Stray Hawkeye

Have you ever looked at a New Yorker cartoons and said to yourself, “Wow, I can’t even imagine who would have ever even thought that could make someone laugh, much less paid for it, especially since it’s so consistently pretentious and annoying in a New Yorker’y kind of way?”  Which really is to say, have you ever looked at New Yorker cartoons?

Turns out if you just give the same cartoons literal captions, they’re pretty funny, as The Monkeys You Ordered proves.  Buried gold I tell you.  A few favorites:

• Dog
• Tree
• Dolphin
• Piano

Via Kottke and Boing Boing.

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows falls firmly into the category of things I don’t think I really understand, but I’m pretty sure I like.  It’s a list of terms and definitions.  Each is a sort of poem about some feeling or situation, which the term labels.  A sort of free form modern poetic dictionary of life.  Or something like that.  Perhaps an example:

cumulostalgia

n. self-aware satisfaction with discussing the weather, which although a well-worn marker of shallow conversation thwarts the suspicion that any day now our fragmented and variegated selves will no longer overlap long enough to maintain a working definition of ‘we.’

Or:

anti-aliasing

n. -soc. psych. curiosity about the real flesh-and-blood people behind internet usernames, whose vivid individuality suggests that when our parents were tracing their fingers along our nameless faces looking for some hint of who we were to become, they really should have gone with Mr. Cookieface, Unicornpuncher, Dutchess Von Whatever, or Wookiegasm.

Or:

contact high-five

n. an innocuous touch by someone just doing their job—a barber, yoga instructor or friendly waitress—that you enjoy more than you’d like to admit, a feeling of connection so stupefyingly simple that it cheapens the power of the written word, so that by the year 2025, aspiring novelists would be better off just giving people a hug.

Intended or not, some of the best contemporary poetry I’ve read since college.

Via Kottke.

Ps – So, after writing this, I clicked the little information button at the top of the page, and it turns out the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is not only cool (and has a bit better definition of itself than what I came up with above), it’s also local, written by John Koenig of St Paul.  Adding local tag…

Most Twitter accounts suck.  This one, not so much.  What BP would say if it said what it meant – @BPGlobalPR

Via Kottke.

Do you spend entirely too much time online?  Feel like some of the major websites are your friends?  Wonder what it would be like to go to a party with them?  Wonder no more!

And the sequel:

Abridged scripts from the editing room are great 2-3 pages versions of popular movies.  And by abridged, I mostly mean 2-3 pages that narrate the plot and key scenes of the movie, while making TOTAL CRAP out of the MOVIE, while using STANDARD SCRIPT FORMATTING.

They’re pretty funny, especially for ones you’ve seen- most of them are mocking enough that you need to actually have seen the movie for them to make sense.  The Dark Knight is a pretty good one, though I’m not sure why they feel the need to make fun of Maggie Gyllenhaal, I think she’s kind of cute.

So, High Times magazine is sort of amusing on it’s own for being a magazine solely and blatantly about pot.  Their website is even funnier for the fact that it take your normal website with flashing banner ads full of half naked women and replaces them with flashing banner ads for pot and naked women half covered with buds.  What’s even funnier (at least to me) is that not only do they have podcasts, but that they refer to them as potcasts.

Damn Interesting is a great site, which is unfortunately undergoing a bit of an extended period of inactivity.  It has great articles (even the old ones are still good, I know, amazing in this new ever 5 minutes internet) which combine reporting on obscure events and locations with a wonderfully dry sense of humor and an engaging narrative style.

This one came to mind because they’re not only interesting articles, but they stick with you.  A few days ago I was discussing websites with a friend from work, and we both remembered a particularly line from a particular article.  This article.  To not spoil the particular line, it comes immediately before “When airline mechanics finally arrived…” very near the end of the article.

There’s plenty of other great stories on the site, that one just happened to stick out in my mind.  A great site to spend some time reading.  I believe they also have a book out as well.

Radio Locator is a kind of handy site.  It’s basically a search-able list of radio stations everywhere in the US, and some foreign countries as well.  I know it’s way cooler to listen to your iPod and download songs for a dollar a piece, but I still love the radio and listen to it pretty much all the time.  You can also search for stations that stream online, in case you want to listen at work, or want to listen to radio stations from other places (like if you found one you love while on vacation.)  Not life changing or anything, but a handy site none the less.

Stressed out?

• Solution 1 – Snap Bubbles
• Solution 2 – Perpetual Bubblewrap (for the really, really, really stressed out)

Warning – both have sound when you pop the bubbles, in case your speakers are turned way up.

Some of the prettiest non-functional weaponry I’ve seen out there.

Via Web Urbanist