January 29, 2005
words fail
from the BBC's site: Isaac Adjetey Sowah's showroom in a suburb of Accra has some of the most colourful coffins to be found anywhere. (Check out the giant uterus.)
January 27, 2005
collect the whole set!
from BoingBoing:
Nap time will never be the same again, and your kid’s art teacher might have some words with the school psychologist – and perhaps with you – but your kid will be the only one in the neighbourhood with Hiëronymus Bosch action figures. Guaranteed.
January 18, 2005
and that means comfort
Maryland couple, tired of rental hell. Hearing the neighbours on the other side of the wall makes them miserable: between the blaring music and the demented toddler, they get five hours of sleep. Landlord doesn’t care. They’d like to buy, but don’t have a whole lot of money.
But close to their hearts, they hold an idea of domestic comfort that has appealed to millions. We can recite it together:
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort. It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle.
Now, most of us just enjoy the fantasy in the abstract. But the pair behind ourhobbithole.com are practical folk, and they want a building permit.
Believe it or not, there are versions of the same idea here and here. The Bagend2 site's concept, which I could see working, involves large sections of pre-formed concrete pipe.
January 14, 2005
My inner frat boy
Needs some fun now and then. These clips are from compfused.com, on the not-work-safe list only because it’s completely addictive.
Unclear, unclear, unclear on the concept. Who gave this guy a hand grenade?
How not to get your car out of a snowdrift. (why not push it forward?)
Taser etiquette 101: if the cop is shocking you with the thing, it behooves you to be polite.
this one is a TV commercial from some Scandinavian country, but it’s still cute.
Morning efficiency taken too far.
January 05, 2005
Heavy airlift on a light budget
BruceR links to a paper by a MCpl Sean Marshall making the argument that the solution to the Canadian military’s lack of heavy airlift is to start a Crown corporation leasing Ilyushins or Antonovs (the poor man’s C-17s) with a mandate to find customers for the airlift when the military doesn’t need it. DART could have been moved in four Antonov trips, Bruce points out.
One of the things I like about the Canadian military is the quality of individual soldiers – God knows we’ll never be able to compete on quantity. One healthy sign is the very articulate, well-argued staff papers we’ve been seeing coming from junior NCOs. Back when I was a reservist, years ago now, I thought that reserve officers could have a useful role saying contrarian things that regular officers couldn’t afford to, for career reasons. Now it turns out that role is being served, but by regular army corporals.
Another example: an infantry corporal’s long and completely convincing article in the current Dispatches about the deficiencies in the way the Canadian army trains to deal with battle casualties.