Month: July 2008

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New record in lutefisk eating contest!

Now I really regret not attending this year’s Ballard Seafood Festival. MyBallard.com has all the details.

One of the most popular events at this weekend’s SeafoodFest is the lutefisk eating contest. Ten contestants with iron stomachs battled it for $150. The previous record was just 18 seconds. But amazingly, a man named Einer Johannsen smashed the record by slurping down two pounds in just 7 seconds! Here’s the winner in the blue-checkered shirt. “I poured it down like a pitcher of Rainier Beer,” Johannsen told me after the contest. “It has a wonderful taste.

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Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC?

This article about Rachel Maddow says it all — a great addition to MSNBC if it happens.

She appeared on her way to a career as an AIDS-policy advocate when a funny thing happened: on a lark she auditioned to be the news reader and sidekick on a wacky FM morning radio program in the area. She got the job, which had her occasionally donning an inflatable calculator costume at a local Ford dealer. She acknowledged that the work was not exactly what she had in mind when she graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in public policy and from Oxford University, which she attended on a Rhodes Scholarship and where she earned her doctorate.

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Truck Stop Women and Phil Gramm

HEY! I just heard/watched this on Keith Olbermann, who mentioned IMDb! It turns out former senator Phil Gramm has an IMDb page and was an uncredited executive producer for a film called “Truck Stop Women”. Porn! Republicans! VHS! Anyway.

These scenes “really got Phil titillated,” Caton told journalist John Judis in 1995. Gramm enthusiastically cut Caton a check for $15,000. Because the film was oversold, however, Caton returned his brother-in-law’s money, offering him an investment opportunity in an upcoming feature.

Phil Gramm’s page and Truck Stop Women.

AND! Apple co-founder Stephen “The Woz” Wozniak may have been spotted on “The Price Is Right,” according to a post on macrumors.com.

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Nola’s 1st birthday party photos!

Photos from Nola’s first birthday party, held on July 18th, 2008.

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Bat to bra in three sentences

I love how Harper’s Weekly connects dots in their weekly emails. An unaltered paragraph from their latest digest:

“The British retailer Marks & Spencer defended a policy of charging extra for bras that are bigger than size DD, saying the charge represented “a small premium for [necessary] specialist work,” while the protest group Busts 4 Justice derided the price increase as an unfair tax. A British teenager who assumed that tremors in her bosom were caused by her vibrating mobile phone found a baby bat nestling in the padding of her 34FF bra. The World Health Organization warned people not to go into Ugandan bat caves after a Dutch tourist died from the Marburg virus, a hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola.”

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Edward Tufte on the iPhone

The New York Times weighs in on the iPhone’s success, and design usability hero Edward Tufte gets a prominent mention.

In a recent article and accompanying video posted on his Web site, Edward Tufte, the information and visualization designer at Yale, argues that the iPhone’s success is attributable in part to the decision by iPhone designers to dispense with clutter — all of the irritating buttons and menus that are part and parcel of a typical computer interface.

“The content is the interface, the information is the interface, not the computer administration debris,” he said in a video critique of the iPhone.

He also notes that the iPhone succeeds by “intensifying” information, made possible in part by its higher resolution display and in part by packing more useful information in each display.

Microsoft’s products could use this approach. Honestly, we might use about a tenth of those grouped icon bars. To be fair, they’ve improved the clutter somewhat on Office 2008 for the Mac, but it’s only a faint start. Hopefully, the next (last?) version of Office is truly a Mac application.

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Bruno is the new Borat! With Iranian missile “enhancement”.

They’re filming Sacha Baron Cohen’s next movie, it seems, when things like this appear in the news:

Crowds in Arkansas came for the lure of cage fighting and $1 beer, but police say what they got instead was men ripping each others’ clothes off and kissing _ a stunt suspected of being orchestrated by Sacha Baron Cohen of “Borat” fame.

…The two men would then wrestle, rip away some of their clothes and share a brief kiss reminiscent of one between Baron Cohen and Will Ferrell in the film “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.”

An elaborate array of mounted and handheld video cameras caught the crowd of 1,600’s reaction as the two men “went right up to the line” of the city’s morality laws, Holland said. The two men stripped down to their underwear, kissed and rubbed on each other, the sergeant said.

The audience, as well as local fighters drawn to take part in the show, became enraged. “It set the crowd off lobbing beers,” Holland said. “They had beers in plastic cups. Those things can get some distance on them actually.”

The article finishes with a bit of Mike Huckabee trivia!

If the cage match visits came from Baron Cohen, it wouldn’t be the first time Arkansas fell for a practical joke. In 2000, then-Gov. Mike Huckabee fell for a prank and congratulated Canada for preserving its icebound Parliament, calling it a “national igloo.”

National igloo! He ran for President! National IGLOO!!! Brüno releases May 15, 2009 in theaters.

Is having Photoshop overseas a recipe to enhance your missile testing? Iran thinks so, and got most major US dailies to run the photo untouched!