This is a fantastic ad.
But you know who are the burger experts. Fergburger, Queenstown, New Zealand.
Since my year of no fast food ended on the first of July I have had the chance to try several of the Grand/Mighty Angus burgers, and I’ve got to say, they are pretty fantastic.
But not as good as the McRib. Which I tried in Singapore. The McRib is a menu enigma. There’s even a web page devoted to its appearance around the globe.
A Starbucks Barista apparently made this little chart profiling his customers and their orders:
I’ve got a more accurate profile for all of them:
Lacking in discernment and too eager to part with their money for low quality burnt coffee.
So there.
Via Yasrsly.
Well. World War Three didn’t kick off last week, as predicted by the Third Eagle of The Apocalypse. AKA William Tapley, AKA The Co-Prophet of the End Times.
He explains (you’ve probably already seen this video on Simone’s blog):
I love the use of a ballpoint pen to help us chart where he’s up to in the text he’s reading. That’s production values right there… he advertises a book in each of his videos. I’ve sent him a message asking if I can get hold of a copy.
“As you know. SATAN CONTROLS THE NEWS MEDIA.”
They’re covering up a story of a bomb blast in Iran. Which prevented full scale war.
That’s possible, but I would argue that it’s more plausible that William Tapley is actually the beast from Revelation.1
Here is my reasoning. Were he one of the co-prophets of the end times you would expect him to be one of two witnesses mentioned in Revelation 11:3. If that were the case he would be prophesying for 1,260 days wearing sackcloth. I haven’t seen him wearing sackcloth in any of his end times prophecies. Therefore he is a false prophet. If he is not, then by saying this, I have bought myself a nasty date with fire:
5And if anyone would harm them, fire pours from their mouth and consumes their foes. If anyone would harm them, this is how he is doomed to be killed.
Also, it has been raining quite a bit during his days of prophesying.
6They have the power to shut the sky, that no rain may fall during the days of their prophesying, and they have power over the waters to turn them into blood and to strike the earth with every kind of plague, as often as they desire.
And flowing rivers feature quite prominently in his videos – yet none of them feature blood red water. Explain that Third Eagle!
More concerning is the possibility that he is actually the prostitute predicted in Revelation 17:
1Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, “Come, I will show you the judgment of the great prostitute who is seated on many waters, 2 with whom the kings of the earth have committed sexual immorality, and with the wine of whose sexual immorality the dwellers on earth have become drunk.”
He is often seated by water (see the video above), and the water often looks different, and he does sound a bit like a drunk, jilted lover when he talks about politicians.
This conspiracy stuff is easy, and fun. You should also check out the comments on the Third Eagle’s videos. They are worrying and entertaining.
1 Please note, I don’t think this is very plausible at all.
What a bizarre story.
A rogue crocodile, in the process of being smuggled in a passenger’s carry on luggage, escaped mid flight. And caused the plane to crash. And killed 20 people.
A stampede of terrified passengers caused the small aircraft to lose balance and tip over in mid-air during an internal flight in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The unbalanced load caused the aircraft, on a routine flight from the capital, Kinshasa, to the regional airport at Bandundu, to go into a spin and crash into a house.
The crocodile, and one passenger, survived the crash. The crocodile was killed by a salvager with a machete. The full story is here, at the Courier Mail. So it must be true.
If you’re like me and you:
a) grew up watching Disney’s animated and animalated version of Robin Hood.
and
b) think Mumford and Sons are pretty awesome…
Then you’ll doubtless enjoy this video.
The musical goodness starts 23 seconds in.
I’m really enjoying Whitley’s Go Forth Find Mammoth at the moment. You should check it out.
Here’s one particular song that is almost constantly in my head.
This story of an addictive personality manifesting itself in the form of degenerate gambling and the lure of the poker table is quite incredible. It has the hallmarks of gonzo style essay writing where the writer is the story, and a few insights into the mind of the gambler, and society more broadly. Check it out.
As a literary society, we have long since gotten over our modesties. The literature of addiction, once the exclusive territory of imbalanced, suicidal poets, has now come to dominate the market. We no longer recognize self-indulgence as self-indulgence. The term itself has fallen out of use, relegated mostly to protests from bitter Amazon.com reviewers and the curmudgeons of the weekly book reviews. Stylish women in New York write chatty columns about how much of their paycheck they spent on the latest “must have” designer handbag. The bestseller shelves are flooded with the memoirs of 30-year-old alcoholics. Sex addicts write 200-page books, complete with sex-cougar dust jacket photos.
Pain in poker comes in many forms. There is the loss you feel about living off of the dregs of a societal illness. There is the gambler’s moment of clarity when you realize you have become just like the old, sad men that you ridiculed in your younger, luckier days. There is the tedium of sitting at a filthy felt table for hours, sometimes days, feigning a studied intensity. There is the anxiety over explaining to a loved one exactly how you lost $30,000 in the course of a weekend. There is searing unease that comes from watching that same loved one twist uncomfortably whenever you give them a gift bought with the spoils of gambling. But none of poker’s daily pains are deadly or instructive, really. What’s more, all of guilt’s iterations can be cleansed by one monster score. Hit a set of 6s on a J-6-2 rainbow flop against the Donkey at the table, the one who is wearing a fake Versace rayon shirt whose outrageous patterning is the only thing taking attention away from his Dolce and Gabbana sunglasses and the poor, doting, usually underage girlfriend who sits behind his right shoulder, awash in the illusion that her boyfriend is Paul Newman from The Hustler—well, win $5,000 off a guy like that and you stop worrying about ethics and your misspent youth.
Have you ever been somewhere, like an airport or public spot, and turned on your wifi only to discover a computer-to-computer network called “Free Public Wifi”?
It almost never gives you internet. Because it’s a phantom network (basically) created by a quirk of Windows XP.
“When a computer running an older version of XP can’t find any of its “favorite” wireless networks, it will automatically create an ad hoc network with the same name as the last one it connected to -– in this case, “Free Public WiFi.” Other computers within range of that new ad hoc network can see it, luring other users to connect. And who can resist the word “free?””
Windows, when it looks for networks, goes through the following steps:
1. It looks for preferred networks to connect to from the networks available.
2. If that fails, Wireless Auto Configuration attempts to connect to the preferred networks that do not appear in the list of available networks.
3. Failing that, if there is an ad hoc network in the list of preferred networks that is available, Wireless Auto Configuration tries to connect to it.
4. If that fails, and there is an ad-hoc network in the list of preferred networks that is not available, Wireless Auto Configuration configures the wireless network adapter to act as the first node in the ad hoc network.
So here’s what happened:
“At one time or another somewhere out there someone connected to a real ad-hoc WiFi network that had the SSID “Free Public WiFi”. They added this network to their preferred network list. They then traveled to a location where this WiFi SSID didn’t exist (airport, airplane, and/or hotel). They powered on their laptop with the wireless card on and Wireless Auto Configuration took over and starting searching for WiFi networks. After trying steps 1 through 3 above, Windows gave up and configured WiFi card to ad hoc mode with the SSID “Free Public WiFi” (since it was a preferred network).”
And a meme/harmless virus was born:
“A second person in close proximity to the user above also has a wireless enabled laptop and is looking to connect to a WiFi network. They scan to see what is available and notice an SSID called “Free Public WiFi”….they connect to it not knowing that it is an ad hoc network. After a few seconds of wondering why they can’t surf the web they disconnect from the SSID, shrug their shoulders and move on with life. Now they have the viral SSID in their preferred list too. The next time they power on their laptop it starts to look for the “Free Public WiFi” SSID. This process is repeated in many locations across the US and world again and again. Soon this SSID is in preferred wireless networks lists everywhere spreads like a virus.”
This board game version of The Wire doesn’t have enough “go to jail” squares for my liking, though perhaps they’re in the Chance pile. Community Chest should probably have been renamed “Community Service”… but they’re replaced with “The Game” and “Re-Up”…
What other popular TV series needs a board game?
Ben likes making up portmanteuas to describe blogging. See his latest work here in this handy post about not letting the lack of blog love get you down. So here’s mine. Bloggernation – it’s where a blogger appears to go into hibernation.
I don’t think I’ve ever written one of those “I’m sorry I haven’t posted here for a while” posts. And I don’t really plan too start now. But if I were to not blog so much in the next three weeks (or if I were to blog exclusively about boring stuff like what I’m studying) please understand it’s not because I hate you, but because I love my fellow students and like the idea of passing (and possibly the idea of helping others pass to).
I’m also still playing around with the design. Bear with me on that too, and no doubt I’ll be procrastinating here in the coming days and weeks. And I’ll try to comment on your blogs occasionally – rather than just arguing with atheists for the sake of arguing, or perhaps more correctly, for the intellectual stimulation (even though I said I wouldn’t do that any more).
I do love a good procrastinargument. Anybody got a topic they want to thresh out?
Expect a lot of blists (blog lists) and blictures (posts almost entirely made up of a picture) to tide me over.
Harvard’s med school put together a bit of an infographic about the health benefits of caffeine. You should totally start drinking it (though there are downsides).
Ria van Dijk has visited the same shooting gallery almost every year of her life. A shooting gallery that spits out a polaroid of people who successfully hit the target.
Here she is at 16.
She’s 88 and still a dead eye.
From this gallery here.
Dear female readers,
It is rare that I step into the murky world of dating and singleness. I just don’t like the flak that comes the way of married people who dare to raise their heads on the issue. But we were all single once… and I’m a guy, and I have single male friends and single female friends, and I realise this is a murky issue and a real struggle for many people – but the problem is compounded by a bunch of myths and misconceptions that are rarely discussed. This post isn’t for you if you’re the kind of girl just waiting for a guy to man up – and it isn’t a post urging guys to man up. I wrote one of them before somewhere (or two). If you’re a guy bemoaning your singleness and you haven’t asked a girl out – man up. Grow some balls. Take a risk. If you’re a guy who is sick of having your heart mercilessly crushed then you should read this letter to a frustrated single man (from elsewhere). And take heart, most married guys have been there too (I know I have). Lets face it. Girls are complicated.
Ladies,
If a man in your life, an acquaintance or friend, asks you to spend some time in his company you can be almost certain that he is interested in you and that he’s actually asking you out on a date (even if it’s not specified) – that he doesn’t want to be “just friends” – it takes enormous courage to ask a girl to do stuff, because when they say no, after you’ve mustered up whatever nerve you have, it feels like you have been belted in the stomach with a baseball bat. It’s crushing and often leads to periods of deep reflection on the question of “what is wrong with me?”
Guys can’t be just friends with girls they are interested in. The same baseball bat like experience hits over and over again every time you observe other guys getting a yes where you got a no. It’s incredibly unlikely that a guy is asking to spend time with you exclusively because he wants to be your mate. If he asks you to dinner, to a movie, to go for a run, to have coffee, to do anything where it’s just the two of you – and you aren’t related – then he’s interested. In his mind one-on-one time is basically a date, and asking you to spend such time is essentially a case of asking you out. And if you’re not, you should say no straight out. Don’t let him down gently. Don’t string him along looking for an opportunity to ease him into it. Rejection hurts, but the longer you drag it out, the more it hurts. And the crueler it becomes.
The worst situation is to be “the brother I never had” – because then you get all the emotional baggage of a relationship with none of the payoff. Hollywood writers know this. They play on that tension with the poor geeky guy all the time. It’s the tension the TV show Bones is built on. And if it frustrates you watching Bones destroy Booth’s heart over and over again then take that lesson and apply it to your life. It seems girls in Christian circles don’t watch enough of these movies and TV shows. Because they seem to sail into these murky waters in negligent or reckless oblivion. I’m sick of sitting by watching guys hearts get messed with by girls who don’t understand this one, foundational idea, guys, 95% of the time, aren’t really interested in being your “mate” – they’ve got all the mates they need, and they don’t want to pile that list up with people who have rejected them.
Relationships are hard work. Love doesn’t happen overnight. You’re not committing to marrying the first guy you go out with. Give a guy a break. If you enjoy hanging out with him in groups, or in one on one settings, don’t hang out for Mr Right – hang out with the guy Mr Right in Front of You. A bird in the hand and all that proverbial jazz.
Most Christian guys have problems – part of becoming a Christian means you recognise you have failings. The ones who don’t appear to have problems are probably arrogant or harbouring some sort of deep seeded emotional issues anyway, scratch the surface of most guys and they’re probably incredibly insecure when it comes to relationships or entirely too scared of commitment to be worth pursuing (that’s why they’ve dated all of your friends and none of the relationships have lasted). If a guy seems to have it together, can hold down a job, and is passable at conversation then he’s probably a winner. It helps if you find him moderately attractive.
Stop hurting my friends. It’s harder being a guy than you realise and you’re just compounding the singleness problem by making the risk of asking a girl out too great and the dating process too serious. If you’re thinking about marriage on or before the first date you’re probably doing it wrong. You’re making it worse for all of your single friends who are dying to have a guy ask them out because you’re making relationships seem out of the reach of mere mortals. You’re also blurring the lines between friendship and guy/girl relationships so that nobody really knows what’s going on. And I’m sick of trying to pick up the pieces on both sides.
That is all.
