(via tdw)
Star Trek pizza cutter makes me drool in two separate ways
It’s the NCC-1701. But it’s a pizza cutter. It’s like geek Nirvana. For a certain kind of geek.
It’s $25 from Thinkgeek, which is on the reasonable side for a piece of cool Star Trek-ery. But is pretty darn expensive for a pizza cutter.
I mean, really, how often do you use that tool? Not when you order, because restaurant pizza comes presliced.
And if you really need to cut up a home-made pizza, my suggestion is to use that pair of kitchen scissors that is sitting in your knife block. Seriously — way easier than a pizza cutter.
But you should still buy this for the kitsch.
Zombies, the final frontier
It’s like Inception-level deep mashing-up-ness: This is a trailer for a book about a zombie attack at a Star Trek convention.
And it looks awesome. I know The Walking Dead starts at Halloween, but wouldn’t it be great to also have this as a series?
A Cuban-Irish pub, in the heart of Prague
As my parents gear up for a month in central and eastern Europe, they’ve been perusing a number of guidebooks. One of them, for the Czech Republic, said it listed the Top 10 pubs in Prague.
Intrigued, I flipped to the indicated page, and at No. 6 or so, burst out laughing.
O’Che’s, they said, was a Cuban-Irish pub. The combination was just delicious enough and just absurd enough to really appeal to me.
I Googled it — it’s real — they’ve even got a Facebook page.
Apparently, they are also known for their extensive sports coverage, their darts league, and their Thursday cocktail specials.
Guinness meets Guevara? Count me in.
Superimpose history over the modern world
The BBC has had a site built that allows you to superimpose things and places and events on top of other places (via Google Maps).
Here’s Victorian London, for example, superimposed over Brandon, Manitoba:
Head to How Big Really to see more — lots more.
It’s not limited to the obvious, either. They include modern markers like the War on Terror — what if the WTC twin towers were in your neighbourhood, for example? — and ongoing natural disasters like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or the Pakistani flooding.
Very cool mashup. Well done, BBC, and design consultancy BERG.
Use your Nikon lenses on your Canon camera
For some technical reason, it cannot work the other way around, but if you’re a Nikon user from way back who would love to try out a Canon body but are stuck with a gajillion dollars in pricey Nikon-only lenses, you can now buy a $300 adapter that will fit F-mount lenses on EOS-bodies.
The adapter, by Novoflex, even preserves your ability to set the aperture, which is cool.
Read more about it at Wired or at Photography Bay.
Jane Austen’s ‘Fight Club’
If this is truly made by a bunch of Mormon girls in Los Angeles, as they say on Boing Boing, that only makes it funny on a third or a fourth level. I wish this trailer had included a little bit about the identity-swapping or the anti-capitalism of the book and (original) movie, but it’s pretty downright great as it is.
The envelope, please
When was the last time you wrote a letter — not an email, but an actual, physical, pen-on-paper (I would also accept “typewritten”) letter. And then put in an envelope. And then licked a stamp and mailed it.
Ha! Got you! You don’t even have to lick stamps any more, you just peel them like stickers!
Anyway, aside from bills, paystubs and junk mail, I can’t recall the last letter I even received, let alone sent. Oh! Christmas cards!
But if I ever do send a letter just for fun again, I think I’ve found my envelopes:
Go to MapEnvelope.com, and enter your address, along with a brief message, if you like. Because this will be on the inside of the envelope, it’s probably best to use your return address. The website itself helpfully suggests a different tourist attraction (Honolulu, the Statue of Liberty) every time you refresh the page, and if you happen to be vacationing with a colour printer, that’d be swell.
Because, the next step is to print off the map, which comes as a template that you cut out and fold up. Tape it together, and you’ve got yourself an envelope!
(I suppose if you did it inside-out, you could have the address on the outside, but it’d be a very busy-looking envelope.)
Because there’s no glue to lick, this envelope will have to be taped closed, too, which makes it more likely that people will open it using the flap, and therefore will actually see the address.
Cool idea!
Bad-ass Muppets
In the vein of Grant’s mash-up from the other day, I offer you a scene from a Muppet movie, shortly before things turn violent:
What our kids should be learning from Sesame Street
I love mash-up culture. This was posted first on Facebook by Wynston, and I’ve pinched it for my blog, because I’d rather get the hits.
I think I might love mash-ups because I love the sensation of cognitive dissonance. It’s essential to many forms of humour, and it’s something that truly makes us human.
Aside from the obviousness of children’s show characters being set to gangsta rap, there is a much subtler — and subversive — cognitive dissonance here.
Just think: when was the last time you saw a rap video featuring gay main characters? (I mean, in a positive way.)