Celeblogging

Yet again, I get the feeling that I'm at least a month behind the rest of the blogosphere here, but I stumbled across this blog earlier today. It's written by someone claiming to be a well-known Hollywood actor, and the people who speculate about these things are speculating that the author could be Owen Wilson, Benicio Del Toro, or even George Clooney.

Sure, "Rance" is almost certainly a hoax (what fun would the blogosphere be without the occasional hoax and/or accusation thereof?), but it's an interesting read nevertheless.

Roads? Where we're going we don't need roads.

Teedz just clued me in to this eBay auction: a recreation of the time-traveling DeLorean from the Back to the Future films. A couple of photos -- including the all-important Flux Capacitor that makes time travel possible (larger images can be seen on the auction page):

If you plan to bid, be sure to confirm with your car insurance company whether your policy covers damage resulting from temporal paradoxes.

Taking the blog linkfest to a whole 'nuther level

Kelley of Suburban Blight has rounded up roughly umpty-gazillion links in her latest Cul-de-Sac and was kind enough to include my recent entry complaining about the replacement of low-fat, low-calorie foods with low-carb alternatives at grocery stores around the country. Meanwhile, check out the rest of the Cul-de-Sac; it serves up enough fresh reading material to keep you busy for at least the next few days.

Evil Doug for President!

It was only a matter of time, but Evil Doug has finally thrown his hat into the ring and officially announced his bid for the presidency.

His stance on robot workforce replacement alone is more than enough to get my vote. If you still aren't convinced, however, you can read more about his bold plan for America's future here. Evil Doug for President: "If You Were Running for President, He'd Vote for You."

Blog It Forward

It's time for the latest round of Blog It Forward, and Lachlan over at My So-Called Blog (an all-around excellent blog in its own right) has been far too kind in chosing this site as one of her picks. Thanks for the kind words!

Now, it's only fair for me to pass along the linky love, so allow me to choose a few favorites from my own blogroll upon which to heap praise. I'll start out with a blog near and dear to my heart: Evil Doug's Existential Journal. I've known Evil Doug since we were undergraduates together back in the proverbial Day, and as I've said before, he is easily one of the funniest people that I've ever met. We're talking literally laugh-out-loud funny here. Needless to say, I was thrilled to find out a few months ago that Evil Doug had launched an online journal full of his trademark absurdist humor. Check out this entry from just a few days ago to get an idea of what I'm talking about.

Next up is Wendy Darling's Magic Short Bus. Wendy's posts never fail to amuse -- take, for instance, this recent entry about a sandwich with its very own business card. Classic. Plus, Wendy is a stop-motion animator. How many people do you know who can make that claim? Honestly, that is -- we all know how many people are running around these days pretending to be stop-motion animators.

Finally, I wanted to mention Chew's News -- a site that I only recently discovered, but that I have quickly come to rely upon for my daily dose of odd news, interesting links, and more. Better still, the site is usually updated before 7:00AM, making it the perfect blog to read while eating a bowl of cereal before work in the morning. Plus, Chewie's a student at my alma mater, too, so that certainly never hurts.

Naturally, mad props and big ups go out to everyone on my blogroll; you guys and gals produce more quality reading before breakfast than most blogrolls do all day. I just thought I'd pick a few from the list and join in on the Blog it Forward fun.

Two random links

Just a couple of random links to start off the day:

First up is the aptly-named Subservient Chicken (link via Electric Bugaloo). It's about time that we finally harnessed the power of the Internet for something worthwhile. Command the Subservient Chicken to do the Robot! The Macarena! Take a nap! Your wish is the Chicken's command. It's INTERACTIVE!

Next is Jay-Zeezer: The Black and Blue Album. Somehow, I get the feeling that I'm weeks behind the rest of the Internet in discovering this one, but the Black and Blue Album is a remix of Jay-Z's Black Album that combines Jay's vocals with the musical backing of Weezer's Blue Album (in the spirit, of course, of Danger Mouse's Grey Album). It's still a work in progress, and some of the tracks are a bit rough around the edges (unlike Danger Mouse, the creator of the Black and Blue Album isn't a DJ), but I have to admit that "Dirt Off Your Shoulder/Surf Wax America" kinda rocks.

Maybe I should try this with my classes...

What happens when an English teacher in Japan prints out a bunch of Penny Arcade comic strips, blanks out all the speech bubbles, and asks his students to fill them in with their own dialogue? Well, something like this (click to embiggen):

More "remixed" PA strips are achived here. Oh, and if you play video games and don't already read Penny Arcade, I beseech you to either stop playing said video games or start reading Penny Arcade. Personally, I'd recommend the latter.

It could have been worse; he could have ticked off Disney

Discovery Channel has served On the Fritz (one of the first blogs not written by one of my friends to really catch my attention) with a cease and desist letter due to the unauthorized use of the Trading Spaces and While You Were Out logos in parodies at the site.

I'm no lawyer, but I'd recommend that Fritz proceed with caution. After all, if he doesn't comply with Discovery's demands, there's always the chance that they'll send Trading Spaces' Hildi Santo-Tomas over to his house to wreck up the place.

Blogging by the numbers

The Pew Internet Project has released the results of a recent study indicating that an estimated 44 percent of U.S. Internet users "have contributed their thoughts and their files to the online world." Moreover, the results suggest that somewhere between 2 and 7 percent maintain a blog, with only 10 percent of those updating on a daily basis.

Meanwhile, roughly 11 percent of Internet users surveyed say that they read blogs, a third of which comment on the blogs they read. The study goes on to break down content creators into three groups: power creators, older creators, and content omnivores.

"The gaiety, the hoopla and the handshaking that make any presidential campaign a great political show..."

Just a few minutes after teaching a class on the civil rights movement, I stumbled across this great entry at On the Fritz that quotes extensively from a September 1960 article in Life aimed at providing background for voters on the issue of civil rights. It's interesting stuff; I might have considered working it into my lesson plan somehow if I had known about it sooner.

What's your sign, baby?

Jay is guest-posting Electric Venom's weekly Hunting of the Snark, and my recent love letter to Charter Communications is included in the zodiac-themed list o'snarkiness.

Mix Master Mike, what you got to say?

In search of a fun new web diversion? Look no further than the Website Mixmaster (link via Wizbang). Just enter the appropriate URLs, and the Mixmaster will take the layout of one site and merge it with the content of another to produce a wacky composite site. For instance, here's my blog's content smooshed together with CNN's site design. There are a few bugs here and there, but the Mixmaster is still good for a laugh.

Snark, brought to you by the letter "W"

Electric Venom is hosting its weekly Hunting of the Snark, and the most recent salvo in this site's ongoing assault on fast-food chain Hardee's is included. Check out the rest of the Hunt for some of the week's snarkiest posts from around the blogosphere.

Meanwhile, EV also served up its Letter of the Day yesterday, and said letter was "W" (no, not that W). While I'm a day late, I thought I'd play along anyway...

W is for working out with Captain Jack Sparrow.

W is for Weirdsmobile, home to such fine blogs as Magic Short Bus and Canciones de Amor y Tristeza with Señor Don Gato.

W is for why--as in why this guy hates personal weblogs. Please note that this article includes some rough language and isn't intended for the faint of heart.

W is for wow--this Letter of the Day stuff is harder than it looks.

Hunting the Great White Snark

The Snark Hunt is back at Electric Venom, and this post in which I describe one of my blogging pet peeves made the cut. Be sure to check out the rest of the list for more snarky fun.

Also, I wanted to let everyone know about BlogMadness 2003, described by its hosts as "a contest where bloggers enter their best or favorite entries of 2003, and those entries are tossed into a tournament bracket (a la 'March Madness') and everyone votes on the matches until a winning entry is crowned." Just for kicks, I've entered my Masked Fisherman entry into the running. We'll see how well it fares against the competition when voting starts later in the month. I believe the deadline is January 21 if you want to add your own entry into the fray.

Over twice as evil as the average Doug

Quite possibly the funniest person I've ever met, the inimitable Evil Doug, has launched a new LiveJournal, so go and check it out. The Evil One is just getting started, but I'm willing to guarantee that good things are in store from his blog. Oh, and thanks to Kara for passing along the news.

Toss another entry on the bonfire

Each week, the Bonfire of the Vanities "honors" the worst of the blogosphere, and it seems that the judges agree that it doesn't get much worse than my Freaky Friday entry from last week.

Around the blogosphere

Today is the last day to vote for Apropos of Something in Wizbang's 2003 Weblog Awards. It's probably too late for the site win in the Slimy Molluscs category, but there's still room to move up a few notches in the rankings.

Meanwhile, Jim at Snooze Button Dreams is looking for submissions for the second week of his Bestofme Symphony. Information on submitting your own classic entry is available here. Hurry, though--the deadline is fast approaching.

Oh, and I also got two submissions accepted at Slashdot (here and here) in the past day or so. For those of you visiting the site via Slashdot, welcome! Feel free to stick around and enjoy a recent post or two.

Mr. Picassohead and his bucket of fun

Gaze upon the wonders of my Mr. Picassohead. Feel free to create your own and post a link in the comments. Thanks to Kottke for the URL.

Linkage

This week's Carnival of the Vanities is up at Signal + Noise, and it seems that my recent entry discussing my short-lived career as a fragrance model made the cut. Meanwhile, my "classic" (and I apply that term as loosely as possible) rant on fast food advertising is linked in the first edition of the Bestofme Symphony at Snooze Button Dreams. In related news, Jay insists that the new burgers at Hardee's are actually pretty good, but I'm still not sure that I'm convinced.

Since I'm already in a linking mood, I should also point out this story at Yahoo! News (link via teedz). Apparently, Colin Powell has appointed James Brown "secretary of soul and foreign minister of funk." I had intended to provide a bit of commentary on this news item, but I now realize that there's nothing I could possibly add to the story.

Blogging pet peeves

Sugarmama has a great post up today discussing her current blogging pet peeves (as well as some of the things she actually does like to see in a blog). The only thing I can think of to add to her list of annoyances is the kind of blog that not only relies almost exclusively on quizzes ("Which character from F-Troop are you?") for its content, but that also posts tons of the always-tacky graphics announcing the results--typically complete with misspellings and bad JPG compression to boot. Oh, it's even better when the graphics are remote-hosted and show up as broken images when the host server is inevitably down.

Noooooo!

According to SelectSmart's 2004 American Presidential Candidate Selector, the Reverend Al Sharpton is the candidate whose political views most closely match my own. Noooooo!

Tarot of the Blogger

I just stumbled across Tarot of the Blogger at Davezilla. Pretty funny stuff--especially "The Pundit" and "The Web Grrl." Still, where's the card for the blogger who started out his weblog with purely ironic intentions, just to play around with the technology, and quickly found out that he actually enjoyed blogging and became addicted?

Not that I know anyone like that, of course.

Ann Coulter Spontaneously Combusts

I was playing around with Google earlier this morning and decided to follow the "similar pages" link for this site and discover what pages Google thinks are related to my weblog. The first related page that Google returned turned out to be a column at MSNBC.com by humorist Andy Borowitz entitled "Ann Coulter Spontaneously Combusts."

I'm not sure exactly what that says about the contents of my weblog, but I think I like it.

Martha Stewart's Haunted Gingerbread Mansion

So, is this thing haunted by the ghosts of devoured gingerbread men? If not, I want no part in it.

Why didn't I think of this for grad school?

Given recent discussions about law school, passing the bar, and so forth around these parts, this item at The Smoking Gun seemed somewhat apropos. Who could imagine a résumé as creative and wacky as that getting negative feedback from law firms? I mean, I'd hire a guy who was proactive enough as to assure me of the following in his cover letter: "If a piece of evidence was accidentally dropped into the garbage, I would have no problem going to the local dump and spending days covered knee-deep in the worst foul-smelling sludge imaginable to search for the evidence." After all, what law firm wouldn't want a guy who's just serious enough to dig through trash if necessary, but not quite serious enough to file a legitimate résumé and cover letter? Is there an "eye-rolling" emoticon out there?

Meanwhile, teedz already linked to this at his weblog yesterday, but it's just too good not to pass along: ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Home Despot. That reminds me--I really should fire up Tropico again now that my days of studying for comps are behind me.

I think it's hella tight... and you guys need boyfriends.

The latest installment of the always-funny Teen Girl Squad is up at Homestar Runner. Let's get ready to look SO GOOD!

Meanwhile, since this is a blog and blogs apparently require the occasional link to a personality quiz (I believe it's in the End User License Agreement for the software), here's the "Which member of Teen Girl Squad are you?" quiz. Apparently, I'm "So and So." Or something.