Syd Allan: Frequently Asked Questions About Women

Syd knows women - listen and learn at the feet of the master.

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Rollercoaster

A cute java game in which you control a rollercoaster and it's passengers on their wild and wooly ride, "k" key speeds it up, "s" key slows it down and "b" stops the game.

We All Live in a Yellow Submarine

A pointless little time-killer - pilot around a yellow submarine beneath the sea. Who knows? Perhaps you'll find that Octopus's Garden of your dreams.

Funniest Thing Ever - Spock Sings The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins

I don't know if this can ever be topped for sheer surreal lunacy - Spock (a.k.a. Leonard Nimoy) - on some 60's or 70's television show, singing some ridiculously cheesy song about Bilbo Baggins of Tolkien fame. Complete with a funky day-glo set and swinging hepcat teens surrounding him and listening happily as though it's the greatest thing on earth.

In their defense, they were probably really, really stoned - that goes for Nimoy, too.

Cool Idea

An artist in Antwerp constructed this ferris wheel - for cars. Here's a link to the story, with a bigger picture.

Act Now, This Will Sell Fast!

Someone's selling a bag of dog hair on eBay.

Wow...I Repeat, Wow.

Well, the mad-scientists types just keep on blowing my mind, everyday, like clockwork. This time it's brain implants that have full-on given a blind man his sight back.

Yup, no joke, they've hooked a man up with real-life Star Trek, TNG - style eyesight. You can read about the details and see pics in this eye-opening five-page article from Wired - and yes, that was a very, very lame pun on my part. Look, it's late. You want professional writing, go pick up a New Yorker or something - it's not like I'm getting paid for this crap :)

Mr. Roboto

Check out this Quicktime footage of a cool new robot from Sony that was posted on Boingboing, I guess it's some new Aibo-type thing. Sure looks cool, though. I'm still waiting on the robot that will bring me a beer and tidy up around the house like Rosie from The Jetsons...sigh. Guess that'll be awhile.

Meantime, here's some more info about this singing, dancing robot, the SDR-4X, which can recognize up to ten human faces and can even recognize emotions from facial features. There are still some issues the engineers are going to have to work on, but it looks like it may be time to take the old Aibo to the robotic dog pound to be put to sleep.

Messenger Madness

Bigblueball.com is your one-stop-shopping site for instant messenger information - all the major messengers are covered and there are forums, help pages and chat. I found out there today that there was a new beta version of Yahoo!'s messenger that has - yes! - a grand total of thirty new smileys and something called "Super Webcam", which allows you to see larger webcam images with better frame rates (as long as the person you're chatting with has it as well).

Pachyderm Painters

Elephants like to paint - apparently you can give them a brush and pallete and they're happy as can be. Artbyelephants.com is devoted to showing off their work, which has been compared to that of several twentieth century abstract luminaries.

One of my favorite stories involves the famous abstract painter Willem de Kooning. As a joke, someone decided to show him a painting done by an elephant and upon looking at it, the artist was quite impressed. After commenting on the exquisite color and beautiful curves of the lines, his friend revealed that the painting was, in fact, done by an elephant. Not missing a beat, de Kooning responded with line, "That's a damn talented elephant you have there."

A Toast to the King

25 years after his death, The King continues to dominate. He was on this week's TV Guide, he recently beat out The Beatles for the honor of most #1 singles in the U.K. and yet another album is about to be released, consisting of his said #1 singles. A New Zealand supermarket owner has immortalized him in a toast portrait (shown above - click here for a larger version and the Yahoo! story or here for his site, which includes other toast portraits) and Forbes magazine has named him the "top-earning dead celebrity".

Amidst all this hoopla, Lisa Marie has secretly wed Nicolas Cage. Hope for her sake this one's not a complete sham like the Wacko Jacko fiasco...*shudder*.

Doubleplusgood

The Memory Hole - which takes it's name from the tubes in which news articles were tossed into and destroyed when the govt. changed their spin on things in Orwell's 1984 - tells you about all those nasty news little items that tend to get supressed or overlooked by the media.

Fruit Box Art

Paperstuff.com has a large selection of fruit box art - like on those big crates of oranges you get - that go back for years and have some pretty interesting illustrations.

Playing Dice With the Web

Mangle lets you grab one of Google's 2 billion web pages at random and has links to other random page generators as well. I particularly liked the Yahoo! version - since they have real people checking their sites for content, the urls that come up tend to be more interesting.

Horror Cards

A big collection of 1961 non-sport trading cards - Frankenstein, The Amazing Colossal Man, etc. Cards even scarrrrier than the cardboard-stiff pink gum they came with.

Just a Quick Post to Let Everyone Know I'm Not Dead

Sorry folks, wasn't around much over the weekend and now I'm too dead tired to do a lot of posting, I've bookmarked some sites for tomorrow, though, never fear - I shall soon return to our regularly scheduled load of links and miscellaneous crap asap. Till then, why not go to Fark? I steal half the junk on here from there anyways. Thank you for your patronage :)