Courtesy of BoingBoing, apparently they’re making an underwater hotel in the Bahamas. $1500/night seems a little steep to me, but this picture is pretty compelling. Compelling, of course, if you think there will actually be dolphins and tropical fish swiming inches from your window. Maybe they’ll put out some food or something to keep interesting animals nearby. It would definitely be cool to see a shark maul another animal outside your window.
I’ve never actually seen this magazine but it sounds hilarious.
It’s barely 3 p.m., and Frank Kelly Rich, who edits the bimonthly homage to getting soused, is draining his gin and tonic and eyeing a whiskey bottle on the top shelf. Moments later, he’s drinking that as well.
I’ve made the switch to XM, and it’s great to have Opie and Anthony back. Their material is so far beyond what Stern is doing that I harbor some doubts that I’ll ever listen to him again. Now that O&A no longer work for Stern’s company, they can actually talk about him (Stern had requested a gag order so they couldn’t mention his name back when they both worked for the same parent company).
O&A were talking about this, and how there may be more to come. That would be great.
BoingBoing has a paragraph/link about an author who is now filing a lawsuit against the publishers of the DaVinci code.
If I were living in Brazil, I’d totally consider living here.
This idea is pretty cool. Set up an Amazon wishlist, then get a random person assigned to you. You buy them a present, someone else buys you a present. Secret santa on a global scale.
I found some of these pretty shocking. When I first saw the movie I thought it was pretty compelling, although it had some questionable logical leaps. The amount of deception (and outright inaccuracy) is surprising.
This is an interesting article I found via Fil’s Metadex about sex at the olympics. Very interesting and entertaining read.
The secret of the modern Olympics is that the athlete village, with its tightly packed collection of firm young bodies, 24-hour sports television and all-you-can eat international cuisine, has become the most exclusive VIP club in the world. It’s “a two-week-long private party for thousands of hard-bodies,” says Nelson Diebel, an American swimmer who won gold twice in Barcelona.
An interesting tidbit of information…
At the Albertville winter Olympics, condom machines in the athletes’ village had to be refilled every two hours. And in Sydney the organisers’ original order of 70,000 condoms went so fast that they had to order 20,000 more.
After the big shocker on American Idol last week (yes, now that I no longer live alone, I watch American Idol) Elton John felt the need to comment. Basically they are down to 7 contestants, and 3 of what many consider to be the best candidates, ended up as the bottom 3 (they got the fewest votes). I was immediately reminded of last year (ok, I have no excuse for watching last year) when Ruben was in the bottom 2 at one point near the end. Ruben went on to win the competition last year.
This year, 3 of the best singers are black women, and Elton John thinks that the fact that they ended up in the bottom 3 is nothing short of “incredibly racist.” This quote is classic:
“The three people I was really impressed with, and they just happened to be black, young female singers, and they all seem to be landing in the bottom three […]”
Even if you ignore the suggestion that the bottom 3 has been made up of all black men/women more than once (which it hasn’t), his suggestion of racism in American Idol is moronic for a number of reasons.
What he’s saying is that his favorites all just happen to be black. Just coincidentally, there is a group of people he considers to be the best, and they all have the same skin color. However, should that same group of people be considered the worst, no longer can that be considered a coincidence. Oh no, that must be racism.
It’s really amazing.
So, a few weeks ago Google announced a new webmail system people could sign up for called Gmail. It is free, web-based, and has 2 features that make it unique:
1) You get a full Gigabyte of storage space
2) They scan your e-mail for keywords so they can target ads in the browser.
Naturally this has become controversial… even the stupid government is excited about it.
“We think it’s an absolute invasion of privacy. It’s like having a massive billboard in the middle of your home,” said Sen. Liz Figueroa, a Democrat from Fremont, Calif.
Let me save the government a whole lot of time and taxpayer dollars – shut up and go away. If people don’t want advertisements based on the contents of their e-mail, they won’t sign up. I guess they’ll have to live with Hotmail, or Yahoo!, or the mail account that comes with their ISP, or work, or one of hundreds of other places you can get a free e-mail account.
Of course, since those have ads too (albeit not targeted based on e-mail contents) I guess that would be considered like having a massive billboard in my home. The difference being, I might actually be interested in the billboard from GMail. Let me tell you, if word got out that -based on the contents of my e-mails- I was interested in computers, and I got advertisements for products I might be interested in buying, I would feel totally violated. Particularly when I voluntarily signed up.
I must be in the minority, because based on the two candidates we have to choose from for president, it looks like no one in America is really interested in smaller government.