Waiter, what is this fly doing in my soup? It would appear to be the backstroke, sir.

Ever noticed how similar a completely docile and nonvenomous insect looks to the vicious, would eat-your-face-as-soon-as-look-at-you, cousin of said harmless insect? Is that a nonvenomous Tarantula that just wants to hang out or a crazed Brazilian Wandering spider that picks fights with animals 100x bigger than it for fun?

If you're the kind of guy who doesn't bother killing the bug scaring your girlfriend/wife with a newspaper, but picks up the little guy and ushers him outside, this is the site for you. Because (1) it is nice to know that that 'little guy' isn't going to inject you with neurotoxin and turn you into a drooling idiot, and (2) the experts from WTB? don't really appreciate the unnecessary killing of insects, and if they found out you were whacking the little buggers semi-professionally they might not be completely honest with you if you ever ask, "is this thing crawling on my arm venomous?"

No. It is most definitely not going to bite you and require the doctors to wake you up from the coma to tell you that they had to amputate your arm, your face is permanently swelled up to that size, and your pubes have all fallen out.

What's that bug? (whatsthatbug.com)

I Believe In Evolution, Except For The Whole Triassic Period.

This much is clear to anyone with any background in modern thinking. We can look at the fossil record and trace many of our genetic traits back to ancient species. In fact, scientific reasoning can explain nearly every stage of life from the Big Bang to the present day. I say "nearly" because the period that scientists claim lasted from roughly 205 to 250 million years ago, commonly known as the Triassic period, was quite obviously the work of the Lord God Almighty.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not one of those religious nut cases who denies that evolution is real. Of course evolution is real, just not during the "Triassic period.

For a half-dozen million years, life advanced from prokaryotes to primitive fish to mammal-like reptiles via natural selection, and we're supposed to believe that that just continued happening? I don't think so. Isn't it much more likely that a formless, invisible deity intervened, temporarily stopped the course of evolution, and shaped each and every trilobite over a period of six days? Of course it is, at least to any objective observer.

So, if you follow my reasoning to its logical end, the only sound conclusion is that, at some point, God paused evolution and stepped in, made a few modifications, and boom! Pterosaurs.

I Believe In Evolution, Except For The Whole Triassic Period. (The Onion)

Of the seven dwarves, only Dopey had a shaven face.

Ever since prehistoric man first scraped a seashell across his cheek so prehistoric woman would let him dance cheek-to-cheek, shaving has been a part of the male experience. But even with today’s high-tech razors, lots of men still get nicks, cuts, and razor burn.

The perfect shave has three ingredients: a good razor, a good brush, and glycerin-based shaving cream. But the biggest difference between wetshaving and the way most guys shave today is the use of a shaving brush. A good badger-hair shaving brush is the single most important ingredient in getting the perfect shave -- if you change no part of your shaving routine except to add a good shaving brush to the mix, you’ll be astounded at how much better and more enjoyable your shaves become.

How to get that perfect shave. (MSNBC)

The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.

Anyone who has ever spent time in an office can appreciate this...and garner a little inspiration from it as well.


Cubicle War 2006. (Barats and Bereta)

Imagine if Tetris got drunk, knocked up Connect Four, and then ran out on her.

The bastard child from this relationship would be Blocky. This simple yet addictive and challenging game can get intense at times, but is fun and a classic time-waster. (Tip: play the game on mute for a more enjoyable experience.)

The Smilies are feeling blocked in and sad! Help them escape – and make them giggle – by clicking and dragging a rectangle with four like-colored corners. The larger the rectangle, the more Smilies you release. Turn a frown upside down with this fast-paced puzzle game.

Blocky. (Shockwave)

The secrets of the firefox. Have you ever seen it live, in its natural habitat? Now you can.

The most recent statistics seem to indicate that Firefox has reached a 15% market share in the browser battle. Now that may not seem like much, but considering the hold that IE had until the emergence of Firefox, it is quite amazing. The ability to customize the browser with add-ons has contributed greatly to its growth, but there is another customizable feature that far too many people are unaware of - about;config. Below you'll find some of the well known and not so well know tweaks/hacks that will improve your browsing experience

Type about:config in the address bar and press Enter, and you'll see all the settings currently enumerated in prefs.js, listed in alphabetical order. To narrow down the hundreds of configuration preferences to just the few you need, type a search term into the Filter: bar. (Click the Show All button or just clear the Filter: bar to get the full list back again.)

To edit a preference, double-click on the name and you'll be prompted for the new value. If you double-click on an entry that has a Boolean value, it'll just switch from true to false or vice versa; double-click again to revert to the original setting. Not all changes take effect immediately, so if you want to be absolutely certain a given change is in effect, be sure to close and reopen Firefox after making a change.

Hacking Firefox: The Secrets of about:config. (Computerworld)

Too bad Will ain't partying with Drama and Hef at the Playboy Mansion these days.

No More Kings: "Sweep the Leg" (sweeptheleg.com)

He saved Teri Hatcher with a rubber band when she was desperate, but not yet a housewife.

Give him a shoelace, a piece of bubblegum, a broken toothpick, a fish hook, and an empty matchbook and the next thing you know he'll be traveling to other worlds using wormholes and saving their moderately attractive 80s glam-haired women.

All Macgyver ever needs. (Neatorama)

Delta, Echo, Alpha, Foxtrot. Mike, Oscar, Romeo, Oscar, November.

People who are hard of hearing. A bad telephone or cellular connection. The person on the other end of the line is a flippin' moron. These are all reasons why when you rattle off a series of letters over the phone to spell a word no one ever seems to understand no matter how well you enunciate.

To solve this issue people use a phonetic alphabet (of sorts) to aid in conveying the information accurately. However, there isn't really a standard version of this being used by the general population. A phone call or exchange without phonetics usually turns into a game of Pictionary with one person shouting out random words that look nothing like what is actually being drawn.

How the hell did you get 'Spruce Goose' from that? It's a damn lawnmower! See, there is the motor and the handle. That? That is the grass being cut. What do you mean the grass looks like people? I don't see any arms and legs on the grass, do you? Have you been smoking grass, woman? Because you have to be high to think that was a damn plane. Yes I will be comfortable sleeping on the couch tonight, thank you!

Example: you are forced to spell your name out because the person on the other end can't get it right (moron). Hedey...I mean Hedley Lamarr turns into "Howard, eagle, domino, lettuce, easy, yellow. Loquacious, anteater, Mike, apple, Ringo, rutabaga". Sure, that makes sense in the flame engulfed asylum that is your head, but the other guy is probably a wee bit freaked out and very confused.

NATO has a phonetic alphabet that has been in use since 1956 that was designed for this purpose. The next time you're required to spell out a word over the phone try using the designations provided in this list. This way your friend will have his name spelled correctly on his trial issue of that magazine with the opaque wrapping on it - so there is no confusion when his wife grabs the mail.

NATO phonetic alphabet. (Wikipedia)

The biggest MELFF ever could be right next door. Where is your telescope when you need it?

Even by astronomical standards, Roger Angel thinks big. Angel, a leading astronomer at the University of Arizona, is proposing an enormous liquid-mirror telescope on the moon that could be hundreds of times more sensitive than the Hubble Space Telescope. Using a rotating dish of reflective liquid as its primary mirror, Angel's telescope would the largest ever built, and would permit astronomers to study the oldest and most distant objects in the universe, including the very first stars.

Angel dreams of a 100-meter mirror, which would be larger than two side-by-side football fields and would collect 1,736 times more light than the Hubble. Even a 20-meter instrument, which is more likely in the near term, would be 70 times more sensitive than the Hubble and could detect objects 100 times fainter than those that will be seen with the James Webb Space Telescope, a next-generation orbiting observatory scheduled for launch in 2013.

There are many advantages to building a deep-space telescope on the moon. A lunar LMT would be free from the atmospheric distortion that afflicts terrestrial telescopes of all kinds, and from the self-generated winds that produce troublesome waves in the largest earth-based LMTs. The light from the universe's most distant stars is intensely red-shifted, and the airless lunar deep-freeze would be ideal for infrared observation – as would a liquid mirror: While they perform as well as conventional mirrors at visible wavelengths, liquid mirrors do even better in the infrared.

Alas, the same low temperatures that would facilitate infrared observation would also turn mercury, the liquid used in terrestrial LMTs, into a solid. So the greatest technical challenge for Angel's team lies in finding reflective liquids with low freezing points and vapor pressures – liquids that would neither freeze nor evaporate into space. That task fell to Ermanno Borra, a physicist and liquid-mirror pioneer at Laval University in Quebec who first made the case for a lunar LMT in 1991. Recently, Borra has been experimenting with metal liquid-like films, or MELFFs, that reflect light as effectively as aluminum.

A plan to build a giant liquid telescope on the moon. (Wired)

Tip #1: Avoid disposable cameras held vertically.

My first love in photography when I first got my trusty old Minolta SLR as a teenager was landscapes. There’s something about getting out in nature with the challenge of capturing some of the amazing beauty that you see. Perhaps it fits with my personality type - but I loved the quietness and stillness of waiting for the perfect moment for the shot, scoping out an area for the best vantage point and then seeing the way that the light changed a scene over a few hours.

While I don’t get as much time as I’d like for landscape photography these days - I thought I’d jot down a few of the lessons that I learned in my early years of doing it.

Eleven tips for improving your landscape photography. (Digital Photography School)

Bob Sagat is still accepting funny home videos, even though the show is not on anymore.

America loves to shoot home movies of the non-Pam and Tommy Lee variety...and, lets be honest, of the Pam and Tommy Lee variety. Most computer systems and video cameras come with bundled software that may or may not suck. While I'm not the biggest Mac fan, they do include some very nice multimedia applications with their systems. However, if you're more than a once-in-a-while-to-resurrect-my-career kind of videographer, there are some excellent applications out there for you across all of the major operating systems (Windows, Mac, Linux).

If you're internet savvy you'll read the comments section below the list and find a few more worth checking out.

Free video editing software for all platforms. (tv.isg.si)

Good thing Minnesota is not seismically active.

Kinetic art movement device utilizing Tim Fort's extensive repertoire of impulse-transmission techniques, created with the magic of montage and incorporating a medley of sundry props, and constructed in the city of New York Mills, MN in August of 2005 #1

NYM Project Video. (revver)

Maual labor that was actually fun depending on the strength of the Yuan (¥).

Who among us didn't set out to dig to China when we were young? The bad news is that unless you grew up in Chile or Argentina you didn't stand a chance of actually ending up in China. Actually most of America's children would have drowned upon completing their task as they would have emerged in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Bummer.

Still, it is pretty cool that you can zoom in to the point that you can see your own back yard and find our where your epic project would have taken you. Once you've cleaned up after your big dig, try going for a walk.

Are you concerned about where you go to arrive if you dig a very deep straight infinite hole on Earth? Your problems are solved! Surf on the map, choose where you will dig your hole and click there. After this, click on "Dig here!" and you will see the place where, one day, you will (believe me) put your feet.

If I dig a very deep hole, where will I end up? (Tall Eye)

Now if Google could just tie my shoes for me.

Just replace "band" (keep the quotation marks) with a band or song of your choosing. We at TIBTP are not responsible for what you do once you have located Tiffany's I Think We're Alone Now.

Find songs and a full albums online. (Google)