Man Throws Shit, Judge Throws Book

"As they began to file out of the courtroom, McGowan pulled out a bag of feces he'd hidden in his clothing, rubbed excrement on his lawyer and threw it at the jury."

All kinds of awesome here.

The closing sentence from the defendant's attorney too cries out for an honorable mention:

“When he hits the bottom, he gets angry when he is mistreated or when he feels he is mistreated,”

Yeah. Makes sense. But you know what? If you haven't at least once felt the urge to fill a bag with feces with the intent to fling it at the world, well then, man, maybe you just don't give a shit.

Is There An Animated .GIF Tombstone?

This Monday, Yahoo shuts down Geocities. Oh God, now where will I go for those "site under construction" signs?

Just google for "Geocities" and click on the "News" tab and be prepared to be surprised at just how much news Geocities made back in 1997 or 1998. Actually, with Google's "Timeline" feature, you can go all the way back to 1990-91 - but that just throws up some archived newspaper pages containing Geocities links, probably ads.

Here's an interesting abstract from an archived article in the LA Times from 1996:

"The site is called Geocities (http://www.geocities.com). It exists solely to make money from our natural human instincts to puff out our chests, announce that we are here and what we say can make a difference.

The Santa Monica-based company offers free access to an Internet tool set and a mapped address book that lets Web "homesteaders" create a page in a "community" of their own choosing.

Then Geocities makes a business out of it by inviting advertisers and commercial vendors to market directly to these specialized neighborhoods, by offering deeper Web services to individuals and through transactions."

Funny, I always thought Geocities pages simply existed to stab us all in the eye with their HTML and occasionally puncture our eardrums with a self-launching MIDI interpretation of the Geocities page owner's favorite '50s tune. (For some reason, it was *always* a '50s tune.)

Can we count on Father Time to make social networking sites go away in 2019?

In Praise Of Weekend Laziness

Alive, Barely Kicking

Thanks, MT, for posting a link to 4Chan - always restores my faith in my fellow puerile Man.

??!, I am doing ok, thanks for asking and good Lord no, the net has not "finally become boring". If anything, it has only become more interesting. Like when Black Mamba sent me an invite to Google Wave. It's a fascinating piece of software. One day I *will* figure out how to get past the sign-up stage.

I hope you all have a great Diwali.

Re: Title

Does the {Title}: {Long, pretentious, tease of a subtitle that summarizes the entire book} format of non-fiction book titles annoy you? Of course it does.

This blog imagines how some classics might be marketed if they were written today. An example:

Then: The Wealth of Nations
Now: Invisible Hands: The Mysterious Market Forces That Control Our Lives and How to Profit from Them

Fun, right? Here are some I half-expect to see in bookstores:

Then: The tortoise and the hare
Now: Slower: On hubris, winning and the seven habits of highly effective athletes

Then: Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
Now: Purr: Skimbleshanks, Mungojerry, Growltiger and the dark secrets behind the domestication of America's whiskered wild

Then: The Bhagvad Gita
Now: The Lecture: Everything I needed to know about decision-making I learned from slaughtering my uncles and cousins

OK, you get the point. Your turn now.

(Via)

M3 + ISRO = H2O (But You Can't Bottle It Yet)

Don't drink that water!

Nasa's M3 and India's Chandrayaan-1 find evidence of "large quantities of water on the lunar surface". Space.com has more details.

Werner Herzog's Rogue Film School

Werner Herzog has announced the launching of a film school, named the "Rogue Film School". This excerpt from the school's charter:

Related, but more practical subjects, will be the art of lockpicking. Traveling on foot. The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully. The athletic side of filmmaking. The creation of your own shooting permits. The neutralization of bureaucracy. Guerrilla tactics. Self reliance.

Censorship will be enforced. There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth.

Rogue Film School.

How can you not hero-worship this man?