The very short and fairly descriptive domain name e.co is being auctioned off. 90 minutes into the 3 day auction, $16,000USD has been bid, and it can be expected to go much higher. Of course, anyone can bid, and it’d be a great asset for the BP PR department at any price, right?

As seen at MonkeyFilter

A blogger reporting from “Greater China” is lobbing useful info over/around/through the “Great Firewall of China”. The latest involves Friday’s 21st Anniversary of a Big Event China Wishes You Didn’t Know About at Tien’anmen Square. (Hint below)

Now Chinese Authorities had shut down Twitter, Facebook and every other major piece of the so-called Social Web before or during the 20th anniversary, but intrepid web-people, determined to make symbolic but mostly futile statements, used the “Social Locator” service Foursquare to declare that they were at Tien’anmen on Friday (whether they really were or not).

Of course, that got shut down in a hurry. Thankfully, we can still know that it got shut down, which is a victory of sorts for those who live on teenylittlesmall victories.

And for the 7 or 8 of you on the Web who don’t know what Foursquare is, here’s a visual aid from the PvP comic strip, using a fictional version of the service with a similarly ‘schoolyard game’ name, because Scott Kurtz is more afraid of the Social Web people than David Feng of Techblog86 is of the Chinese Authorities.

This week, the Sheldon comic devoted three days to the subject of Food Poisoning.



As with just about everything people write about digestive sickness, I consider it rather understated.

I don’t get “A Touch of Food Poisoning”, I get “Touched by Chainsaws, Flame Throwers and Sidewinder Missiles”.

I don’t feel “Bloated” or “Stuffed”, I feel “Like Whatever I Ate Smuggled In Its Extended Family”.

I don’t get “Nausea”, I get “Meals Arrested by the Arizona Police and Deported to Countries They’ve Never Been To Before”.

I don’t get “Heartburn”, I get “Internal Eyjafjallajökull Eruptions with Occasional Krakatoa”.

I don’t get an “Upset Stomach”, I get a “Stomach Screaming Obscenities, Throwing Things a Me and Leaving Me to Go Home to Mother, Taking Several Other Vital Organs With It”.

I don’t have “Excess Stomach Acid”, I have “A Chemical Experiment Go Wrong in My Stomach Creating a Universal Solvent That Burns a Hole to the Center of the Earth”.

I don’t get “Cramping”, I get “Everyone at a Boy Scout Jamboree Practicing Knots With my Intestines”.

I don’t get “Irregularity”, I get “Total Irresponsibility that make Lindsay Lohan Appear Saint-like by Comparison”.

I don’t get “Diarrhea”, I get “Deepwater Horizon”.

I don’t “Fart”, I “Turn the Room I Am In into the San Quentin Gas Chamber”.

I don’t get “The Runs”, I get “The Boston Marathon (that doesn’t end until that fat guy who never should have entered crosses the finish line 3 days later)”.

I don’t do “The Pepto Bismol Dance”, I do “St. Vitus’ Dancing With the Stars with the Combined Casts of Lost and The Wire”.

And I don’t have something that I eat “Disagree With Me”, I have something that I eat “Call Me Names, Accuse Me of Crimes Against Humanity, Declare Me Unfit to Live, and Call for My Public Assassination.” (And honestly, I don’t remember eating Glenn Beck)

Via my peeps, eeks and smocks at MonkeyFilter, here is a McDonalds ad from France that falls in the institutional-family-feel-good category with a refreshing twist:

This brings back only somewhat-related memories. I attended an all-boys high school in the ’70s; the second worst thing the bullies could call you was “gay”, the first was “fag”, and I got both often. (I hate to use this phrase, but…) One of my best friends was gay but well closeted until he was safely away from that place. He always seemed more sad than my other nerd/geek/outcast friends and I didn’t know why until later. Thus I learned you don’t have to be happy to be gay. (I learned/realized some other things of value when he ‘came out’ to me, including how much it didn’t matter to me.)

I was able to shrug off the “fag” namecalling myself because I was a member of the school band, which went on long bus rides to march in parades… with a drill team from an all-girls school. It was no shame to sit in the back of the bus there; with the marching uniforms hanging behind the seats, you got the most privacy. If the jocks only knew what the band geeks were doing…

But I digress… badly. Sweet ad, sweet message, told well, Le Mickey D’s… but I still have to worry about the drama when Dad learns The Truth. Or is that just an American thing?

There’s one very quotable quote in the Word Press Blog’s item about WP’s 7th Anniversary (referring to the ‘state of the market’ when it first came out).

“if the common perception is that a market is finished and that everything interesting has been done already, it’s probably a really good time to enter it”

This gives me hope, especially considering all my best ideas are years old and have either been totally unfulfilled or half-baked and left in cold storage. There’s always hope to make things better, as long as you’re alive and haven’t been relocated to the Sideways World (to make a “Lost” reference).