Make Snack Fly, See Spot Run

I found this great new product over at Boing Boing this morning.

It is called Snackshotz. Basically it is a toy gun designed to fire a specially designed dog food pellet for the dog to run and eat. The theory is that it will give you and your dog more precious bonding time as well as help the dog fight the growing risk of obesity that is so common in pets today by running before he ingests the tasty treat.

To anyone thinking this product sounds appealing... How about you help your own obesity and just throw the damn dog food pellets yourself?

Tags:

• dogs
• pets
• obesity
• exercise
• stupidity
• consumerism

Seven Days Without Prayer Makes One Weak

Here it is! You can now make your own clever wordplays and have them displayed on a church sign that you can save for future use as demonstrated below.


Enjoy!

Tags:

• church signs
• humour
• generators

Monopoly Rules

I absolutely love the board game Monopoly, so I was pleased to discover a page listing people's variations on the standard rules.

There are some great ideas. Like this one...

Six Railroads
Rule: The two utilities are treated like additional railroads. They cost $200 to buy and can be mortgaged for $100. The rent for five railroads is $400 and for six railroads is $800.
Reason: Makes the utilities actually worth having and a railroad tycoon a serious opponent.

Makes me think a bit more about the various possibilities. I guess the possibilities for variation is one of the things that makes Monopoly such a great enduring game.

All I need now is to convince somebody to play a game with me.

Tags:

• monopoly
• game
• game rules
• rule variation
• fun

Could I Have a Moment of Your Time?

I found this nifty little counterscript for dealing with pesky telemarketers.

Telemarketers have things just like these for talking to you. There are standard responses to circumvent any resistances you might have to giving them some of your cash.

With this counterscript you can be just as fast on your feet. It is printable as a nice PDF, so go ahead and have one handy by the phone.

Tags:

• telemarketing
• scripts
• sales
• pestering

7 Lists I Don't Want to See in del.icio.us

I was reading over at the Problogger blog that a good way to increase traffic to your blog is to get it listed as a popular site on del.icio.us. A good way to do this is to make a list. Great! We are going to start witnessing a deluge of lists like 4 ways to poach an egg.

I thought I would preempt all of this by being a bit postmodern and making a list of lists I don't want to see. Here it is.

1. 5 Good Things About Having a Rootkit Installed on your Machine
   
2. 8 Reasons Why You Shouldn't Read Blogs at Work
   
3. 6 Things That Make Norton AntiVirus Worthwhile
4. 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover
5. 12 Bad Things About Open Source Software
6. 9 Ways Big Business Helps The Environment
7. This List

Tags:

• del.icio.us
• list
• lists
• irony
• increase traffic

The Beatles for Trainspotters

What Goes On - The Beatles Anomalies List

I discovered this page in my web travels. It has extensive details on anomalies and items of curiosity to be found in the Beatles recordings.

I was aware of some of them, like the swearing in Hey Jude that once you know is there stands out a mile, but whoever has documented all of this sure is thorough.

Read it and marvel.

Tags:

• beatles
• trainspotting
• music

Elliott Smith Rarities

One of my favourite blogs aka::Raff pointed me to an awesome page which has downloads for Elliott Smith tracks that are not available anywhere else. There are also copies of demos recorded during the making of each of his albums.

I absolutely love Elliott's music and I was shattered when he died. If you haven't heard any of his stuff, you should go straight to Amazon or your nearest record store and buy a copy of XO. It's the best album to get a taste for his music.

Or, just download some of the stuff... either way, you won't be dissapointed.

Tags:

• elliott smith
• mp3
• dowloads
• music

Economics of Pricing

Today I read, a very interesting article over at Slate.

The subject of the article was about Starbucks' invisible short sizing for coffees. It is supposedly a better coffee due to the fact that it has a higher espresso to milk ratio, the milk has better froth due to the smaller quantity, and it's cheaper. But you won't see it on any of their menus. Why they offer it and not publicise it was what I found most interesting about the article.

A dilemma that a lot of businesses face when selling a commodity is how they price it. Too low and they won't make enough money, too high and the customer will go elsewhere. If a company offers a low priced product that appeals to everyone, who would buy the more expensive products with the higher profit margin? The trick is for the company to offer these products but make them unappealing to anybody who can afford that little bit extra.

Have you ever found yourself buying the more expensive box of tissues because you don't want to see a plain black and white box in your house? Join the club!

Tags:

• starbucks
• coffee
• pricing
• economics

More Record Industry Reactionism

These guys know no limits to the stupidity of trying to control how people listen to music?

Proud owners of the relatively new Coldplay album, X & Y have been greeted by a rather nice list of things they cannot do with their CD.

You are prevented from playing the CD in "some" CD players:

• CD-recordable or rewritable hard drives
• DVD players
• Game consoles such as a Playstation or Xbox

Great! Why don't they just make a big law that it will be 1993 forever? Which other industries would benefit from a law like this? I'm sure the photographic industry would have liked something that made it illegal to capture an image without using film.

A nice reply to the record industry regarding this is over at the Consumerist blog in their article.

Dear RIAA - here’s an interesting question for you. When you tell your customers (by definition, the only people who are actually guaranteed to have paid for the album they are listening to) that they didn’t actually purchase anything for their twenty bucks, what is stopping them from loading up DC++ next time and just downloading a pristine DRM-less copy of your next shitty release?

There is a nice parody of the Coldplay DRM restrictions. It asks the question, what if these rules were applied to a take away pizza?

Tags:

• record industry
• coldplay
• drm
• music
• stupidity

Witness Protection

I had an idea the other day for people in the Mafia that have been 'flipped' by the feds. For those of you that don't watch The Sopranos, this means that they have been arrested by the FBI and rather than do prison time are forced to turn against the family by becoming an informant and ultimately getting some damning information on tape.

These people are no longer any use the family, so why don't they tell their boss as soon as it happens? Then, instead of getting whacked because they have given over information to the FBI, they can be given a new identity by the family and dissapear. Kind of a mob version of witness protection if you will.

Some of you might say that those true to the family should do their time in prison, but this way there is another option for these people.

Tags:

• mafia
• suggestion
• mob
• witness
• protection
• sopranos

On Resource Trading

I was watching part two of the TV version of The Corporation last week. Comments from Michael Walker, who is president of the obviously neo-liberal think tank the Fraser Institute was talking about how wonderful the world could be if we would just commoditise natural resources.

I can't remember his exact words, but basically he said, if we could take the current pollution levels and grant licenses to the polluters and sell licenences for similair levels to others, there is an incentive for the organizations to reduce their pollution. Or, they can buy excess usage from lesser polluters with licences. The more we do this the better.

My thoughts are this. How can we continue to allow the devastation of our environment to people who have the most money?

Would Michael Walker happily drink a glass of water that I had pissed in, if I told him that I bought a licence from someone who hadn't pissed in their glass of water?

Tags:

• corporation
• pollution
• environment