Category: Of Interest

Those miscellaneous things that just must be published.

Posted on by — 2 Comments

Help Me Internet, You’re Our Only Hope

American Seating Envoy DeskAn American Seating Envoy school desk sits in our dining room. Our children used to study here. As an authentic school desk, it had seen its fair amount of usage. Years of students leaning on the desk stressed the weld and bent the support. As Cathy refinished the wood and re-painted the metal, I searched for someone to straighten or replace the support and spot weld the broken joint. A friend stepped up, and offered to handle it for me. American Seating Co. Envoy desk from Grand Rapids, MichiganAnd then I never saw the desktop again…

His job changed. He quit coming to the coffee house where we shared more conversations. Then he quit answering my calls and text messages. 17I suspect that the desktop is history. So I turn to you, the people of the Internet!

Can you help me find a replacement desktop for an American Seating Co. Envoy desk from Grand Rapids, Michigan. I do not know the year of manufacture. The only identifying mark beside the manufacturer stamp is the number 17 stamped on the back. Do you know this desk? Do you have a resource to help me replace the top? Thank you Internet!

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Revolution3 Triathlon in Knoxville May 5

This Sunday, May 5, a triathlon will happen in Knoxville which includes a $50,000 purse.
Competitors will swim up river from Volunteer Landing (evading the floating bodies at Calhoun’s) just past First Creek, turn around and swim down to Second Creek. From Second Creek they will bike to the Gay Street Bridge then to John Sevier Highway and back downtown (24 miles). The run will be along the Neyland Dr Greenway, through Tyson Park, continuing down Third Creek Greenway, all the way down Cherokee Blvd, and back ending at the World’s Fair Park.

See more at the rev3tri website.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

R.I.P. Upcoming.org

Yahoo!, the killer-of-companies, is at it again. This time Upcoming.org is on the chopping block. Yahoo! is also killing off five others: Yahoo! Deals, Yahoo! SMS Alerts, Yahoo! Kids, Yahoo! Mail and Messenger feature phone (J2ME) apps, and Older versions of Yahoo! Mail.

One day I hope to have a wonderfully successful Internet based company; and I also hope Yahoo! never buys it.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Durex has brought us the future!

My favorite condom company, Durex, is bringing us the future! There’s not a geek that since the time of 300 baud dial up and ascii port who has not imagined the possibly of combining a serial port and sex toys for long distance love. Durex has created Fundawear, a combination of vibrating underwear and iPhones for what Durex deems the ultimate in foreplay.

Frankly, Durex’s vision of touch over the Internet looks pretty fun. Looks targeted toward couples but the potential seems enormous for masturbation or enhancing the experience with those paid Internet porn cam sites. Imagine a single person on Chaturbate wearing these! I can see a new iPhone app now. "RandomVibe" with choices such as "Use BlueTooth to touch a stranger within 30 feet" making subway rides exciting or "Wifi a stranger on your network" making office romance safer or "Randomly touch someone on the Internet" for Worldgasms. Ah! What about one app that allowed you to touch multiple people for "the virtual orgy!" If the generation of free love thought the sex partiers of the 80s and 90s were strange and those generations found themselves envious of the past decade and a half or so of shrinking clothing, lycra, rainbow parties, and oral and anal are okay because I still have my virginity and can keep wearing my ring, their minds will melt with the potential for the next two generations of virtual, supersafe, sex.

Of course, it feels like I’ve seen this before:

See also: Gizmodo and h/t to Angel Stewart.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Bad things are happening in Boston…and good things are too

Patton Oswalt says this far more eloquently than I could but echos my sentiment. Yes, horror is happening in Boston right now. However, great things are happening there too and elsewhere. Somewhere a baby is being born. A life is being saved. Someone is sharing a smile with someone else who needed it.

Status Update
By Patton Oswalt
Boston. Fucking horrible.

I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, "Well, I’ve had it with humanity."

But I was wrong. I don’t know what’s going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem. One human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths.

But here’s what I DO know. If it’s one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out. (Thanks FAKE Gallery founder and owner Paul Kozlowski for pointing this out to me). This is a giant planet and we’re lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in awhile, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they’re pointed towards darkness.

But the vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evil doers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak. This is beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We’d have eaten ourselves alive long ago.

So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, "The good outnumber you, and we always will."

[Source, Facebook, Patton Oswalt]

H/t Danny.

As a reminder, news is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Ladies, take that bra off!

bra Yes, you can burn those bras with confidence. Sagging boobies? According to a 15-year study led by professor Jean-Denis Rouillon, your bra may be contributing to sagging breasts while not wearing a bra will help keep them…um, perky.

"Medically, physiologically, anatomically – breasts gain no benefit from being denied gravity. On the contrary, they get saggier with a bra," Professor Rouillon told France Info radio on Wednesday.
[Image Source, Venusian Glow, Does this bra fit ? How do I tell ?]

[Source, The Local,Women better off without bras: French study]

If you can believe one of the commenters, she supports this idea of losing support:

Maia • 14 hours ago ?
I haven’t worn a bra in almost 20 years, I’m 50 this year, and my breasts are in perfect shape – they feel no different from when I was 20.

[Source, The Local, ]

Of course, I think she should show us pictures for proof 🙂

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Big Orange Blasphemy

#14 Stephanie Psick - LA TemptationMy father watched football regularly. Recliner, beer, game, don’t interrupt Dad. We lived in New Orleans in 1981 for Super Bowl XV and I rooted for Philadelphia and proudly hung my Eagles pennant on my wall. I played shirts and no-shirts tackle football, albeit poorly, with friends in a field of snow in New Jersey once or twice but never played in leagues or school. Football just wasn’t my game.

I came to Knoxville, TN for college and the football spirit sucked me in. Despite the University of Tennessee’s losing team, the fandom was incredible. With a stadium seating over 100,000 people and always packed on game day, it is difficult to not get sucked into the excitement via the crowd mob mentality. I still didn’t understand the game and was mostly there to cheer with the pigskin made it over the goal line. My fandom has waned. I don’t participate in the superstitions and don’t watch the games. But I do get a text message with the final score and am always slightly disappointed when UT loses.

Is it possible to get someone like me interested in football? Apparently so! Welcome, the Lingerie League!

Gang Tackle

And now every guy who reads this immediately heads over to Bing image search for "lingerie league wardrobe malfunction."

Images by KellBailey. See also.