http://www.comedycentral.com/mp/play.php?reposid=/multimedia/tds/headlines/8115.html

Grimace

Dear Andrew,

Grimace personifies the child in everyone. He's a big, fuzzy, purple fellow, and is Ronald's right-hand man.

Everyone in McDonaldland loves Grimace because of his innocent, loving nature. He's enthusiastic, eager and easily pleased. Grimace walks with a rolling gait, and can't be classified as any particular kind of animal.

When Grimace first emerged from his cave and confronted the other citizens of McDonaldland, he expected them to be frightened of him. The opposite turned out to be the case. No other character in McDonaldland is more beloved, especially by the children who visit McDonaldland from time to time. While initially conceived as a character representing McDonald's shakes, Grimace has transcended his role and is now seen as Ronald's closest friend. He still, though, retains his love of shakes.



Grimace is generous and affectionate. He occasionally causes minor problems in McDonaldland because of his clumsiness and perpetual confusion. But, these problems are generously overlooked by his many friends.

When Grimace first joined McDonaldland he did have four arms. You may be interested to know that at that time he was known as the evil Grimace who stole everybody's milk shakes. However, by 1974 he became the big, fuzzy purple fellow that everyone knows and loves today.

Again, thanks for thinking of Grimace. We look forward to serving you for many years to come.

Perla
McDonald's Customer Satisfaction Department

Still Got It

I was under the impression that the Onion had lost its mojo.
But this is dead on:



Raving Lunatic Obviously Took Some Advanced Physics

STANFORD, CA—Known throughout the community for his verbal outbursts and his shopping cart full of trash, area street denizen "Cosmic Stan" must have studied advanced physics at some point, sources reported Monday.

Above: Cosmic Stan asks for enough change to take a bus to the Riemannian manifolds.

"Where's my cheese? Don't take my rowboat! Got no room!" the lunatic screamed from his regular spot near the Campus Drive bus stop. "I need space! Gimme space! Infinite dimensional separable Hilbert space!"

Though his rants seem nonsensical to most passersby, some astute listeners say they contain evidence of higher learning.

"I'd always see him around that bus stop, dressed in his ragged wool clothes, duct-taped shoes, and that plastic sheeting covered over with symbols drawn in magic-marker," Stanford Ph.D. candidate James Willard said. "Then, a few days ago, he was out there waving his tin-foil wand at random strangers, and I heard him yell, 'I demand that you buy me an ice-cream cone! My third-favorite flavor is strange! My second-favorite is top! My favorite flavor is anti-charmed!' Suddenly, I realized the guy was talking about quarks."

Willard said he spent the next several minutes listening to Cosmic Stan's rant.

"Mixed in with the usual stuff about CIA mind-control beams, talking dogs, and monkey-people, I heard him mention beta decay, instantons, density matrix, and subspaces of n-dimensional Riemannian manifolds," Willard said. "I'm not sure where he got it, but he definitely seems to have had extensive schooling in theoretical physics. Man, what could've happened to him?"

Stanford theoretical physicist Carl Lundergaard seconded Willard's theory on the loonball.

"He's definitely had some advanced training, though I'm not surprised that it went unnoticed for so long," Lundergaard said. "It's hard for the layperson to differentiate schizophrenic ramblings like 'Modernity chunk where the sink goes flying on the ping-pang' from legitimate terminology like 'Unstable equilibria lie on the nodal points of a separatrix in phase space.'"

Lundergaard said he first became intrigued by Cosmic Stan in December 1999, when the homeless man threw a chicken bone at him and said, "Components of the Weyl conformal curvature tensor." The professor said he initially suspected that Stan was repeating a phrase "from a textbook he'd found in the garbage." Then, several weeks later, the screaming nutcase shouted some things that indicated a strong grasp of high-level science.

"As I was buying coffee in the quad one morning, Stan came by waving those roller skates he sometimes wears on his hands," Lundergaard said. "I distinctly heard him say, 'I can't be in two places at once! I can't meddle in my own affairs! I can't destructively interfere with my own future plans! What do I look like—the uncollapsed wave function of an electron?' He was referring to the seemingly paradoxical aspects of wave/particle duality as illustrated by the 'two-slit' experiment in electron diffraction. Stan wasn't just mouthing phrases: The crazy homeless man knows his stuff."

Added Lundergaard: "I almost approached him the other day to see if he had any ideas regarding the general solution for the relativistic force-free equation describing the structure of the pulsar magnetosphere, but he was busy smearing a plastic doll with glue."

Cosmic Stan also appears to be versed in other academic subjects, Lundergaard said.

"He seems to have a working understanding of several of the higher maths, including Zurmelo-Fraenkel set theory, category theory, and algebraic topology," Lundergaard said. "He also seems to be quite interested in the subjects of religion, sexuality, fast-food restaurants, Ferdinand de Saussure, malevolent evil, '70s TV shows, and shadowy authority figures."

Lundergaard said he has no knowledge of Cosmic Stan's past, but theorizes that his nickname derives from the physics term "cosmological constant."

"You have to wonder how this happened to him," Lundergaard said. "Was he calculating the transition amplitudes between the unperturbed eigenstates due to the presence of the perturbation in order to determine transition probabilities in time-dependent quantum phenomena, and the next day, strapping a TV antenna to his head?"

Perched atop a bicycle rack on Marquette Street, Cosmic Stan was asked for comment.

"Who you? You've been balderdashed! Doodads! Wood glue, dammit!" Cosmic Stan said, glancing around wildly and cradling a partially disassembled transistor radio. "Fock space! Spin polarization! The Clausius-Clapeyron equation obtains! The incident field is representable by a plane wave vector potential! You gotta believe me!"



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Love Canal Declared Clean, Ending Toxic Horror

This article is not about an enema.

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TIME TILL TOURNAMENT TIME

O The Power of Poo

From New Scientist

The waste you flush down the toilet could one day power the lights in your home.
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what the font?

Have you ever seen type in an absolutely great font, and wanted to know what font it is?



Link(care of BoingBoing)

who watches the watchers?

"Think of how ubiquitous google.com has become and the interesting data mining possibilities of the search engine gathered information itself (e.g., stream of thought). Couple that with the information that we pump into orkut.com, such as links to friends, location, likes/dislikes, habits, content of posts, etc., and you have expanded that profiling system quite nicely. Correlating google.com behavior with orkut.com behavior probably provides interesting tidbits. (And, if you have been using google.com for quite some years and google.com has effective profiling, then it might finally be able to map that activity back to you personally through the orkut.com provided information.) This is, of course, valuable information." -Andrew, member of "Orkut Paranoia" community

Orkut dynamo Huy Zing was terminated, because the Big Brother watching Orkut didn't like something about him. Communities were created in his memory, but these were deleted too.
Google offshores jobs.
Google has contract labor slaves. They get no benefits. They are treated as serfs. They are dropped like flies when they don't pump out just the right amount of labor and undignified silence.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Larry and Sergey's mantra of "Don't be evil" has already been compromised, now that it's more about money than about a great idea from two Stanford CS dorks.
Read orkut.com's terms of service. "By submitting, posting or displaying any Materials on or through the orkut.com service, you automatically grant to us a worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicenseable, transferable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to copy, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly perform and display such Materials."

There is no rational basis to support this monopoly. Drive competition.


Teoma
AllTheWeb
Mooter

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bao!

What's a tapir?


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travel cheap

like i am right now.


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handsome girl modeling school

shabu shabu

SmarterMobs

SEOUL - Lee Bong-Ryul has a day job as an engineer at a semiconductor company. In his spare time, he's helping to shape tomorrow's journalism.

Lee is an active ``citizen-reporter'' for OhmyNews, an online news service. Only 4 years old, the publication has already shaken up the South Korean journalism and political establishments while attracting an enormous audience.

OhmyNews is transforming the 20th century's journalism-as-lecture model, where organizations tell the audience what the news is and the audience either buys it or doesn't, into something vastly more bottom-up, interactive and democratic.

Link to story

Link to site (in Korean)

Fiendster The friendster reject's asylum

Fiendster The friendster reject's asylum

stick it to the man!

stick it to The Man with stickfigures (or more, depending on your talent and motivation)!



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