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Category: intertubes flotsam.

careful, your mascara is running.

Posted on by Marko

I avoided looking at the display model iPhones on the way in, and averted my gaze from everyone elses iPhones. I wanted to enrich the experience of opening my own iPhone 5, and make it more special than it already would be…

You know you’re a pampered, entitled little whiner when you go to buy a new iPhone and feel compelled to write a tear-soaked blog post on how the AT&T rep “ruined” your first impressions of the phone by carelessly unwrapping everything prior to setting it up. ZOMG! He didn’t leave the protective film on it so I could peel it off in a quasi-religious trance! He unwrapped my USB cord so I was deprived of the experience! WAAAA! This is followed by a list of “How To” tips that outline how the experience should have gone. (In this kid’s ideal world, the salesguy should practically avoid eye contact and treat you like you’re in a bank opening a precious lockbox.)

The folks at the phone store don’t have the time to let every customer spend fifteen minutes ritually unpacking and getting to know their new iPhone. On iPhone launch day, these places are wall-to-wall with hipster kids looking to pick up their new phones between hitting Starbucks and pretending to go to class. You don’t want to make them late for their Ethnic Basketweaving 101 class so you can smell the packaging on your new iPhone.

architects and their chicken coops.

Posted on by Marko

One of my Facebook friends linked to an article about artisan chicken coops yesterday—you know, the sort of chicken coop that has the chickens living in more style than a middle-class wage earner in a developing nation. That had me thinking about what chicken coops designed by different architects would look like.

The Frank Lloyd Wright: A beautiful chicken coop mimicking the flow of water down a stony terrace. Eighteen different square elements are stacked into a descending spiral shape. It takes two people nine hours to clean the poop out of all the nooks and crannies every week.

The Minoru Yamasaki: Two box-shaped coops slightly offset next to each other. Each coop has a 10x10ft. footprint and is 120 feet high, holding 12,000 chickens.

The Walter Gropius/Bauhaus: A coop vaguely shaped like a rooster comb and made out of steel and glass. The chickens live in 128 identical single apartments with little balconies. Because of the huge windows, interior temperature on sunny days is 112 degrees.

The Le Corbusier: A monstrous 30x30ft. concrete block with an interior chicken run and its own freeway exit. The chickens descend into depression and substance abuse, and the suicide rate is sky-high.

The Frank Gehry: The coop is made out of corrugated sheet metal, hammered together in the shape of a giant beak. It sits in the middle of a two-acre reflecting pool.

The Hundertwasser: A brightly-painted, asymmetrical chicken coop that sits on stilts. It has a roof garden. Predators intent on chicken meals forget about their prey and take pictures in awe instead.

The Libeskind: The coop is just wide enough for two chickens side-by-side, but it’s 50 yards long and makes nine angles, including three 90-degree turns. The chickens often get lost inside.

The Howard Roark: A bare patch of ground in the middle of the front lawn. The chickens can’t expect everything to be handed to them.

betcha he was wearing flip-flops and oakleys, too.

Posted on by Marko

Dumbass of the Month award goes to this guy, who taped himself going 180+ MPH on a busy Canadian highway on a motorcycle.

Runner up is the dumbworm who made this comment on the CNN intertubes site:

“Aaah…how, exactly, was a guy on a motorcycle going to kill anyone? Most likely case: he crashes into a car, and he dies.”

Physics knowledge FAIL. A 400-pound bike with a 200-pound rider going 180MPH is a metric fuckton of kinetic energy. Anyone unlucky enough to be rear-ended by that moron at those speeds would have had a very bad day indeed. Imagine an anvil getting shot out of a cannon and plowing through an occupied minivan from back to front.