Silly Site o' the Day

Happy Manhattanhenge! Considering this cold, I don't think I'll want to be sticking around Manhattan until 8:17 PM just to see the sun set smack in the middle of 57th Street, but fellow New Yorkers' mileage may vary. Just make sure there aren't any cars coming at you when you venture into the middle of the streets to witness the sunset. Particularly cars with lashes. Because tertiary sexual characteristics aren't just for cartoon characters any more!

On This Day

I shan't wish anyone a Happy Memorial Day 'cause that phrasing is kind of weird, and besides, in my mind this is supposed to be one of those days set aside to ponder and reaffirm the utter futility of war, not to celebrate the willingness of young vital men and women to become human cannon fodder.

Silly Site o' the Day

A stuffy head indicative of a nasty little summer cold has ensured that I'm up in the wee hours, trying to catch up on blog reading so perhaps I can finally do a blogaround. Don't count on it. Of course, catching up has its good points, like the Silly Sites I'm able to pass on. This one in particular appealed to me and, I hope, to Robin:



Via The Mary Sue.

Silly Site o' the Day

Today was just about the laziest day I've had in awhile, including an inordinate amount of sleeping until the basement neighbors' outdoor party woke us up and drove me to the other end of the house. But I've gotten through a good deal of blog-reading, and hope to be all caught up by month's end. In the meantime, since I don't have to think about work until Tuesday, I can enjoy the winners of the Worst PowerPoint Slide Contest (via BoingBoing.)

Silly Site o' the Day

Just for Robin, with whom I'm pleased to be spending the next three days alone together, I present this drawn video:



Via BoingBoing. As Rob is fond of saying, we're true adherents to the idea that dark matter is probably hogwash and pretty much "something that scientists use to make their sums add up." Your mileage may, of course, vary.

Silly Site o' the Day

Oh, that's right, I have a blog! With new daily content, if Blogger's working! Erm, let's see now... Mom seems to like the artistically-inclined ones, so how about the Guggenhead Collection of Awfully Modern Art (via Mark Evanier)?

Silly Site o' the Day

A number of my coworkers like the smartphone app called Words with Friends, a Scrabble-esque program that often confuses me with what they do and don't accept as words. I think I'm going to start looking up some of the entries that pass muster using Is This A Word (via Wonder Tonic), although if I get a "no" answer I'm unsure of where I'd lodge complaints that they're letting through letter combinations that aren't words...

Silly Site o' the Day

I finally lucked out and found my bosses out of the office during an absolutely spectacular lunch hour weather-wise, so I spent the hour in Central Park just chilling. I love that I work where I can do that! Much prettiness. Almost as pretty as these creased paper illustrations by Simon Schubert (via BoingBoing).

Silly Site o' the Day

Our downloads have been very slow of late, so I haven't seen this whole thing yet, but what I've been able to view has looked pretty cool:

Alimation - Annecy Festival 2011 from Alexandre DUBOSC on Vimeo.

Very tasty! Via BoingBoing.

Silly Site o' the Day

And now, the patron saints of silliness, the Muppets:



Via The Mary Sue. I can hardly wait for the movie!

Silly Site o' the Day

Well, the latest fake Rapture came and went, affecting a small minority of idiots and providing mirth to millions and garnering huge unearned publicity for its crazy-like-a-fox rich radio host instigator. So what's next? An actual government agency is all ready. Presenting the real Centers for Disease Prevention's real Assistant Surgeon General's real blog post about preparedness for the zombie apocalypse. Really.

Silly Site o' the Day

Are you ready for the Rapture? "No, give us five more minutes!" Here's how Matthew Inman interprets the Creator dealing with managing today's program. Apparently the Blue Screen of Death has occurred somewhere but not on Earth, as the day's in full swing in Europe and so forth. So I guess I'd best get to that ironing after all. As for Robin, he just likes the sound of "Dispensationalist Pre-Millennialist."

Silly Site o' the Day

A very strange day, which began with our office's servers going completely kaput, meaning no phone or computer use, meaning we all went home early (by the time they were fixed there was no point to returning, as we have early Friday departures in the summer), which meant I could get errands done and take my husband out to lunch, and it turned out to be a nice relaxing start to a 3-day weekend. Robin's still hinting at wanting to see Thor, though. Have fun, Rob! Speaking of which, let's celebrate by seeing conceptual art for this summer's movies done Lego-style. Via The Mary Sue.

Silly Site o' the Day

June is just around the corner, which means Pride Month. Of course, that could be a bit tricky in places like Tennessee. George Takei to the rescue!



Buy the merch too! Via Carolyn Ibis in Facebook.

Silly Site o' the Day

More book-larnin' stuff! Good Show Sir provides classy (and amusing) commentary on schlocky genre book covers. Via Kalinara.

Silly Site o' the Day

Continuing with our literary theme, and inadvertently timely due to current political gossip, lots of folks have helped out the folks behind the Shakespeare-inspired Terminator the Second, so it would appear to be a go. Via The Mary Sue.

Silly Site o' the Day

Glad to see a woman-written and -starring comedy (albeit one produced by Judd Apatow0 did so well in the box office this past weekend. Perhaps we can now show a bit more slack to On The Bro'd (via Mike Lacher), which I'm actually curious to read, and believe Kerouac and his ilk might have gotten a kick out of.

Silly Site o' the Day

Good morning! Okay, rainy morning, and rainy all day (at least Yankee fans can hope so, considering the way the team's been playing of late), but we don't care, we're off to attend my young cousin Daniel's Diabetes Strike Party this afternoon, at which we hope to see lots of relatives. I'll miss seeing Mom, who lives a bit too far to make the journey alone, and who never seems to get my Silly Sites anyway, so here's another one she won't get for tons of reasons (she can't load videos in the Land of Dial-Up, she has no interest in smartphone games, etc.) It's a duo called Pomplamoose (what a great name for a band!) playing the Angry Birds theme:



My husband finds me the coolest videos. Here's another, an ad T-Mobile claims was "a congratulatory message to William and Kate":



They got a few good ringers in there.

Silly Site o' the Day

Just look at these Chinese fruit pit carvings (via My Food Looks Funny). I mean, just look at them. Wow.

Silly Site o' the Last Two Days

Via BoingBoing and pretty much everywhere else, I'd better run this page from the Galactic Empire Times before people no longer get the parody.

Friday Cat Blogging*

Are we back yet? Ah well, it's all so ephemeral, this Cloud universe, I can't get all worked up when one cloud produces a little rain, particularly right around Friday the 13th. Nothing stays static. I'm even reconsidering alternatives to Flickr now that they've announced that their free version will only include the most recent 200 photos you've taken (and I'm almost at that limit), kind of like the text-message version of an actual photo album. So pretty soon lots of photos accompanying older Pen-Elayne posts might go bye-byes, and I'm investigating other ways to publish photos, such as my MobileMe gallery, where I put today's FCB photos. And of course, speaking of Friday the 13th, I needed some photos of my black cat:







Of course, heaven forfend Amy not have her photo taken as well:



*(Friday Cat Blogging is ™ Kevin Drum)

Silly Site o' the Day

Well, it's been awhile since I've run an episode of "I'm a Marvel, and I'm a DC," and with the summer movie season upon us this one seems appropriate:



Via The Mary Sue.

Silly Site o' the Day

Behold, the subway map of modern science! Via Arthur.

Silly Site o' the Day

Via Robin and College Humor, here are some sci-fi Ikea manuals. Rob's favorite:



Because, let's face it, fezzes are cool.

Silly Site o' the Day

With Rob needing to work in the computer room this weekend, I moved the ironing board and such out into the living room. So today I could either iron and catch up with my DVR'ed shows, or try to catch up on my blog reading. Ironing won, and I have no regrets. But I do have wearable blouses now! Now, back to the TV. I wonder what's on?



Via Mark Evanier.

Silly Site o' the Day

Happy Free Comic Book Day! We will be having a very low-key celebration at the Riggs Residence, with Robin working and me going down into the Land of Dial-Up along with my brother Jay to visit Mom. Have to do it today, the highways will be madness tomorrow on Mother's Day. So here are some comic book'y visuals, courtesy of The Mary Sue: Memorable moments in DC superhero comics as drawn with Peeps (I'd love to see them staged and photographed with actual Peeps), and this handy-dandy Bingo card on ComicVine that you may wish to take with you:



Have a great FCBD, everyone! Oh, and I understand there's a horse race today as well.

Silly Site o' the Day

A good day - slept a lot, did errands, even cooked, just about everything except for The Dreaded "I" Word. Even watched the first two episodes of the new Doctor Who season, at long last. My head hurts from all the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey. Speaking of wobbly, these don't look right, do they? Bless modern technology. Via BoingBoing.

Silly Site o' the Day

Via Robin, who got it from Leonard Kirk on Facebook, today is the day when many Americans get drunk celebrating what most Mexicans don't, but when Brits go to the polls - specifically to vote on the idea of proportional representation (which for some odd reason is being termed AV, not audiovisual but Alternative Voting, in much the same way nonsuperhero comics have been called Alternative even though they represent more mainstream genres). Here's what Stephen Fry has to say on AV:



And here's a video appealing to the LOLCat contingent:



It would be nice if Brits voted in proportional rep (honestly, compared with us I thought they already had it), and even nicer if it spread to this country.

Silly Site o' the Day

May the Fourth be with you - happy Star Wars Day!



Via The Awl.

Silly Site o' the Day

And now, a bit of culture. Via The Mary Sue, here are some lines of dialogue from the "reality" show Jersey Shore delivered in the style of Oscar Wilde:











From the wacky folks at Playbill Video, whose offerings will probably encourage a great deal of Broadway-bound traffic.

Silly Site o' the Day

My old friend Jill said it better than I ever could regarding the alleged killing of Osama bin Laden, so I'll just opine about the legacy of bin Laden's greatest success, terrorizing the American people (with the help of our cynical and greedy politicians) for the last decade and pretty much changing our way of life and bankrupting our economy, exactly as he'd bragged he'd do. How kind of Bush and now Obama to play right into that scheme. I long for the day when we're truly free of "our bastards," when wisdom again trumps fear as a governing policy. Until we can trust ourselves enough to act like grownups again, we're stuck with these clowns. It's a good time to post Gary Sassaman's color-coded alert list, at left.

Official Spring 2011 Blossom Post

These are all the spring photos I posted below plus the ones I took today at VE Macy Park in Ardsley. This is the first time I've uploaded a Flickr set of mine that's playable as a slide show (except if you're Mom in the Land of Dial-Up, of course). I tried to be somewhat amusing with the captions so I'd suggest, if you have the capacity, that you click the Play button and then the icon at lower right with the arrows to view it at full size, then turn on Show Info toward the upper right of the frame to read the captions and descriptions.



Thanks again to Robin, who happened to remark, "Say, did you know you can upload directly from iPhoto into Flickr?," making the creation of this set and slideshow that much easier.

Okay, You Found Me Out...

Yeah yeah, all that stuff below about being swamped with work and not being able to post Silly Sites, it was all a ruse. I was actually in England attending the Royal Wedding. For some reason Robin wasn't among the 1900 folks who received invitations, but he was kind enough to get a screen grab of me going into the church with my white umbrella and my lovely purple outfit:



Here's another screen grab, a closer shot, where I'm waving to the camera:



Seriously, this was one of the only times I've ever seen someone on the telly who pretty much looks exactly like me. If anyone has a clue as to who my English doppelganger is, I'd love to know!

Silly Site o' the Day

White Rabbits! Wow, sorry I haven't done a Silly Site in a couple of days. Can I have a TARDIS to go back in time and correct that? Well actually, all I'd need to do is redate a couple posts retroactively, but that'd be cheating. Speaking of a TARDIS, looks like we all enjoyed the Royal Wedding of the Century-So-Far:


Via everywhere. Robin and I saw the whole spectacle, from the arrival of the cars and the bands right on through to the balcony scene, via LiveStream yesterday, after the hoopla and nonsense (and my office's busy season) were over. No insipid mainstream-media running commentary ruining the feeds, so Robin supplied alternate (and very funny) commentary of his own. Now that I can breathe again workwise, maybe we'll have time to watch those new Doctor Who episodes...