The WASP Injection Knife is well named:

This weapon injects a frozen ball of compressed gas approximately the size of a basketball at 850psi nearly instantly.

No question, that would hurt.

[Via William Gibson]

Sometimes it isn't enough to just review a film:

The Movie Review: 'The Happening'
by Christopher Orr

M. Night Shyamalan's latest movie, The Happening, is not merely bad. It is an astonishment, so idiotic in conception and inept in execution that, after seeing it, one almost wonders whether it was real or imagined. It's the kind of movie you want to laugh about with friends, swapping favorite moments of inanity: "Do you remember the part when Mark Wahlberg … ?" "God, yes. And what about that scene where the wind … ?"

The problem, of course, is that to have such a conversation, you'd normally have to see the movie, which I believe is an unreasonably high price to pay just to make fun of it. So rather than write a conventional review explaining why you should or shouldn't see The Happening (trust me, you shouldn't), I'm offering an alternative: A dozen and a half of the most mind-bendingly ridiculous elements of the film, which will enable you to marvel at its anti-genius without sacrificing (and I don't use that term lightly) 90 minutes of your life. [...]

[Via The Morning News]

About time I posted another of these:

• Hairy Frogfish
• Pinky
• Siberian Swirls
• "Please allow me to introduce myself…"
• Water detail
• Neurotoxic
• From Woofstock
• Kite
• Egg.
• Loch Ness Impostor

Incredible Hulk Provocations, or "Ways to make Dr. David Banner angry":

1. Problems with flat tire.

[...]

17. Receiving a lethal injection, and then having the person say, "Oh. I just gave you a lethal injection. Sorry, David."

[...]

38. Placed in a small room with a ravenous black panther.

[...]

57. Being pushed out of a plane at 30,000 feet by a mean guy who yells "You’re gonna land a lot sooner than the rest of us!"

[...]

95. Falling out of a plane without a parachute, then being given a parachute (which causes the person who pushed him to be told "That guy has nine lives", to which the mean person responds by pulling out a rifle and saying "Yeah, but I got ten rounds"), and then having the straps to his parachute shot off when he is still 30 feet above an empty house so that he falls through the roof and hurts himself.

[Via James Nicoll]

Les Machines de l'Ile: quite possibly the coolest tourist attraction in the history of the world.¹

[Via MetaFilter]

1. It's not clear to me whether there's some formal link between the creators of Les Machines de l'Ile and the street theatre group who brought The Sultan's Elephant to London a couple of years ago, or whether it's just that the French really, really love the combination of Jules Verne and giant mechanical creatures. Either way, Vive La France! ↩

The Munchy Box: surely the most awe-inspiring post-pub snack ever concocted.

Just throw in a deep-fried Mars Bar and a can of Irn Bru and you'll be set for the night. And the following day, come to that.¹

[Via MetaFilter]

1. I defy anybody, drunk or sober, to consume the entire thing at a single sitting. ↩

Some of the 100 oldest family-owned businesses in the world go back much further than you might imagine.

What I find interesting is how little-known the companies are: the first I'd heard of was way down at number 32.

[Via The Long Now Blog]

A compilation of the late Humphrey Lyttleton's closing lines from episodes of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue:

…and so, ladies & gentlemen, as the hoodie of time is roughly ejected from the Lakeside of eternity, and the Benedictine Monk complains he only wanted to buy a new pair of sandals…

Well, as I see the sands of time are being washed by the Tide of eternity, it's time to decide whether it's kinder on coloured fabrics than our usual brand…

…well, I notice it's the end of the show, and indeed the end of another series. Yes, I don't mind telling you it's at times like these that my emotions can get the better of me, and I can sometimes find a tear forming in my eye…sheer joy and relief often have that effect…

[Via Yoz]

Courtesy of Skippy's List, the story of Sgt Screecher and Sgt Horndog.

The hierarchy of intellectuals, illustrated.

Gidget on the Couch: Freud, Dora (no, not that Dora), and surfing's secret Austro-Hungarian roots.

While sports, life, and style have been around for a while, the "sports lifestyle" as a distinct market is a mere half-century old. Like much else of cultural import in the years since World War II, this niche is the product of the human laboratory we call California, and specifically of its coastline. Surfing is enjoying (or despising, depending on your perspective) one of its periodic peaks in the general consciousness, which makes it appropriate to look back the five decades to the moment when the sport broke free of its cult status and became the urtext of athletic sports retailing. The publication of Gidget in 1957 did not just introduce us to the barely fictionalized account of a girl’s summer in Malibu; it started a chain reaction that introduced surfing to the rest of the country and spread it to the world at large. The novel was licensed for three hit movies, and later made into numerous television shows. Within a few years, the Beach Boys, woodies, hangin’ ten, and board shorts were as popular in Kansas City as Santa Cruz.

[...]

Before Gidget, however, there was a real girl named Kathy Kohner who learned to surf Malibu in the summer of 1956. [...]

[Via The Morning News]

Heaven visualised as an amusement park:

Beyond the Pearly Gates (emblazoned with the slogan You Did It!) is a Nu-Body Machine (1), instantly providing everybody with the body they’ve been trying to shape into while still alive. Catholics are welcome to Heaven, but are confined to a small section next to the entrance (2) where they can indulge their semi-idolatrous tendencies at the Throne of Mary (3). Others can try their hand (and their wings) at Angel Boot Camp (4), which is "great for Pentecostals and Charismatics." [...]

[Via Strange Maps]

I don't think I've seen a single trailer on E4, but it turns out that Gilmore Girls is finally coming to free-to-air TV in the UK, starting tomorrow morning at 8:50am.

John Siracusa has come up with an evocative image as the background for this year's game of WWDC keynote bingo.

[Via Daring Fireball]

How to make a librarian cry.

[Via mathowie]

Professor Edward Felten and his colleagues have come up with beautifully simple strategy to improve the way that governments provide information to their citizens:

In order for public data to benefit from the same innovation and dynamism that characterize private parties’ use of the Internet, the federal government must reimagine its role as an information provider. Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, it should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that "exposes" the underlying data. Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data. The best way to ensure that the government allows private parties to compete on equal terms in the provision of government data is to require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large.

[Via rc3.org]

The Nutty Buddy Athletic Cup is available in the following sizes:

• Hammer
• Boss
• Hog
• Mongo

The things companies will do to bolster the male ego…

[Via Fritinancy]

Here's a different perspective on this image.

Could the Sony Rollyâ„¢ be the most irritating MP3 player ever made?

Apple have significantly improved the way Spaces works in Mac OS X 10.5.3: it's gone from being a nice idea,¹ poorly implemented, to a usable means of working for those of us who like to compartmentalise our workload.

That said, there are a few improvements I'd like to see in Spaces when 10.5.4 shows up:

1. There should be some visual indication in the Dock of which applications have windows in the current Space – perhaps shading the background of the icon in the Dock in a different colour, or just changing the colour of the dot that indicated which applications are running?
2. It should be possible to force some applications to stay in a single Space (or, conversely, to force some applications to always 'follow' the user to the current Space.)
3. It should be possible to have each Space use a separate wallpaper.
4. It should be possible to move an application's windows between Spaces by accessing the Dock item's menu.
5. If both Spaces and Expose are active, selecting Expose's Show All Applications option should display all the windows in all Spaces, rather than only the windows of applications in the current Space.²³

[Via Daring Fireball]

1. I'm well aware that virtual desktops have been around for many years on every decent operating system, but Spaces was the first 'official' implementation of the idea in Mac OS X. ↩
2. Preferably by displaying the Spaces as they are now when the user presses F8, but with the application windows spread out across the Space where they reside: effectively, showing the view you'd get when doing Show All Applications with Spaces not running, only with the application windows grouped according to which Space they're in. ↩
3. It turns out this is possible in 10.5.3: if you switch to the view of all Spaces then press the function key assigned to Expose's Show All Applications option then you see the application windows arranged within each Space. Very handy. ↩