FUNNY stuff for the week of 12 July 2009

Barbie Doll table soccer - football




Just in case you've been looking for the Hello Kitty Taser, you may as well give up because it's not a real product. TASER International has

cute bee costume cat

diving cat

Cats In Costumes

Whether you consider it a form of animal cruelty or just a little harmless fun, it’s hard to deny that cats look pretty cute in costumes. The gallery on Now That’s Nifty has a few fantastic feline frocks for your viewing pleasure. Click and enjoy.


Hello Kitty castle in Taiwan - Formosa


FIAT 500 cinquecento Fun car
Take the bodywork of a Fiat 500, throw in the mechanics of a second-hand tractor, and you may end up with this: the Fiat Cinque Tank. The handiwork of Kogoro Kurata, a Japanese ironsmith, the distinctive vehicle’s one main flaw is its somewhat pedestrian top-speed of just 3kpm (less than 2mph).




Alien Abduction Lamp

Women in Malmö have been given the right to bathe topless in the swimming pools of Sweden's third largest city.
The city's sports and recreation committee voted on Wednesday against a motion entitled: "Women with two-piece swimsuits ought to wear a top piece".

The committee eventually settled on the wording that "everybody should wear bathing suits" at Malmö pools but there is no requirement for women to cover their breasts.

The city considered a vote to be necessary after several visits by the feminist Bara Bröst (Just Breasts/Bare Breasts) network to Malmö's pools met with widely varying reactions.

The breast issue has proved divisive, with political wranglings leading to the question being struck off the agenda at an earlier meeting in April.


These political cleavages remained on view right up until Wednesday's meetings with disagreements on both the left and right sides.

But eventually the committee overcame its misgivings and the final decision was unanimous.

“I’m satisfied with the decision,” Bengt Forsberg, chair of the sports and recreation committee on recreation, told The Local.

“Everyone is required to have a swimsuit when visiting the city’s indoor pools and if it doesn’t cover the upper body, that’s OK too.”

According to Forsberg, some on the council had lobbied for wording which would have required women to keep their nipples covered, but Forsberg explained that attempting to enforce such a rule would have been too complicated.

"We don't define what bathing suits men should wear so it doesn't make much sense to do it for women. And besides, it's not unusual for men to have large breasts that resemble women's breasts," he said.

The Social Democrat politician feels the entire issue has been overblown.

“This is really not that big a problem,” he said.

“But women from the Bara Bröst network pushed the issue.

“It’s not really the way I would have wanted it, but you don’t always get what you want in life.”

The Bara Bröst network swept to prominence in late 2007 after two bare-breasted young women were called ashore by a lifeguard at a swimming pool in Uppsala. When they refused to cover up, they were asked to leave the premises.

Speaking to The Local at the time, Ragnhild Karlsson, 22, explained the womens' motives for swimming without bikini tops.

"It's a question of equality. I think it's a problem that women are sexualized in this way. If women are forced to wear a top, shouldn't men also have to?"

Outraged by what they regarded as discrimination, a group of women in southern Sweden made a show of solidarity by establishing the network, whose name translates as both "bare breasts" and "just breasts".




There can be little doubt that the provision of an effective and free service for BitTorrent anonymity would prove hugely popular. Today we bring you a detailed report on BitBlinder - a brand new open source project which promises to cloak your torrents, hide your browsing and get round many obstructive filters.

A question which regularly pops up in the TorrentFreak mailbox is “How do hide myself online? How can I get free anonymous BitTorrent?” Our answer is usually something along the lines of “Free anonymous BitTorrent isn’t really a reality right now. You could use TOR but please, please don’t. It’s slow and really, the people who run TOR do not want it flooded with torrent traffic. Your best option is to use a VPN service, but this will cost you a few bucks.”

Maybe, just maybe, in future our answers will be different. Allow us to introduce BitBlinder, a new and free cross-platform (Mac support coming soon) open source project which not only claims to make anonymous BitTorrent transfers a reality but also hides your IP address while browsing the web. Its functionality also extends to the bypassing of some web filters and in the future will be compatible with more applications, such as email, IRC and instant messaging clients.

Although anonymity with the previously-mentioned TOR is good, using it for torrents is a big no - it’s too slow and the operators of the network do not appreciate it. BitBlinder was born to solve the problems that TOR couldn’t. TorrentFreak caught up with Josh Albrecht, one of the creators of BitBlinder, for the lowdown.

“BitBlinder is an attempt to address the aforementioned issues with Tor - we want to make online anonymity fast, usable, and ubiquitous to the point that organizations give up on spying and filtering us,” Josh told TorrentFreak. “BitBlinder is actually built on much of the same technology as Tor, though we have a completely separate network.”

The anonymity itself is provided by BitBlinder’s own P2P network, inside which everyone is required to contribute their own bandwidth to proxy other users’ data. The diagram below shows a standard user setup, without anonymity;

Since decent BitTorrent-capable anonymity services cost money these days, how can BitBlinder offer the same for free? The key is to think of it as operating a little like a private BitTorrent tracker.

In order to maintain a good ratio on a private tracker, at a minimum you need to upload the same amount of data as you downloaded. With BitBlinder there is a similar system - in order to get the service for free you have to proxy X GB of data for other people inside the swarm if you want to share X GB of anonymized data. In common with some new accounts on private trackers, BitBlinder accounts come pre-loaded with some free credit to get the user going - 2GB to be precise. If anyone prefers not to be bound by ratio rules in the future, just like on many private trackers it will also be possible to buy ‘upload credit’ to use BitBlinder, but there is no reason why people can’t use it for free, as long as they share their bandwidth as detailed above.

Of course, since traffic is sent from your PC to others in the BitBlinder swarm before reaching its destination in order to anonymize it, it won’t be as quick as regular non-anonymous BitTorrent use, but Josh told us speeds should be respectable and in any event, much faster than TOR. Indeed, within a few seconds of starting a ‘Steal This Film’ torrent from The Pirate Bay, we experienced speeds in excess of 2Mbit/s, which is massively faster than my previous experiences of BitTorrent over TOR.

For Windows users the BitBlinder package comes in a 17mb installer. The torrent client is a custom version of BitTornado and although it doesn’t have all the features of say uTorrent, more features will be added as time goes by. The bundled anonymous browser is naturally built on Firefox.

Josh told us that the BitBlinder network could be made to work with uTorrent or another browser such as Internet Explorer but unfortunately both applications are closed source, which means that it’s impossible to be certain that all data will be sent through other users (proxies) in the BitBlinder swarm and not directly to the Internet. For the same reasons, Flash is unavailable in the bundled version of Firefox.

Another trick up BitBlinder’s sleeve is the development of techniques to bypass web filters.

“BitTorrent encryption is pretty good at avoiding ISP level restrictions but it doesn’t do much for things like avoiding university or corporate firewalls. One of Tor’s goals is to circumvent the Great Firewall of China and we hope to make BitBlinder even better,” explained Josh. “Filters generally work by either blocking ports, a certain IP address, or by inspecting the traffic itself for specific protocols. We’re working hard to make BitBlinder effective against all three of these methods, but we still have some work to do on these features, so results may vary.”

Since BitBlinder has an anonymous browser, it should prove useful if you don’t want your employer knowing what you’re doing on Facebook or other social networks, for example. Indeed, if these sites are blocked it’s possible to use the BitBlinder network to access them. Of course, the anonymity would also be useful for signing up to and using the HTTP element of a torrent site.

Only Fifty Percent Of Country Music Fans Have Internet Access

According to a recent survey by the Country Music Association, only 50% of the 7,500 people polled had home access to the internet. So this would mean country music is not being pirated at even close to the same rate as say the “Rock” genre right? Based on this survey, Country music should be making 50% more revenue right? WRONG!

The Nielsen Sound Scan report for Country Music found album sales dropped 24% from the previous year’s numbers. To put that in context, there were more “Metal” albums sold last year than Country. Maybe pirating music was never really the issue with lackluster album sells over the last few years. Bad music and a poor economy could very well be the main reason the music industry is in such a slump. I knew it!

Or ………. is the sample size to small?

From the Washingtonpost.com :

“A 2008 survey by Nielsen Media Research found that 80 percent of all U.S. homes have a computer, and almost 92 percent of those homes have Internet access.

The 50 percent figure “was a bit of an eye-opener,” admits Tammy Genovese, CMA’s chief executive. “We know that most of our fans have access to a computer. We just didn’t realize they didn’t have it in their homes.”

“It’s dial-up, and it’s just too expensive,” says Chuck Taulbee, 39, from Stockton, Mo., who was in town for the festival, which concluded Sunday and featured performances by such superstar acts as Kenny Chesney, Brad Paisley, Rascal Flatts and Taylor Swift. Like many of the people polled in the CMA survey, Taulbee lives in an area without broadband, making accessing the Internet so tedious that he’d rather do without.

Super Mario and Son Luigi



Protect me, Satan!




Subversive Cross-Stitch

First up is Katie Kutthroat, of the Alabama Kutthroats, I believe. Katie is a frequent contributor to the Subversive Flickr pool and has made darn good use of her stitching gear and the “F” word. Also, don't forget to check out Ms. Kutthroat’s website and her Etsy shop.

Stitchy: Hi Katie, so nice to meet you. So, tell me, how long have you been cursing like a salty sailor? How long have you been cross-stitching? And why did you finally decide to combine them? I really commend you on your commitment to more efficient, long-term cussing.

Katie: Thank you Stitchy! It is so nice to meet you too and to be involved with Subversive Cross Stitch! I guess I get my salty disposition from my father, who was actually a sailor. I grew up in a household where sarcasm and wit were praised! So I started at a young age for me, it has been rumored my first word was "shit". I have been cross stitching since I was 14 years old. It started as a hobby to keep my hands busy during “nap time” at my aunt’s at home day care. I guess after a while I got bored with it and put it down for a long, long break. I didn’t feel inspired to do anything for the longest time because I am not one of those “Bless this home with love” types. I guess all of that changed a few years back when I was living in Denver, Co and saw a Subversive Cross Stitch book. The inspiration and ideas I got from Julie’s awesome little cross stitches was enough to keep me stitching!

Stitchy: I noticed you have a particular affection for movie quotes and two of our favorites are from Anchorman. “Why don’t you go back to your home on Whore Island” and “You are a smelly pirate hooker” both evoke a certain Pirate Wenchian quality that I suspect you possess. How do you decide which movie quotes will make it to the linen and hoop? Are there any others we can look forward to?

Katie: Don’t you just have me pegged like a leg! I have a huge fondness for anything Will Ferrell is involved with and all things pirates! I have a list I started months and months back and when I hear something or get an idea I write it down. Once I finish one project I have a list to refer back to for ideas. I plan on redoing some of my old items, such as the Anchorman quotes you mentioned. I just want to keep making silly, goofy things that make people smile. As far as future ideas, I will have to get back to my list. I can guarantee they are all equally as dirty and vulgar as the next!

Stitchy: Thanks, Katie. I mean, Aaaarggh, Katie, ya scurvy dog of a lass, ya! Any partin’ words for yer fans to inspire ‘em ta spend a few dubloons in yer shop? Say something filthy, go ahead!

Katie: Bring your booty to my one stop shop for vulgarity and cutesy items, what’s not to love!? I accept and love to do custom orders too, for those who have ideas but not the same gutter mind as mine.

Stitchy: I consider that as good as an engraved invitation!

http://subversivecrossstitch.com/stitchy01.htm