Wendell.Me

• No Title

  The news about the breakup of reality-TV-made celebrities Jon and Kate was accompanied by notification that their show “Jon and Kate Plus Eight” would be going on hiatus – for one month, returning in August. My personal reaction was WHY?!? and WTF?!? and other things starting with W, but apparently, the serial adopters are under contract for 34 more episodes before the TLC channel will allow them to fade away into much-deserved obscurity. The damage this does to the “everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes” truism is shocking, but it also raises an interesting possibility to me… shouldn’t the…

• Not a Followup to Three Dog Night…

  …thankfully. Still, I was trying to ignore the meme-bomb that was the Three Wolf Moon t-shirt, until I was going through my collection of shirts (not so much a collection as evidence of a severe addiction that I have recently gotten over cold turkey; I really should apologize to the t-shirt sellerspushers for doing some serious damage to their business model) and I found my Space Wolf shirt. —>

  Obviously, some explanation is needed for this. Yes, that is a dead wolf floating in space, because wolves don’t thrive in a near-vacuum any more than you or I would. But more importantly, this…

• I Said Allen, Not Alien

  Design geek and brilliant self-promoter Pete Dungey just completed a project where he did a ’survey’ to find the best-known people named Alan or Allen, and printed the top names on Allen Wrenches (or Alan Keys as they’re called in the UK, I guess). Brilliant! And if you’re a non-UKian who’s wondering who the funny-named #1 is: Ground Force!

  And after I posted this to MetaFilter, I started wondering to myself which Alans and Allens would earn wrenches in a USAian survey. Well, I went to the search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Bing) and got the first few people names that came up…

• Re: Source

  I was working on one of my Databases Of Trivial Stuff (DOTS), figuring out data types and their relationships as apply to Oxymorons or Murphy’s Laws or Tom Swifties and I was talking out loud to myself (which, since I was working alone, nobody would care about, notice or even know of if I didn’t blog about it).

  “I need to differentiate between my Research Source and the Original Source.
  Call it Origin?
  I’d rather use Source, but they can’t both be “Source”…
  Source…
  Source…
  Source?
  Of course!
  Go right to the source and ask the horse!
  He’ll give you the answer that you’ll endorse!
  He’s always on a…

• Today’s Naughty Joke Challenge

  …comes from the usually only slightly naughty Octopus Pie webcomic where, while creator Meredith Gran makes a cross-country migration (that will NOT be reflected in her Brooklyn-based comic, at least not at once), she has allowed far-naughtier webcomicker Erika Moen (not usually SFW) to do a guest comic in which she provided a collection of “verb out with your noun outs” as declared by the various Octopus Pie characters.

  I like the casual style of “hang out with your wang out”, the proud un-coolness of “nerd out with your bird out” and “geek out with your cheeks out” and the age-appropriate “lie down with your…

• Typer Stickers

  Speaking of Bumper Stickers, the late semi-great site EyeWire.com (since fully absorbed into the commercial site Fonts.com), did a feature once in which it presented a number of “Typographically Topical” Bumper Stickers (saved for posterity by archive.org). Of course, these “sticker” designs are not terribly good for placing on cars, nor for adorning web pages like the Internet Bumper Stickers (unless your site is typography-themed… as one I am now developing will be). Still, they offer some entertaining in-jokes for the type-obsessed, and since the viewing interface within the archive site is kind of … how shall I put it?…

• Re: Things

  “This is why we can’t have nice things.”

  It’s an oft-repeated cliché on the Web, especially at MetaFilter, where many members worry about whether they actually deserve “nice things”. Honestly, I find “nice things” are somewhat overrated (and I’m looking at you, Apple). I have an adequate supply of adequate things that do what I want them to do… adequately. Of course, one of the things that my adequate things do is to help me make things… and if I’m doing a really good job, the things I make are “nice” and nobody better tell ME they’re overrated. Because the difference…

• Hut One, Hut Two

  In what has to be the biggest mistake in a ‘minor’ rebranding since the SciFi announced it was becoming the SyFy,
  the folks at Yum! Brands (the ! is part of the company name), the same people who have been trying to make you forget that KFC stands for Kentucky Fried Chicken for over a decade, is now bringing you “The Hut”.
  
  Yes, it’s Pizza Hut, but no, they’re not changing everything as they are reassuring the world in a hastily-written press release…

  Pizza Hut Name To Stay The Same
  Company Issues Statement Addressing Its Brand

  Dallas, TX (June 20, 2009) — “Pizza Hut is not changing…

• Bumper Schtick

  First, a note about my last post: the last line about not having slept for 88 hours was a JOKE, but soon after I wrote it, I fell asleep and slept, with minimal interruption, for over 14 hours, waking with memories of bits of three separate dreams, and what I remembered was NOT scenery, NOT architecture. Let’s just say I finally made the team in one, got the robot working in another, and saved a TV series in another. It’s true what they say about bloggers, we really do write for ourselves, and this time it really helped. But you…

• Sleep. That’s Where I’m An Architect

  The following may be the strangest and most self-indulgent 900 words that I have ever strung together. It’s about dreams and weird places and BBC TV. Do not click the “more” link unless you are very open-minded (or if you came to this page via a direct link, DON’T LOOK DOWN).
  

  I don’t have what you call “vivid” dreams, just tiring ones. Because I am almost constantly moving around, usually by foot, in these dreams. And, unfortunately for my desires to become a writer of fabulous stories, my dreams usually have little in the way of plot or characters, but the…