The Cheerful Insanity of Me

Finally, just what the world always needed. Shoes with toes...


Five Finger Shoes from Globe

...next year I would like one of these please:


Steampunk Etch-A-Sketch

Given I quite often just put all my music on random play, this should be fairly easy:

1. Turn on your MP3 player or music player on your computer.
2. Go to SHUFFLE songs mode.
3. Write down the first 15 songs that come up—song title and artist—NO editing/cheating.

1. The Happiest Days of Our Lives - Pink Floyd
   from The Wall


2. King Rocker - Generation X


3. House Under The Ground - A
   from How Ace Are Buildings?


4. All Night - Def Leppard
   from Euphoria


5. Charting the Single - Marillion
   from the bonus disc from the remastered version of Script For A Jester's Tear


6. Since I've Been Loving You - Black Velvet


7. Mr Suit - Wire
   from Pink Flag


8. Easy - Faith No More
   from Who Cares A Lot? The Greatest Hits


9. Brudmarsch Till Per Och Anna - Stömp
   from Machine Without Horses


10. You Didn't Try To Call Me - The Mothers of Invention
    from Freak Out!


11. Myxomatosis (Judge, Jury & Executioner) - Radiohead
    from Hail to the Thief


12. Babylon's Burning - The Ruts


13. If I Could Do It All Over Again, I'd Do It All Over You - Caravan
    from If I Could Do It All Over Again, I'd Do It All Over You


14. One and the Same - Audioslave
    from Revelations


15. Your Daddy's Car - The Divine Comedy
    from A Secret History... The Best Of

Now that would make an interesting compilation album. Something makes me suspect it may not sell very well (although I'd buy it if I hadn't already got them all).

More on last.fm

more

This is an interesting idea:


The c))motion screen

Basically it's ventilation covered by a plastic material that behaves in a similar way to bi-metalic strips. i.e. When it gets warm they bend and the ventilation opens.

And here it is in action:


Direct link

The internet is full of strange things, and I seem to have been a bit lax in sharing these lately.

However, with the approach of World Toilet Day on Friday this can easily be rectified with the Flush Tracker (via @DaveGorman).

The concept is shit, literally. You tell it where you are and when you flushed and tracks your flush on a googlemap telling you how far it's gone and what speed it's travelling at.

The idea is to raise awareness of the sewage systems which we all take for granted and the issues of sanitation in places without them.


World Toilet Day

Too many mathematicians on here not to share this...


(Direct Link)

Don't often do meme's, but this one sounds a bit of a challenge...

Rules: Use the first two letters of your name to answer each of the following questions. They have to be real . . . nothing made up! If the person before you had the same letters, you must use different answers. You cannot use any word twice and you can't use your name for the boy/girl name question. (via jacquic)

1. Your name: Owen
2. A four-letter word: Owed
3. A boy's name: Owain
4. A girl's name: Owena
5. An occupation: Owenite
6. A colour: Owlish Tawny
7. Something you wear: Owser tanned leather (says the vegan...)
8. A food: Owsen (getting desperate now...)
9. Something found in the bathroom: Own Brand Toiletries
10. A place: Owensboro
11. A reason for being late: Owing Time Elsewhere
12. Something you shout: Ow!
13. A movie title: Owls of Ga Hoole
14. Something you drink: Owdham Edge
15. A musical group: Owusu (no I'd not heard of them either)
16. An animal: Owlet
17. A street name: Owgan Close
18. The title of a song: Owner of a Lonely Heart

...and yes I cheated and used google to find some of them

Sunday morning... must be time for some contemporary Danish folk music. Luckily I recently got hold of a copy of Analogik's 2008 album "Søens Folk".

For those that aren't familiar with Analogik they play traditional music (particularly Balkan) with an electronic twist and clear hip-hop influences. It's generally the sort of music you should really do a Cossack break dance to.

Hard to get bored here, each track is radically different from the next and highly eccentric.

The album starts off sounding fairly traditional with Russisk Vuggevise (Russian Lullaby according to Google Translate), with minimal electronics, but complete with all the necessary "Hey Hey"s. They then launch the electronics at you in force in God Russisk (Good Russian) with it's wonderful oom-pa baseline, before slowing it down with Forbudt Sprut (Forbidden Booze) where the hip-hop influences start to really come to the fore giving a sound something like you might expect if you crossed the old style ballroom with the kia-ora advert. So it goes on for track after track, with each sounding almost like an entirely different band.

Other highlights include Ond Mand March (Evil Man March) which sounds exactly like the name implies, Godmorgen (Good morning) which capture that mechanic "I'm not really awake yet feeling" with added breakfast sound effects and Farligt Monster (Dangerous Monster) which for a few moments at the beginning sounds like it's going to launch into the theme from the littlest hobo, but then you're suddenly rescued by the other instruments and it starts to morphs into a blend of traditional folk and record scratching.

The whole album is available on bandcamp, but here's a couple of samples:

God Russik -

(Direct link)

Farligt Monster -

(Direct link)