Yummy Wakame

“The Icelandic Knocker Frog is unique in being the only animal on the planet, apart from man, that can make cheese on toast. They can also climb rope ladders, a skill that has proven invaluable over the years in helping them to escape from danger. You’re probably wondering why it’s called a ‘Knocker’ Frog. So are we.”
The University of the Bleeding Obvious

Billy Harvey Music is a super fun Flash site where Billy himself welcomes you.

Check out these top of the line, one of a kind sticks…er, I mean, wands, for sale – less than $20!

Does the guy on the right look familiar?

Shawn found this.

As long as you love me – the video

Thanks Pieter!

Every year, in the wake of overstuffed stomachs full of Thanksgiving mashed potatos, pumpkin pie and tryptophan, the denizens of the United States of America arise from their football drunken slumber to attend Black Friday, a quasi-holiday born out of immense consumerism and passed off as preparation for the holiday season. Black Friday is the busiest shopping day of the year. Stores mark their success for the whole year on how much they sell on this most sacred of shopping events, and consumers come out in packs, biting, kicking and scratching for the best deals, in spite of the fact that the stores are chalk-full of other likeminded money-exchangers and some establishments are so packed that it practically involves copulation to make it through the aisles (aka queues).

But never fear, there is a solution. Buy Nothing Day is an anti-Black Friday, anti-c0nsumerism holiday meant for the most part to directly lower the end-of-day sales and slow our ever increasing reliance on exchanging money for goods. It is also a time to truly reflect on what we already have and find appreciation for it. To sit back and look at that sweater you’ve been wearing since college and appreciate how much wear and tear you got out of it. To think about your girlfriends or mothers or children or friends and how happy they make you, and to realize that the old saying really is true, “The best things in life are free.” Or at least as cheap as you want them to be.

Buy Nothing Day in the US is today, November 24.

Buy Nothing Day in the UK is Saturday, November 25.

Enjoy!

YubNub, the (social) command-line for the web.

YubNub is a command-line for the web. After setting it up on your browser, you simply type “gim porsche 911″ to do a Google Image Search for pictures of Porsche 911 sports cars. Type “random 49″ to return random numbers between 1 and 49, courtesy of random.org. And best of all, you can make a new command by giving YubNub an appropriate URL.

Oh yeah, and another thing that rocks about YubNub, it means “Hooray” in the Ewok language.

HBO is a for-pay premium channel available in the US which has spawned shows such The Sopranos and Sex & the City, as well as some really good joint-BBC ventures such as Rome & Extras.

They’ve teamed up with PBS to produce their latest original movie, Yesterday, a movie about a South African mother who’s contracted AIDS through her husband and is struggling to survive to see her daughter start school. It was filmed entirely in South Africa. The site includes a trailer.

Have you seen these posts on ClickNathan?

Oppression and (as promised).

You may or may not agree with him, but you can’t deny he does have some good arguments…

Oh yeah, and if you have something to say, leave your opinions under his articles, not here. He earned ‘em. Unless you want to leave a comment like, “Olivia, you rock! And you’re a much better driver than Nathan.” In which case, leave it here and there. Thank you.

Wow I have such a mixture of emotions today. I was meant to spend my first Thanksgiving with Nathan’s whole family, cozying up with him, eating all kinds of vegetarian delights prepared by his lovely mom and celebrating my first proper snow with him.

Instead I’m stuck at home working on a frighteningly impossible amount of work trying to break the main hump before it breaks me, watching the Thanksgiving Day parade on TV and squealing about the snow all on my own. I’ll need to raid the fridge later (and try my best to resist the Chort’s halloween basket) for my Thanksgiving dinner.

Next year I’m definitely not missing it.

Anyway, I hope wherever you are today my American readers, that you have a fantastic day!

And the most important part of this post – Nathan, I miss you terribly!!!!!!

Always good for a laugh, Bush made a fool of himself again. Don’t forget to watch the video…

Oh but don’t forget that George W isn’t all good times and rock n’ roll:

“President Bush planned to bomb Arab TV station al-Jazeera in friendly Qatar, a “Top Secret” No 10 memo reveals.” – Mirror.co.uk

Tristan is on the carpet behind me playing with his GI Joe’s.

Tristan in his toughest, meanest GI Joe voice:
GI Joe 1: “…okay, but gimme a smooch.”
GI Joe 2: “You wanna smooch?”
GI Joe 1: “Yeah, I wanna smooch.”
GI Joe 2: “Are you sure you want a smooch?”
GI Joe 1: “Yeah!”
GI Joe 2: “Okay cum’ere! I’ll give you a smooch.”

Even funnier was retelling that story to his grandma, who looked very alarmed and tried her best to explain to Tristan why it’s okay for Daddies and sons to give a smooch, but Gi Joe’s definitely don’t smooch, and other boys shouldn’t smooch each other either.

So they’ve made it, Aeon Flux, the movie.

Okay check out this handy little game that shows you the big bad continent of Europe and asks you to place the countries in their appropriate positions. Pretty fun and also informative!

But who knew there were so many little countries, smaller than the size of some cities…

SA advertising man the ‘best creative director in world’

At a banquet at the Hammersmith Palais, London, on Monday evening 7th November 2005, The Jupiter Drawing Room’s Graham Warsop was honoured as the No. 1 Creative Director in the world by the London International Advertising Awards (LIAA).

Check out this MTV ad!

The ultimate custom built portable

“Request a free lighter and start a smoking chain yourself.”

Brainf*ck is the ungodly creation of Urban Müller, whose goal was apparently to create a Turing-complete language for which he could write the smallest compiler ever, for the Amiga OS 2.0. His compiler was 240 bytes in size. (Though he improved upon this later — he informed me at one point that he had managed to bring it under 200 bytes.)…

More info in Wikipedia.

Children’s drawings redone by adults

The struggles of the San bushmen

Wired News: Engineers are developing adapter kits for hybrid vehicles that will increase their efficiency to 100 miles per gallon by powering them solely on electricity during short trips.

Today’s hybrid vehicles use electricity stored in batteries to assist the gasoline engine in acceleration and to completely power the vehicle while idling or at steady low speeds (generally less than 25 mph). Vehicles such as the Toyota Prius, Honda Civic Hybrid and Ford Escape Hybrid include drive-train management systems that automatically decide when to use the batteries or internal-combustion engine.

Enter CalCars and EDrive, organizations developing modification kits that enable the Toyota Prius to be recharged from the grid. And a new group of automotive component suppliers, the Advanced Hybrid Vehicle Development Consortium, hopes to develop technology that enables hybrids to run without help from the gasoline engine for up to 50 miles.

Read the full article…

Americans drive on the wrong side of the road! This makes it extremely confusing and dangerous for normal people to cross the road – Darwinism in reverse.

And everyone here drives automatics. Where I come from, automatics are for girls who can’t get their head around how a stick works. You can’t pop a decent wheelie in an automatic or drive a sports car properly. I guess sticks are for expert drivers, expert drivers like me who remember to pull up the handbrake for Nathan when he parks on a slope… and not like how he drives off with the handbrake still on, or how he continually reminds me who has the license when I give him expert driving advice.

Found on Bloggers4Labour

South Africa – The Good News: A pioneering South African cellphone bank is changing the lives of South Africa’s “unbanked and underbanked”, tackling unemployment and leading the world’s emerging markets towards convenient, affordable banking.

South Africa has 16 million unbanked or “underbanked” citizens – a huge chunk of the nation that is largely excluded from meaningful and convenient access to economic participation. According to the FinMark Trust’s 2004 FinScope survey, the overwhelming majority of unbanked South Africans cite unemployment or a lack of sufficient money as the reason for not having a bank account. With no bank account, these South Africans are obliged to stash their cash in the proverbial cookie jar. Physical access to a bank is also a major issue, particularly for South Africa’s 8.1 million rural poor, only 5% of whom have a bank “nearby”. Unsurprisingly, it takes the average South Africa 58 minutes to access a financial services point. A trip, or rather an expedition, to the bank becomes a costly experience for the very people that can afford it the least.

Enter Wizzit, a division of the South African Bank of Athens, who in April launched South Africa’s first cellphone bank aimed at providing the South African unbanked and underbanked population with a fully functional bank account that would eliminate the risks of carrying cash and would enable these marginalised masses to interact financially and participate in the economy. more…

I wish I could eat him up, but his dad won’t let me.

more…