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Excuse me, there’s a weasel in the ballpit

weaselintheballpit.jpgThat’s what the web reminds me of. It’s nothing like a super highway, it doesn’t hugely feel like an interconnected web. The way I do it, it’s more like swimming in a big, colorful, bobbly pit of information balls.

I’ve never actually been in a ballpit, for I am old. Wikipedia tells me they have hygeine issues — they’re full of children and unwashed balls. Bad stuff floats to the bottom and stays there. So, see, the comparison is perfect.

Anyhow…like so: click on a link in your own blogroll, then click on a link in his blogroll, then click on a link in her blogroll…and keep clicking links until you find yourself someplace utterly strange. I do that a lot. I was hoping to come up with a cool name for this activity, but I failed.

I am also (you may have noticed) a gigantic consumer of Wikipedia (not everything hippies do is stupid). I frequent link collecting sites like Fazed and Portent. I keep a whole page of international newspaper links that I add to (and occasionally remove from).

Here’s the problem: I use Opera, the original tabbed browser. And I drink. And I leave my desktop machine on all the time. So when I come down most mornings, I am confronted with twenty cool open Web pages and no earthly idea how I got to any of them. I think it’s important to attribute stuff properly. But then, life is full of important things I don’t do.

So please, share some of my colorful balls of unknown provenance…


Did you know there was a Daily Photo Blog community? Here’s a map of current participants. I got in through Milano Daily Photo. Bath and Budapest were good, too. I only really got to the B’s before I began to skip around. Some are better about updating than others, but I enjoyed the lot of ’em.

I really love ideas like this. They feed my sick delusional yearning for godlike powers of vision and…eavesdropping. Oh, yeah, like you wouldn’t eavesdrop if you were a god.


And so continues our proven interest in all things deer anus — behold, the Butt Out Tool.

This tool is the fastest, easiest way to disconnect the anal alimentary canal from deer or similar-sized game. Immediately after harvesting game, insert the Butt-Out Tool into the anal canal and twist until it grabs the membrane. Continue twisting another half turn, then steadily pull the Butt-Out Tool out of the canal. Extract 10″ of membrane, tie the membrane off and cut.

There’s video. (I definitely got this one from Fazed).


This tattoo artist apparently specializes in bulldogs and serial killers. Okay, I don’t recognize that very last one, but the one before that is Albert Fish, Eater of Children, and the one before that is Richard Ramirez. Not just serial killers, but badly drawn, especially losery serial killers. Would it be better if these tats were all on one guy, or spread out among several scary people with bad taste? I can’t make up my mind.


This one’s almost a year old, so you’ve probably seen it if you’re into gaming. I’m not and I hadn’t. It’s 1K Project II, a thousand cars racing through a game called Trackmania. I tried a couple of different addresses for the kid who made it, in case he had any remarks, with no luck. Then I found a page explaining how he did it — in French. My French, she is not so good — but I gather he cut together multiple walkthroughs to achieve the effect. This explains why the cars seem to have collision detection in some cases and not in others.

It’s very well done and seriously cool. Sometimes they look like shoals of fish and sometimes flocks of birds and sometimes swarms of bugs and sometimes bitchin’ cars.


Finally, this guy: Tim Knowles. He’s an artist in London of the kind that does stupid shit like ink up pine trees and put paper under them and let them draw pictures in the breeze. I know, I know…I can’t help myself. I went to a poncy art school. They polluted my mind.

Like, check out this drawing, which was made by this huge seismography thing in the back of a station wagon on the way to its own exhibition. Or the slideshow he made by mailing a box rigged with a digital camera to take a picture of its journey every ten seconds for 6,994 pictures (sadly, the whole slideshow is not online). Or these surprisingly evocative pictures of the full moon reflected in water.

Or you could, you know, bite me.

Comments


Comment from Dave in Texas
Time: July 6, 2007, 4:38 pm

Everytime I saw a ballpit, I thought of the bottom of a fish tank and what gets lodged between the rocks.

Ick.


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: July 6, 2007, 4:39 pm

Forgot one:

07/06/2007 | 11:00

Christmas trees sold out in Akranes

Artificial Christmas trees are sold out in Akranes, west Iceland. Local residents are busy coloring them green, white and orange – like the Irish flag – in preparation for “Irish Days” celebrated in their town this weekend.

“Irish Days” are celebrated to commemorate the Irish settlers who first inhabited the town. Many of Akranes’ current inhabitants can trace their lineage back to Ireland, Fréttabladid reports.

The flag-colored Christmas trees are an indispensable part of the decorations at this annual festival, celebrated the second weekend of July every year since 2000, with about 15,000 people from all over the country expected to participate this year.

Tasteful.


Comment from Dawn
Time: July 6, 2007, 5:02 pm

And I thought we were just going to get a weekend weasel.
The serial killer tattoos are probably on opposite calves of the same guy. The two legs both look pasty white. That guy should probably be locked up.
We only had a Peter Piper Pizza in my town and everything in it was broken and lame. No ball pit 🙁


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: July 6, 2007, 5:07 pm

Weekend weasel! Shoot…hmmm…

And that weasel in the ballpit is seriously crappy. I’m just getting look at it on a big monitor. Oh, well. Into every blog a little crappy weasel must fall…


Comment from Enas Yorl
Time: July 6, 2007, 6:07 pm

Ah, cool stuff! I got an early start to my weekend – I left work with an extremely urpy tummy. It’s no fun driving the freeway at 70 mph fighting the urge to hurl.

Hey check out Theo Jansen’s Strandbeest. I found this over at Ghost of a Flea.

Oo. Time to go lay down again 🙁


Comment from whitishrabbit
Time: July 6, 2007, 7:07 pm

I actually thought the weasel in the ballpit was a real photo for a sec.
But my eyesight isn’t like, stellar, so…


Comment from Pupster
Time: July 6, 2007, 8:07 pm

Eh-heh heh heh.

The “Butt Out Tool” was originally named the “Deer-E-Ere” (I learned from reading the comments) 😉

(Sung to the tune of Mairzy Doats)

Ball Pit Stoats and Fainting Goats

And Tools for yooouur deer’s hiney,

A serial killer too, by Tatoo-ooo


Comment from zsolt72
Time: July 7, 2007, 1:43 am

i like the special feature of your site! Creative:)


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: July 7, 2007, 5:09 am

Zsolt! Enjoyed ‘visiting’ your city! (Zsolt is proprietor of BudapestDailyPhoto). Very beautiful…

The guy doing my city hasn’t updated in a year, but it wasn’t looking all that great, anyway. Providence is a beautiful place in parts and an ugly place in parts…more so than most places I’ve lived.


Comment from Lokki
Time: July 10, 2007, 7:07 pm

This post is a little late, Weasel, but I’m struck with the beauty of the imagery of the ball pit/internet surfing analogy. Brilliant.

Of course, I’ve waited till nobody’s looking, but, hey… a compliment in a dark room, at midnight isn’t always a bad thing.

(Thinks: Damn – Did that come out wrong?

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