Check out these hilarious washing instructions for Tom Bihn bags. Hint: the French part is what’s interesting. I just get a kick out of the idea of putting a hidden message into a care instruction tag.

I believe Tom Bihn is an American label for laptop and carry-all bags.

Extreme Ironing - it is what it is, I guess.

Check out the scandal of the Victoria’s Secret model with a secret of her own.

This woman has the most unfortunate name I think I’ve ever seen.

Just what the world needs: a Star Trek themed rock band. Oh, did I say ‘needs’? I meant ‘could have gone forever and ever without’!

Accordion Guy points to this “it’s funny ’cause it’s true” post at Bad News Hughes. Be sure to read to the end, because the punch line is priceless.

It terrifies me that my son may have to go through some form of this when he reaches middle school / high school age. And since he has my genes, it’s almost predetermined that there’s some geekiness in there just waiting to come out. Thank God his mom’s cool.

Tales of Future Past is a website dedicated to looking back at predictions of the future, and comparing them to where we really are.

“A few years ago, people talked about building a bridge to the 21st century. Now that we’re there, the phrase seems as odd as building a causeway to five o’clock. As Midnight brought in the year 2000 (or 2001 if you prefer), something odd began to sink in. For people of my generation, who had lived through the tarnished promises of the Atomic Age, the Space Age, the Computer Age, and the This That and Another Age, the year 2001 was a gateway. We waited twenty, thirty, forty years and some longer to pass though that gate into a time when spaceships the size of ocean liners plied between colonised planets, where cities were colourful collections of brand new towers without a single old building or blade of grass, where people wore jumpsuits like they were the togas of a technocratic Rome, where robots were our powerful and obedient servants, and where jetpacks were as common as galoshes.

Boy, were we off base. It isn’t simply that the predictions were wrong. No one with half a brain really expected that sort of accuracy. And true, though some marvels did not come to pass, others that were and weren’t predicted did. We certainly live very different lives from that of our fathers and grandfathers. That is not in dispute. But what did not happen is what many expected, though never talked about much. Assuming that we dodged the 1984, Brave New World bullet, our future was supposed to be a sort of technocratic, atomic-powered, computer-controlled, antiseptic, space-travelling Jerusalem that would at last free us from the curse of Eden and original sin. We expected some how, some way that we would be on the road to being freed from the human condition. We expected a sort of bloodless, benign French Revolution with Hugo Gernsback as our Voltaire and Carl Sagan as our Robespierre. And what did we get? The City of Man with Tivo. The fact is, science fiction and popular science had set the bar so high that only the Second Coming with ray guns would have satisfied.”

I’m not all that sure that I agree with this attempt to characterize Windows vs. Mac OSX, but it’s entertaining, nonetheless. Found on Scobleizer.

“There’s a certain painted-on mystique to her, of course. We’ve all been indoctrinated with the propaganda, the hooker with the heart of gold, the disturbingly wide-mouthed Pretty Woman. When you find her, though, beneath the paint she’s really quite plain. You take what you need from her, but reluctantly and because you have no alternative. You get what you want, but she is almost peripheral to the act.”

Actually, I think what makes me uncomfortable about this is that he may be right. Of course, from all appearances this will change drastically with the release of Longhorn.

Read the response of AccordianGuy, a Filipino-born Canadian, to a racist blogger who maintains that non-white Canadians are somehow less Canadian. AccordianGuy (Joey DeVilla) is my newest hero.

Off the westernmost coast of Japan, is an island called “Gunkanjima” that is hardly known even to the Japanese. Check out the photo gallery, and description of this forgotten place.

“I was twenty-two when I first visited the island I had dreamed about ever since childhood. Much like a fortress built upon the sea, surrounded by high walls, the island possessed an air of a small kingdom, where its denizens boasted ‘There is nothing we don’t have here.’ They were right. They did have everything within their miniature kingdom - except a cemetery. But, the irony of it was proven by the passage of time. Already, the island had been doomed to turn into an enormous graveyard.

Eventually, the mines faced an end, and in 1974 the world’s once most densely populated island become totally deserted. The island, after all its inhabitants departed leaving behind their belongings, became an empty shell of a city where all its people disappeared overnight, as if by some mysterious act of God.”

My buddy Greg points me to this page explaining why you should never put your picture on the Internet. Gotta love it.

UPDATE:
Hrm. It looks like too many people found this site, and my guess is the added bandwidth caused them to password protect it.

Would you think that a Mini would be safer than a Ford F-150 pickup truck in a 40 MPH collision? Although if it were a head-on collision, it’s pretty clear the truck would win, in a collision with a static object (the far more common variety of collision), the Mini wins, hands down.