammals.
2. Ninjas fight ALL the time.
3. The purpose of the ninja is to flip out and kill people.

It is also why I say, "or ready for bed!" whenever anyone says someone is ready to rock.

My favorite part is the hatemail, even though I am sure much or most of it is fake.

Hey retard.. just to let you know.. Seppuku is not the form of killing yourself when your pissed off or when there is no one else to kill. Its the art of an honorable suicide done because they pretty much fucked up (like if they get caught). Ninjas do not kill and stab all day. They are actually silent assasins. e.g. they would dress up like a salesman to get into your house, and while they are pretending to sell you something they would look for holes and cracks to climb into, then at night they would come back and murder you. If you going to talk about somethinig... make sure you know what the fuck you are talking about. Thats not even the jist of whats wrong on your dumbass site.

from Sudo Shima (John Madison)

Although supposedly this one is real:

DEAR ROBERT (OR WHOM EVER)

I HOPE YOU REALIZE THAT THE INFORMATION YOU HAVE POSTED ON YOUR SIGHT IS NOT ONLY COMPLETELY WRONG BUT ALSO VERY MISLEADING AND DANGEROUS. YOU OBVIOUSLY HAVE NO FACTUAL KNOWLEDGE OF NINJA,NINPO OR NINJUTSU BUT CLAIM TO BE AN AUTHORITY ON THE SUBJECT. GOD FORBID SOMEONE ACTUALLY TAKES YOUR GARBAGE TO HEART AND TRIES THIS INSANITY....YOUR GOING TO GET SOEM POOR KID KILLED....ARE YOU READY TO ACCEPT THAT RESPONSIBILITY. AS FOR ME....IM A NINJUTSU SOKE...GRANDMASTER....IN A LEGITAMATE NINJA RYU (FAMILY) WITH 25 YEARS UNDER MY BELT IN AN HISTORICALY TRACEABLE LINEAGE. I STONGLY URGE THAT YOU DO THE FOLLOWING....
>1:PLACE AN APOLOGY ON THE SIGHT WITHIN 48 HRS OF RECIEPT OF MY EMAIL TO ALL NINPO STUDENTS AND TEACHERS.
>2:PLACE A NOTE ON THE BEGINING OF YOUR SIGHT TELLING EVERYONE THAT GOES TO YOUR SIGHT THAT YOU ARE FULL OF BS.HAVE NO KNOWLEDGE OF THE ART AND TO NOT TAKE THE SIGHT SERIOUSLY
>3: REMOVE THE SIGHT BEFOR SEPT 15 2002. SHOULD YOU NOT REMOVE THE SIGHT BY THAT DATE THEN I WILL FIRST LOBBY AOL TO HAVE THE SIGHT REMOVED. IF THAT DOES NOT WORK I WILL PAY YOU A VISIT TO TEACH YOU WHAT REAL SHINOBI IS CAPABLE OF DOING....AND BELIEVE ME...I CAN AND WILL VISIT YOU. YOUR SIGHT IS DANGEROUS AND OFFENSIVE...ESPECIALLY TO SOMEONE LIKE ME WHO HAS DEDICATED HIS LIFE TO THIS ART AND HAS INHERITED THE SYSTEM AND KNOWS THE DANGERS AND VALIDITY OF NINJUTSU. I EXPECT AN EMAIL IN RETURN TO CONFIRM YOUR RECIEPT OF THIS EMAIL.....GOD HELP YOU IF YOU DONT RESPOND.

SOKE D. FUJITA
BUFUKAN NINPO BUJUTSU HOMBU DOJO

I don't think anyone updates or runs the website anymore. Shame on you, Mr. Hamburger!

Closely related: I know where Bruce Lee lives is an early and I think my favorite sound board. If nothing else, just putting it on the "Victory" music makes you feel pumped up.

Two fake signs

Well, that's not exactly correct; they aren't fake signs. There are actual physical signs there, not just holograms or hallucinations. Better: here's one unapproved sign and one altered sign.


Inspired by this hero's work.

shoryuken!

My favorite part is the brief pan to the camera recording the destruction. Hardcore!

Good news, everyone!

Futurama might be coming back. At least, that's the word, apparently starting here. That would be exciting. While I liked the DVD releases well enough, I think the show worked/works better in a half-hour format.

I'll believe it when I see it, though. These sorts of rumors pop up all the time, and Futurama already got its second chance, so I am taking this news with a grain of salt. Right now we have to be content with it being on the list of great shows canceled before their time.

My only other question is, why ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD



UPDATE AND A BUMP UP: it is official

comics I like

Married to the sea

Chrysler, we hardly knew ye

"a great homage to an (Gerald!) Ford era of spectacularly diminished expecations, as the narration emphasizes the benefits of settling for less in a high-inflation, high-unemployment, high-interest-rate America" -- Nick Gillespie

Realfield

Old. Credits to whoever invented this.

I love lists

Here's a collection - a list of lists, if you will.

Did you know the banana tree is technically a herb? Now you do.

get your hopes up for funny!

New Terminator Movie Brings J.D. Salinger Out Of Hiding

When asked what he thought of today's novelists, and whether he had plans to publish any new work, Salinger replied that he loved it when the helicopter crashes and John Connor gets grabbed by that terminator that's only half a torso, and then he blows it away with the mounted machine gun.

facebook is stupid.

an entire website dedicated to that idea.

3E Presents: A Top 21 Things on the Internet: #21 Tunak Tunak Tun

So there's lots of neat stuff on that internet. Over the next few weeks, we'll be taking you through a list of some of it. This list is by necessity a partial and subjective list, in some sort of order, and we hope criteria for inclusion will emerge over the course of publication. Doubtless someone will point out things we should have included, and everyone will slap their foreheads and go, "Of course!" But hopefully not too much.

If you're incredibly angry about any of this, here is a much more comprehensive list (although it has some surprising omissions). There is some overlap between that list and ours.

So, let's get on with it.

3E Presents: A Top 21 Things on the Internet: #21 Tunak Tunak Tun



I first saw this video in college, and as you can imagine it made a pretty big impression on me. The orange one is my favorite. Whatever has happened in your life, if you do the Tunak Tunak Tun dance, you'll feel better about it. In fact, you should do it right now. It starts about 1:12.

Fun fact! This video is so awesome in part because people complained that Daler Mehndi was only so popular because of all the attractive women in his videos. So, he made this video of himselves doing this fantastic dance. I think they're supposed to be some sort of nature spirits?

Fun fact! The scene from Michael Bay's Transformers wherein the Autobots arrive on earth was lifted directly from this video.

Fun fact! That's not true. But this is: a great Halloween costume for four people would be to go as this video.

freezing

Within a few seconds, the palms of your hands are a chilly, painful 60 degrees. Instinctively, the web of surface capillaries on your hands constrict, sending blood coursing away from your skin and deeper into your torso. Your body is allowing your fingers to chill in order to keep its vital organs warm.

You replace your gloves, noticing only that your fingers have numbed slightly. Then you kick boots into bindings and start up the road.

Were you a Norwegian fisherman or Inuit hunter, both of whom frequently work gloveless in the cold, your chilled hands would open their surface capillaries periodically to allow surges of warm blood to pass into them and maintain their flexibility. This phenomenon, known as the hunter's response, can elevate a 35-degree skin temperature to 50 degrees within seven or eight minutes.

Other human adaptations to the cold are more mysterious. Tibetan Buddhist monks can raise the skin temperature of their hands and feet by 15 degrees through meditation. Australian aborigines, who once slept on the ground, unclothed, on near-freezing nights, would slip into a light hypothermic state, suppressing shivering until the rising sun rewarmed them.

You have no such defenses, having spent your days at a keyboard in a climate-controlled office. Only after about ten minutes of hard climbing, as your body temperature rises, does blood start seeping back into your fingers. Sweat trickles down your sternum and spine.

As Freezing Persons Recollect the Snow--First Chill--Then Stupor--Then the Letting Go

World Cup Qualification Map OMG!

Today, Japan, Australia, South Korea, and the Netherlands became the first teams to qualify by actually doing something. Also of note, Iran and North Korea played to the most EVIL scoreless draw in the history of sport.

Hint:
green = yes
red/pink = no
blue = we'll see
purple = paperwork FAIL
grey = being a real country FAIL

I've finally decided to let a video of myself get out on the internet

CollegeHumor

internet boredom

I get an ironic enjoyment out of reading screeds or complaints or jeremiads or concerned missives about the dangers that the internet and constant over-connectivity are bringing, especially when I find them online via link aggregators like Arts and Letters Daily. But there is a lot of truth in this line:

The truth is that we are often bored to death by what we find online—but this is boredom on the installment plan, one click a time, and therefore imperceptible.

That should be the new motto for this blog.

Johnny Cash's memoirs

“Willie, Waylon, Kris and I weren’t just good friends who loved to make music together. We’d also been wrongly accused of a crime and imprisoned, promptly escaping to the Los Angeles Undergound. If you had a problem, if no one else could help, and if you could find us, maybe you could hire… the Highwaymen.”

[...]

“The first time I met Bono, he asked me to play a song with U2. I looked him up and down and said ‘Son, I ain’t never played with a man couldn’t beat me at NBA Jam Tournament Edition.’ A half hour later, I was in the studio to record The Wanderer. It’s gotta be the shoes.”

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Let's watch my new favorite commercials

There's an honesty in his "I don't always drink beer" that I love.

What is the source of the LESBIAN BARBECUE?

This could out-batshit Dr. "Mean" Gene Ray if whatever jaded hipster writing it actually believed what he was saying. Spaceship Jesus even gives a shoutout to the Cubist and Wisest Human. So, either someone actually buys into the timecube mythos (Tha Captain can't live in a world where that can happen) or it's a cute little farce. Note: It's the second thing.

Crazy points would be awarded for not trusting the Gorton's Fisherman. That guy is on the level.

Tiananmen Square Massacres

Twenty years ago today, folks.

mix an explodin' drink

Not literally so. With Mentos.


I love the look on that guy's face. Oh man it's exploding!

Wired

3E approves

Sometimes you want to drink some dark beers without feeling like you just ate a loaf of bread.

3e endorsed.

Now I want a list of exclusively English words

Thirteen words not found in the English language, which is not really an accurate title as virtually all foreign words are not part of the English language; it's a list of concepts for which there is no easy English translation. Some of my favorites:

1. Waldeinsamkeit (German): the feeling of being alone in the woods

3. Taarradhin (Arabic): a way of resolving a problem without anyone losing face (not the same as our concept of a compromise - everyone wins)

4. Litost (Czech): a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery

5. Esprit de l’escalier (French): a witty remark that occurs to you too late, literally on the way down the stairs…

no comment

Up

I really liked it. It continues Pixar's notable tradition of making fantastic films about entirely unlikeable or unrelatable characters: a rat, a mute robot, an old man. If I had to explain aging to a small child, I would just show them the first ten minutes of it.

My favorite part is the dog, Dug, who talks exactly how a dog would talk if able to do so. This movie gets three E's up.

Shit I found on my computer.

...Apparently some kind of dream journal (gay!) that I tried to keep up.


10/19/06

Chopping through a box of books with an axe. Green, bulbous slime in the box with hypnotic, mind-control powers. Retards chained together and hitting railroad spikes into large wooden stakes with an axe. Part hellraiser, part Friday the 13th part V. A midget, maybe part clown. I chop his arms off and then steal them. He runs a video rental store that uses keys instead of video tapes. I go to rent Hellraiser. I have a ring of power. Jewel Staite is on a chair inside, cut in half, covered in shit. She’s in a movie called Thought Vacation. Upon arriving I ask the midget/clown/video clerk “Where are your arms? Oh yeah, I chopped them off and then stole them.” He says something to the effect of “Water under the
bridge!”

03/07/07

Someone’s family doesn’t like me. Thanksgiving dinner. I’m squeezed in at the table.

Swimming in a lake. Fantasizing about having my hand bitten off by a bull shark. Wouldn’t be mad at it. If it came to my house, I’d be mad. This is his territory. Harold Reynolds is there. Tells us how he’s gotten his life back together. I slide along algae covered rocks doing the robot dance. I get really pissed off that Caroline forgot to invite NASCAR driver David Gilliland.

10/30/07

Tim Tebow teaches me to hunt for clams. It makes sense because he is a clam.

"I clearly miscalculated how popular it would be to show Calvin urinating on a Ford logo." - Bill Watterson

So I bought a real, physical copy of the newspaper for the first time in months recently. I saw this in the comics section:



It's not particularly funny -- in fact, it doesn't really make any sense -- but there's a certain, what shall we say, familiarity to its execution.


It will only get stronger when you read a few more comics -- the main character, the eponymous Frazz, is a brilliant underachiever with blond, spikey hair. I remember when Frazz came out, but it was right at the end of the my regular paper reading days, and I never followed it online. So, it's news to me.

It turns out that the strip's creator, Jef Mallett, is not Bill Watterson. He simply draws like him. I don't read the strip regularly, so I have no idea if it's as much a copy or effort to replace Calvin and Hobbes as it looks like. Mallett says it is not, but frankly I don't believe him.

The real point of all this is for me to point out how much I miss Calvin and Hobbes, a magnificent creation that was the last really good comic strip. I wish Watterson would start producing comics again online. He could completely avoid all the hassles (syndication, merchandising, etc) that seemed to bother him so much as a newspaper cartoonist.

You mean the bad guy from Rocky IV?

Dolph Lundgren has a master's degree in chemical engineering, was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship, and has at least some knowledge of seven languages.

for John

Indigo children

The indigo phenomena has also been described as not the next step in human evolution, but rather the reaction of children watching television shows with an emphasis on magic and New Age-compatible language. An example of this was illustrated in a Dallas Observer article discussing indigo children, a reporter recorded the following interaction between a man who worked with indigo children, and a purported indigo child:

Are you an indigo? he asked Dusk. The boy looked at him shyly and nodded. "I'm an avatar," Dusk said. "I can recognize the four elements of earth, wind, water and fire. The next avatar won't come for 100 years." The man seemed impressed.

Readers of the Dallas Observer later wrote in to inform the newspaper that the child's response appeared to be taken from the storyline of Avatar: The Last Airbender; a children's cartoon showing on Nickelodeon at the time of the interview. The editor of the Dallas Observer later admitted they were not aware of the possible connection until readers brought it to their attention.

3E Detritus

It's been accumulating in 3E's colon for far too long. Enema, players.

For the uninitiated, reasons this is funny:

• That's not Brad, it's his brother Brian!
• There was only one (1) RA on the 3rd floor!
• He has a unibrow!
  

Bumbling, yet endearing. Also lucky not to be a vegetable.

Let me first say that I like Lee Corso more than most people seem to. However, even after a potentially life-threatening ordeal, he finds a way to lapse into hackneyed self-parody.

Corso issued a statement in which he called the stroke a "small bump in the road" and a "not so fast, my friend, in my game of life" -- a play on one of his more well-known quips.

Or is it that after potentially life-threatening ordeals people are most likely to whore themselves out to trite-nicities? I can never remember.

From the Blurry Collector's Set

Would Jesus Wear a Rolex?

Preseason SEC football poll

The SEC's spring football fling just ended, and here are some results. Sports information directors voted their choices for each division and for the conference overall. I've got to say, this is about the least imaginative preseason poll one could create.


Except for the odd but not surprising elevation of Tennessee to third in the East, that is almost exactly how the teams finished last season. Very creative, SIDs.


In the overall vote, it looks like Florida voted for Ole Miss, not Alabama, to win the Western Division. I wonder if that's because they actually think Ole Miss is the second-best team in the conference or simply the result of (entirely understandable) distaste for Alabama, Saban, or some combination thereof. It's also interesting to look at the differences in order when the divisional votes are together -- Tennessee loses the tie breaker with South Carolina, and Vanderbilt falls into a tie with Kentucky. Given that a school could not vote for itself, only one person out of eleven with the option to do so did not pick Mississippi State last. The poll is only more certain that Florida is first overall.

Last year, the only team to finish where predicted was Arkansas, barely, in a three-way tie for fourth in the Western Division.