Sarah Silverman promotes The Great Schlep

It's a little bit long, but it's hilarious in a lot of places.

For those who haven't heard about it before, The Great Schlep is a campaign to get young, democrat Jewish voters to visit their grandparents in Florida (one of the big swing states) and dispel all the lies and rumours about Barack Obama.



More information about The Great Schlep.

Gold Membership

This is a song an internet friend of mine - cavalcade from The Society of Gamesplaying Gentlemen and Womenfolk, the internet's premiere Victorian-themed videogame discussion forum - put together, fed up spending £35 for a year's Xbox Live just to get verbal abuse from American teenagers. He's hoping to gain internet notoriety from this, so I'm doing my part.

Warning: contains lots of profanity.

The Doyouinverts - Gold Membership (demo)

Death-detecting cat

There's a story doing the rounds (on the BBC, The Register, and other places) about a cat living in an American old folks' home that can apparently tell when someone is about to die.

A US cat that is reportedly able to sense when a nursing home's residents are about to die is baffling doctors.

Oscar has a habit of curling up next to patients at the home in Providence, Rhode Island, in their final hours.

According to the author of a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, the two-year-old cat has been observed to be correct in 25 cases so far.

Staff now alert the families of residents when he sits down next to their ailing loved one.

Normally I wouldn't bother with this kind of thing, but the final line of the BBC article is just too awesome to pass up.

A doctor who treats patients at the home said she believed there was probably a biochemical explanation, rather than the cat being psychic.

I can has tombstone?

Alberto Gonzales: A Guide

By Mike Luckovich.

(Full disclosure: I love the AG's name. "Alberto Gonzales" is just so much fun to say.)

The Dude abides

I need these Big Lebowski action figures right now.

Famous poems as limericks

This is all at once awesome and horrific; someone has rewritten Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven as a limerick:

There once was a girl named Lenore
And a bird and a bust and a door
And a guy with depression
And a whole lot of questions
And the bird always says "Nevermore."

There's a whole bunch of others here.

Iran arrests 14 squirrels

Either Iran is getting really paranoid, or somebody tipped them off big-time about these things. I mean, what would cause you to arrest squirrels for spying?

What's even more incredible is that the animals were actually carrying espionage equipment, at least according to the Iranians.

"In recent weeks, intelligence operatives have arrested 14 squirrels within Iran's borders," state-sponsored news agency IRNA reported. "The squirrels were carrying spy gear of foreign agencies, and were stopped before they could act, thanks to the alertness of our intelligence services."

Iran claims the rodents were being used by Western powers in an attempt to undermine the Islamic Republic.

Apparently, information about what sort of spy gear the rodents were carrying is thin on the ground.

Edit: Boing Boing have also reported on this, with the awesome headline, "Cry havoc, and let slip the squirrels of war".

On the plus side...

I tend to go on about it a little too much, but even I have to admit that on occasion copyright does bring a smile to my face.

Four inmates of Oklahoma's El Reno federal prison were yesterday indicted for what must rate as the most audicious prison break scheme in history, the Washington Post reports.

Clayton Heath Albers, Carl Ervin Batts, Barry Dean Bischof and Russell Dean Landers are alleged to have copyrighted their names then "demanded millions of dollars from prison officials for using the names without authorisation".