MySpace user urges others to drink the Kool-Aid … and boy does it taste bad!

Today (Wednesday) is International Delete Your MySpace Account Day. Incidentally, it is also the same day “Crazy” King George (George III) died, most likely from syphilis; the day Kansas officially became a state in the great U-S-of-A; the day the 49ers became the first football team to win five NFL championships (Steve Young + Jerry Rice = totally unstoppable); and the birthdays of Oprah and Heather Graham. So MySpace haters can take faith that they share their special day with STDs, tornadoes, gold, the rich, and the whorish.

ANYWAY, I think I might have a point here (then again, maybe I don’t). So all the shenanigans began about 10 days ago when a blogger decided he hated MySpace enough to deactivate his account. Rather than just click the button when prompted, “Are you sure you want to deactivate this account and lose touch with your 200 million friends who don’t want to lose you to the evils of the real world?” said blogger decides he wants to go out Jonestown-style and get as many followers as possible to follow his lead.

I apologize…wait, no, I don’t apologize. Why do people need a Day (capital D) to deactivate their account on a social networking site? Has the power of the individual to think and act on his own disappeared as we all become inextricably linked to everyone everywhere around the world? (Thanks to the internet, we might only need four degrees of separation by this point.) I just think this delete you MySpace account day is so silly. Two thousand people deactivating their accounts on the same day is small change when you have 100,000,000+ users (in case you care, that would be a user loss of a .oooo2%, or something like that). So, honestly people, whether it’s 2000 or 10,000 (which I highly doubt), I don’t think your little fly will be noticed on the MySpace beast.

A word of advice. You don’t like your MySpace account? You don’t use it anymore, don’t like privacy breaches, don’t want random people knowing your favorite movie is Gigli? THEN JUST DELETE IT. There’s no need to make a spectacle of the event.

Man, people are just getting way too involved with their SNS profiles. This is not a romantic relationship everyone. It’s just a webpage.

Library of Congress jumps on the social networking bandwagon, creates mega-Flickr account

I still have yet to jump onto the Flickr bandwagon, but For example, I recently blogged about a woman who used her Flickr account to demonstrate how she makes “8-bit cookies” with patterns from our favorite Nintendo games (among other things).

The Library of Congress, which houses information on just about everything to have ever occurred anywhere at any time, has created a Flickr account and uploaded more than 3,000 images that fall into one of two categories: “News in the 1910s” and “1930s-40s in Color.” You should check out this site if you have any interest in history from a visual perspective, or if you just have some time to kill. I like this one of a woman sitting outside Union Station, as it looked 65 years ago.

Picture of the Day: This is how I feel about children (in a nutshell)

Ahh, children. Such joyful creatures aren’t they? Hah! In my opinion, anyone who holds such a sentiment needs a mental health evaluation stat. Since a young age, I have been compiling a list of reasons why I shouldn’t have children. I’m currently at #13,267: “I’d rather be spending that $300,000 on myself!”

Needless to say, I’m not too fond of the little buggers. However, just in case my dear sister happens to be reading my blog, please note that I do love her little buggers (although that is primarily because I have to).

Today I came across this glorious image, and thought it summarizes my opinion of children quite succinctly. Thanks to List of the Day for the image.

Who’s getting busy and who’s wearing chastity belts?

I came across this rather interesting world map today that looks at the average age in which citizens lose their virginity. Looks like those crazy kids in Greenland, Iceland and the Scandinavian countries have figured out that sex is a great form of exercise that doesn’t require you to go outside in the -20 degree winters. Meanwhile, I am not at all surprised that Brazil also includes some of the youngest kids gettin’ busy, as I am convinced Latinos are born with a heightened sex drive. And I must say, I’m happy to see that the U.S. isn’t the biggest whore on the block for once. Although that might not be an accurate statement. Now what we need is a map of the world showing the average number of partners people have. Then we’ll really see who the whor…I mean, “free love” believers, are.

Picture of the Day: An MP3 player to encourage criminals to rob you + a taser gun to render them unconscious

Mashing up two typically unrelated products is a relatively common occurrence as lazy people lacking the creativity to invent new products get bright ideas that people will want to buy a 2-in-1 product, even if they already own the two individual products. An easy example of this is the increasingly common appearance of music players on cell phones. Why carry around an iPod and a cell phone, these companies ask, when you can have a cell phone that stores significantly less music and offers a much poorer quality of sound?

As silly as I find this, it can’t compare to the product I discovered today, which combines an MP3 player with a TASER GUN. Offered in a stylish leopard print, this gun is (obviously) geared toward women, who are more likely to get jumped while walking down a dark alley in a short skirt while listening to Celine Dion’s greatest hits. I understand what they’re aiming for with this, but haven’t we gotten a little taser-happy in the last year? There are women who have taken to selling taser guns to other women much in the same way they sold tupperware during the 90s. There’s been extensive media coverage over police and security being too trigger happy with taser guns. And now we’re turning tasers into a fashion accessory no women should be without.

What’s next? Maybe there’ll be a product that helps silence friends and relatives who talk too much. It could be a pen on one side and a blow gun on the other, coming with five free tranquilizer darts. Hmm, I wonder if I should work on the patent before someone steals it from me. Gotta run!

And you thought the rats outside Burger King were big…

If you were born between the years of 1970 and 1985, you should have seen the movie Princess Bride at least once (and due to its popularity on cable networks, you have most likely seen in approximately 1,257 times). In fact, this movie is one of my favorites. So think about the plot line, when Wesley and Buttercup are traipsing through the fire swamp and Wesley fights with the ROUS (rodent of unusual size). That was a pretty big rat, wouldn’t you think? Probably much bigger than a rat could even get here, where they sometimes reach the size of a small housecat in the big cities, but no larger, right?

Wrong. At least in South America you’d be wrong, where scientists recently unearthed the fossil of a ONE-TON rodent. To put this into perspective, the average horse weighs in at about a half ton. Now that is quite a rat, if you ask me. Said rat could probably eat a grown person and still be hungry for dessert. Can you imagine life with these bad boys roaming the streets? Mobsters could hire them to run jobs; fast food staff would be equipped with rifles and heavy artillery; women would have yet another reason to avoid walking alone late at night. The world would plunge into a deep, dark despair (I picture Gotham City in Batman Begins).

Well, that’s one thing we should be happy we don’t have to worry about today. I mean, yeah we have wars and guns and disease pandemics and poverty and all that stuff, but at least we don’t have giant, man-eating rats. Hooray!

 (Check out the AFP article here.)

Picture(s) of the Day: Shaking babies, eating cats…sounds like my kind of man!

Here at Welcome to Oblivion, I like to both entertain and educate you. So, for today’s education, let me reinforce that it is bad to shake babies. If you do so, your face might freeze like this guy’s (and you’ll probably go to jail for murder, but that’s beside the point).

Strangely, this guy really looks like my friend Tom. And as if the fear of having your face frozen wasn’t enough, here’s what happened to Tom after he shook that poor crash test dummy baby to his heart’s content:

So children, what have we learned today? That’s right: Don’t shake babies or you might get eaten.

Geeks of the world unite, become so excited about Macworld that their quick little fingers shut down Twitter

I have previously mentioned my intrigue with the site Twitter. After about two months using it, I am still no closer to understanding its mass appeal among some of the dorkier techies out there. I especially don’t understand why so many people use it almost as a instant message chat room, where everyone can see what you’re talking about. I mean, phones do still exist people. And so do chat rooms, like through GMail, where NOT EVERYONE CAN WATCH YOUR CONVERSATION UNFOLD.

Anyway, I have given up trying to understand the appeal of Twittering. What really surprised me, however, was how all those dorkorific kids out there salivating over Macworld today and Steve Jobs’ keynote, actually brought Twitter to its knees briefly. Poor things, trying to find out if Jobs’ had chuckled or merely smiled after making some lame joke, they were instead greeted with this error message:

Poor babies. I’m sure they cried and hugged their laptops to their bony chests and screamed at god for being so totally unfair.

I’m sorry people, but I think we all need to take a step back from the the technology train that is bearing down on us at such an incredible pace. If you are really that upset about not knowing what is happening at Macworld the very second it happens, maybe you need to climb up the stairs out of your basement, put on some clothes other than your PJs and take a walk outside for maybe 10 minutes or so. That’s not asking too much of you. We’re all getting so caught up in technology these days that I think we’re forgetting where our real priorities are. And here’s a hint: they’re not related to the computer.

And that, my friends, is enough lecturing from my high horse for today. You can now resume you Twittering you weirdos.

[Thanks Techcrunch.]

UPDATE: Now, this is more of what I’m talking about:  Steve Jobs’  Key Note  as  a Drinking Game!

My vote for biggest comeback of 2008? I’m going with the Black Death

According to a story from Reuters, the plague (most notably known for killing nearly one-quarter of the world’s population between the years of 1347 and 1351), appears to be making a comeback, with recent appearances in nations with no previous cases. Some of the most recent cases have occurred in Africa, because the Africans obviously don’t have enough problems already.

What many people don’t know is that there are a few cases of the plague each year still. I know I was surprised when I found this out. The image that always pops in my head when I think of the plague is the scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail when the man is walking through the town yelling “bring out your dead” and some guy brings his not-so-dead father out, who is protesting the whole time, but ignored. Hilarious.

ANYWAY, in the U.S., most cases arise in the southwest. Luckily for us, the marvels of modern science and the lack of carriers (rodents) would make it extremely difficult for the plague to ever become widespread here. In third world countries, however, there is the potential for significant deaths associated with the plague. Pretty scary stuff if you ask me.

Of course, we shouldn’t get too concerned over the potential death toll quite yet, as the health industry often tends to over-exaggerate health threats (and often rightly so). It’s good to be looking out for people, but sometimes predicting the end of mankind as we know it leaves health officials the butt of many jokes when it doesn’t pan out. Case in point: anybody remember SARS?

Dear Al Gore, Did you know Super Soakers can end global warming?

Well maybe that is a bit of a stretch, but I found this Engadget post mildly entertaining to say the least. Or maybe it was the tremendous wave of nostalgia to roll over me as soon as I saw *my* Super Soaker in the blog post, sitting there in all its hypercolor glory. What mid 20-something to mid 30-something doesn’t remember the joys of summer days spent shooting Super Soakers at older siblings and horror stories of people filling them with bleach (I never did figure out if that really happened or if it was an urban legend)? Ahh, those were the days.

So yeah, the guy who invented the Super Soaker, Lonnie Johnson, is apparently quite the nuclear engineer. He has managed to harness the energy of the sun to rule the world…or, at least turbines. His invention, the Johnson Thermoelectric Energy Conversion System (JTEC) is supposed to be somewhat like a fuel cell and can apparently covert more than 60 percent of solar energy into electricity, which is twice the current rate. And that’s about the totality of nuclear engineering I can understand.

On the other hand, imagine if Mr. Johnson applied that level of technology to his Super Soakers. People would be able to save the world with them!

I never thought my love of baking and 8-bit video games could be combined into one awesome item…until now!

People have way too much free time on their hands; HOWEVER, it occasionally works out for the benefit of mankind. Thanks to a lovely Flickr how-to by Eva Funderburgh, I can now impress all my friends at my next party with these gorgeous 8-bit cookies!

Yes friends, they are Tetris cookies. Eva and her husband use a Playdoh extruder, of all things, to squeeze out long rows of dough, and then lay the dough logs on top of each other to make patterns. After chilling, they cut the cookies from the formed roll and voila! Awesome patterned cookies from scratch.

I think I’m in love.

[Thanks Boing Boing!]

What’s all that thumping, you ask? It must be Michael Moore doing the “I told you so” dance

In not-so-breaking (or oh-so-shocking) news, the U.S. ranks last in healthcare among industrialized nations. Now, while I do enjoy Michael Moore’s passion for bringing light to important issues, I tend to agree with those who say he often goes too far. That said, this report is quite a slap in the face to all the naysayers who said Sicko was just a bunch of baloney. (Having not seen Sicko myself, I can’t really comment on it.) One thing I can comment on, however, is my own problems with the healthcare system, which have been almost entirely with the business of healthcare and not with the actual medical treatment I have received. To those of you who have always been on your parents’ plan or employed full time with benefits, you have no idea the nightmare involved with getting your own insurance. And god forbid you have a pre-existing condition. You might as well just say you have a rare form of leprosy that can be spread through the telephone. It took me months of forms and innumerable phone calls to get a plan in place (with one of the leading healthcare providers, mind you) and nearly cost me my sanity. Which, of course, would have been quite the problem if I had gone crazy before I had healthcare.

Read the AFP article here. I must say, the toughest decision for me would be choosing whether or not I was willing to deal with the French people in order to experience their top-ranked healthcare.

Here comes 2008…and a badass cold…yippee!

Here I was telling myself that since I had a nice, long break from school, I’d be able to blog so much more. Well, first there was the entire first season of Heroes to watch (thanks Lance), then an urgent need to replay Final Fantasy 3 all the way through (for the 187th time), then some books to read, and now, for the entirety of 2008 (all four days, I know), I’ve had to deal with this:

No, I have not had a small, very sad-looking child (with ginormous hands!) dropped on my doorstep. What I have had since I woke up on the first morning of 2008 is a very, VERY annoying cold. So I apologize for my recent lack of witty banter and smart-ass comments on the goings-ons of idiots all across this lovely planet, but my nose is rubbed raw, I’ve sneezed so much I think I have brain damage, and all I want to do is snuggle under my covers and have Morgan Freeman read me stories. (Johnny Depp in character as Jack Sparrow will do as well.) Is that too much to ask for?

Therefore, I promise there will be more action on the site very soon, as I plan on kicking this nasty cold to the curb ASAP.