Lewis Black on Candy Corn

Just in time for Hallowe'en: America's angriest comedian rant on candy corn as posted on YouTube.

Free Fonts Online

When Apple first came out with the Macintosh and the LaserWriter, typographers everywhere first thought that their careers were coming to an abrupt demise. They imagined that every Mom and Pop operation with such a relatively inexpensive desktop publishing setup would be able to knock out all of their own printed materials quickly and inexpensively. Well, fortunately it never happened; having the equipment was certainly no prerequisite to being a fantastic graphic designer or typographer. In fact, we used to have a not-so-nice term for some of the awful results that got churned out: The Ransom Note Effect. "Hell, I've got 50 fonts on my Mac. Why not use all of 'em on this client's brochure?"

Anyway, with that little bit of desktop publishing history, I'll segue right into the subject of fonts and the fact that you really can't ever have enough of them. Especially when you're looking around for that one font that suits a headline or presentation that you're working on. I just discovered a new site called NeatFonts. These guys have managed to collect hundreds and hundreds of free or shareware fonts from everywhere and loaded them up on one site that's reasonably manageable. Check 'em out HERE. They even have some spooky ones for that last-minute Halloween invitation you've been putting off!

Best New Application for Duct Tape

David Blaine Puts His Hand Through Glass

One of my favorite David Blaine Street Magic gags as posted on YouTube.

Time to Quit Smoking

World Stats in Real Time

A full page of important global statistics that actually update in real time HERE. Some of the numbers are staggering.

Granny Guard Protection Services

Protect your home with Granny Guard Protection Services.

Another Picture Worth A Thousand Words

Speaks for itself. ROTFLMAO!

Selling Microsoft Windows 1.0 (1985)

I'm sure this was done as a gag (at least I hope so) but like all things stupid, they have a nasty way of lingering around and then coming back to bite you in the ass. Guess Steve Ballmer didn't even have any hair back in those days either. This commercial is scary! (As shown on YouTube.)

How Much Should You REALLY Weigh?

Tired of all the crap about BMI and all that other stuff? A more realistic way to calculate your proper weight should take both your frame size and your height into account. Check it out HERE at HealthatOz.

Add Your Name to the One-Mile Website

Pass this one on -- fun idea! Just type in your name and city to add another 5 cm (2 inches for the metricly-challenged) to a website that's trying to create the first One-Mile Website.

Skidboot -- Smartest Dog Around

You probably remember Skidboot the Dog. If not by name, then at least by his incredible intelligence. He's been on just about every show on American television -- including Oprah and Letterman -- over the past 10 years and he's won a gold medal on Discovery Channel. Here's an 8-minute video posted on YouTube that pretty much covers his amazing career.

Kids and Video Games

This slideshow on Flickr is both a funny and a sad statement. This family takes their little kid to these incredible landmarks all over the world -- and all the kid wants to do is play his GameBoy!

Just Some Silly Fun for the Kids Today

Farting Dog Harmonics from AmishDonkey.

Johnny Cash Sings 'Hurt"

Wow! This is a video of Johnny Cash doing a cover of Nine-Inch Nails' "Hurt." You can feel his sadness and pain come through in this final personal performance recorded after the death of June Carter Cash. (I originally posted this with a link to Google Video but it got dropped so here it is on YouTube.)

Ridiculous 20-inch Laptop from Dell

I can still remember those huge Compaq "Portable" computers of the 80's (Wikipedia reference HERE). These were the precursors of the laptops and notebooks of today. In fact, it was the first PC that I purchased when I began my first tech startup. I think it was a Thursday afternoon when I walked into the local ComputerLand and bought that computer along with a copy of WordPerfect (I actually still have the entire package complete with 5¼-inch floppy disk software!) and Lotus 1-2-3 Ver. 1.0B or something like that. I had the weekend to pull together an entire business plan and projections. Never mind that I also had to learn the software as well. Nonetheless, I managed and -- over the next 6 months - we managed to raise over $500,000 to start the company. The Compaq had a little green screen, a small hard drive and a floppy drive all built in with a detachable keyboard. It was encased in Lexan to make it virtually indestructible (and amazingly it was!). I remember the Compaq Portable was more lovingly known as the Compaq Luggable, weighing in at something over 25-30 pounds. If you ran too hard through the airport swinging this thing for balance, you were just as likely to shear off a kneecap (which I managed to do on more than one occasion). Nonetheless, it did serve me well and it kept working long after we'd launched the company.

So now Dell has decided to come back with bigger once again by introducing a stupid 2-inch (yes, you read that right -- 20-INCH!) laptop. I emphasize the name laptop because I personally can't believe you could call this monster a notebook. It's huge, it's heavy and it's probably quite useless as an easily-transportable computer. I suspect that it will have some limited appeal to those who need the huge display for presentations on the road when you want it all in one package. Other than that, I suppose it could be used for a mini-theater that several people could sit around and watch but... Anyway, this reviewer for c/net UK did a really humorous video to demonstrate the size of this thing and it's well worth watching for the laughs.

How Safe is Your Drinking Water?

The US EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) has a very extensive study on the quality of drinking water that covers most of the United States. Go to the site HERE and click on your state or region to get a more detailed report. (The picture attached here doesn't link BTW.)

It's the Caffeine That'll Kill Ya!

Just exactly how much Coke or coffee would it take to kill you? Well that depends on how big you are. Like to find out? Check out Death by Caffeine HERE.

More Photoshop Touchups

Want to see just how good Photoshop can make you look? Check out what this picture looked like Before.

Crappy Halloween Costume

Literally. Would you let YOUR kid go out dressed like this?

(More costumes HERE.)

A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words Part II

My Kinda Search Engine!

Forget Google, toss Yahoo!, quit Ask. Check out Ms. Dewey. I love her!

How to Lose Your Job on Live TV

Make sure you read below BEFORE watching this video clip.

It's from a real show in Holland... It's a video of a Dutch interviewer who is interviewing a man on a LIVE TV (Dutch version of 60 Minutes) on "Surgeries Gone Wrong."

This man had a surgical team inadvertently remove his testicles. I think the interviewer could have handled the facts but it was the man's voice that appears to have set him off. Watch a veteran reporter's career go down the drain in about 30 seconds.

It doesn't need to be in English to understand what is happening.

Medical Interview (Windows WMV file approx. 4 Mb)

Thriller Done to Benny Hill

A YouTube mix combining The Benny Hill Show theme song over the Michael Jackson Thriller video. Excellent!

An Oldie-but-Goodie for Monday Morning

The Story:

She spent the first day packing her personal belongings into boxes, crates, and suitcases.

On the second day, she had the movers come to collect her things.

On the third day, she sat down for the last time at their beautiful dining room table by candlelight, put on some soft background music, and feasted on a pound of shrimp, a jar of caviar, and a bottle of Chardonnay.

When she had finished, she went into each and every room and deposited a few half-eaten shrimp shells dipped in caviar, into the hollow of the curtain rods.

She then cleaned up the kitchen and left. When the husband returned with his new girlfriend, all was bliss for the first few days. Then slowly, the house began to smell.

They tried everything, cleaning, mopping, and airing the place out. Vents were checked for dead rodents, and carpets were steam cleaned.

Air fresheners were hung everywhere. Exterminators were brought in to set off gas canisters, during which they had to move out for a few days, and in the end they even paid to replace the expensive wool carpeting.

Nothing worked.

People stopped coming over to visit. Repairmen refused to work in the house. The maid even quit.

Finally, they could not take the stench any longer and decided to move. A month later, even though they had cut their price in half, they could not find a buyer for their stinky house. Word got out, and eventually, even the local Realtors refused to return their calls.

Finally, they had to borrow a huge sum of money from the bank to purchase a new place.

The ex-wife called the man, and asked how things were going. He told her the saga of the rotting house. She listened politely, and said that she missed her old home terribly, and would be willing to reduce her divorce settlement in exchange for getting the house back.

Knowing his ex-wife had no idea how bad the smell was, he agreed on a price that was about 1/10 of what the house had been worth, but only if she were to sign the papers that very day.

She agreed, and within the hour his lawyers delivered the paperwork.

A week later the man and his girlfriend stood smiling as they watched the moving company pack everything to take to their new home, including the curtain rods.

I LOVE A HAPPY ENDING, DON'T YOU?

What Does She REALLY Look Like Under All the Makeup?

Dove the soap company has been running a very successful campaign for natural beauty. Some of their print ads have featured groups of women (don't know why they haven't included men yet; maybe it's the fact that most men don't use a beauty bar on their faces at night before going to bed?) covering a wide range of ages and sizes. None of the women are your atypical stick-figure model types that normally jump at you from magazine covers and billboards everywhere.

I like this campaign. Especially when you consider the fact that most women don't even closely resemble the glamorous models that show up evrywhere. But just how much makeup do they plaster on to make them look the way they do? And with digital imaging software like PhotoShop, they can re-touch the pictures even more to create an impossible vision of beauty. Dove has posted an incredibly well-done time lapse video of a rather frumpy model being converted over to a stunning cover girl. Check it out HERE.

Cannibals in the Workplace

Recently, a large corporation hired several cannibals to increase their diversity.

"You are all part of our team now," said the Human Resources rep during the welcoming briefing. "You get all the usual benefits and you can go to the cafeteria for something to eat, but please don't eat any employees."

The cannibals promised they would not. Four weeks later their boss remarked, "You're all working very hard and I'm satisfied with your work. We have noticed a marked increase in the whole company's performance. However, one of our secretaries has disappeared. Do any of you know what happened to her?"

The cannibals all shook their heads, "No."

After the boss had left, the leader of the cannibals said to the others, "Which one of you idiots ate the secretary?"

A hand rose hesitantly.

"You fool!" the leader continued. "For four weeks we've been eating managers and no one noticed any difference in production. But Nooo -- you had to go and eat someone who actually does something!!!"

Painting a Plane in Two Minutes

An amazing two-minute time lapse video on where else? YouTube. Painting a brand-new Virgin Airlines Airbus A320.

Amadeus Revisited

I suspect that with YouTube growing even more rapidly now that Google has bought them, more and more retouched clips like this one are going to be showing up. This one's childish but fun (probably funnier to the guys). As seen on YouTube.

Kim Jong Il Music Video

From the MADtv 12th Season Premier as shown on YouTube. Really well done.

Cute Italian Teddy Bear

Something to send all of your friends: A VERY cute Italian Teddy Bear (I think he must be from New York?).

Election Ad Deemed Too Hot to Show

Although David Zucker wrote and produced this anti-Democrat ad completely with his own money for the upcoming election, even the most hard-core GOP decided it was wa-ay too hot to run. Zucker -- for those who are not horror movie fans -- made the Scary Movie series. The actress plays a great Madeleine Albright (who else do you recognize?). So it looked like it was going to get locked up in the film vault, never to be seen again. But as with all things video in the age of YouTube, here it is for your viewing pleasure.



BTW Zucker started off as a Hollywood Dem but got disillusioned with his party's attitudes towards national and international security. So he switched parties and voted for Bush.

A Tearjerker of a True Story

This was an article written by Rick Reilly of Sports Illustrated (June 13, 2005 edition). Be sure to check out the Google video at the bottom.

Strongest Dad in the World

I try to be a good father. Give my kids mulligans. Work nights to pay for their text messaging. Take them to swimsuit shoots.

But compared with Dick Hoyt, I suck.

Eighty-five times he's pushed his disabled son, Rick, 26.2 miles in marathons. Eight times he's not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars -- all in the same day.

Dick's also pulled him cross-country skiing, taken him on his back mountain climbing and once hauled him across the U.S. on a bike. Makes taking your son bowling look a little lame, right?

And what has Rick done for his father? Not much -- except save his life.

This love story began in Winchester, Mass., 43 years ago, when Rick was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs.

"He'll be a vegetable the rest of his life," Dick says doctors told him and his wife, Judy, when Rick was nine months old. "Put him in an institution."

But the Hoyts weren't buying it. They noticed the way Rick's eyes followed them around the room. When Rick was 11 they took him to the engineering department at Tufts University and asked if there was anything to help the boy communicate. "No way," Dick says he was told. "There's nothing going on in his brain."

"Tell him a joke," Dick countered. They did. Rick laughed. Turns out a lot was going on in his brain.

Rigged up with a computer that allowed him to control the cursor by touching a switch with the side of his head, Rick was finally able to communicate. First words? "Go Bruins!" And after a high school classmate was paralyzed in an accident and the school organized a charity run for him, Rick pecked out, "Dad, I want to do that."

Yeah, right. How was Dick, a self-described "porker" who never ran more than a mile at a time, going to push his son five miles? Still, he tried. "Then it was me who was handicapped," Dick says. "I was sore for two weeks."

That day changed Rick's life. "Dad," he typed, "when we were running, it felt like I wasn't disabled anymore!"

And that sentence changed Dick's life. He became obsessed with giving Rick that feeling as often as he could. He got into such hard-belly shape that he and Rick were ready to try the 1979 Boston Marathon.

"No way," Dick was told by a race official. The Hoyts weren't quite a single runner, and they weren't quite a wheelchair competitor. For a few years Dick and Rick just joined the massive field and ran anyway, then they found a way to get into the race officially: In 1983 they ran another marathon so fast they made the qualifying time for Boston the following year.

Then somebody said, "Hey, Dick, why not a triathlon?"

How's a guy who never learned to swim and hadn't ridden a bike since he was six going to haul his 110-pound kid through a triathlon? Still, Dick tried.

Now they've done 212 triathlons, including four grueling 15-hour Ironmans in Hawaii. It must be a buzzkill to be a 25-year-old stud getting passed by an old guy towing a grown man in a dinghy, don't you think?

Hey, Dick, why not see how you'd do on your own? "No way," he says. Dick does it purely for "the awesome feeling" he gets seeing Rick with a cantaloupe smile as they run, swim and ride together.

This year, at ages 65 and 43, Dick and Rick finished their 24th Boston Marathon, in 5,083rd place out of more than 20,000 starters. Their best time? Two hours, 40 minutes in 1992 -- only 35 minutes off the world record, which, in case you don't keep track of these things, happens to be held by a guy who was not pushing another man in a wheelchair at the time.

"No question about it," Rick types. "My dad is the Father of the Century."

And Dick got something else out of all this too. Two years ago he had a mild heart attack during a race. Doctors found that one of his arteries was 95% clogged. "If you hadn't been in such great shape," one doctor told him, "you probably would've died 15 years ago."

So, in a way, Dick and Rick saved each other's life.

Rick, who has his own apartment (he gets home care) and works in Boston, and Dick, retired from the military and living in Holland, Mass., always find ways to be together. They give speeches around the country and compete in some backbreaking race every weekend, including this Father's Day.

That night, Rick will buy his dad dinner, but the thing he really wants to give him is a gift he can never buy.

"The thing I'd most like," Rick types, "is that my dad sit in the chair and I push him once."

Who Else Has Your Name?

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 50,209 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

A new site popped up called How Many of Me that lets you type in your name to see how many other folks happen to have your name in the US. Based on the US Census data, this online app provides lots of fun when you start checking different people's names against that database. Try your friends and family and if that starts to get boring, start typing in what you think are weird names!

From the site itself: "There are 299,940,047 people in the United States of America. If everyone in the U.S. lined up single file, the line would stretch around the Earth almost 7 times. That's a lot of people.

The U.S. Census Bureau statistics tell us that there are at least 88,799 different last names and 5,163 different first names in common use in the United States. Some names are more common than others.

There are 49,531 people named John Smith in the United States. There are 1,048 people named James Bond, 113 people named Harry Potter , 503 people named George Bush, and 31 people named Emily Dickinson. However, Johnny Cash (39 people) songs aside there are, statistically speaking, no boys named Sue."

Human Time

An unusual digital clock for your Desktop.

Cops Lose a Chase!

Normally when you see those car chases down the freeway with the cops in hot pursuit, the lesson they generally point out is that they will always catch you. Except in the case of this wild and crazy bicylclist. Man, now just where exactly DID Lance Armstrong retire? From Break.com.

For All You Shaving Freaks Out There...

and you know who you are... Go to Shave Your Yeti and try you hand!

Battle of the Bands (Covers)

Nice little piece of animation. How many of these old covers do YOU recognize? (or even dare to admit you own?) And even more films from the ad guys who put this one together.

Grossest Commercial of the Week: Burger King

And it's for their Triple Whopper (ugh!). Eat like a snake. Just for this commercial alone, I know I won't be touching one of these things for quite some time into the future. As shown on You Tube.

Take This Elevator Ride

Wow! Check out the floor on this elevator. More pictures HERE.

From the Dopey-Ideas-Dept.

Well, many of us personally witnessed the rise and fall of the stupid CueCat, which garnered millions in venture capital from the likes of Forbes Magazine and Radio Shack among others. So along comes another really, REALLY STUPID concept (I won't even dignify it by calling it an idea!): The CombiMouse (dopey name too). Who thought combining a mouse and half-a-keyboard was a great product? Award-winning? My ass! Geez...

A Video Site I Can Identify With

Hey -- we all have to know our limitations. Me, I like to invent products, start companies, write, paint and draw. But dance? Fuggedaboudit. And this afternoon, I came across a page full of reasons why people who can't dance simply... shouldn't. It's aptly named WeCantDance.com. Thanks for the reminder, guys! To get you started, here's Elaine's Dance Video from an old episode of Seinfeld.

The Immigration Debate

Ha ha -- Why is it that cartoons often end up being able to express things in such a simple way when a million politicians, bloggers and any other opinionated hacks with an opinion can't? As posted on YouTube.

The End of the World in 60 Seconds

This Flash animation takes a while to load up but it's worth the wait. A cynical but funny look at how it'll all end.

Someone You Don't Like?

Hire your own hitman!

Commercial of the Week: VISA

Cute and really well done. As shown on YouTube.