From the aptly named 'strange but true' category (in the Sydney Morning Herald news) here's a story about ridiculously gullible people.

Look, a leak - quick, get a plumber!

IMNSHO the cablegate-gate serves assange right, after dribbling out just some of the cables and in homeopathetic amounts over a year.

Information wants to be free after all:-)

That's a screenshot from a recent TV advertisment where Dolly Parton threatens she'll visit Oz real soon, after leaving us in peace for the previous 28 years.

Partlejuice indeed: looks like she spent those umpteen years well interred and/or hitting the botox clinics.

include, amongst others, that they're patronizing little FPOS.

...if the fellows have to advertise "free shipping". I'd also like a few "Tomohawk"s with that order, please :-)

From a spam that recently made it here (identifying bits redacted):

Subject: Free heroin shipping!
From: <*certainly dud from*>
To: <*me, myself and i*>
Date: Thu, 7 Apr 2011 14:34:25 +0100

FREE HEROIN SHIPPING!


1. Heroin, in liquid and crystal form.
2. Rocket fuel and Tomohawk rockets (serious enquiries only).
4. New shipment of cocaine has arrived, buy 9 grams and get 10th for free.

Everebody welcome, but not US citizens, sorry.

ATTENTION. Clearance offer. Buy 30 grams of heroin, get 5 free.

Please contact: <*some other fool*>

PHONE 0093(0)4765***
FAX 0093(0)4485***

Afghanistan

Every time I walk past that room I have to suppress a fit of silly laughter - because I can't help associating the idea of "completing" students with the video of how a Trabant final inspection used to work.

Now for the all-important question: Can student brains also be improved by just a few judiciously applied hammer blows? ;-)

A real treat for mathematicians - but does scaled-down bratwurst taste scaled-down, too?

Inquiring minds simply have to know.

(But even really inquiring minds won't like to find out that font "fixed" in Tk 8.5 is a totally different beast from the same font in Tk 8.5...)

A pair of youngsters rode the Yarra River in Melbourne using sex dolls for buoyancy. Imagine the embarrassment when they had to be rescued.

Today I learned that the survival kit carried in the Mercury space capsule contained, amongst useful things, also "1 Bar Soap".

I don't know about you, but I would have traded that soap for more of "1 Container of Matches" or desalination gear for more than "8 pints".

Maybe McD-D were expecting their craft to crash-land somewhere tropical, so they packed that soap to ensure the astronauts wouldn't repel the admiring female lovelies.

I love well-written manuals, and the Mercury familiarisation manual is a pretty nice example with great diagrams and drawings. Pity that there's nothing comparable for Vostok and Soyuz (and even if it weren't classified it would be in Russian, which I don't understand more than a few words of...)

Today's xkcd is pretty good - depressingly good, in fact.

Jake Kaufman is evil. And a Bastard. A Tricky Bastard...

"IRC is a network full of chat rooms (or "channels") where a lot of scary internet people (or "perverts") hang out.
...
so i replaced eliza's tiny, boring script with a massive dumb blonde script that has like 3,800 responses on all sorts of topics, but mostly sex. jenny18 is very horny and she loves talking to horny guys. and everyone knows the best place to talk to horny guys is on dalnet irc sex channels."

And he took jenny18 there. jenny18 passed the sex Turing test with flying colors, but a lot of the dalnet denizens didn't pass anything...except pass for fools, that is.

"this goes to show that lots of challenge in AI is in speaking naturally, and on the internet most people speak like idiots, so you can sort of cheat around a lot of things."

Jake's article on speaking like an idiot is a lot of fun to read, too.

All the good links broke. I've replaced them with the latest archive.org versions - but for the logs you need to manually add the filename to the url: the archive.org pages come with a broken <base>...

Samizdata makes my day.

"Culinary".

For some unfathomable reason I found this gem in the pikiwedia entry on ducks highly hilarious.

A classic example of this problem....

keine ahnung ob diese Rosa Riedl auch ein schutzgespenst ist; den nervigen hausmeister-posten und gschau und gwand teilen sie ja eh schon - nur die strassenbahn zum drunterfallen fehlt uns hier...

The object of contention is Halva, which I recently found at Coles (one of the big supermarkets here) and simply had to buy. Looks like Conny likes it :-)

"Lucky" must be his middle name -- and "Clumsy" his first: a fellow in Frankfurt fell down an elevator shaft, and landed on a woman who had "been there, done that" 24hrs earlier. He stayed awake, she stayed unconscious; he was not hurt while she is in bad shape.

How exactly one manages to fall into an elevator shaft despite knowing the thing is being repaired, is a tad beyond me.

A snippet from the classic Owed to a Spell Chequer:

I halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plane lee marques four my revue
Miss steaks aye ken knot sea
...

Reminds me a bit of what openoffice's spall choker did to one of conny's homework texts recently...

(This title constitutes an obscure in-joke for Austrians. No alkbottles were harmed making this joke.)

In the news today: Australian Senator arrives at Parliament dressed as a beer bottle. My first thought: "When in Rome^WACT..."

ABC has the story complete with pics.

Das Inserat hier ist grad eben vorbeigekommen, sehr schräg... Dazu passend die folgende Headline von gestern: Ein Abgeordneter in Mississippi (selber blad) hat einen Gesetzesvorschlag eingebracht, nachdem es Restaurants verboten werden soll, Blade weiter zu füttern. Welch Brilliante Idee.

In Obelix' Worten: ils sont fous, ces americains. Completement fous!

Townsville might be a good place to learn golf quickly - or else. Gives a whole new meaning to the term "water hazard".

This stuff is pretty cool I think. I found that one the funniest construct.

The QLD Transport Authority was (or still is?) running one of those safety awareness campaigns, with the slogan "Rest or R.I.P.", complete with huge billboard ads showing a white pillow and said slogan.

(see pg. 5 of this flyer for an idea of how that looks).

Driving up to Ikea and rob's place yesterday, I went past the driver training centre at Mt. Cotton, which sports such a huge billboard ad.

It also has a neighbour/vis-a-vis, which is announced on the road signs around the place in the same size as the training centre: the neighbour is a crematorium. Driver training turn left, Crematorium turn right. Easy, but don't you forget it!

I wonder which institution was there first, and who decided to show that particular ad facing the road and the crematorium.

Apropos billboards and coppers:

Not for me. For him, apparently.

And of course, here's the ObXKCD:

You should have a look at the title attribute (mouseover usually shows it) that Randall has come up with.

Tim Kreider has a nasty kind of humour, and he's observant, politically-INcorrect and draws wicked weekly cartoons.

And of course there's the title of his mad angry tome: The Pain -- When Will It End?

The Archive and the Enemies section are especially recommended.

...can indeed be odd. Very odd.

The phone rings. Hmm, an external call, maybe I should get ungrumpy. Alright. "hello, this is alex speaking."
"hello, is this mr. garagedoors?" (some east-european accent)
huh? "no. no garage doors here."
"i'm calling because of right motor on my garage door doesn't work."
...
*sigh* "this is a university."
"oh, i must have wrong number. sorry." *click*

Hamming-coding for phone numbers NOW!

A pretty fun writeup of the 11 worst toys. Not in my book, though: worst, I'd say, only in the opinion of the bloody landsharks, ahem, liability lawyers; what a PITY that these things got recalled! I'd have *loved* to see more unthinking proto-idiots kill themselves...

On this happy note of unmitigated antisocial ranting we conclude this Christmas bulletin.

das material vom Österreich Institut zum deutschlernen beinhaltet auch auszüge aus Indien, dortamts im schönsprech "Filmdidaktisierung" getauft. Schon schön deppat wenn einer grad den film zum lernen kriegt; den verstehns ja schon links von Kufstein nimmer mehr. "europasiegel für innovative sprachprojekte", my ass...

I like the xkcd comic strips very much, but reading comics on lotsa pages sucks. dailystrips doesn't come with support with xkcd, and I couldn't find anybody else's setup to steal. This definition snippet takes care of xkcd.

strip xkcd
        name xkcd
        homepage http://xkcd.com
        type search
        searchpattern <img\s+src="(http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/[^"]+.png)"
        matchpart 1
        provides latest
end

I wonder: did Adam+Eve succumb to this problem when they took that bloody apple?