I have two items for you on this Friday before the long Memorial Day weekend.
First up, if your Windows PC presents a screen like this photo I found on Ask The Admin when you try to start it up, something isn’t right. But if you look a bit closer you’ll see that it’s really quite a bit more abnormal than it appears. Or should I say, abngrmadl?
Start Wandows Ngrmadly
Second, Something Awful took Wolfram Alpha for a spin this week, just like the rest of us, with some humorously informative queries. Humorous because they start off by asking what portion of the US Gross National Product is represented by the film Ernest Goes to Camp and just get stranger from there, and informative because they illustrate the sort of data sets Wolfram Alpha has access to. Fair warning: Something Awful contains material of questionable taste and may not always be appropriate for work or children. There’s nothing too awful in this one, though. You can read the complete story here.
Ernest Goes to Camp as a percentage of the US Gross National Product
This technology stuff isn’t all serious. The web has long been a forum for humor of the most democratic sort. The barriers to entry are low, and pretty much anybody can put up a website and start talking or joking with the world. My favorite category of net humor is the remix: take something made by somebody else and recontextualize it. Lawrence Lessig has written about this, if you’re interested in learning more about the Internet’s effect on the democratization of culture.
On with the funny! I’m going to take some time on Fridays to share the best of those things that I’ve found on the nets that have made me laugh. This week, we have a remix of those Slap-Chop advertisements you may have seen on cable TV complete with auto-tuning a la T-Pain or Kanye West.
If you haven’t seen the original, you can watch it here.
The abundance of useful services on the Internet that can save you time and make your life easier is truly astounding. I found MomSourcing (mom-sourcing.co.in) via BoingBoing yesterday, which is a service that “makes it easy to be the perfect son or daughter.”
Also great for Grandmas and Stepmoms!
Another thing the web is good for is humor, and the best jokes come with their own call centers. Happy Mothers Day!
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