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THE MOST RETARDED CONTEST EVER

I'm all for fluff pieces and soft news, and I will admit that on Sundays I'll usually read the New York Times starting with the least newsworthy section (Lance Armstrong is a Cad!) before making my way to tackling the front page articles about the power struggle in Zimbabwe, but I mean this question posted by the New York Post is truly retarded: Who is more important to NYC’s economy, Models or Geeks? This child has the answer to that question:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMNry4PE93Y]

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DID COLDPLAY "PLAY"GIARIZE?

Creepy Boards, a New York band is contesting that Coldplay's song Livin La Vida Loca "Viva la Vida" was stolen from them after Chris Martin, Coldplay's lead singer, saw them perform at the CMJ festival in New York. As WOW points out, Creepy Boards's song is ironically titled "The Songs I Didn't Write." And they have a video, which is naturally on YouTube where they be callin' Coldplay out! It's just like Ice T and Soulja Boy! Or not. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUhFLiw6h6s]

There's some similarity but I dunno that I'm entirely convinced. Music is so derivative any how. Anyway, what say you?

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GEORGE CARLIN, 1937 - 2008

George Carlin passed away yesterday. He always did have interesting things to say.

Death is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time.

The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A Death! What's that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you're too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating...and you finish off as an orgasm.

- George Carlin

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HAHA

Other than their concise but informative articles, I enjoy the Economist for its sometimes sarcastic wit and humor.  The last line in the quoted section below made me laugh.

It is theoretically possible that the superdelegates who have announced their support for Mr Obama could change their minds before the convention in August and hand the nomination to Mrs Clinton. But it is vanishingly improbable, barring the revelation that Mr Obama is secretly a polygamous Mafia boss in the pay of Iran.

Read more here.

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JAY Z IS BROOKLYN'S NERDIEST

Jay Z trying to maintain a swagger at a Coldplay concert while hanging out with Ricky Gervais. Basically the same swagger I had when I was in 5th grade and wore similar thick glasses. What is happening to this world where Ricky Gervais looks cooler than Jay Z? And Coldplay? Really? As Poplicks pointed out: You can knock the hustle.

[Via]

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QUOTE

I have to tell you, I find solace in sweeping. I have no other responsibilities. I have no phone. I have time to think. I just have, you know, peace.

- Naomi Campbell

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BRILLIANT AD

I really wish this wasn't an ad and instead the product of a child's meandering imagination. Or thinking about it another way, I guess maybe despite things like jobs, bills, relationships, and the other trappings of adulthood, the child in all of us never quite disappears. I think we can all relate to the experience of looking out the car window when we were young and letting our vivid imagination roam, quite literally conjuring a sea monster in the distance. I think the ad's message would have been more powerful if it weren't for the awkward insertion on the bottom right corner of the actual car.

[Via]

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SMITHSONIAN ON FLICKR

The Smithsonian Institute, the world's "largest museum and research complex" as well as the repository of our nation's historical artifacts, has joined the Flickr community. They are uploading an initial number of around 900 photographs.

Only a very small percentage of our photographs presently exist in digital form, and many have not been fully researched and described. The photos you see here are a sample of the more than 13 million images in some seven hundred collections in our museums, archives, and research centers. These collections contain photographs collected from outside sources in addition to those taken by Smithsonian staff, and represent a broad range of subjects and themes in the fields of art, history, culture, and science.

This is a really savvy initiative on Smithsonian's part. There's a lot of good stuff there like this image of a mail carrier delivering a freakin' child:

Read more here and check out the rest of the Smithsonian Flickr images.

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GOOGLE: SKIP FLASH INTROS

Google searches now have a new feature (not sure when it was deployed) that allows you to skip those oft-annoying flash intros on websites from Google's search results page.  I'm not sure how web designers feel about this, and I know advertisers will hate this, but strictly from a user experience standpoint it is a nice addition that makes obtaining information just that much easier and quicker. This is yet another example of why Google is what it is and why everybody else is in last place.

Find out more here.

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THE HAPPENING AIN'T HAPPENING

So my favorite thing to do currently is to discuss loudly the "gotcha" spoiler of M. Night Shyamalan's new movie The Happening. I think of it as my civic duty to protect people from themselves and let them apply their hard earned 11 dollars instead towards better things like buying two and a half gallons of gas.  The movie is that horrendous.

Says who? you ask.

Says my coworker.

Says this critic who just eviscerates the movie. Spoiler warning:

Elliot, Alma, and Jess flee from Philadelphia to a series of smaller towns and ultimately the rural countryside. This makes sense in the movie's nonsensical context--the nation's trees are somehow "targeting" big cities first and then smaller and smaller populations. But it seems more than a little unhinged that our heroes' response to the revelation that the trees are trying to kill them is to head into the forest.

Says Moye and I...and we haven't even seen it.  And we won't. So there.

Actually the object of this whole pointless entry was just so I could use the obvious pun in my headline.

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THE DEPARTED: FLICKR FOUNDERS

Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield, the husband and wife team who co-founded Flickr (my favorite photo and now video hosting community), which was purchased by Yahoo in 2005 for $35 million, are leaving their baby--prematurely in my opinion.  I was there when this site first appeared on my nerdar in 2004, and since then it has been my blogging partner in crime. This is one property (and maybe their fantasy sports leagues) in the Yahoo portfolio that is superior to anything that Google has been able to offer. This said, I'm always interested in the next thing around the corner, so let me know if there's a better website out there than Flickr. I had a conversation with Kaizar recently where we were discussing the issue of Yahoo and in particular how being part of that dysfunctional family might be impacting Flickr. I guess news of Fake and Butterfield's departure gives us some insight into that question.

Here is Butterfield's pretty bizarre and far-out alleged resignation letter.

Read more here.

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BEHOLD! BACONHENGE!

Let Baconhenge be the site of your seasonal celebration! Let bacon stand in for the sacrificed Year King, French toast for the Grain Goddess, the eggs in the frittata for the Cosmic Egg, and the vegetables for the bountiful Earth on which we live.

I'm going to put on my Captain Obvious hat for a moment here and say that this does not look very healthy.

Read more here.

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JERRY YANG'S YAHOO POISON PILL

Writer Joe Nocera published a harsh public letter today in the New York Times condemning Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang for negligently failing his duty to shareholders when he successfully engineered the rejection of Microsoft's takeover attempt of the company that he co-founded. What is interesting to me in this was the "poison pill" Yang instituted as a final safeguard against the "evil empire," which would have amounted to basically a "we have to destroy the village in order to save it" defense. What is this mysterious poison pill?

Viewing employee retention as Microsoft’s Achilles’ heel, Yang engineered an ingenious defense creating huge incentives for a massive employee walkout in the aftermath of a change of control,” reads the legal complaint. “The plan gives each of Yahoo’s 14,000 full-time employees the right to quit his or her job and pocket generous termination benefits at any time during the two years following a takeover, by claiming a ‘substantial adverse alteration’ in job duties or responsibilities.

[...]

Indeed, according to the complaint, you wanted a severance plan far more aggressive than the one being recommended by your own human resources executives. Your compensation consultant called your plan “nuts” in an e-mail message. A Yahoo vice president wrote that it would be “a bizarre outcome if people who stick around make off worse financially” than people who are laid off. But another executive got to the heart of the matter. Your severance plan, he wrote, “will make things increasingly more expensive for msft though.”

Damn. That is some evil ingenious shit right there.

Read more here.

Update: One positive side effect of the Yahoo and Google ad partnership is that "Google Talk and Gmail users can chat with Yahoo Messenger users, in addition to AOL AIM users."

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REQUIEM FOR A DAY OFF

Ferris Bueller gets reworked into a new trailer set to music from Requiem for a Dream.  It's lengthy (4 minutes) but worthwhile.  I especially like the last moment in the trailer. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Vy2aJY6rq8]

Amazing what music and editing can do to turn a comedy into something utterly creepy.

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