Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Foreign Accent Syndrome

Yeah, I know, it's been a while. But I've been really, really busy. New episodes of Breaking Bad are airing!

This was a half-baked idea I had bouncing around in my head for a long time and kind of forgot about it, and then I saw the story of the British woman suddenly talking with a Chinese accent and it came back to me. Enjoy.



Update: I found video of the lady in the news story. She's not talking in a Chinese accent any more; now it's sort of generic European.

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Touchless Soap Dispenser

This seems to be a totally different subject, but it could be considered a sequel to last week's health care reform episode, which for some reason is getting 10x the normal number of YouTube views.



Don't get me wrong. I'm not a socialist, at least not all the time. Free-market capitalism is great for some things. If it weren't for free-market capitalism, we'd all still be toting around Commodore SX64s. Here's what that looks like:

I used to use a box like that to program multimedia shows. (I'm really old.) That open bay is for a second $400 170 KB floppy drive, which was handy for making back-up floppies. But I digress.

I'm glad capitalism drives so much innovation and creativity, most of the time. But when it comes to my health insurance, I'm not sure a corporate entity whose primary objective is maximizing ROI for the investment community has my best interests at heart. There it seems all the innovation and creativity goes into finding new ways to screw us.

Here's one of those nifty soap dispensers. Only thirty bucks (batteries not included). Note the handy built-in tray for catching the inevitable dribbles due to lack of hand/motion-sensor coordination.