AIEEE! I see what you mean! It looks like a Jim Woodring frog, sculpted by Syd Mead.

"A boy today, a man tomorrow... and then I'm coming after YOU!"

A backyard version of the Jungle Cruise? Strong Bad, I gotta level with ya. That might have been the worst three thousand dollars I ever spent.

http://www.hrwiki.org/index.php/theme_park

Note: you have to scroll to the bottom of the Lulu page for the free downloads by chapter.

Looks a bit like the Wasp T12 speechtool.

It's Everett True's weapon of choice.

http://www.barnaclepress.com/cmcvlt/OutburstsOfEverettTrue/oet019.jpg

The owners wouldn't happen to be named Fred and Doris Ziffel, would they?

You mean somebody was watching Family Guy and something random, unfunny and irritating suddenly popped up on the screen?

How could they tell?

I remember a movie about a robot mowing a lawn...

http://youtube.com/watch?v=S02HI-nzAyo

And then I remember watching some robots make fun of a robot mowing a lawn...

http://youtube.com/watch?v=2_E1sVMoeoM

When the Dead or the Airplane throw a free concert in Golden Gate Park, the attendance can hit three hundred thousand.

And when there's no more room in Hell, the dead shall walk the earth.

A defunct, sloppy, stoned, hippie jam band intentionally shutting off another slim possibility of me hearing them? What's not to like about that story?

Hey, Grateful Dead: KBOO radio in Portland has Dead marathons for pledge week -- can you shut that down too, pretty please?

"This is just further proof that we now live in Dictator Bush's police state."

Yeah, those cops were obviously under direct orders from the president!

the bike reminds me of the monobikes they used in the "venus wars" manga & anime...

Reminds me of this:

http://www.gobroomecounty.com/transit/images/BCTransitLogo146x180.gif

How very Nathan Barley.

John,

I believe what you are looking for is this:

http://www.worldworksgames.com/store/products/sdm/sdm3.jpg
http://www.worldworksgames.com/store/products/sdm/sdm5.jpg
http://www.worldworksgames.com/store/products/sdm/sdm6.jpg

It's a modular papercraft mansion for gaming. You buy the PDFs online, then cut and assemble exactly the mansion you want. The Cluedo board should be a lead pipe cinch to build. (Oh, I slay me.)

One of these days, I'm going to build the ultimate Kill Doctor Lucky board with this thing.

I just watched the DVD of "Triumph of the Nerds", from which comes this here clip. It made me laugh because Jobs was both annoyingly arrogant and 100% right at the same time. I feel so very, very dirty agreeing with him; I don't know if I hate him or have a total mancrush and hate myself.

Four words: Daft Punk Halloween costume.

I am so very glad that Ronnie Barker's "Four Candles" sketch made the list. I visited a fellow comedy geek in London two years ago, and said, "Okay, what English comedy geniuses don't Americans know about," and he popped an old Barker tribute into the VCR. Now I can't get enough. I highly recommend his sitcom "Porridge" -- set in an English prison, of all places.

Since we will all have to throw in our "How-could-they-leave-out" suggestions, I can't believe that Peter Cook and Dudley Moore didn't make the cut. It's possible that "Mini-Drama" is the most harrowing and dark comedy sketch ever to make me laugh.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=xLvPNVQXia0

Old news. They've been showing a 3-D version of this for years at Bucketheadland.

Just to balance things out, I'm gonna buy some surplus combat trousers and make a tent out of 'em.

We all probably spend more than two years on the toilet in our lifetimes, but very few of us have the gumption to attempt to get it all out of the way in one sitting.

May I point out the perfect soundtrack for your reading pleasure? Yes, I may.

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2007/12/365-days-337--.html

Apart from our performers, no one in the food court was aware of what was happening.

...because that's what you want in an audience, lack of awareness.

Even more amazing is the "Stereoscopic Atlas of Venereal Diseases," which I once got via interlibrary loan. Those disks ought to come with a View-Master with a built-in eyewash station. Bleugh!

There are also some very beautiful View-Master collections of cactus and succulents, as well as mushrooms and fungi -- the latter collection is truly stunning.

It's like that episode where the band "Gomez" was sued by Morticia.

My high school German teacher was a turtle. One of my fellow stoner smartass students found out about this, and frequently asked him, during class, if he was a turtle. To Herr Mac's credit, he always proudly replied "You bet your sweet ass I am," in full.

I know I'm unfairly judging him by criteria he probably never aspired to, but as a cycle geek, riding that thing sounds unutterably tedious.

Yeah, pretty tedious riding back and forth on an abandoned monorail track. Much less tedious to go fast in the bicycle commute lane along an exciting city street, huh?

After the fall of civilization, I'll be charging for rides on one of these over the ruins of Disneyland. Book your tickets now.

The evolutionary biology message of the film is clear: in the struggle for food, your strategy should be to wait patiently as your rivals kill themselves.

Maybe it's designed for putting something like this on it...

http://tinyurl.com/2yvaxv

...in the long run all hybrids do is squelch the demand for ZERO emission solutions like hydrogen or solar.

You might as well say that all bicycles do is squelch demand for walking, and all walking shoes do is squelch demand for walking barefoot.

Regardless, the button is dumb.

If you live in a town with a grid-like street system, you could add GPS and play the Tron "Light Cycle" game for real.

Deviation! You don't "scale" downwards.

OED: "To climb, get over (a wall or the like); to ascend (a mountain); to get to or reach the top of."

The other one I remember was the old trace function on Corel Draw, which did pretty well from memory. Shame it's not really around these days...

The Corel auto-trace function was awesome. You could set it to look for things of a certain thickness and then it would find the line in the center. Required a fair amount of cleanup, but it was cleanup from a decent original.

I suspect I know exactly what Joel means by "the vectors came out with lots of solid white areas" -- like that dark area on the Rhino's butt, right? It doesn't come out as a series of crosshatched lines scratching out a darkened area, but as an outline of the dark area, right? Sadly, I don't think anyone has automated that aspect of digitizing woodcuts; you have to go in and correct it by hand.

This sounds an awful lot like one of those drinky bird gadgets.

Memo to Lord Alton: You can't make policy based on something that previously happened only once... a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Life imitates art:

http://tinyurl.com/yr5ggh

But a central task is to recognize microfacial expressions -- a flash of feelings that in a fraction of a second reflects emotions such as fear, anger, surprise or contempt...

Just great. A look of contempt is my face's default setting.

How can I get someone to buy my cd if most people think paying for it is a silly idea and they can rip it instantaneously from friends?

I feel for you, but that ship has sailed. While you weren't looking, CDs changed from being products to promotional tools for your music career. What you're asking is: "Why should I make business cards if people can just scan them and get them from friends?" People sharing your business cards is good for business. If you want to continue to sell product, you can sell CDs and t-shirts at your live shows.

Or you can continue to make horseshoes until this whole horseless carriage fad blows over.

And lo, St. Moe did climb the ladder and did take the Holy paintbrush and did stick it in St. Larry's mouth, which did make St. Curly laugh, causing him to drop the Holy pipe wrench on St. Moe's foot...

ZENHAMMOND: "Is it just me or does that design (and paint job) just totally fall into the lame zone?"

It's just you.

This version is a very knowing update of the original 1950s design. It's as if Detroit came out with a new version of a big-finned car, but made it look modern. There are clever, subtle echoes of the old Bob Gurr design.

To use my girlfriend's term -- it's "swoopy"!

And Kirk had every last one of them. It's good to be the Captain.

Captain Kirk is the Screamin' Jay Hawkins of the Galaxy.

Harry Shearer mentioned a neat bit of irony that happened in the lost CDs case: the British government sent out apologies to many of the people whose data was on the lost CDs, and at least one of those letters arrived unsealed.

With all the personal information on the apology letter.

For which the British government apologised again>.

Welcome to Great Britain: We Apologise for the Inconvenience.

The Addams Family used the same technology on their front gate.

The phrase "It's like, 'Whoa, man.'" really sums up why Burton is the right man to do justice to a book full of clever wordplay.

Hmm. Life imitates 1950s Sci-Fi:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Earth_Stood_Still

"DOC! Watch out for the LIBYANS!"

I would have named it Zaphod.

Looks more like Sourpuss, really.

As much as I love England and the English, I've always felt there should be huge banners at Heathrow and Gatwick reading: "Welcome to Great Britain: We Apologise for the Inconvenience."

Still, mustn't grumble; there's a war on.