This Top Ten Weirdest USB Drives list contains some gems. What I wouldn’t do for this fried shrimp one. Although I also love the dimsums and the sushi drives, too. Hell, the sake bottle is fantastic, as well.
(Via Kottke.)
Month: January 2006
Don Norman’s In Praise of Good Design is a site that highlights usefully-constructed and aesthetically-pleasing products, like the measuring cup above (which, incidentally, I recently saw in my friends Bill and Carri‘s kitchen and promptly became envious of).
Last night Faye and Jake and Chad and I launched into a discussion Chris D. and I have had occasionally in the past: How many cats would it take to pull a dog sled*?
I find this conundrum to be an especially intriguing thought experiment. How many cats does it take to pull what a typical dog can pull? 50? 100? I argue that a direct ratio of cat to dog pulling power is problematic, as my feeling is that cats cannot pull with as much torque compared to body weight as dogs can.
Anywho, we had a laugh about it last night and then Faye posed the question to Google this morning. She emailed me the following incredible Web site on which the above photo can be found: SledKitty.com.
Quoth the anonymous Northern Virginia resident who I admire for his/her sense of humor and desire to see a ridiculous project through to its absurd end:
One day, reading about how even small dogs can pull sleds, I got an idea. Sled cats! More specifically, sled cat. One of my cats, Socky, is a very special animal. He, unlike most cats, has been trained to do a variety of activities…Anyway, if small dogs can do it, I thought, why can’t Socky? So I set about training the world’s first sled cat.
Don’t miss the site, which contains additional hilarious photos of Socky competing in the “Hallditarod.”
*I am well aware that felines are much less obedient than canines. To those who say, “But Newley, you dumbass, cats would never pull a dog sled like pooches would — they’d all take off in different directions,” I respond thusly: The question is not if they’d be willing to pull the sled, but rather how much power they’d generate if they did. Besides, I believe cats might be made to all head in the same direction if you implemented a sort of catnip-and-stick apparatus, which would be, like, a big long stick with a sack of catnip hanging off the end.
My Bloggers’ Favorite Books of 2005 Round-up continues to attract mad eyeballs due to some additional links from various fine folks:
— Jason Kottke at Kottke.org
— Gadling
And don’t miss the comments to the survey, in which Richard Lewis (blogging from Bali), Seeking Irony, Joe at Book Covers from the NY Times Book Review blog, and John Williams at A Special Way of Being Afraid weigh in.
UPDATE: Gothamist has also provided a link.
Categories
Some Links
Some stuff of note:
— I’ve posted three new items over at Gridskipper of late.
— Here’s a license plate my brother Colin and I saw here in DC the weekend before X-mas. I wanna know who’s in charge of VA vanity plate obscenity screening. Someone is sleeping on the job. (Weird side note: a bumper sticker on this car featured the word “abortion” with a line through it and said “Slavery: it was legal, too.” Um, okay.)
— Culture Bully’s 10 Favorite Mash-ups of 2005 looks promising. (Especially the Flaming Lips/Snoop Dog joint.)
— This came out before X-mas, but it’s still interesting. Andres Oppenheimer asks: “Will Bolivia’s Morales follow good or bad role model?”:
Bolivia, which has an estimated 55 percent indigenous population, will enter a new era of majority rule following last weekend’s landslide election of Evo Morales, a leftist coca growers’ leader of Aymara descent. The big question is whether indigenous-ruled Bolivia will follow the steps of South Africa or Zimbabwe.