Yesterday was a big day for those of you (us) who notice and cringe at signs with extra or missing apostrophes. If people suggest that makes you a nitpicker, tell them you have nothing on former newspaperman Jeff Rubin, the founder of National Punctuation Day. Jeff started it as a “celebration of the lowly comma, [...]
Tag Archives: General nonsense
Secrets & six strings
Here are some interesting items I came across this week: PostSecret.com: Frank Warren started PostSecret.com as a community art project. Since November 2004, he has received more than 150,000 postcards, each sent anonymously and containing that person’s secret. The web site receives more than six million visitors a month, viewing the shocking, soulful and laugh-out-loud [...]
Guilty pleasures
It has rained here most of the day, so what better time to share some of the web sites that never fail to bring a smile: I can Has Cheezbuger, or LOL cats. Talk about creative writing! The silly captions to crazy pictures of cats (and occasionally other small pets) often make me laugh out [...]
Truly awful writing
Everyone can write, can’t they? But it takes real skill to come up with truly awful writing, like that celebrated by the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. This is almost as much fun as the Oddest Book Title of the Year contest. But instead of just finding existing examples — in this case, that fit the [...]
Twitter signs He’s Just Not That Into You
In the movie, “He’s Just Not That Into You” (seen on the plane on the way home from San Francisco), Drew Barrymore’s character laments the sorry state of communication with the opposite sex: “I had this guy leave me a voicemail at work, so I called him at home, and then he emailed me to [...]
More odd book titles
This is such a great contest: The Diagram Prize‘s Oddest Book Title of the Year. Its 2009 winner is The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-miligram Containers of Fromage Frais. I’m sure you are wondering, how could that possibly have beat out Baboon Metaphysics (#2) and Curbside Consultation of the Colon (#3)? Such is the nature [...]
Dream toys
Happy birthday to Barbie, who turned 50 today. Talk about a toy with legs! Whether 50 is the new 40 or 50 is the new 30, she sure looks good. And she’s got all kinds of “dream” things — dream bedroom, dream dining room, dream kitchen, dream game room and more, much of it pink, [...]
Test your Scrabble power
Here’s a new way to waste time practice your Scrabble(R) skills: Scrabble Zone, found at Merriam-Webster Online. You don’t actually connect the words the way you do on a Scrabble board, just make a word as fast as possible with the tiles given. Premium squares show up in random spots to challenge your skills. The [...]
Glory file as a word cloud
They’re everywhere these days: illustrating a newspaper article, highlighting a book’s content, offering a glimpse into a web site. Word clouds are great visual signals for what’s inside. Make your own with Wordle, a fun toy created by Jonathan Feinberg at IBM Research. Wordle generates word clouds, either from text you’ve cut and pasted or [...]
More fun words
Some interesting words I’ve run across lately: Wrapsimonious: “Joe recycles nothing, so when he carefully removes the paper from his gift, he’s just being wrapsimonious so he won’t have to purchase any.” (From Verbotomy) Clickstream: The path taken through a web site. Thinute: “A brief minute when I was two pounds thinner than usual.” (From [...]