FRIDAY FUN: A Weird Picture

I download a lot of video off the Internet. Once I watch a video, I move it to a “burn folder”. Once that folder hits the 40GB range, I burn the videos to data DVDs. I also have three large binders for storing discs: one for software, and two for the three types of video I download (“American TV”, “British TV”, “Movies”).

Over time, the binders had become a big mess, and I’d taken to storing newly burned DVDs in empty spindles… which made finding a particular disc difficult. So, a couple of weeks ago, I decided to get rid of 90% of the discs in the “Software” binder (who needs Outlook 98 or Cinemania 97 these days?) and use that binder for movies. So, in a nutshell, I had a giant pile of 600+ DVDs on the floor of my office, which I sorted into one of three binders.

In that huge pile of discs, I found an old DVD containing 3.85GB of old pictures I’d downloaded off the Internet. A friend recently asked me about an old picture I might have had – a copy of our high school principal’s mugshot. I put the disc in the drive and started looking. I haven’t found the mugshot yet, but I did find this:

Funny Transimullet
(click to embiggen)

Something about this picture cracks me up every single time I see it. I mean, I know that sexual… “perversions” (for lack of a better word) transcend all races, cultures, genders and social classes… but this picture of a mullethead in a nightie cracks me up every time I see it. I don’t know why, but it’s just comedy unobtainium to me!

Happy Birthday, jimcofer.com!

Happy birthday to… my own website! jimcofer.com turns 8 years old today! For the somewhat amusing story about how this site got started, click here and scroll down to the section labeled “How This Site Came To Be”.

Happy Birthday site

I also want to take a minute or two to thank my hosting company, JaguarPC. Back in 2002, I was looking for a web host and found a company called Aletia Hosting highly recommended at the Ars Technica forums. I chose Aletia because a) a geek I knew and trusted recommended them; and b) while not “bottom of the barrel” cheap, they really had a good deal: $114/yr for 500MB worth of storage space and 1GB/month in bandwidth.

Then a company called JaguarPC bought Aletia… and everything just got better. My site’s uptime increased dramatically, as did my web hosting plan. Nowadays, I pay $83.64/year for unlimited storage space and 10GB/bandwidth/day. JaguarPC and I have come a long way together, and their sales and support staff has always been totally top-notch! So THANK YOU JaguarPC for making having a web site so enjoyable!

Birthday Factoids

Well, today’s my birthday! Also on this date in history, Gen. Douglas MacArthur left the Philippines (1942), Mikhail Gorbachev was named president of the Soviet Union (1985), Janet Reno was unanimously confirmed as the first “female” attorney general (1993), Paul McCartney was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II (1997), bombs exploded all over Madrid’s train network (2004), a man on trial in Atlanta stole a gun from a deputy and went on a killing spree (2005), and Slobodan Milosevic was found dead of a heart attack in his cell (2006). Happy stuff!!

People who are still alive and share my birthday include: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, reporter Sam Donaldson, singer Bobby McFerrin, Airplane! director Jerry Zucker, New Wave singer Nina Hagen, sexy British actress Alex Kingston, singer Lisa Loeb, actor Terrence Howard, Johnny Knoxville, and actress Thora Birch.

People who are dead and share my birthday include: British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, bandleader Lawrence Welk, Danish king Frederick IX, actress Dorothy Gish, French mathematician Joseph Bertrand, Supreme Court Justice and Dred Scott dissenter John McLean, Italian renaissance poet Torquato Tasso, and civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy, for whom everything in Atlanta is named.

Wednesday Randomness

– Heidi Montag has made a commercial about credit card protection. So yes – the girl made of plastic is telling you not to use plastic.

– You don’t smoke, so you thought it was great when states went after smokers by banning smoking in public places and increasing the price of cigarettes. Smokers tried to warn you that once the do-gooders were done with them, they’d turn to you. You ignored them. You laughed at them. “I don’t smoke or drink,” you said. “What can they come after me for?” And now the state of New York is considering a bill which would ban the use of salt at any restaurant in the state. Seriously.

– Marion Cotillard shows us her beautiful French breasts in this Funny or Die video (no, it’s not what you think).

– A kid moves out of the house. His parents decide to sell some of the stuff he left behind on Craigslist. Hilarity ensues (link possibly NSFW).

– Walmart is rolling out a line of locally-grown produce to its stores. In a blind taste test, a bunch of pretentious, self-righteous food snobs found out, to their intense horror, that they often preferred Walmart’s (significantly cheaper) offerings to their beloved Whole Foods.

– Best idea ever?

ipod touch reward

The Mystery of Overtoun Bridge

Overtoun Bridge is a beautiful stone bridge near the village of Milton in West Dunbartonshire, Scotland. Peaceful and covered in ivy, the bridge looks like something off a postcard or tourist brochure:

Overtoun Bridge

But the bridge holds a dark secret. For you see, since the late 1950s or early 1960s, at least 600 have committed suicide by throwing themselves off the bridge. And although the fall kills most, many of those who survive the fall climb back up the bridge and jump again, sometimes immediately, other times several days later. It happens so often that the locals even have a nickname for them: “second timers”. On average, around one dies every month from jumping off the bridge. And while this would certainly be tragic if I were talking about humans, it’s also downright bizarre because I’m talking about dogs.

Yes, over 600 dogs have killed themselves by jumping off the Overtoun Bridge. And the obvious mystery is… why? All of the suicides seem to happen at the same spot, between the final two parapets on the same side of the bridge. Almost all the suicides happen on bright, sunny days. Further clouding the mystery is that, as far as anyone can tell, only long-nosed breeds like labradors, collies and retrievers have jumped; beagles and chihuahuas seem immune to the bridge’s siren song.

Continue reading “The Mystery of Overtoun Bridge”

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-03-07

  • Well this isn’t looking good. #
  • Holy crap! #
  • Canada: barely better than America at a sport they invented. #
  • Why can’t Flash die already? #
  • “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.” #
  • @AnglophileA Current 93? Own a couple of their discs, but they always freaked me out. If Satan ever had a band, they would be it. in reply to AnglophileA #
  • Hooray! All my data DVDs are now organized! #
  • @AnglophileA Runaways trailer: http://tinyurl.com/yad3s6w in reply to AnglophileA #
  • Panthers fans: the nightmare is over – Delhomme has been cut. #
  • “Smashing a brick through a f—–g dude’s window is nothing compared to what I’ve done… I’ve killed people.” #
  • My iPod just shuffled Usher and Dead Can Dance back to back. Culture shock! #

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Sunday’s Hottie: Shivani Ghai

Shivani Ghai is an English actress of Indian decent. She recently appeared on the just-ended BBC miniseries Five Days and was also seen in the 2008 BBC-HBO miniseries House of Saddam, where she played Saddam Hussein’s daughter Rana.

She’s also famous in the UK for appearing on an Italian drama called Medico In Famiglia. The show’s producers wanted a female Indian character, but couldn’t find one who could speak Italian. It was so difficult, in fact, that runners gave up and hired an Anglo-Indian actress and taught her Italian instead of finding an Italian-born Indian actress!

Shivani Ghai 01
(click to enlarge)

Continue reading “Sunday’s Hottie: Shivani Ghai”

A Shotgun Blast of Trivia

– London, England, is farther north than Amatignak Island, Alaska

King Narmer, an Egyptian pharaoh who ruled in the 32nd century BC, is generally thought to be the oldest known historical figure. There are certainly mythological people (like Adam & Eve) who are older than Narmer, and there are fossils of early humanoids (like “Lucy”) who predate him by thousands of years… but Narmer is the first person we can actually date and know a bit about his story.

– If you took a piece of string and wrapped it around a basketball, then took another piece of string and “wrapped” it so that it hovered 1 inch above the first string, the second string would be 6.28″ longer than the first string. If then you took a string and wrapped it around the earth, then took a second string and “hovered it” an inch above the first string… it would also be 6.28″ longer than the first string.

– The largest countries, in terms of geographic size, are (in order): Russia, Canada, China, USA, Brazil, Australia, India and Argentina. The next country on the list? Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan is also the world’s largest landlocked country, and is larger than Western Europe.

– The Super Bowl champion New Orleans Saints wore black helmets for the 1969 pre-season. The only problem was that the Saints’ front office hadn’t run the new helmets by the NFL to see if they approved. The league objected to being left out of the loop, and thus put tremendous pressure on the team to change back to their original gold ones. When team ownership found that fans hated them, they quickly went back to the gold helmets we’re familiar with today.

1969 Saints helmet

SONGS I LIKE: “Cherry Tulips”

I won’t say I love this song yet, but all week I’ve been grooving on the tune “Cherry Tulips” from Champaign, Illinois-based indie rockers Headlights. This song – from the 2008 album Some Racing, Some Stopping – is just the sort of lush, poppy tune I can get into!

Have a listen and tell me what you think!

[audio:headlights.mp3]

Samantha Fox: Looking Good!

I caught all kinds of hell for this post about how Terminator star Linda Hamilton was aging… well, let’s just say “less than gracefully”. Several people left nasty comments, the worst of which I deleted before they ever went public. And so, in order to counter the claims of ageism from that post, let me show you how 80s pop star Samantha Fox is getting along these days.

First off, a picture from her Page 3 Girl glory days, not too long before “Touch Me (I Want Your Body)” became a hit in the UK and US:

Samantha Fox
(click to embiggen)

After the jump, a picture of her now.

Continue reading “Samantha Fox: Looking Good!”