I don't know if the fishballs you refer to are the same as the ones we get here in Asia, Noen, but I have to say that I absolutely love them. Nothing to be ashamed of!

Oh, Takuan, I did not need to read that at 9AM in the morning.

Make me unthink it.

That choral bit at the end sounded a tad like something off the Volga Boat Song.

What about gay anime characters?

I guessing the listowner thought about it, then quickly realized that the list would be absolutely flooded if he included anime characters. So he wisely decided to leave them off.

Everything all for this, I guess.

This wasn't even the most disturbing part of the whole park. It was a really popular venue around the Chinese New Year period back when I was a kid in the 80s, so I went every year, and my parents would gleefully take me through the tunnel depicting Hell and the wonderfully graphic depictions of just how they would dismember you in the afterlife if you were bad person when alive. Cory's Flickr site has beautiful pictures of it.

It certainly explains my adult self's predilection for dismembering plastic toys and painting them red with marker ink, that's for sure.

@ JJasper (#28):

I eat my words. You've not only seen one, you've actually used it to pay for something in the flesh? That's insane! Didn't the art gallery accept credit, or a cheque, for something of that magnitude? Did the bank give you a lot of grief when you requested that much money, in cash?

@ SDT (#32):

The SGD and the Brunei dollar are equivalent, so that possibly makes our notes the Biggest Damn Circulating Notes in the world. (I'd love for somebody to prove me wrong-- maybe there are notes out there even more ridiculously high-powered, circulating...)

In Singapore there's been issued a SGD$10,000 note, which, as far as I can tell, is still in legal circulation, although why the hell anyone would own one, much less make use of it, is completely beyond me. In monetary value that it comes up to US$7020, or €4786. Madness.

Having said that, the bio geek in me is highly amused by the fact that the partial protein sequences of tyrosine kinase and tyrosine phosphatase are printed as a safety feature. I would love to get my hands on one just to spazz out over it.

In Soviet Russia, roaches crush YOU!

Mr Slater added: 'Octopuses are very intelligent and they like to be stimulated and busy.'

Am I the only one who thought of tentacle porn when I read that?

...yes, apparently.

Moving along.

So how does a 'catastrophic fail' measure up to an 'epic fail'?

Frog legs are a delicacy in several Asian countries-- I enjoy them, myself, but I don't think they're worth the price you have to pay for them. Chicken is a cheaper alternative.

Here's a link to the only frog farm in the country I live in, Singapore:

http://www.jurongfrogfarm.com.sg/

I was actually plenty surprised myself, stumbling upon this discovery. We don't get to much farming in Singapore, much less of something as unusual as frogs.

AFAIK "pazi" means "heads up!" or "look!" in South Slav languages, as in pazi ovo "Check this out!" So that sign would technically be saying... "Watch out, school zone"?

I'm a little surprised I even managed to read it, since it's been 2 years since I gave up on studying the language (well, Croatian really but it's similar enough to Serbian sans Cyrillic alphabet).

Love the exploding kids, though.

Neil Gaiman is awesome, completely awesome. I met one of my current good friends for the first time at one of his signings-- we'd run into each other online the week before and arranged to meet at the signing. When we told him the story he said, "I feel like I'm performing an important social function."

Nothing as important as this, however!

@＃2 posted by Sudasana:

After linking seemed to imply that the scientific name of the fungus in question is either Collybia albuminosa or Termitomyces albuminosus, or... "chicken flavored mushroom". No, not very scientific. In any case it's some kind of rare fungus that only grows in the mountains of the Yunnan province. Nothing to shed light on how they came up with 'wikipedia'. 鸡枞 looks just like 'chicken fungus' to me.

Apparently one of the other names for it is "chicken foot mushroom" so maybe that's where the 'pedia' part came from?

@Clifford:

Those were my thoughts exactly when I saw the shot!

The thing I find funniest about this entire affair is that the advertisement bar at the top of the page is running an ad for Kindle. I don't know this is the Internet playing an ironic prank, but every BoingBoing page I click to has a Kindle ad on it.

I am not sure if this is someone's who uses odd spelling for its own sake or they were just trained in 19th century British English.

I am somebody who uses 'aeroplane', 'tyre', 'aluminium' and 'lift' all the time, but the fact that I've been trained in 19th century British English is news to me, as it would be to the majority of my fellow countrymen. Apparently, we've been stuck in a 200-year time warp without knowing it! The wonder!

The decline of TB after World War Two remains somewhat of a mystery.

I guess it has nothing to do with the fact that childhood vaccination against the disease only became widespread after World War Two, then...

I was about to say that "creepy" and "fright" in the title were redundant... until I saw the picture. What the unholy wazoo...!?

The 38-year-old mother was charged with possession of a controlled substance after deputies found a vial in her purse that a field test suggested was meth.

Anybody else read this and thought, "Wow, what have they been feeding their cat?"

This article made me go to the study room to pull out our copy of The Mind. Wow, it's been years since I've looked at this! Good memories.

Although-- the 70s? I hadn't realized this series of books was so old. I was an 80s kid, but I'm pretty sure my parents didn't get the library until I was at least 10.