Gleanings

After a hard day’s work meting out two-fisted justice in the dog-eat-dog streets of Saint Paul, I like to head to a local “internet café” and search random blogs looking for interesting stuff. As a result, I read scores of inane blogs every day so you don’t have to. Here are some of the bits I’ve gleaned from bloggers around the world.

The first item is ripped from an entry posted by Prudhvi Narayana in a blog called “HAIR TONICS ADS, WITH MODELS WEARING WIGS.” Note that this is not simply the title of a blog entry, but the name of the whole damn web blog (hairtonics.blogspot.com). It seems that someone is not amused at the irony of models wearing wigs in hair tonic commercials. In the latest HTA,WMWW entry, Prudhvi asks the interesting question,

"Do they think that we hold cabbage flowers in our ears all the time, to think that these products will grow hair on the scalp?"

Judging by the quality of most hair tonic commercials, I’d have to say yes, Prudhvi, they do think we hold cabbage flowers in our ears all the time.

On another blog called “4malmal”, it appears that “Malmal” is the affectionate nickname of Malcolm Sim Yong Jun, born 18 April 2004. One presumes that the blog is posted by his parent(s). Malmal seems to have it pretty good for a two-year-old. In a recent entry, we learn that

"It had been 1 week 2 days since Mal started bathing in Stout, to be more precise, it is Guinness Stout...."

Dang. I’m moving to Singapore. Of course, I’ll probably only get to bathe in Coors Light or something, just my luck.

Speaking of luck, I was fortunate to run across Chris Hurst’s blog, called “Chris Hurst”, appropriately enough. Apparently, Chris likes discovering weird shit on the Internet as much as I do. Here a couple he found that I hereby shamelessly steal:

From the New York Times we get:

“In an interview two years ago on the Web site Suicide Girls, [Max, son of Mel] Brooks was asked, ‘Are you one of those guys that whenever you’re in a house and you see lots of glass windows, you think that would be a bad place to fight off zombies?’ His reply: “Oh yeah.”

I get asked that question all the time and I always have to think carefully about the answer. From now on, however, I’ll just quote Max and say “Oh yeah,” and save myself the trouble.

From Pitchfork:

“Post-hardcore band the Plot to Blow Up the Eiffel Tower have announced that they will call it quits after their fall tour.”

I like this band name as much as Chris does. If you go to their web site, they tell you they are San Diego’s best punk band. With a name like that, they ought to be good. As an aside, I intend to get a tattoo of their logo even if they do call it quits.

So thanks to Chris Hurst for the harvest of odd little bits from the net. By the way, I also like Chris’s byline: “Not Giving Up His Day Job.”

The current frontrunner in Hulles’ Best Nom de Blog Contest is “The Ego Has Landed.” I like that a lot. If that’s original, good work, Ego.

My final nugget is from the ambitiously-titled blog “Every Thing About Science And Space”, by Dimake in Bucharest, Romania. He notes that:

“The world's booming shark fin trade is killing up to 73 million sharks per year—about three times more than the official catch number reported to the United Nations, a new study concludes.”

Now that’s a lot of sharks. If we assume that the average length of these sharks is six feet, if you laid all the dead sharks end to end on the equator they would circle the earth 3-1/3 times and smell really bad. Assuming the average weight is 32 kilos, if the dead sharks were made out of cocaine they would meet the American demand for coke for 7786 years. If all these sharks were put into a swimming pool, I wouldn’t go swimming in it.

- Hulles