Ploafmaster General

This is so true that it's almost not funny:

Silly Germans...tricks are for...oh, wait. This is actually hilarious:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbrcEAH9Q3U&rel=1&w=425&h=355]

Rebecca, if you're reading this, please let me know if I got the post title correct...

So I wanted a fuller understanding of how the Bird Feeder Pepper functions in my installation of Mint. Then I read this comment by Inman himself in the Mint Forums, and I thought, "Really? That feed count is the number of unique requests in a given day?"

Here's a screen shot of the Feeds pane as of this writing:



So theoretically, I've had 67 unique subscribers hit my main feed today alone! And what the heck is up with Sunday?!? There's gotta be something off...

But that anomaly aside, it still looks like I'm averaging over 40 unique subscribers a day. If that's true, then I apparently have lurkers on my site. And quite a few.

Okay, so if I really have lurkers, come on out and say something. Or somebody at least explain what's up...

Dan Liebert, occasional verbal cartoonist for McSweeney's, has his own website. And it's hilarious.

Like so:

Every now and again I'm shocked that I neglected to write about a site that I frequent. Today, that site is Aurgasm (and yes, you read that correctly).

Paul Irish's brilliant MP3 blog more often than not proves the truth in its tag line: "your favorite music you've never heard." Here you will find a collection of music from genres multifarious, and more than likely scarcely known in this country. The wide range of international artists probably contributes to their lack of eminence on these shores, but most are worth a listen. Even better than the listening itself, of course, is the download-ability of the featured tracks. And best of all, in my opinion, is that Aurgasm fetches permission from the musicians it features.

You would do well to check it out and spend some time digging through the archives.

Scoop08 is a political journalism site launching on Sunday, November 4th.

Sure, the political internet landscape is already littered with innumerable blogs and news organizations reporting on the goings-on in American halls of power, but this site purports to be something different. You see, Scoop08 is run by college students and recent graduates. While they have an impressive list of advisors, the entire journalistic team and editorial staff is comprised of young academics with widely varying backgrounds.

According to BBC News and Scoop08's own "trailer" (really?!?!) there will be increased coverage of issues and candidates typically neglected by mainstream media. With two editors each for Republican and Democratic reportage and but one for the over-broad category of Independents, however, the concentration of truly balanced content remains to be seen.

I hope this works out if only to provide an alternative to the major existing news outlets which depend on the sale of entertainment to satisfy shareholder requirements. It'd be nice, for a change to see political news reported for its relevance rather than its effect on ratings.

I was looking forward to seeing what came with the new incarnation of Tumblr that launched today, and I have to say that I'm really no more interested than I was the first time.

I can see the value in Tumblr for many folks - quick, easy posting of different media types in a clean and (seemingly) customizable format. There are still no comments, and this is a sticking point for me (but certainly not everybody). Sure, I only get a few now and again, but I still love the ability for readers to post relevant links and anecdotes. Additionally, I'm fairly comfortable with WordPress right now. I like the ability to use drafts, recognize multiple authors, and of course my beloved list of categories (and really, if I could see a list - not just auto-completing as I type - of tags I've used before, this wouldn't matter).

I'll probably keep playing with Tumblr just to see how usable it is...but between Twitter and this blog, it's difficult to see a compelling reason for me (personally) to use a "blogging lite" web app.

P.S. If you have Tumblr pointing to a sub-domain, is it possible to slap the Mint JS call in the HTML so your visits are tracked?

When I want a treat for Halloween, I need only look to my dear McSweeney's.

You'd be amazed at how cheap razorblades are these days.

Recently, my friend Dave has been spamming me with links to choice articles from The Onion, and today was one of the best yet.

Even though this glorious nugget is nearly 11 years old, you could essentially substitute the years and it would be just as relevant.

I wrote about Jessica Hagy's indexed back in February this year, and fortunately for her, so have many others more important than me.

I found out today that she's releasing a book through one of Joel Turnipseed's first posts to Kottke.org - an interview with Ms. Hagy, in fact.

The book is titled, appropriately, Indexed, and releases February 28th of 2008.

I almost busted out laughing when I saw this picture accompanying the BBC's story about Bush's visit to California:



Arnie seriously looks like he's about to snap the President in twain.

Today's been a really busy day work-wise, which means it's been a really slow day blog-wise, but I did manage to find this awesome high-speed-camera clip of a lighter striking and burning:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPP7WLuZVUk&rel=1&w=425&h=355]

I just discovered an excellent set of pages on Wikipedia: the entire collection of "...in film" pages.

For example, you can view a page summarizing the awards, events, and theatrical releases (by month and day) for the year 2007. This has already helped me glean films that I missed in theaters which I can add to my Netflix list. Replete with the usual links to nearly everything, these pages are also great springboards into further nerd research about actors, directors, etc.

While the pages are weighted almost exclusively towards American and British releases, they're still capacious resources for me (and many other of my readers, I'm sure) since most of the cinema I watch is American or British.

There's a master list as well for jumping to any decade or year you choose.

Just in case you thought all humor had drained out of my blog today, here's a fine video involving bird poop, as you probably expected:
[youtube [www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RI0UGy7kTI&w=425&h=350])

Have you seen that new All Bran ad on TV? No? Check it out below...there are some really great visual...um...metaphors...
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwX8MzOKOzI&rel=1&border=0&w=425&h=366]

These past two days I've driven over a thousand miles, watched my favorite NFL team win an away game, and discovered a tiny glimmer of what appears to be a really cool Southern city.

Dave, Chris, Nate, and I left Richmond yesterday at 5:00 am and headed south primarily along I-85. Along the way we moaned about how much of North Carolina we had to drive through, took pictures of many hilarious signs in North Carolina, and champed at the proverbial bit as we covered the last leg in Georgia. The Georgia Dome was an excellent stadium, MARTA is a clean and efficient metro system, and I just became conscious of my redundant sentence structure :-)

Ultimately, I had a great weekend with some of my best friends. It's my sincere hope that I can make many more such "mini road trips" with my friends, because the break from routine was just what I needed. I also hope to attend more NFL games, because this was a reminder of just how exciting it is to attend a major sporting event. Go Big Blue!

Driving back was better than I expected, too. Between the music on my iPod and the conversation with my friends, it was easy to stay awake. We made sure to stop in South Carolina so Chris could snag some fireworks (and the rest of us grabbed some peach cider), and met my friend Robert in Greensboro for an early dinner at New York Pizza. I am glad to finally be at home now, however, in the company of my lovely wife.

The bonus surprise for me when I returned, however, was discovering a link from 37signals' Signal vs. Noise blog for my "Screens Around Town" submission about Facebook. It's cool enough to be linked up by one of my favorite blogs...but having my crazy mug visible for the world to see? Hilarious!

There's a nifty article about the redesigned five dollar bill over at A Brief Message.

Personally, while I think the new five-spot looks fugly I believe it's a step toward more visually interesting (and useful) currency. So many other countries have a number of difference color schemes to their money that make different value bills easily distinguishable.

Of course what I'd really like to see is a variety of bill sizes.

The Sneeze made my day with the long-overdue return of "Steve Don't Eat It."

A Brief Message has an interesting take on Olympic Games identity.

As a side note, I really like the use of different color links rotating throughout the piece in the order of the rings of the IOC logo.

For the past several days I've been testing out the Tag functionality that came standard with Wordpress 2.3. You probably notice the obnoxious (noxious?) tag cloud in the sidebar...it really looks crappy in a Times-style serif typeface.

Anyway, I wanted to see if categorizing my posts using Tags would be easier than checking off categories I'd defined, adding new categories when relevant.

My conclusion is that I'm switching back to categories as of this post. I can't search my site based on tags, and the default URL structure (which I'm too lazy to mess with) doesn't take my tags into account. Granted, that last one would be difficult to implement, but I like that categories are included in the URLs - I believe it aids navigation a tad.

Now I have the extremely exciting task of categorizing my posts since the upgrade (and killing that infernal tag cloud). Hopefully that won't take too long.

You know, sometimes the message is so right and so good, that potentially ulterior profit motives can't spoil it.

Courtesy of swissmiss, this is probably one of the best ads I've seen all year. Anybody know what that song is? I know I've heard it before, and it's AWESOME.
[youtube [www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaH4y6ZjSfE&w=425&h=350])

Call it derivative (hamster dance, anyone?), call it stupid.

I can't stop laughing at this "remix" of a portion of an Arby's commercial:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2AN7kBQOsw&rel=1&w=425&h=353]

Thanks to Trey for making me aware of Rolling Stone's preview of the forthcoming Radiohead album. You have to go page by page, song by song (for the most part), but it's still worth checkin' out. I'm counting down the days until I get my download code!

The Morning News has a fantastic slide show featuring the work of painter Stephen Earl Rogers. The accompanying interview, while brief, is informative. The following line, particularly, stands out:

I can’t remember the last time I ran dry. I work with medieval technology, so things take a long time—I am always playing catch-up with myself: so many ideas, so few of them realized yet.

I quite enjoy the sense of aloofness on much of the subjects' faces (when people are involved). It's the closest thing I can imagine to a "candid painting." Please forgive the distortion that comes with a reduced image size for the below painting - one my favorites:

Sometimes Married To the Sea makes me smile.