Apparently, this is a real product, due to be launched in 2012. Judging from the awful facial expressions of cashiers struggling to replace rolls of thermal paper into their tills, this is a product that will be used through one, maybe two rolls, and then never used again.

Because, dear God, this is an aggravating product.

Are there still even CEOs so out-of-touch that they get their emails printed off and read to them? I can’t imagine anything less useful than a receipt-paper printout of day-old e-phemera like Twitter updates and Foursquare check-ins.

That little dude is going to look CREEEEEEEPY, too, when the red/pink smear that indicates an almost-done roll starts smearing down his face.

Despite this ad’s upbeat narrator, I sincerely doubt that my “Forever Lazy” will be the talk of my next tailgate — at least, not in a positive way, as they imply.

If you’re a little taken aback by the sheer consumer frenzy that is Christmas shopping, just think about all the “impossible” or “too expensive” things that you could do with that money — a total of about $45 billion this year — instead.

Thankfully, the people at Visual.ly have done all the thinking for you. Full infographic after the jump.

They say that comedy and tragedy are two sides of the same coin, and here’s another proof of that: 3eanuts.

It’s in the same vein as Garfield Minus Garfield, or Calvin Minus Hobbes, but instead of removing, say, Snoopy, the blogger has removed the final dénouement of each strip:

Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comics often conceal the existential despair of their world with a closing joke at the characters’ expense. With the last panel omitted, despair pervades all.

There are eight more pages of this sadness!

Eagerly, I read through the whole thing. Well, the whole thing until, about 500 words in, I got to this little nugget:

A laser requires energy to operate, but it’s not always as easy as plugging one into a wall socket. The gin-and-tonic laser would have to be powered, or pumped, by other lasers.

Yes, according to Popular Mechanics, you can make a laser out of a Gin and Tonic. But Step One is “first, get some lasers.”

And lest you think that you can just rig up a buncha laser pointers, the article quickly goes on to state:

During the 1975 experiment in Boulder, researchers pumped straight gin using a 20-watt carbon-dioxide laser, which is 4000 times more powerful than a 0.05-watt laser pointer …. With 20 watts of carbon dioxide laser light, they could only produce 0.00001 watts of coherent gin laser light.

Now, although that sounds a little dispiriting, the article does conclude with the possibility of drinking a laser, “at which point,” they say, “all of the meticulous effort will be worth it.”

And that does sound cool. So I go back and read it again. Do I really need to come up with a hospital-quality CO2 laser that’s easily worth several thousand dollars? Turns out, no! Teased with a link from the article, Popular Mechanics promises that I can build my own!

Wait — I can build a powerful laser in my basement? Why isn’t that the headline, skipping all the Gin and Tonic stuff?

So I click over to that article, on Instructables. I am told that, with an Etch-a-Sketch and a broken scanner, I can build a laser for less than $30. Incredible!

The first step? Buy some laser diodes.

Sigh.

Sigh. I guess you could play a drinking game based on product placement and selling out. But you’d get drunk pretty fast.

I can’t wait to see Black Mamba 2: Dark Secret, in which the Black Mamba’s secret past as a date-rapist is revealed.

(via tdw)

Huzzah! Drawing on data published in the Lancet, the Economist has produced a chart showing the prevalence of obesity in countries around the world. I’ve embedded it above, and you can select either data from 1980 or data from 2008 as well as the percent change over those nearly 30 years.

Not exactly shocking, but saddening.

I know I’m struggling with maintaining a healthy body mass index — something I attribute pretty much 100% to the fact that I’m paid to spend the majority of my waking time sitting nearly stationary in front of a computer. It wouldn’t be so bad, except that we’ve spent those same last 30 years designing leisure activities that also require us to be stationary in front of a screen.

They also link to a less user-friendly but much more in-depth chart done by the original authors of the study, at Imperial College. At that chart, you can also examine different risk factors, like cholesterol and blood pressure.

This is perhaps every soft drink known to man. So far. Click the image or here for the massive 4590 x 4333 pixel original, sorted by parent company, brand, style and flavour.

Then ask yourself, is the production of an infinite variety of colas really the best use of our society’s energies? Are we at least approaching the limit of some sort of Platonic cola ideal? Or are we just regressing towards some mediocre mean?

Sigh. Unfettered capitalism

(source, author, via)

If you’ve been paying any attention to the news, no doubt you’ve read about the uproar over a bowdlerized version of Huckleberry Finn recently released in which the offensive word “nigger” has been replaced throughout with the allegedly-less-offensive “slave.”

Now, in Canada, comes news that the Dire Straits classic “Money For Nothing” will have bowdlerization enforced upon it. A person complained that the use of the word “faggot” was offensive.

So, I have decided to do the world a favour and combine those two crimes against political incorrectness.

Noting that the full text of Huckleberry Finn was available online, I imported it into a word processing program and did a quick find-and-replace for “nigger / faggot”. The two words are pleasingly similar with their double-g centres and consonant/vowel distribution. The whole process took no time at all. There were only a few hundred replacements needed.

So, I hope you enjoy the “Knopflerized” version of Huckleberry Finn, which you can download right here, in .doc format.

(Image, above, appears to be Huck Finn and his pal Faggot Jim, sharing a snooze together, perhaps after smoking each others’ corncob pipes?)

The Center For The Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law reminds us that, until 1978, copyright in the U.S.* only lasted for 28 years, renewable once for a total of 56 years. That means that everything published in 1954 would be entering the public domain this year — yours to cite, remix or mashup, free of charge, and free of fear from pesky lawyers.

And, since something like 85% of all works didn’t get their copyright renewed, it would be open season on tons of works from as recent as 1982, too.

Of course, the copyright law has changed since then — and Americans now get life of the author plus 70 years of copyright protection. (Canadians get something like the life of the author plus 50 years, and every other country has their own little wrinkles.)

Here is a list of some of the works that, when they were created, were expected to fall into the public domain today — but don’t:

• The first two volumes of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of Rings trilogy: The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers
• Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (his own translation/adaptation of the original version in French, En attendant Godot, published in 1952)
• Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim
• Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception
• Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who!
• Pauline Réage’s Histoire d’O
• Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, subtitled “The influence of comic books on today’s youth”
• Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
• Mac Hyman’s No Time for Sergeants
• Alan Le May’s The Searchers
• C.S. Lewis’ The Horse and His Boy, the fifth volume of The Chronicles of Narnia
• Alice B. Toklas’ The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook

The 1950s were also the peak of popular science fiction writing. 1954 saw the publication of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (filmed three times in the last half century by Hollywood), Philip Wylie’s Tomorrow!, Arthur C. Clarke’s The Deep Range, Robert Heinlein’s The Star Beast, and the Hugo Award-winning They’d Rather Be Right by Frank Riley and Mark Clifton. Instead of seeing these enter the public domain in 2011, we will have to wait until 2050 – a date that, itself, seems the stuff of science fiction.

Many, many more are cited in the CSPD post. I find it sad that we’ll have to wait another generation and a half for them to be seized on and re-made by today’s artists.

(via Waxy)

(*U.S. copyright law is difficult enough. Canadian copyright law is in the interminable process of perhaps changing, and I’m basing the info in this post of the CSPD post — I’m not going to delve into cross-border legalities when the point is sufficiently made here.)

We’ve posted about Misery Bear before — a BBC creation who just doesn’t have a very good life, no matter how much he tries. Or drinks.

No one does soul-crushing depression better than the Brits. See also: Marvin, the Paranoid Android; and The Office.

Here’s a scenario:

Middle Eastern terrorists hijack a U.S. jetliner bound for Italy. A two-week drama ensues in which the plane’s occupants are split into groups and held hostage in secret locations in Lebanon and Syria.

While this drama is unfolding, another group of terrorists detonates a bomb in the luggage hold of a 747 over the North Atlantic, killing more than 300 people.

Not long afterward, terrorists kill 19 people and wound more than a hundred others in coordinated attacks at European airport ticket counters.

A few months later, a U.S. airliner is bombed over Greece, killing four passengers.

Five months after that, another U.S. airliner is stormed by heavily armed terrorists at the airport in Karachi, Pakistan, killing at least 20 people and wounding 150 more.

Things are quiet for a while, until two years later when a 747 bound for New York is blown up over Europe killing 270 passengers and crew.

Nine months from then, a French airliner en route to Paris is bombed over Africa, killing 170 people from 17 countries.

That’s a pretty macabre fantasy, no? A worst-case war-game scenario for the CIA? A script for the End Times? Except, of course, that everything above actually happened, in a four-year span between 1985 and 1989.

Can you imagine the national meltdown if that happened now?

Now, if you need even more perspective, consider this:

how far are we willing to go to prevent weapons or bombs from getting on airplanes? In the past decade, terrorists on airplanes have killed just about 3,000 people — all on one day. Even if the Christmas Day bomber had succeeded, the number would be under 3,500.

Those are horrible deaths. But in that same period, more than 150,000 people have been murdered in the United States. We haven’t put the entire U.S. on lockdown — or even murder capitals like Detroit, New Orleans and Baltimore.

While reducing the murder rate to zero is very desirable, we also understand that the costs, in terms of liberty and resources, are too great.

That’s from a Washington Examiner article that (ahem) examines to what extent the airport nudie scanners are ineffective yet make some lobbyists a very large amount of money.

I haven’t yet had the opportunity to choose the train or car instead of the plane, in order to avoid intrusive security practices, but I’m seriously considering a trip to Europe via boat — half because I’ve always wanted to, half in the vain hope that I’d get profiled anecdotally as part of a bogus trend story.

It was co-directed by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola. Which is kind of awesome, but also kind of depressing. I mean, it’s great that there’s this fantastic new commercial to enjoy, and the presence of some top Hollywood talent really shows off how lazy a lot of ads are, but wouldn’t you rather they be working on something artistic, not shilling for brewskis?

(via Slashfilm)

I am no fan of big box style shopping, though I know it’s going to be part of our urban landscape now for decades. Unfortunately, although I know that the retail avant garde has moved on to newer things (plaza-style faux downtowns, for example) the big box monstrosities are still was passes for cutting edge where I’m from.

(Heck, we’re still trying to save our downtown shopping mall, which is about 80 per cent office space these days.)

One of the things that really gets me about these Borg cubes of shopping is their essential sameness. They are cheaply built as quickly as possible, and that leads them to be stripped of any real personality. All they have to differentiate a Wal-Mart from a Home Depot is the colour of the paint, and the subtle differences in the fake arch over the main doors.

That sucks, because a tiny little bit of whimsy could do so much for these soulless places. Check out the picture above, for example, which cleverly inverts the monolithic permanence of these structures and reminds you that it, too, will eventually be grey field.

It’s part of an experiment in big box design by SITE architecture. They were commissioned by Best Products Company in Virginia to do nine retail buildings. They also came up with a number of unbuilt prototypes.

According to their website:

these merchandising structures have been used as a means of commentary on the shopping center strip. By engaging people’s reflex identification with commonplace buildings, the BEST showrooms also explore the social, psychological and aesthetic aspects of architecture. This approach is a way of asking questions and changing public response to the significance of commercial buildings in the suburban environment.

Depressingly, these were created in the 1970s and early ’80s, so if we were going to see them catch on, I think we would have, by now. Here’s a couple more of my favourites:

Play here.

It simulates the Mega Millions lottery, which uses slightly different rules than the Lotto 6/49 that I’m used to, but I’m sure the chances of winning aren’t that different.

I picked five numbers, and let it run as if I were playing those same numbers twice a week for the rest of my natural life. It cost me $10,400 and I won back just over $600 of that.

Woo-hoo?