A short stack of warm urls and cold milk before bed

Fine Art Taco Photography.

Kitteh and Pip of the early-1900s century comix classic Laugh Out Loud Cats get in on all that bloggy flowchart action. I bet they'd like the Fine Art Tacos, too.

Movie posters for Oscar shoo-in Mr. Woodcock are swipes from the earlier Matt Stone and Trey Parker ballsploitation classic, BASEketball. Ever-observant Sean Bonner called it first.

Here is a Los Angeles Times article about Wired NextFest in which I come clean about my long-running love affair with a robot named Keepon. Come to think of it, he sort of looks like two balls smushed together, too. .

John Schwartz has a great piece in the NYT on system breakdowns -- he starts out with the recent airline system clusterfck at LAX that stranded 17,000 passengers on planes for hours one day, after computers for the United States Customs and Border Protection agency went down and stayed down for nine hours. "Hackers? Nope. Though it was the kind of chaos that malevolent computer intruders always seem to be creating in the movies, the problem was traced to a malfunctioning network card on a desktop computer."

WSJ article by Lee Gomes asks whether sonic technology limitations in iPods and MP3s are wrecking popular music.

Why is it important to pay attention to crackpot inventors? Jer Falludi at Worldchanging offers insights on how to spot value in kooky creations. Also my tinfoil beanie thong and matching steampunk buttplug can cure cancer, pls send money order for blueprints and investment plan.

Here is a freaky 28-second video clip in which an animated, 4-legged, headless naked ladybody crawls like a crab across a living room. NSFW I guess, but it's less than half a minute so your boss probably won't catch you anyway.

DeBeers uses zeppelins (oh sorry, "semi-rigid manned aerostats") to sniff out diamonds with gravity measuring devices.

"Lick Me in the Ass" is a canon in B-flat major composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Is Bin Laden As Tall As Bigfoot?

Judge Dredd trufan Kevin Goldsmith, who has a magnificent ZZ Top beard, built himself a costume and bike based on the Judge Dredd movie.

(Thanks, susan mae, nat, Loren "Cryptomundo" Coleman, Adam "Ape Lad" Koford, Andrew "Rocketboom" Baron, Susannah "Reverse Cowgirl" Breslin, Alex "Worldchanging" Steffen, PJ Holden)

[transmothra #1 01:09 on Thu, Sep.13]

Lee Gomes is apparently mixing up audio compression, which reduces the difference between loud and quiet for the purpose of sounding louder, with data compression, which removes or recalculates bits to save disk space.

[Anonymous #2 04:37 on Thu, Sep.13]

The creature in the "ladybody" clip looks EXACTLY like one of the monsters in Silent Hill 2, although those creatures were made of mannequin parts and walked upright (the better to use their upper legs for kicking the crap out of you).

I'm not accusing the filmmaker of ripping off the game... it's entirely possible be came up with this design on his own. Still, the resemblance is worth noting.

[kjs3 #3 08:40 on Thu, Sep.13]

Re: Mr. Woodcock poster

Certainly the "balls suggestive of massive testicles" gag couldn't have been an original invention of the South Park guys, and what what visual would one expect from a movie about a coach named "Woodcock" (get it?).

[Anonymous #4 09:22 on Thu, Sep.13]

"Ever-observant Sean Bonner called it first."

not that it matters, but james allenspach noticed this about three weeks before sean bonner's september 12th post:
http://www.empty-handed.com/archive/2007_08_23.html

[Anonymous #5 12:53 on Thu, Sep.13]

#3 the poster would make much more sense if the film was called Mr. Woodballs. They could easily have shown him holding a more appropriately phallic baseball bat. Wooden, no less.
Either way, it's not like I'll actually see the film, but it's important to point out when Hollywood thinks it's being funny and falls flat.

[Anonymous #6 13:05 on Thu, Sep.13]

Not a flow chart but a Venn diagram illustrates the intersection of fine art and taco lovers.

[Owen #7 16:14 on Thu, Sep.13]

Dontchaknow headless naked ladybodies violate YouTube's terms of use?