Oh Internet

Very silly, but somehow great too. Vampire Hunter D meets The Muppets.

Some guy discovers that his neighbours are leeching his wireless Internet connection, and rather than taking the usual route and just blocking their MAC addresses, decides to have some fun instead.

Filmcritic.com chooses its “Top 50 Movie Endings of All Time”. Sadly, I’ve only seen about 30 of the films on the list, so I’ll just have to take their word for a lot of them…

So very, very wrong. I actually remember Ian mentioning the San Fransisco version of this a while ago, and us laughing about “those wacky Bay-Area types”.
I think I’m going to leave town while this is happening. Clerkenwell is a pungent enough place as it is.

A man claiming to be a bridge troll was arrested after he demanded a toll to allow a sherrif’s deputy to cross.
According to a police report obtained by 7NEWS, Robert Hibbs, 19, was arrested Friday in a park near Foothills Highway and Colorado Avenue after demanding money and attacking the deputy. Police said that Hibbs [...]

It’s been said before, but I’ll say it again: Top Gear is the funniest piece of British TV in the last 10 years.
Also, I really wish Parkour was a viable hobby for unfit computer programmers with dodgy ankles. The insurance interview would be hilarious: “Sir, could you explain how you shattered both of your tibias?” [...]

Ah, the agony of choice.
The temperature here is keeping pace with the rest of the week, during which, let us not forget, the UK’s highest ever temperature was recorded. (And, marvelously, the day the air conditioner in our office broke down, leading to indoor temperatures of 37 degrees C and to me breaking our game [...]

Easily mispronounced domain names.
Yes, it’s puerile, but don’t tell me you didn’t laugh:
TherapistFinder.com
PowergenItalia.com
ExpertsExchange.com
WhoRepresents.com
GasHeating.co.uk

Because this arrived while I was reading The Dice Man and was thinking on the theme of life lived through random chance, because I am bored, and because I have just run out of whisky: Tag, you are all it!
Directions: Put your iTunes/Winamp/WMP/whatever on shuffle. Say the following questions aloud (or not), and press play. [...]

This is going in the opposite direction from the ‘brain-in-a-jar’ ideal, but cyborgs are neat too:
Scientists have for the first time developed a brain implant that allows people to control electronic devices by thought alone, it emerged yesterday.
The remarkable breakthrough offers hope that people who are paralysed will one day be able to independently operate [...]

BBC News - Silk ‘could help repair nerves’
Silk may be able to help repair damaged nerves, according to scientists.
The UK researchers have shown how nerve cells can grow along bundles of a special fibre, which has properties similar to spider silk.
They hope the silk will encourage cell re-growth across severed nerves, [...]

For a band whose albums I love so much, Animal Collective are a surprisingly dreech live proposition.
Picture a man alternately yodeling and screaming through a flanger and reverb unit, backed up by another man making baby-noises through a differently timed reverb unit, accompanied by drums and by someone manipulating keyboards/synths/mixers in accordance with the instructions [...]

And people wonder how the child slave trade got started:

One of the nicer perqs of our company being bought out is that we get free copies of all newly released MS Game Studios titles, and this evening we all trooped off with shiny new copies of Rise of Legends, which was lovely.
What was less lovely was discovering that there was a magnetic security tag [...]

Song of Kali - Dan Simmons
A writer takes his wife and baby on a trip to India to attempt to acquire a newly written poem by the supposedly long dead M. Das. They do not have a good time of it.
This is obviously a first novel; it’s fairly straightforward, a lot of the supporting characters [...]