FAO Schwarz: Make Your Own (Anatomically Correct) Monster

I woke up this morning with a neat little page that I'm assuming got onto my browser when I stumbled and then switched tabs before it could load. But that's beside the point. The point is that I came upon this cool little site displaying a new FOA Schwarz Exclusive which lets kids draw their own monster and fork up a measly $250 to have it made into a surprisingly accurate plush rendition.

And when I say surprisingly accurate, I mean it; the people at the North American Bear Co. seem to put a lot of care into making these stuffed animals... er... monsters as close to the retarded scribblings of children as possible.

Take this weird guy, adorned with weird spikes and moles popping out of his feakishly round head. The monster he designed is pretty cool tho:

And this monster design, while a bit simple, translates into what I must say is a pretty rad stuffed monster:

Although, hon, you look a bit old to be having your parents shell out 250 bones to buy you stuffed animals...

But my biggest shock came when I came across a design called Dot by an innocent enough little tyke named Sherri.

Notice anything a little disturbing about the picture? Here, have a closer look:

It appears little Sherri wants her monster to be a bit more than a friend. Let's see if the boys at North American Bear Co. noticed this lil' inconspicuous detail and if they actually implemented it:

That's perfect. I wonder if the parents noticed that part of their daughter's drawing, and what they think of her brand new purple monster with a big fuzzy dong hanging between its legs!

Link: Make My Own Monsters Creation Boutique

StaJewtistics

Let me first diffuse any comments along the line of "u rasist fag0t!!!11" (yes, Jewish is a race, get over it) by pulling the age old, "Hey! I'm [insert race, sexual orientation, nationality, or black here] so it's okay for me to make fun of them!"-card. Yeah, it's a card with a big name.

Second, let me amend that statement by saying that I'm an absolutely terrible Jew: I've been to church more times than I've been to temple, I can't remember whether you fast on Yom Kippur or Rosh Ha-Shonnah, and the only Hebrew I know is the standard Hannukah prayer, and only then it's by wrote memory - I have no idea what the gobbledy-gook that's coming out of my mouth actually means. I even just had to consult Wikipedia one last time to find out how to spell Rosh Ha-Shonnah. Oh, and I didn't know Purim was a real holiday until today.

[And what a lovely segue that was.]

So, today I was browsing Facebook and noticed some party being held for Purim in LA. Now, any of you who have seen For Your Consideration (or are better Jews than I) know that Purim is a Jewish holiday which "commemorates the deliverance of the Jewish people of the ancient Persian Empire from Haman's plot to annihilate them." (It seems we've got a lot of holidays based on escaping from some sort of oppressor or another. A recurrent theme in the Jewish history, if you will.)

Well, I'd seen For Your Consideration (and, as stated before, am a terrible Jew) and had actually thought that they had made up the whole holiday! I mean, it's a Christopher Guest film; I wouldn't put that anywhere near past him. Actually, I'd put the two right fucking side-by-side. So I was shocked when I threw "Purim" into my Wikipedia search bar and what came up was not a page on the film but one meticulously detailing the very real Jewish holiday of Purim.

A few minutes of fascinated clicking went by and I had moved past the Purim article, on to the Ashkenazi Jews page and finally to the article on Jewish Population. It was here that I started looking at the statistics on the distribution of the Jewish population and noticed a few odd things.

First of all, Jews really don't exist outside of the US and Israel (which my friend Meena claims is the 51st state, so that doesn't even count). According to Wikipedia, 38.62% of all Jewish people live in the United States. The next highest populated country is Irael with... wait what?! The US has more Jews than the fucking homeland?? I guess it must be all the New York bagel shops and waiters willing to lightly toast it, cut it into quarters, and with a small amount of butter and light chive cream chesse - do you have that? Oh, and the cream cheese has to be on the side. But not the butter! And half a kosher dill pickle. No, I can't eat a whole one, just half. Anyone want to split it with me then? Oh well, forget the pickle, just the bagel then. And can I get some napkins over here?



It gets worse from there. After the US and Israel, the next highest popJewpulated country is Russia with a whopping 800,000 Yiddish-cursing residents. Thats only 4.91% of the Jews in the world! Also, if you were wondering what the little splotch above the sad face in my illustration is, it's supposed to be a Yarmulke. At least I knew how to spell that word. Edit: I didn't.

So to recap, nearly 75% of the Jews on Earth (I'll get to that later) reside in only two countries, one of which has more Jews and more movie-making than the other. This gives us a fairly decent world view of the sitJewtuation. But wait, Wikipedia wants to give us an even more comprehensive understanding, because in determining the Jewish population of the world, we need one more piece of crucial information:



Yes! It is indeed true, according to Wikipedia, that 100% of the Jews are on Earth! Goddamn, I'm glad that someone cleared that up, because I had been beginning to wonder where the Joozians were going to be factored into these population percentages.

But no Jew feels as alienated (Ha! Pun! Get it?) as the one lonely Jewish person in Afghanistan. You read that right: there is 1, count it, 1 Jewish person in Afghanistan, according to Wikipedia. Again in a conversation with Meena, it was decided that someone should edit the page to make it maybe a little more up-to-date:



Sorry little guy, but no one really expected you to make it.

UPDATE: Oh man, would it have been better if I titled this post Stajewstics?

StumbleUpon Menagerie 2

• A light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek viral vid of a hospital plagued with an outbreak of ailments from popular urban legends.


• A list of Dr. Parodies, one of my favorites being this Freudain analysis of Cat in the Hat:

  After poohpoohing the righteous rantings of the waterlogged Christ figure, the Cat begins to juggle several icons of Western culture, most notably two books, representing the Old and New Testaments, and a saucer of lactal fluid, an ironic reference to maternal loss the two children experienced when their mother abandoned them "for the afternoon." Our heroic Id adds to this bold gesture a rake and a toy man, and thus completes the Oedipal triangle.



• Virtual Spirograph - great fun!


• Amusing, biting comic with which I agree:
  


• The Twenty Science Fiction Novels That Will Change Your Life - I do question the abscence of the Ender's books, but they get kudos for including a novel by Cory Doctorow of my favorite blog, BoingBoing.


• A totally awesome list of videos of building demolitions. This is one of my favorites, mainly because you can see so much of the explosion illuminating the inside of the building:
  


• And finally, a picture (thanks to my neighbor Brittany) of a car which drove through the front of the 7-11 down the street. Another of my neighbors, Doug, was in the store and literally 5 feet from the car when it crashed through the window. The guy was so trashed that he was actually trying to back out of the store. I guess he was hoping for a drive-thru.
  
  

This is the bottom of the barrel people...

This is probably one of the worst people on earth right here:



This kind of exploitation of people is just horrendous, as are the people willing to go on these shows. Although, I hate to say it, but I almost wanna know what happened in the first half of the show; I mean, stealing the money and everything? Damn this bitch is cold.

Link: AWKWARD! is Today's Big Thing

Chicago Lawmakers are Retarded

A city council in Chicago has just put forward a law to ban the sale of plastic bags under 2 inches in height - essentially, dime bags. Like banning the bags is going to have any effect! Think about this: if the substance being transported in the bags is illegal, what's to stop the dealers from getting the bags illicitly as well?

Lt. Kevin Navarro, commanding officer of the Chicago police Department's Narcotics and Gang Unit, said the ordinance will be an "important tool" to go after grocery stores, health food stores and other businesses. The bags are used by the thousands to sell small quantities of drugs at $10 or $20 a bag.

Navarro referred to the plastic bags as "Marketing 101 for the drug dealers." Many of them have symbols, allowing drug users to ask for "Superman" or "Blue Dolphin" instead of the drug itself, he said.

Yeah, um, because drug dealers never heard of CELLOPHANE or any other number of methods of transporting drugs. This is the equivalent of banning pint glasses and bottles in order to "crack down" on alcohol sales. What's next? Is it gonna be illegal to have a rectal cavity?

Also, just to prove how unknowledgable they are on the drug culture, logo'd bags are not used to code-name drugs but the dealers who SELL them. Even if they were right, considering how many other pseudonyms drugs have, I highly doubt it would have made much of a dent in drug sales if suddenly people had to stop ordering "Blue Dolphins" and find some other way to refer to their shit.

Link: City May Ban Small Bags Used for Drugs
Image from mirPod

The Front Fell Off

I've been enamored with this video lately:

"Well, the ship was towed outside of the environment."
"Into another environment."
"No, no, no, it's been towed beyond the environment... it's not in the environment."
"Well what's out there?"
"Nothing's out there!"
"Well there must be something out there."
"There's nothing out there. All there is is sea and birds and fish."

"And?"
"And 20,000 tons of crude oil."
"And what else?"
"And a fire."
"And anything else?"
"And the part of the ship that the front fell off...

But there's nothing else out there - it's a complete void!

The environment is perfectly safe."

Link: YouTube

Are YOU addicted...

...to the internets? Dr. Kimberly Young probably thinks so. She has written a book as well as launched a website dedicated to the subject of internet-related addictions, including cybersex, online gambling, and eBay.

Sites like this just reek of late-90's cyberphobia, only this time with a deceiving Web 2.0 shell. She even includes a bogus "DSM-based" list of criteria under which nearly anyone who uses the internet in his or her daily life could be classified an addict. This kind of pseudo-scientific babble parading itself as psychology is what leads to things like the over-diagnosis of ADD and ADHD in children in this country.

Two glaring hypocrisies stand out as my favorites. First is the fact that links to any kind of real help (therapists, info on schools and kids) for this pseudo-disorder are only found under the "Professional" tab, implying that anyone who is less than affluent can cure themselves by *shock!* buying her book and self-help tapes. I also find the featured sidebar on the right baffling - "End your addiction to the internet by using the internet more!" Truly some groundbreaking logical minds are at work here.

For a compelling argument as to why people who claim that one of their loved ones or they themselves are completely full of bullpoo, check out the terrific Boston Legal episode Word Salad Days. It features a cogent argument by lawyer Brad Chase against the case for internet and other non-addictive substance addiction, as well as one of my favorite Boston Legal moments ever where attorney Alan Shore (James Spader) indeed becomes afflicted with the afore mentioned word salad.

"It is earth, wind, and cheese. It is cheese."

Link: Center for Internet Addiction Recovery via Stumble

Denver Legalizes MJ

Hippie buses, tie-down shirts, and disingenerosity will soon all be flocking their way to home of a basketball team called The Nuggets.