The best thing I clicked all day
Posted: Thursday, January 18, 2007 10:49 PM by Will Femia
The best thing I clicked all day is this video of a water buffalo being purchased for a Chinese family. Jason Kottke has links and back story but in short, inspired by a charity that purports to buy these animals for poor people but doesn't actually do so, some people got together to make it really happen. UPDATE: Let me just clarify that they do buy animals, just not in the direct way implied by their 'catalog.' I don't doubt that good work is done by this organization and the money they receive. The point is that the people in the video wanted to literally purchase a water buffalo and give it to someone.
Speaking of Kottke links, I may not know what a rep is outside of a weightlifting context but I'll be ready when I hear someone say "book" instead of cool.
"Working all but alone from his hardware-strewn office, Jeff Han is about to change the face of computing. Not even the big boys are likely to catch him." This is about a kid who invented a really cool touch screen interface - video of which we saw a few months ago, so I was going to skip it, but then I saw the new video. I mean seriously, can you imagine?
'Extraordinary heroism' of helicopter rescue bid - They actually strapped themselves to the outside of a helicopter and flew into an enemy fort to retrieve a fallen comrade's body.
Mickey Kaus returns to that Boxer/Rice confrontation - And this time he's more explicit about its real meaning: "Boxer's illogical detour allowed her to not-so-subtly advertise her motherhood in line with the reigning mommy-rhetoric of the Pelosi Era, in which "the gavel" is in 'the hands of America's children.'"
Katie Couric must have missed all the media coverage when she left the Today show because she seems to be realizing only now that she's the only female news anchor.
37 Fads That Swept The Nation.
"Completed by 1772, 'The Writer' was the most perfect and complex automaton built by Swiss clockmaker Jacquet-Droz." It's a wind-up doll that dips a pen in ink and writes legibly on paper.
Choose your own adventure for iPod is here.
Iranian Politicians Threaten to Wipe Ahmadinejad From Map - Why wait for us to be at war with them before we start paying attention to their political climate?
I think I like these guys even more than the OK Go treadmill dance.
Lately when I see commercials on TV that use supposed real people with real names I Google them. Of course nothing comes up. But it didn't even occur to me to hunt for American Idol contestants. Luckily, someone else did. And by the way, since American Idol is on Fox and their parent company also owns MySpace, you'd think they'd have already come up with a round-up like this. NOTE: It's kind of cruel, but then American Idol is like a big hazing ritual anyway.
The new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles trailer
That was Gary Jules again during the emotional scene in Grey's Anatomy tonight. The track is called "Falling Awake" but I couldn't find any free copies anywhere. Here's his MySpace page though.
Web Sites Challenge the Textbook Goliaths - This is about Web sites that cut the mark-up, but I thought the new trick was to use the Internet to buy books overseas.
Tricky flicky - I hope this kid is getting paid by the company that makes that cell phone.
This guy has a hard time getting FedEx to ship empty containers. My first reaction was that this isn't really a "homeland security is ridiculous" story because the employee is clearly just making up his own rules. But then I have to wonder how often idiocy is employed in the name of security hysteria.
The president of India asks Yahoo Answers how to solve the problem of terrorism.
The top 100 most endangered species
The Jeep Waterfall writes messages and designs with falling water.
Remember when I was talking about how people perceive personalities in the sites they use? This post matches sites with photos of how they imagine the average user looks.
What's funny to me about Stephen Colbert's explanation of the AT&T/Cingular deal is that I'd mentioned the deal to someone in connection to Cingular and the new iPhone but I didn't get the details right and the other person explained it all to me and said exactly what Colbert says in this video.
"Cancer cured" headline of the week: Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers
Fact Checking 101 - How Skeptic magazine was Duped by an Environmental Activist Group (The duping was over a story you may have heard of about creationists in the Bush administration pressuring park guides at the Grand Canyon. Turns out that wasn't very true.)
Parents fight to clear the Internet of photos taken of their daughter after she was killed in a car crash. The story is a little extreme, but in a nutshell: "Graphic accident-scene photos, including close-up shots of Nikki, who suffered massive head trauma, have been leaked onto the Internet." For some reason people are actually harassing the family members with the photos. That part I don't really understand, but there's an interesting lesson in how once something's online, it's not coming off.
Speaking of not getting offline, I've had this one in my notes for a couple of days waiting for a segue like the crash photo story. "Videos show challenge of info wrangling" is about a paparazzi video that shows a Brazilian model Daniela Cicarelli and her boyfriend engaging in various degrees of PDA on a beach. At one point they appear to be having sex in the water. It's not as explicit as, say, the Paris Hilton sex tape, but it's pretty racy nonetheless (consider that a NSFW NOTE if you happen upon a link to the video in the course of clicking through pages related to this story). The model and her boyfriend were sufficiently mortified at the video's release that they went to some pretty extreme measures to try to keep it from spreading, including getting ISPs to block customer access to YouTube. Outraged at having their Internet censored just because some girl couldn't keep her bikini bottom on, a boycott of the model (NOTE: this link has a photo of a scantily clad woman pretty close to the top) became part of the campaign to liberate the Web.
