Santa attacked by pie-lobbing yobs

The gang of yobs pelted Father Christmas with mince pies from the floor above as bemused customers looked on in horror.

Now centre chiefs have issued Santa with a hard hat to protect him from any further attacks.

Being able to travel round the world really, really fast and squeeze down any chimney clearly isn't much use as a super-power.

Meanwhile, as at latest bulletins, goat still unscorched.

Toy Rayguns from the Patent Room
Sorry, kid, you'll fry your eye out.

Via The Talking Squid.

Adrian LaFond's Isometrics

Courtesy of Pihus.

Important Information about Dropbears

Fuckin' short versions:

The Big Lebowski
Pulp Fiction
Scarface

Wikipedia's List of films that most frequently use the word "fuck"

Safe for work? Erm... let me think...

Daily Kos thread on pre-war colour photography.

Note also the site of pre-Revolutionary Russian colour photography mentioned in comments.

More from the "You learn something every day" file: Helen Duncan and the HMS Barham

Something a bit serious: Washington Stakeout

Week-in, week-out, day-in, day-out, public figures responsible for and able to influence policy make themselves available in Washington, DC.

The Washington Stakeout strives to take advantage of these opportunities and ask direct questions — we think the answers and non-answers, confirmations, denials and non-denials will be telling.

Via A Tiny Revolution.

WordCount
An online application that lists 86,800 English words in order of their frequency of use. Allows you to look up both words and ranks.

Also via The Language Log.

The Unsuggester at LibraryThing.

Unsuggester takes "people who like this also like that" and turns it on its head. It analyzes the seven million books LibraryThing members have recorded as owned or read, and comes back with books least likely to share a library with the book you suggest.

If you own or have read Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee you will not own or have read the Harry Potter Boxed Set. If you own or have read Clive Barker's Books of Blood you will not own or have read The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. If you own or have read The Selfish Gene you will not own or have read Virginia Andrews' Flowers in the Attic. Well, thank Christ for that.

Via The Language Log.

Via that Red Paperclip Guy, The 1 Second Film worldwide charity event thingy.

Lords of the Logistic

Showcase at the Beinart International Surreal Art Collective of exceptional collaborations from The Exquisite Corpse Club at the unfortunately named DeviantArt website.

Exquisite Corpse:

Among Surrealist techniques exploiting the mystique of accident was a kind of collective collage of words or images called the cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse). Based on an old parlor game, it was played by several people, each of whom would write a phrase on a sheet of paper, fold the paper to conceal part of it, and pass it on to the next player for his contribution...

It was natural that such oracular truths should be similarly sought through images, and the game was immediately adapted to drawing, producing a series of hybrids the first reproductions of which are to be found in No. 9-10 of La Révolution surrealiste (October, 1927) without identification of their creators. The game was adapted to the possibilities of drawing, and even collage, by assigning a section of a body to each player, though the Surrealist principle of metaphoric displacement led to images that only vaguely resembled the human form.

See also.

The boings led me to Beinart.

Look Around You

One simple way to think of Science is to imagine it as a giant, spinning roulette wheel whose numbers correspond to the great Scientists (1=Newton, 2=Einstein, 3=Quarnborg, 4=Ninn, and so on. (The ball represents Time.)).

Look Around You is an eight-part series designed to promote the understanding of Science in a simple and concise format. Although aimed at those of school-age, we are sure that many adults will also find it of interest.

"Look Around You" on Youtube

MapLib turns uploaded images into a zoomable, draggable custom Google Map complete with annotations.

Photos of Baikonur.

Fimoculous' list of the Best Blogs of 2006 that You (Maybe) Aren't Reading
Except this one.

Via Eyeteeth but then he's in it, the sod.

Goatcam!

This goat will not burn.

Re the International Dance of Matt, a rundown of the origin of the idea here which links to the original, rather more charming, video.

Via Millard Fillmore's Bathtub.

Erik Mongrain

TBogg had the video to 'Air Tap', so I googled.

From the "You learn something every day" file:

Parkour

Neutral Moresnet and Amikejo

And from Youtube:

The reactable, is a multi-user electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical objects on a luminous table surface. By moving and relating these objects, representing components of a classic modular synthesizer, users can create complex and dynamic sonic topologies, with generators, filters and modulators, in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

And a collection of "Donald Rumsfeld at the podium" bits from The Late Late Show.

Last two via Antony Loewenstein.

Two and a half years ago (August 2004), I posted a link to some drawings an artist had drawn while on LSD, done as a US government experiment back in the 50s. I've only just discovered I'd completely bollixed the coding such that the link was not clickable (anyone who actually found their way to the site would have had to have dug the URL out of the page's source code). It's fixed now, but for the hell of it here's that link again.

If you're tired of the run-of-the-mill "On this day in history..." sites, try The Axis of Evel Knievel weblog, which is more along the lines of "On this day in history, something godawful happened." Fascinating, well-written detail on the massacres, tragedies and destructive stupidities that make history such a cheery subject of study - what's not to like?

Image Explorer
Experimental image browsing interface.

Cubefield
Dodge those cubes!

Warning Label Generator

Rate the Title of Your Novel

QTVR Panoramas of Stockholm... and Thailand