Cute Animal Flash Games

I've played just a few of the games here but they have alot of them, all with cutesy critters. The bee one was fun and calming. The crab one was also fun and lets you get some of your aggressions out.

Calvin Pees

See all those stickers on cars of Calvin peeing collected in one place. Don't ask why. Just because you can.

Scanned Flowers

A Brief Moment

Today at 12:50 pm give or take a few minutes I witnessed the most unfortunate accident I've ever seen. On the 405 southbound, at the Sunset exit, a truck with a gray side dump trailer changed lanes and clipped a white early 80s Nissan 200sx. The vehicle bounced and spun like a toy right off the freeway and down an embankment. I slowed down to avoid it and drove right through the dust cloud it kicked up and pulled over to the shoulder of the exit.

I leapt out of my car and ran down the hill to find the car wrapped around a tree and crushed like a soda can. The driver, a latino man in his early 40s, was probably lucky to have hit the tree instead of rolling down the embankment into the wall. But he was very unlucky to have hit the tree on the driver's side, which crushed him into the backseat and pinned him against the door.

He wasn't moving but was moaning, almost snoring it sounded like. He was breathing and semiconscious. I didn't know what to do other than brush the shards of glass from his face and lips. Some people in the hotel parking lot called for help immediately. A tow truck driver came down and told me not to move him. I wasn't going to. The way he was wedged in there, he was practically part of the car. A few others pulled over and one spoke to him in Spanish and tried to calm him down as he began to move and cry out. Some kind of off duty EMT showed up then a pair of cops showed up at 12:57. I backed off and looked down to see a pair of glasses folded neatly among the leaves next to an anonymous piece of molded plastic. They weren't thrown far from the car and were unscratched.

Eventually there were, one LAPD car, one CHP car, an ambulance, about 30 firemen, around four engines, a massive tow truck, and one news copter in the area. They blocked off the exit and one lane and began to tear the doors and roof off the sucka. Then the tow truck winched the car up the hill so they could separate him from the car without interference from the tree. It took almost an hour. As it was being pulled up I noticed he had a vanity plate that said CAREYES.

When I first got down to him and a few others came I realized there was nothing I could do. i went back up to look for the truck that hit him. it was parked further down so I went back assuming that one of the people standing around was the driver. But not long after I noticed the truck was gone. This was about the time the first black and white arrived. When giving my statement I asked if they would catch him, the officer replied that it's not likely since they dont have the licensce plate number. As I was leaving I asked what his condition was. One of the firemen said it's bad but he'll live. I'm angry at myself for not getting the plate.

It's not crime when we do it

When I heard that that Bush set up a Corporate Fraud Task Force, I naturally assumed that their job was going to be to commit corporate fraud. I don't think anyone should be shocked to learn that the person picked to head the 'taskforce' was essentially a white-collar loan shark. He was a director of a company that was forced to pay back $405 million to customers it defrauded.

Baby Names

The list of the top 1000 baby names in America in 2001. It's almost like some parents set out to get their kids beaten up with some of the names they give them. (via Metafilter)

Childhood Memories

The Law of the Playground. An encyclopedia of childhood situations. (via Metafilter)

rage, the
Only certain children are capable of achieving the rage. It is the state where you are empowered by two silver lines of snot running from your nose to your mouth. Once this bionic power feed is broken, the child will lose their powers and become sullen, sorry, and somewhat confused at the chaos that surrounds them.

telling
If you see some geniune badness, and you are very young or naive, then your mouth will drop open, your eyes widen, and the only word you will be able to summon is a breathless "tell-ing". Then you will run in a random direction until you hit something.

Spellchecker

I've noticed that checking the referer logs is a good way to find typos I've missed because people make those same mistakes when searching and they end up here.

Get off your ass and jam

I had the good fortune of seeing Psychedelic Breakfast, a jam band out of Connecticut, cut loose the other day. These guys are the real deal. If I could play guitar like that, I would never leave the house. All the members are talented but they need to work on their songwriting and on finding their own identity.

At the show, I ran into the host of the excellent jam rock radio show The Music Never Stops. He claimed that The Doors were going to reunite soon but didn't know who would be fronting the band. The obvious choice is Val Kilmer of course.

Cartoony Goodness

Homestar Runner is a cute cartoon site that appears on Fark regularly. It takes some time to grow on you but some of the cartoons are really funny.

Eco Gringo

A long and well written article about an American multimillionare going down to South America to buy huge tracts of land and turn them into national parks.

The Tompkinses' sojourn in this place, it seems to me, resembles an Enlightenment project, something that a progressive landlord might have instituted in a remote part of eighteenth-century England or nineteenth-century Russia. It's like visiting Tolstoy at his estate at Yasnaya Polyana in the 1860s: agricultural innovation, rational resource management, and social improvement are the order of the day. Undeveloped, sparsely populated land has made it possible for Tompkins to do, for the most part, just what he wants here. There are not many countries with the same combination of political stability, unexploited natural resources, and an open economy.

Brilliant Satire

Updating old propaganda posters for our times. (via BB)

Free gold

Looks like those crazies over at GATA may not be so crazy after all. They seem to be collecting some credible evidence that the price of gold has been manipulated to stay low. (via RMN)

The gold bugs got a boost at the weekend. An investment letter by John Embry, a money manager with the Royal Bank of Canada, appeared to back the central argument of conspiracy theorists who for more than three years have been crowing about the co-ordinated attempt to keep the yellow metal low.

According to the theory, the United States Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, a consortium of Wall Street banks headed by JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, and others ganged together in the mid- 1990s to keep the price of gold at less than US$290 an ounce.

Mystery Men

The strange story of five people videotaping the World Trade Center on September 11th and laughing about it. (via RMN)