Yes! I'm a Genius!

Okay, maybe not. But it's nice that someone thinks so, even if that someone is a computer program that automatically analyzes writing samples.



Analyze your own blog or any website with The Blog Readability Test.

A few more short posts like this, where I do nothing but point to other sites, and I'm certain my rating will drop.

New Technology Shall Destroy Our Way of Life!

This is for all those people who still believe that e-books will destroy print books:

Stephen's Lighthouse: Telephones will hurt churches

Articles from the 1800s predicting that the telephone would be the downfall of churches and concert halls, and in turn that the phonograph would destroy the telephone. Funny stuff.

Awesome Dragon

Dragon cake
Originally uploaded by Astro-Lopithecus

Can you guess what this is? Can you?! It's a CAKE! This is the most amazing cake I've ever seen! Visit Flickr to see this cake from other angles and in various stages of being eaten.

I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles

I've been playing with the Amazing Circles image generator over at Dumpr. I loaded in a bunch of my vacation photos from my 2005 Czech Republic trip and made bubbles out of them. I really like the effect. Enjoy!

A Fair(y) Use Tale (NOT a Disney movie)

If you have any interest in copyright law, watch this video!

A Fair(y) Use Tale (NOT a Disney movie)

Using tiny clips from numerous Disney movies, this short film created by Eric Faden is the single best explanation of copyright and fair use I have ever seen. It is absolutely brilliant. It should be shown in every school in America.

YouTubing

Now that I have DSL, I've been wasting a lot of time watching YouTube videos. And a lot of it truly has been wasted time, but here are a couple of shining gems that are worth sharing.

Cat lovers should not miss An Engineer's Guide to Cats. Also worthwhile, even though the election is long past, is the sequel, An Engineer's Guide to Voting (Ginger Cat for President). Trust me, the aerial cat fight is worth it.

Movie lovers should enjoy 100 Movies, 100 Quotes, 100 numbers. Someone put in a heck of a lot of work on this cinematic countdown. Can you identify all of the movies shown? I know quite a few of them, but not even close to all.

Enjoy!

Maple-Bacon Lollyphile

Among other things, I received a pair of unusual lollipops for Christmas. I had the first one of them today. The flavor? Maple-bacon. And the flavor is not chemically constructed, as with certain jelly beans. The lollipop was a disc of maple candy with crumbles of actual bacon suspended through it.

And it was fantastic! The flavor was amazing and wonderful, because it was pure and genuine. The texture was very interesting. Most of the bits of bacon were very tiny, which as they emerged from the maple made the surface of the lollipop feel a bit like sandpaper. The largest chunks of bacon were soft and meaty.

Your mileage may vary, of course. But if you like smearing your bacon through the leftover maple syrup from your pancakes, you'll probably like this lollipop.

They are made by Lollyphile. Apparently they only make three flavors of candy at present: absinthe, maple-bacon, and wasabi-ginger. I do not have one of the absinthe-flavored ones, but I will report on the wasabi-ginger one when I eat it.

Addendum 7/19/2010: I know I promised to report on the wasabi-ginger lollipop, but the truth is I never ate it. It got misplaced, and then it got wet. I found it in my cupboard, misshapen and kind of gross looking. I'm kind of disappointed, because I'll probably never have another chance to try one. But oh well. That's how things go sometimes.