…by Roger Ebert. This one for Doom. Very funny.

NYT writer Ian Urbina has written a new book about people fighting back against life’s little annoyances, called Life’s Little Annoyances. He’s also got a blog to go along with it. Do people who get in your way in grocery aisles frustrate you? Sneak some super expensive, tiny product into their shopping cart, like vitamins. Been hit with a bill that you don’t feel you should have to pay? Pay it in pennies. From his blog:

It is a compendium of human inventiveness, by turns juvenile and petty, but in other ways inspired and deeply satisfying. We meet the junk-mail recipient who sends back unwanted “business reply” envelopes weighted down with sheet metal, so the mailers will have to pay the postage. We commiserate with the woman who was fed up with the colleague who kept helping himself to her lunch cookies, so she replaced them with dog biscuits that looked like biscotti. And we revel in the seemingly endless number of tactics people use to vent their anger at telemarketers, loud cellphone talkers, spammers, and others who impose themselves on us.



A celebration of the endless variety of passive aggressive behavior, Life’s Little Annoyances will provide comfort and inspiration to everyone who has ever gritted his teeth and dreamed of sweet retribution against the slings and arrows of outrageous people.

Good gift idea for people who have an overdeveloped appreciation of vengeance (ex. Crabby).

These macabre suicide bath plugs are shaped like little men, chained to your bath-plug and float upside-down with the plug chain around their necks.

Who is their target market?

Do Ho Suh is a Korean artist who recreated his entire childhood home in full-scale, including fixtures and furniture, out of semi-transparent fabric. The whole thing can be packed away in large suitcase.

If you build it they will come. Hot on the heels of the video iPod release comes a new site called POVpod (definitely NSFW). It delivers point-of-view porn movies to play on your video iPod. Their instructions are simple:

• Step 1 Download our Videos to your iPod through itunes 6
• Step 2 Hold iPod at crotch level
• Step 3 Watch our point-of-view (POV) video and feel like you’re there!

I’m counting the days until I see someone on the T with this.

From Slashdot:
A research team led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently broke the code behind tiny tracking dots that some color laser printers secretly hide in every document. The U.S. Secret Service admitted that the tracking information is part of a deal struck with selected color laser printer manufacturers, ostensibly to identify counterfeiters. However, the nature of the private information encoded in each document was not previously known. “We’ve found that the dots from at least one line of printers encode the date and time your document was printed, as well as the serial number of the printer,” said EFF Staff Technologist Seth David Schoen.

Story here.

From Gizmodo:

It seems as though the European electronics job market is a little weak. Mike Minton, an electronics engineer turned entrepreneur has made a nice little invention to assist him in creating toast soldiers. What the hell is a toast soldier you ask? It’s okay I had to research it too, a toast soldier is a slab of toast that is dunked into a soft-boiled egg. Minton was sick of the time consuming process of manually cutting the toast. Minton’s perfect soldier cutter cuts each piece of toast into 22mm even width strips of toasted goodness. Look for Sony’s knock-off ToastMan with proprietary ToastItUpGood technology.

Sadly, this is the most significant culinary contribution to the world that England has made since they first let foreign nationals open their own restaurants.