Category Archives: quirky

On one hand, this is WAY too cute. On the other hand, it is amazing. You pick the hand!

I was sending someone an email tonight, and I was discussing one of my favourite books, The Brothers Karamazov. I noticed that Microsoft Word underlined “Karamozov”. Oh oh, I thought, better fix that.

Now if you type in “Karamozov” instead of “Karamazov” in ScribeFire, and then right click on it, it will tell you to replace it with “Karamazov”. But if you do this in Microsoft Word, you get “Kalamazoo”.

Now the first thought I had was: what, Word has been around since at least the early Dostoevsky novels, and it certainly ain’t small, so you think it would be smart enough to at least know leaders of major world literature? My Cyrillic is non-existent, but I am willing to bet money that the Cyrillic spelling of Karamazov NEVER translates into Kalamazoo.

My second thought was: maybe it’s me. So I right clicked on “Karamozov” and “Karamazov” and changed the language to “Russian” and the spell check error went away! Hmmm, I thought, Word IS smart! You just have to tell it the word is Russian! And it is smart enough to know that there are two ways to spell Karamazov!

But then I thought: I wonder if that is true. So I quickly typed in the another “Russian” word:

“Wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww” and did the same test, and lo and behold, “Wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww” is also the name of someone is Russia! (Perhaps this was a minor character the Dostoevsky later dropped to get the book under a 1000 pages.)

So, if you are a developer, and you are providing multilanguage support for your product, and you are asked to specify what standard you will be supporting, I recommend you say: the same one used by Microsoft Word!

See:

men who look like old lesbians

it’s uncanny.

The Addiction Research Unit from the University of Buffalo has a fascinating page on how

The prohibition of psychoactive substances has evolved gradually in the United States and in Europe. The opium-containing preparation laudanum had been widely available since the 18th century. Morphine, cocaine, and even heroin were seen as miracle cures when they were first discovered. During the mid to late 19th century, many manufacturers proudly proclaimed that their products contained cocaine or opium. A few, like Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup for infants which contained morphine, were more guarded in divulging their principal ingredients. By the beginning of the 20th century, problems with habitual use of cocaine and opiates was becoming increasingly apparent. This led to the removal of these substances from some products (e.g., Coca Cola) and to the introduction of the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) in the United States which required the listing of ingredients on product labels. Nonetheless, standard narcotic remedies like paregoric remained readily available into the early 20th century, and Benzedrine inhalers were marketed without prescription until the early 1950s. Codeine wasn’t removed from most over-the-counter cough suppressants until the early 1980s.

Before Prohibition: Images from the preprohibition era

Thanks to Jean-Francois for this one!

Like alot of newspapers, the WWN is suffering. So much so, that it will no longer be printed. While it is still online, it’s not the same. However, if like me, you miss it, here’s a link to it and one of the great columnists they have.

Here, the entrepreneurial Sammy the Chatting Chimp solves the question: Work Harder or Smarter?

Monkey Business | Weekly World News

Yes, they have their own culture (notice how I said “they”, not “we” ). And you can learn all about it here at:

Geek Culture/After Y2K/The Joy of Tech: pretty much everything you’ve ever wanted.

The site oddee has a great collection of oddities and wonders. I’ll post more later. This one is of an….

event that occurs twice a year. What we see here is a set of ice halos, recorded on a cold winter morning near Green Bay, Wisconsin, USA. Produced by sunlight shining through common atmospheric ice crystals with hexagonal cross-sections, such halos can actually be seen more often than rainbows. The remarkable sunrise picture captures a beautiful assortment of the types most frequently seen, including a sun pillar (center) just above the rising Sun surrounded by a 22 degree halo arc. Completing a triple sunrise illusion, sundogs appear at the far left and far right edges of the 22 degree arc. An upper tangent arc is also just visible at the very top of the view.

Go see the rest at 10 Most Amazing Illusions

If this Telegraph obituary is any indication, in the future, rich people should put aside some money in their will to deal with scathing obits such as this one! I have a quote here, but you really have to read the whole obituary! I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that after the funeral, the author went and stole the flowers from the grave site!

Count Gottfried von Bismarck | Obituaries | News | Telegraph

Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.The great-great-grandson of Prince Otto, Germany’s Iron Chancellor and architect of the modern German state, the young von Bismarck showed early promise as a brilliant scholar, but led an exotic life of gilded aimlessness that attracted the attention of the gossip columns from the moment he arrived in Oxford in 1983 and hosted a dinner at which the severed heads of two pigs were placed at either end of the table.

Hookay. This guy builds a camera and puts it on the cat so you can get a view of a cat’s life. I am not sure what to make of this. I am simultaneously thinking “what a great idea” and “what a dumb idea”.

Judge for yourself!

Mr. Lee CatCam

I thought CheddarVision was a crazy idea.

I get the sense from looking at this photo from the 2007 G8 summit that Bono is thinking what we all think.

BTW, since when did Bono become the leader of a G8 country?

See World of Warcraft too sexy for my shirt

Apparently, this page goes some way to explaining “i can has cheezburger” (one of WordPress’s top blogs) I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER? » Blog Archive A Special In-Depth Analysis by David McRaney – L337 Katz0rz «

I still don’t get it.