beancounters

Fold-ins are back

It's Saturday (finally), so you have plenty of time to take a trip back to yesteryear. The NYT has a great collection of Al Jaffee fold-ins, the ones that originally appeared in the back of Mad Magazines. Yes, really!

I was about ten when Nixon was in office, and I did not get a lot of these jokes the first time around ...

As long as we're on a Mad jag, let's glance through the definitive collection of Mad magazine covers. Remember when Mad had to start placing the UPC bar code on the front cover? Check the October 1979 cover for their reaction.

What punctuation are you?

I'll go along with this:

You Are a Colon

You are very orderly and fact driven. You aren't concerned much with theories or dreams... only what's true or untrue. You are brilliant and incredibly learned. Anything you know is well researched. You like to make lists and sort through things step by step. You aren't subject to whim or emotions. Your friends see you as a constant source of knowledge and advice. (But they are a little sick of you being right all of the time!) You excel in: Leadership positions You get along best with: The Semi-Colon

What Punctuation Mark Are You?

Thank you, Molly!

Your valentines are beyond compare! And so is your poetry. Blogfolk, please, please read Molly's ode to her Valentine. You'll love it. In fact, this is your 'It's Saturday' assignment.

Passing it on

That trip to my mother's house has been canceled because ... she just came down with a cold.

Mom: I don't know how I could have gotten it, or where.
Me: Oh, no! Maybe you got it from my blog.
Mom: Hmm. It does seem every blog I've read this week has been coughing and sneezing.

So there you are. My mother has a cold, and we are all to blame. I hope you're pleased with yourselves. Next time, wash your hands before you type. Have a care for your readers.

Anyway, on with this week's installment of It's Saturday ...

Dog gets dyed blue by insane Giants fan

MJD: Good morning, sir. I couldn't help but notice you're blue.

Blue Dog: You're a sharp one.

MJD: It doesn't sound like you're happy about this.

Blue Dog: Ya think so, pal? How would you like it if you woke up tomorrow morning and you were blue from head to toe? Come on, buddy.

The dog who gets high on toads. No, really.

Intellectual dog fight (via Grow-a-Brain)

I'm going back to bed. Still not all the way well. Note to Mom: buy lots of Kleenex.

Fahrenheit 404

It's Saturday, and if you're like me, you could use a comic strip that's not sugar-sweet and Christmas-y right about now. Try this. And this. [via]
 

Me, I'm going to drag my sorry butt out of the house this morning and see what's cookin' at B&N.

What's with all the cubicle games?

Has everybody played Cubicle Freakout except me? Well, it's Saturday, so you have plenty of time to improve your freakout score. Get some stress in your life, ya damn hippy.

When you're good and jittery, choose your weapon and play Cubicle Warfare. Gotta love the screaming ...

And last but certainly not least, here's Office Block, a Tetris-style game using cubicle furniture! There goes my morning.

Try more office distractions at Chaos Theory.

50 memes and a squid

It's Saturday, so you have plenty of time to find out what your Meme IQ is. Tell me how you scored, please! I got 35 out of 50 - but I notice there are lots of memes missing, such as We Like The Moon and goatse (no link, sickos) ...

When you're done, Go Wild! Create your own animalistic avatar, courtesy of the Bronx Zoo.

Later, I recommend you get outside and find a likely pumpkin patch to visit. Seriously! Halloween is right around the corner! You don't have a lot of time to carve a pumpkin and enjoy a good Jack o' Lantern. After Halloween, pumpkins have to remain whole and sit around, doing nothing, on beds of decorative straw and dried corn stalks and depressing stuff like that. So seize the day.

Here's a list of Sacramento-area pumpkin patches. We're going after lunch at IHOP (Bunny's request).

Speeeeed demon

It's Saturday, so you have time to read Cockeyed's inspired sociology experiment, creating a speed trap in his own neighborhood. I love the picture of this guy crouched behind a car, aiming his toy radar gun, just like a TV cop except perhaps without the gravitas of a uniform ...

Cockeyed has conducted many other rigorous experiments in the name of science. Like this one, attempting to bust the myth that toast always lands butter-side down. Hmm, this site may take more than one Saturday to read.

Kaboom!

Web 2.0 is really something amazing, isn't it? Only in this time and place could we, the children of the Information Age, build our own little online arcade games for the purpose of humiliating each other. Check out MyGame.com, where you can choose from several different games, upload the face of someone special, paste it onto a body in a compromising manner, and mash it all together for hours of fun!

Waiting with Gorey and Hannah

It's (still barely) Saturday, so you have time to read the wonderful Trouble With Tribbles as Edward Gorey might have conceived it. Be sure to read the old article about Gorey that provided the inspiration. [via Chaos Theory. Oh, Jennifer, I was such a fool! I should have turned to you first! But like an idiot, I tried to find It's Saturday inspiration by scouring Presurfer, Boing Boing and Neatorama. They steal all their links from each other, which is a problem right there. But more than that - how many posts about a giant diagram of a Pentium chip made from post-it notes glued to the side of the Microsoft building by robots in ninja turtle costumes do we need to endure before giving up on those crazy sites?]

In other news, have you seen a medical equipment truck in your neighborhood carrying a wheelchair? Because it's late getting to our house. For all we know, it might be lost in your city. Whenever we call the office, they tell us that the GPS is broken, and they're having to communicate with their truck using carrier pigeons.

"Surely you have cell phones," I murmur. But the voice on the other end gets drowned out by a lot of hooting, and then the line goes dead.

In other other news, it's finally happened. One can find an episode of Hannah Montana on TV 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We as a society have achieved complete Hannah Saturation. More on this important phenomenon later.

7.5 on the D.E.M. (Double-Entendre Meter)

It's Saturday, so you have plenty of time to find out how big your balls are. Play Balls, a quick-moving flash game. Travel around the board with your balls, touching some balls and avoiding others. Make the white balls disappear before the black balls engorge you. I don't know how far you can go, but I made it to level 7 and was told I have hefty balls. [via A Welsh View, home of the video for Human Tetris!]

Defend yourself against retail!

It's Saturday, and it's DIY day, by Eris. If you saved the post 100 things you can make yourself, now's the day to crack it open, choose one of the items, and get moving.

Why? Otherwise you'll be like me last Saturday ... finding yourself buying a 4 oz. container of sun-dried tomato hummus for $3 from Whole Foods. Hummus! Garbanzo beans and tahini and garlic, blogfolk! I used to make my own hummus all the time. I swear, I can make a batch of hummus with my eyes closed for about a buck and a quarter. I ask you.

I think I was afflicted by Whole Foods Madness the other day. You know, you get into that big store ...  everything smells like organic macrobiotic free range lentils ... and by the time you get to the deli with its Olive Bar ( mix 'n' match, $7.99/lb) reality has blurred and you're just scooping up heaven knows what with two spoons into tiny little deli containers.

WHICH IS WHY we must defend against the siren call of the specialty grocery store, and make our own food from scratch today. Or at least one thing. Go here and begin. Good luck. Come back here and let us know what you make.

The Bourne letters

It's Saturday, so you have plenty of time before seeing the movie to read The Bourne Letters. Jason Bourne travels from Scranton, PA to Fort Lauderdale, FL, and hilarity ensues.

Opportunity revealed itself on a long, straight highway tonight. While the passengers slept, I took care of the driver, disposed of the body, and took the wheel. During an unscheduled stop I replaced the front torsion bars, changed the oil, and checked the alternator.

The passengers seem to accept my explanation for the driver’s absence. Sometimes I don’t understand civilians at all.

Hope I don't have to be called a Dudette or anything

It's Saturday, so you have plenty of time to join the world's slowest-growing religion, Dudeism.

I think I'll get ordained first, and ask questions later.

The original dude, the O.D. if you will, was surely Lao Tzu, the author of the Chinese classic the Tao Te Ching. Lao Tzu was so incredibly dudeish that no one is even sure if he existed or not. All that we know of him comes from a tale, possibly apocryphal, in which the great sage got fed up with Chinese civilization, and was asked to scribble down his accumulated wisdom before he split, never to be heard from again. [...]

Virtually all Western Dudeism can be traced to [Heraclitus] who said in his single surviving document On Nature, “You cannot step into the same river twice” – an early incarnation of our modern “go with the flow” maxim. Like Lao Tzu, he also stressed that (and I am paraphrasing here) we need to chill out, take it easy, roll with the punches, and everything will be as copasetic as can be under the circumstances.

I did have one question - can a chick be a dude? Looks like the answer is yeah - at least there are a few women honored among the Great Dudes in History.

Series of unfortunate ads

It's Saturday, and if you're my kind of fanatic, you're too busy reading HP7 to check blogs today.*

For the rest of you ... you have plenty of time to gaze upon the ironic splendor of these 15 unfortunately placed ads.

*Guess what? For as much as BB and I were anticipating HP7, it turns out neither of us ordered a copy! We each though the other had done it, and never got around to actually asking each other. Meanwhile, my brother took his son and my Bunnylou to Borders last night for the big HP Deathly Hollows Ball. They were out until 2 a.m. Now Bunny is going to get way ahead of me in the book, while I work my way through throngs of li'l wizards at the bookstore this morning, buying my own copy. Drat!

Bumbo

It's Saturday, so you have time to watch the clever Bumbo series (Pt 1, Pt. 2) - one dog and one baby duke it out for ultimate control over the house, using high-tech gadgets. (No dogs or babies were harmed in the making of this series. Except the Pomeranian. Heh.)

Drag your bodies to the dead center of the room

It's Saturday, so you have time to read one man's account of fulfilling his dream job: Winning a place as an honorary cast member in Disneyland's Haunted Mansion. It's a great story, taking you from his Disney-obsessed youth, to his Haunted Mansion living room, to the opportunity to enter a contest ...

The big fish eat the little ones

So, did you do as I suggested last Saturday, and take clever pictures of your books? Yeah, me neither. Hello! What was I thinking?! I must have been delirious to even suggest it.

Here, let's try and find a better task today - one that doesn't presume we'll get out of our seats.

This is diverting: Fish, by Technophobe. The object: get 150 points. The way you get 150 points: eat small fish until you're big enough to eat medium-sized fish ... and then large fish ... all without getting eaten. Very tough.

Later: Um, I don't think it's actually possible to win this game. What are your thoughts?

Nowadays, we'd call them title mashups

It's Saturday, and it won't take you long to browse Nina Katchadourian's Sorted Books project. (Click on each photo to view a full assortment.) How did I miss this before? It seems that people go through library and bookstore shelves, finding phrases that could be strung together into a sentence or a story. The result is some fairly creative work. Reminds me of poetry refrigerator magnets, but on a larger scale.

Now, here's what you will do with the rest of the time you normally allot to my It's Saturday posts:

Create, and take a picture of, a new sorted book story, using your own books and magazines. Or even your DVDs! Hey, that might be a neat twist. (Cmdr Sue, with your impressive collection of movies, I'm talking to you.) Bonus points if you can create a haiku.

Hey composer, your inventions blow

I'm particularly fond of antique clipart humor, so I'm glad to have found Married To The Sea, the alter-ego comic to Toothpaste For Dinner. Since it's Saturday, you have time to peruse the archives at leisure.