Been a while since you’ve cleaned out your refrigerator? Not quite sure if that tangy zip is what your Miracle Whip should smell like? How long can you keep ketchup before it goes bad? The Table of Condiments via Neatorama is a handy and well designed guide to the shelf life of most condiments.
Archive | January, 2009
Refrigerator Reference Sheet
To the victor…
…go the Whoppers.
Managing to sneak in a sacrifice before Facebook banned the app – the hubs snagged a free Whopper. For the win!
My New Appointment as Secretary of “Getting the Hell Out of Here”: Adventures in the Obama Spider-Man Variant
If you’re a big ole’ comic book geek or a raving Obamaniac – then there’s a good chance that you went freaking ape-shit crazy today over the Spiderman Obama variant cover that hit stores today. If you’re neither of the two – allow me to fill you in:
You know how sometimes TV Guide will put out a week’s issue with a series of 4 different covers with different cast-mates of [Current T.V. show]. On the inside – it’s the same T.V. Guide. Same times. Same shows. It’s just the cover that’s different. With a comic book variant – there will be something sparkly and super duper special about a cover that is different from the one that’s in mass production. So say – out of 10 issues of T.V. Guide – 9 of them have Hurley on them, and only one has Sawyer. Sawyer is the variant. Got it? Easy peasy. Comic book with an insert about Spiderman saving Obama at the inauguration. Easy. Right?
Wrong. SO wrong. Because the one variant is invariably worth more than the regular issues.
But the thing about this variant: it was an [Edit: Super special screwy] incentive plan for Marvel. Marvel tells the comic book shop, “Say you ordered x-number of Spiderman issues last time. For every, say, 20 extra issues you order, we’ll give you a variant.” Not a big deal for your gigantic comic book stores, they can easily order more, somewhat difficult for your lower sized chains. There’s the first print ultra-limited edition with a blue background, that’s the one that came out today. So folks were lining up all over the place today to get their hands on the Obama variant of Spiderman. Here’s how I spent the most terrifying morning of 2009.
So – my resident comic book geek hubs – has been feverishly asking me to go pick up a copy of the variant for like, the past week. There’s only one comic book store in town and it opens at 10 a.m.
Hubs: “You have to get there early. Get there before 10.”
Moi: “Yeahyeahyeahwhatever.”
Hubs: “No. I’m being serious. You really need to get there early.”
Moi: “Mmmkay.”
So I get there at 9:55 and there are three middle aged men, god bless ‘em, standing in line outside the door. Part of me wanted to say, “If there are only three of you – you probably don’t need to be in a line.” But this was the Whopper Virgin in me coming out because, as I learned, fewer people does not mean less insanity.
Are your friends dead weight? Delicious, charbroiled dead weight?
Burger King thinks so.
“The fast-food chain has released the Whopper Sacrifice application on Facebook. The app rewards people with a coupon for BK’s signature burger when they cull 10 friends. Each time a friend is excommunicated, the application sends a notification to the banished party via Facebook’s news feed explaining that the user’s love for the unlucky soul is less than his or her zeal for the Whopper.
The effort crafted by Crispin Porter + Bogusky came about after agency creative staffers confronted the too-many-friends scenario themselves on Facebook.
“We thought there could be some fun there, removing some of these people who are friends [but] not necessarily] best friends,” said Jeff Benjamin, executive interactive creative director at Crispin, and friend to 736 on Facebook. “It’s asking the question of which love is bigger, your love for your friends or your love for the Whopper,” he said.
The app also adds a box to user profile pages charting their progress toward the free burger with the line, “Who will be the next to go?”
Really, Burger King? REALLY?
Now – I can buy the sacrificing part. In a way – it’s kind of clever. But sending a message to the sacrificee about their “less-than-Whopper-like” status among the sacrificer? REALLY? Most folk I know take that shit PERSONALLY.
On the bright side, when you’re laid up in the hospital from your coronary from consuming too many Whoppers – that’s ten less people crowding up the place during visiting hours.
Then again – this is all the King really wants. Free advertising and publicity. (Shakes fist in air) I’ll get you next time – marketers!
Mash-Up and covered in Gravy
ARGH. I don’t know why it took me so long to find this site for Mash-Up mixologists, Bootie. Oh, right…another awesome BoingBoing tip off. I’ve got a very random and weird taste in music and when I stumbled upon their site – I felt as though someone cranked open my cranium and just gave me exactly what I was looking for.
Extra icing for the moist and delicious cake? Their Best of Bootie Albums are available for free download! Here’s a few of their masterpieces. Seriously – wonderful stuff.
Beethoven VS Kanye VS Walter Murphy: A plus D – Beethoven\’s Fifth Gold Digger
Britney VS Amy Winehouse: King of Pants – Detox
Beyonce VS Tom Petty: Earworm – If I Were A Free Falling Boy
That’s just a tiny sample. The earlier (2005) album has less mainstream fare on it.
Happy listening!
When the Universe beckons…Tetris treats head traumas.
I figure that the universe must be nudging me toward this nugget if I found the article on the New Scientist while hearing about it on G4′s coverage of the CES. Apparently – not only was Tetris useful in treating Post Traumatic Stress Disorder – but has also been shown to help treat head injuries. So – let this be a lesson to you – keep a Tetris app on your iPhone in the event you find yourself in a bar fight, spontaneous street hockey game or nasty Vespa accident.
Emily Holmes and colleagues at the University of Oxford theorised that Tetris would work like a “cognitive vaccine,” and immunise patients from future haunting memories of wars, crimes or accidents.
This isn’t the first time video games have been used to treat PTSD. Psychologists and computer scientists have successfully deployed virtual reality scenes to treat Iraq war veterans, months or years after their tours ended.
What’s different about Holmes’ approach is that patients play the game within minutes of a traumatic experience. Tetris is so engrossing and mentally taxing that geometric shapes replace images of exploding grenades, car crashes and human carnage, her team hypothesises.
This seemed to work, according to a preliminary study published today in the journal PLoS ONE. Forty volunteers, aged 18 to 47, watched graphic 12-minute clips of a surgery, fatal car crashes, and a drowning. A half-hour later, twenty of the participants played Tetris for just 10 minutes. The other half sat quietly for the same time period.
Volunteers kept a diary of their thoughts for a week and returned to the lab for a follow-up visit. Overall, the Tetris players experienced fewer traumatic flashbacks than the control group — three versus seven, on average.
It’s too bad ‘Bejeweled’ doesn’t have the same effect.
Save the Date: March 24, 2009 – Ada Lovelace Day
As a lover of all things internet, I just wanted to direct more attention to Boing Boing’s post about the Ada Lovelace Day pledge that’s going on for March 24th this year. Put yo’ bloggin’ pants on and git to goin’!
From the pledge via BoingBoing
Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Over 300 people have already signed a pledge to publish a blog post, video blog or podcast episode about a woman they admire on 24th March 2009. We need 700 more people for the pledge to be successful.
Recent research by psychologist Penelope Lockwood discovered that women need to see female role models more than men need to see male ones. But in the tech world women’s contributions often go unacknowledged and role models are hard to find. Ada Lovelace Day is a chance for us to sing the praises of the women who make tech tick: entrepreneurs, innovators, sysadmins, programmers, designers, games developers, hardware experts, tech journalists, tech consultants… The list of tech-related careers is almost endless and we want to see examples from all of them!
Let’s Be Social
