Nyan Cat Progress Bar, replaces the standard Windows progress bars in Explorer. Oh, Internet!
(Via Cal Henderson)
Tag: humor
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Nyan Cat Progress Bar for Windows
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“There’ll Always Be a Place for Me at the Dairy Queen”
[Alas, my best GIF has disappeared after MLKSHK shut down…]
As I said before, Parker Posey grilling a single chicken wing is one of my favorite funnysad scenes committed to film. And now I’ve committed it to an animated GIF.
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Tom Lehrer Ronald Searle
Awesome thing that I didn’t realize I had on my bookshelf: the Tom Lehrer sheet music songbook I’ve had since I was a kid was illustrated by cartoonist Ronald Searle. I must have been unfamiliar with Searle the last time I looked through this book — his scratchy style complements Lehrer’s acerbic wit nicely.
The whole book, “Too Many Songs By Tom Lehrer with not enough drawings by Ronald Searle”, is available for perusal on Scribd, in case you’re the sort that enjoys songs about masochism, the periodic table, bull fighting, nuclear annihilation, and Ivy League snobbery…
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The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of Writer’s Block
Via NCBI ROFL, a single-page paper submitted to the 1974 volume of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, “The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of ‘Writer’s Block’”.
This amazing research was verified and extended upon in 2007: “A Multisite Cross-Cultural Replication of Upper’s (1974) Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of Writer’s Block”
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Jack Black in Gullivers Travels Review
To grumble further would be, as the saying goes, akin to pointing my Water toward the Wind. I note that Mr. Black has, in other endeavors, proved himself a Mocker after my own heart, but I can hardly begrudge him the greater emolument that issues from cavorting in the mildly naughty manner of an overgrown tot. I can further suppose that a Child of average Wit or even moderate Dullness — a boy of Nine, let us say, who can be coaxed away from the Wii of a Christmas afternoon — might pass a pleasant interval chuckling at the absurd incongruities that arise when something very large is placed beside something very small. From A.O. Scott’s Swiftian review of the new Gulliver’s Travels.
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Physicist’s Goodnight Moon
What happens when a physicist considers the passage of time in Goodnight Moon? Chad Orzel, physics professor and blogger, attempts to measure it using the illustrated passing of the moon versus the wall clocks:
These two methods clearly do not agree with one another, which means one of two things: either I’m terribly over-analyzing the content of the illustrations of a beloved children’s book, or the bunny’s bedroom is moving at extremely high velocity relative to the earth, so that relativistic time dilation makes the six-minute rise of the moon appear to take an hour and ten minutes. Calculating the necessary velocity is left as an exercise for the interested reader.
(Photo credit: Chad Orzel)
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Humor and death: a qualitative study of The New Yorker cartoons (1986-2006)
A paper in the academic journal Palliative and Supportive Care analyzing perceptions of death and dying through the lens of New Yorker cartoons. Science!
“Personification of Death” (n = 38) included a subtheme of “Bargaining with Death.” The main theme included representations of death with human attributes, such as the Grim Reaper. Examples are the Grim Reaper sitting in a bar talking to another man; the caption reads, “Sometimes I give myself the creeps” (from 2005; Mankoff, 2006. p. 28). The subtheme involved people negotiating for more time to live. Many of the cartoons in this theme show the Grim Reaper standing at someone’s door as he or she tries to negotiate his or her way out of dying. For example, one such caption read, “Couldn’t I do a couple of hundred hours of community service instead?” (from 1990; Mankoff, 2006. p. 46). This can be seen as the legacy of death (Elgee, 2003), that we are all its slaves.
(Via NCBI ROFL)
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Medical Paradolia
A handful of medical paradolia on NCBI ROFL: Bad news: you have a tumor. Good news: it’s really cute!
UPDATE: I learn via Back of the Cereal Box that there’s a cancer-causing genetic mutation known in scientific circles as Sonic hedgehog!
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LG Pacman
WTFLG? Maybe my washing machine needs some power pellets.
(Originally from this Posterous post? It’s the earliest example I can find. Via Back of the Cereal Box)
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Twombly
[Video no longer available]
As Seen on TV, a tribute to doing it wrong. I love this aspect of awful informercials, and in our household we’ve even coined a specific adjective to describe it: twombly. As in “No, no, don’t use your sewing machine on the curtains while they’re still hanging! You’re doin’ it all twombly!”
(Via Kottke)