So I happened to come in contact with Keebler's E.L.Fudge Cookies and I got a good look at them. Now, they claim to be "elf shaped"...

(Excuse the poor reproduction; I just shoved them into my scanner, which is at least better than shoving a cat in a scanner - which if you were a MetaFilter member as long as I have, was a very funny joke)

In reality, they are shaped like some kind of odd silhouette into which the four rotating elf characters have been shoved to fit... Now, I could talk about the elf names - Ernie we know is the main Keebler spokes-elf, and the others apparently have appeared in commercials - Elwood, "Fast" Eddie, and Buckets. Buckets?!? If he's the 'Buckets of Fudge' the ads say the cookies contain, I don't want to know.

But let's look at the other side of the sandwich cookie, shall we? Since it would be too much bother to match pictures of the backs of the individual elves to the fronts of the elves, Keebler decided instead to write slogans on the back cookies. And here they are.

Okay, "Uncommonly Good"... "Uncommonly Made"... "From the Hollow Tree"... and "DUNK HEAD FIRST"?!?
OH. MY. GOD. These cookies are teaching our children how to do WATERBOARDING!!!
(And I thought eating Cheez-Its was torture...)

Yes, I've been away from the blog, but I am still alive (by most standards). I am, however, emotionally torn between two fictional loves: you already know about Grace the Face (in the previous item), but did you know I've fallen for "Samantha Who?". And not just because I was paid to write about her. This is the one new show on the networks this year that brings out the dormant sitcom-lover in me. Yes, situation comedy CAN turn me on, and this show is quirky, original, well-performed... aw hell, read the article. Now I'm saying this about the character and the show, and it should not be misconstrued as having a crush on the star, Christina Applegate. However, I would be thoroughly flattered by any rumors of a secret affair between myself and Ms. Applegate (as well as thoroughly tickled seeing her respond to the rumor by saying "Wendell WHO?"). Of course, I cannot imagine how such a rumor might get started and I would strongly deny it. Besides, what am I gonna tell Grace?

...or at least my name in an extra-odd online comic...

An aging radio fan (NOT ME) has put up a GeoCities (how 1997!) site in tribute to semi-legendary broadcaster and my former mentor "Sweet" Dick Whittington, including a reprinted magazine article documenting one of his stunts while I was his Assistant/Gopher/Sidekick.

Yes, I am the "Wendell" in the article AND I'm in this picture, standing to the right, trying to hide a tape recorder under my jacket from the London bobbies guarding 10 Downing Street. (They didn't allow recording devices at the Prime Minister's front door).

I may yet find him a better webplace for his little fansite, but in the meantime let me point out that (a) I was NOT responsible the lost cassette; that was Dave the Engineer's fault, and (b) I did not record the "beer in Bangor" incident because my recorder's batteries had run down after all I had recorded at the LA Airport send-off and on the flight (and Dave the Engineer had all the batteries, so I blame him again).

And that was a PG-rated 'edited' account of the Bangor incident from the Los Angeles Magazine writer - who went on to become, among other things, editor in chief at E!Online - and who got a free ticket to follow this adventure because we'd made promotional trade-offs with the airline and a London hotel for a dozen people - because one of the other 'extra people' along for the trip was Dick's then-girlfriend, who requested to be kept out of the article, even though the real reason for their disappearance was so he could "bang her in Bangor".  

I haven't been much of an Apple enthusiast. In fact, it was my lack of experience working with Macs that made me extra-curious about the Beta test of Safari for Windows. I was wondering if it might give me a little more insight to the whole "Apple Experience" and how it differs from the "Windows Condition".  So I downloaded. I installed. I clicked it on. And, well, it certainly does look different.

In case you didn't notice, except for the words within image files, there is no text. Now that really IS a different way to experience the Web, but not necessarily one I'm eager to experience. A little Googling and I see I'm not the only one with this particular glitch, but no one has reported a fix yet. After some random clicking within the Safari window, I ended up at Google, where the text was visible, but was certainly not in the same fonts as in Firefox.

Now I AM a font enthusiast, so I could tell that the Arial was replaced with Helvetica (very Apple of them) but the Verdana was replaced with something rather whimsical... I have collected hundreds of whimsical fonts on this machine, but this one looked familiar... a little font-surfing and I found it...

The Brady Bunch Font?!?!? No wonder no text showed up on Apple's homepage. I don't have the font from the titles to "The Partridge Family"...
 

I
AM
SO
UPSET.

The "London 2012 Olympic Committee®™©@№½" has unveiled their 'official' logo...

...and I can't believe it!
They totally stole the design from the new logo I made a week ago for the next redesign of this site:

And what's even worse is: I want to get the best lawyers for a frivolous lawsuit, but they've all been hired by Robert Bork.

I thought my capability for outrage had been totally exhausted (I didn't even react to Paris Hilton getting out of jail or Scooter Libby getting so much support to keep him out of jail), but a piece in the 'business oriented' website/magazine called "Fast Company" has gotten my blood to a full rolling boil.

The piece itself, titled "The 6 Myths Of Creativity" is actually a solid contender for the Wendell Award for 2007 for "Uncanny Grasp of the Obvious". But the sad, sorry, terrible fact that the myths listed have been so widely accepted for so many years is the true outrage. The subtitle refers to  "A new study [that] will change how you generate ideas and decide who's really creative in your company" but the only new thing about the study is the fact that it is in a weblication/publication that targets the deeply deluded in the business of business.

So clip your noses tight to protect you from the stench. Here come the myths:

1. Creativity Comes From Creative Types... Come on, what is that old saying that "everybody has at least one great idea"? And 'creative types' (like me) don't have that many more great ideas, we just have a boatload of bad ideas that compete for space with the few good ones. There. I've admitted it.

2. Money Is a Creativity Motivator... which is why there is so much creativity in the top blockbuster movies coming out of Hollywood - "Spiderman 3" "Shrek 3" "Pirates 3"... I can hardly wait for "Die Hard 4". (I know, easy target, but there are so many examples of the most money-making creative endeavors being the LEAST creative that I don't want to waste my time - or yours - on them)

3. Time Pressure Fuels Creativity... Deadlines? They have some influence on people like me - I've admitted before that I have tendencies toward both procrastination and perfectionism that can keep me from accomplishing almost anything. But making them more creative? All you get are cut corners - and those corners aren't even well rounded. I discovered years ago at work that the road to happiness was giving your supervisors a realistically pessimistic timetable, and consistently beating it by a comfortable margin.

4. Fear Forces Breakthroughs... GET CREATIVE OR ELSE? The idea that this idiotic concept ever caught hold in American Business explains so-o-o-o much about what's wrong with American Business (that and #2).

5. Competition Beats Collaboration... Old cliche that really IS true: Two heads are better than one. And requiring the two heads to bash against each other only causes brain damage.

6. A Streamlined Organization Is a Creative Organization... When everything flows totally smoothly through a system, the only output is diarrhea. The times and places where the flow of work gets stopped (often by roadblocks further down the process) are often the only times and places you can step back and think about how to make things better.

Again, these were not just Six Myths... they were Six Big Lies, most often used to generate something OTHER than Creativity. Whew, I feel better now. Okay, I'll return to the usual entertaining tone of this blog soon... just don't put a deadline on it. 

I was about to make a post bemoaning the fact that LOLCATS images are more popular than Webcomics, meaning that all the creative writing and drawing all over the web is being trumped by pictures of cats and captions in bad English, but now a couple of the sharpest writers in Webcomicdom have decided not to fight 'em, but to join 'em.

I'm talking about LOLBOTS, the instantaneously popular blog of LOL-pictures featuring robots, assembled by a team that includes one guy who really knows robots, Diesel Sweeties' R. Stephens and another who knows a few robots, Questionable Content's J. Jacques (both of whose work I have praised in my comicsblog) .

In two days, they have assembled an impressive assortment of memes and macros starring some of the biggest mechanical stars of science fiction and some real-life robots too. Still, in the rush to pull it all together, they have omitted some obvious BOTS woth LOLing.

Where are the Bots from MST3K?

And what, no Bender?

And the robot from Lost in Space (I did a little reverse in this one, having a robot that was usually less than humanly erudite speak like an authority figure)

You DO remember Hymie the Robot in "Get Smart", don't you?

Also in MY robotic memories, the mechanical techs-turned-landscapers named after Donald Duck's nephews in the Eco-Space-Opera "Silent Running".

And this one may be a stretch, but since most real-life robots today work on assembly lines, here's that classic TV moment with a mechanized conveyor belt...

Yeah, I admit it. I LOL Lucy.

Well, here's to you, proud LOLBOTers. And if I get any more ideas, you'll be the 18th to know. (My loyal readership of 17 will be ahead of you)

It has been five days and we have not heard any follow-up on the bird poop attack on President Bush at his recent Rose Garden press conference. I find this personally alarming. Apparently, after spending untold billions on Homeland Security, our Federal Government has not only failed to protect the President, but even afterwards, has been unable to apprehend and bring to justice a small bird! Disgraceful. I'm sure if they had succeeded in capturing or killing this airborne evildoer, they would quickly discover through enhanced interrogation and reported to the American People and anyone else watching Fox News that it had held the #2 position at Al Queda in Iraq. Or something. I certainly hope that the entire White House medical staff, including the Surgeon General, Bill Frist and Dr. Laura, are monitoring the Chief Executive Decider's health very carefully. After all, it could have been a carrier of Bird Flu. Or considering it was an all-white substance, maybe Anthrax. You do realize they never found whoever sent the Anthrax letters in 2001! They also didn't catch the guy on the plane with everything-resistant TB until he had gone to Italy, then Canada, then home. He could have infected our entire supply of Italian Sausage and Canadian Bacon! The least they could do is require anyone going to a government facility, airport or WalMart to empty their birds before entering. And as for the TB, empty their lungs. Sigh. I guess the terrorists really have won. I don't feel so well.

A Main-Stream-Media writer with too much time on his hands decided he wanted to "beat" Google, so he set out to come up with as many phrases as he could that (when searched for as a phrase, i.e. within "" quotes) would get NO search results.

I don't think you can call this Gene Weingarten's totally original idea (hmmm... no prior results). Since the concept of Googlewhacking, finding a combination of two words that return ONE single result, is over five years old (35 in dog years, 50 in web years, 350 in 'on the web no one knows you're a dog' years),

Let's take a look at some of the orphan phrases he discovered, shall we? (And see how far up the search results I can place the ol' WendellBlog)

"Googlenope."
"Queen Elizabeth's buttocks."
"Varsity pinochle."
"If you take off your bra, I'm calling the cops."
"Jesus loves you for your money."
"Plush Osama doll."
"Tiffani Suarez."
"Mohammed Ciccolini."
"Moishe Goebbels." (yeah, no surprise here, you'd do just as well with Woody Goering)
"Please accept these underpants as collateral"
"Thor adjusted his mascara."
"Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious-esque."
"The Iraqi Regis Philbin."
"Laura Bush's secret tattoo."
"Hot cheese sundae."
"Cancer, heart disease and zits." (caused by eating too many hot cheese sundaes?)
"Pizza with Condoleezza."
"Dogs playing poker and mah-jongg."
"The dainty Hillary Clinton."
"Man-boob implants."
"Acid klezmer band."
"The yodeling librarian."
"George W. Bush's subtlety."

I omitted several that just showed that he was mostly throwing non-sequiturs against Google's wall and seeing which ones didn't stick, but I was kind of surprised at some that got Zero Hits, like "much to Paris Hilton's embarrassment", "I owe my life to unprotected sex", "My grandchildren are so ugly", and especially "I was helped by the federal government", because, although rare, it has happened. In fact, I have been helped by the federal government (no hits for that phrasing either).  

Checking out my own meme-creation skillz, I found that I was the first to ever commit to the Web the phrases "Icon Has Cheezburger", "Repent and Indign" "Hollywood Hall of Comedy" and "37 42 4F 69 86 96 A0 BC 667 789 AD0 B52 1995" (to my great relief), but wasn't nearly as lucky with "Neil before Zod" (however, I am #9 of 597; Google does like me).

But this is indeed a game anyone can play, even if you have work ethic of a Washington Post columnist (sorry, WP, no hits).

"Dr. Strangelove trilogy"

"Memorial Day fasting"

"Angus MacGyver Burger"

"ACLU member in the Bush White House" (shooting fish in a barrel)

"When Osama Met Obama"

"The algorithm invented the internet" (stop and think about that one for a moment)

"braiding hamsters" (which actually did come up in an internet chat conversation I had last night - good thing Google doesn't index those)