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I just published a column all about those... distinctive... computer-magazine ads.

You know the ones I mean.

If you've seen a magnificent example of the breed, I invite you to scan it (if it's not already online), upload it somewhere, and bring it to the world's attention in the comments!

(For spam-prevention reasons, you can't embed an image in your comment. Just list the URL in plaintext and I'll image-ify it for you, as per the "Geek Ink" post. An image URL by itself will turn into a clickable link: http://www.dansdata.com/images/ltgf2/fancygraph.png)

Martin Pearson’s The Unfinished Spelling Errors of Bolkien is very funny, very clever, and very hard to find.

[UPDATE: Martin says it’s OK to download it for free!]

(MP3)

It’s a two-hour, two-CD, filk-infested one-man comedy show about of The Lord of the Rings - both the book and the film versions.

(MP3)

Even if you don’t usually like those The Fiftieth Time Some Dude Put Stuff About Elves And Cthulhu To The Tune Of “Jailhouse Rock” sorts of songs, I assure you that you are going to have a very hard time not finding Bolkien funny. C’mon, the guy actually sings the Black Speech inscription on the One Ring to the tune of “King of the Road”.

(MP3)

The total length of the double CD, not counting six minutes of out-takes at the end, is about 115 minutes. And there are a lot of songs in it, but there’s a lot of talking too.

(MP3)

The Bolkien CDs were recorded with a live audience, which is of course essential for this sort of thing. There are also not many of those annoying comedy-record moments when everybody laughs, but you don’t know why, because it’s a visual joke and you don’t have video.

(There are a few videos of Pearson on YouTube, by the way.)

There are also only a couple of jokes that you won’t get if you’re not Australian.

(MP3)

Honestly, half of the world’s English-speaking nerds should have a copy of this.

But they don’t, on account of how it’s not very easy to buy it.

Bolkien is listed here and there on podunk online CD stores (Pearson also has his own Web site, which is currently somewhat unfinished). The only online store I could find that even claims to have Bolkien available for sale, though, is Ducks Crossing, where the double CD costs a handsome $AU40 plus $AU6 delivery in Australia, or $AU12 to the USA. They do at least accept credit cards and currency-convert the total price, though, so US customers will pay a total of a mere $US48.36, delivered, for the double CD.

Which is, of course, a bit on the bleeding steep side.

Apparently you’re also meant to be able to buy the CD through 7th Dimension Music. But for months now there’s been nothing in that site’s shop, and the product page for Bolkien has, for lo these many months, been a database error. Some of his previous stuff used to be on this site, too, but now it’s broken as well. It’s all very depressing.

So I e-mailed Mr Pearson (pearsonmartinXX@XXhotmail.com, without the XXs) and informed him of the large number of people who would like to give him money, if only the CDs were available at a reasonable price. I also asked whether he’d considered opening the money-tap rather wider by letting people pay for downloadable MP3s.

Martin said that if people want to buy the CD, they can e-mail him. And maybe mail him a cheque, so he can put it on a wooden table and take a picture of it, et cetera.

It struck me that buying CDs by e-mailing the artist personally is not necessarily a completely optimal e-business paradigm. I suggested he try out a sell-your-files service like (to pick a random, presumably-honest example) PayLoadz, or of course CD Baby, who sell physical CDs, and can also put artists’ MP3s up on iTunes and Amazon and so on. (This is CD Baby’s “Artist Sign Up” section.) But he didn’t go for it.

So allow me to postulate a hypothetical situation.

Suppose, hypothetically, that someone were to illegally download The Unfinished Spelling Errors of Bolkien, from one of those intarweb bit-waterfall things that the kids are so enthusiastic about. Beats me how you’d find it, but perhaps some cunning search string featuring Martin’s name, or just the word “Bolkien”, might do it.

If that someone decided they liked it, they could go on to send a few bucks to Mr Pearson via PayPal. (Once again, that’s pearsonmartinXX@XXhotmail.com, without the XXs.)

Martin doesn’t have a PayPal account either, but I think he may be persuaded to get one if a thousand bucks pile up waiting for him.

UPDATE: Martin Pearson his own bad self showed up in the comments below, and officially gave free BitTorrent distribution of Bolkien his blessing.

So here’s the torrent, people! Remember to PayPal Martin, pearsonmartin@hotmail.com, a buck or three if you like it!

(Alternative torrent link. This is the magnet URI.)

When I’m looking at the Web site of a tradesman or small business, I actually take it as a good sign if the site looks like crap.

As long as it’s got all the information you’re looking for - often little more than basic “brochure” data - then the presence of dodgy table-based formatting, GIF animations, Comic Sans and so on just means that this particular house-painter, lawn-mower or solar-panel-installer probably hasn’t spent much time or money on site design, with any luck because they were too busy doing their job.

There are, however, limits.

Allow me to present: Biomile Australia!

Or maybe “MOTORTRONICS H20 COMPANY PTY LTD”, which is one of the bits of text peeking out from behind the two large images in the middle of the screen. If you’ve loaded the page, you’ve loaded the full-size images, which are just sized down with height=”320″ width=”240″ to fit on the home page. So I urge you to click on the second one and see it in all of its Web 0.2 magnificence.

Whoever the Biomile (not to be confused with BioPerformance!) people are, they’re in the miracle-fuel-additive business, with - once your eyes stop bleeding and you manage to read the page - the usual claims about economy, emissions, power and so on. And, also according to the standard fuel-pill script, they say that Biomile pills “have been tested and approved by the epa in the Usa”! (I choose to pronounce that as “by the eep-ah in the ooh-sa”.)

Well, the EPA does seem to know that Biomile exist, and the EPA actually has tested quite a lot of fuel-saving power-boosting gadgets and potions. But they have never found one that works. The EPA does not, in fact, endorse fuel-saving products at all.

(I was disappointed to see that Biomile pills also do not seem to have been tested by California Environmental Engineering.)

Never mind these quibbles, though. Let’s get back to that awesome Web site!

I like to browse with the text size set a bit larger than the default, which somewhat breaks the formatting of some sites. I’ve also only got Firefox and Chrome here, plus Internet Explorer 6 hanging around for testing purposes. So I wasn’t completely confident that the stunning broken-ness of the Biomile site wasn’t, at least partly, my fault.

Compare and contrast the Australian Biomile site with the US one, for instance. The US site is a giant blob of Flash, but it looks quite good. And has, you know, page titles and stuff.

So I bounced biomileaustralia.com off a selection of different browsers on the immensely useful Browsershots.org.

The results are here, and they are not good.

(I did rather like Dillo’s minimalist interpretation and Flock’s even more minimalist one, though.)

Perhaps the Biomile Australia site is a devilishly cunning scheme to actively repel intelligent people, because they’re nothing but trouble for the modern questionable-product entrepreneur.

Hmm. Probably not.

Most people have seen stupid “copy protection” on Web pages, where some message about copyright or something pops up when you click the right mouse button. This is supposed to stop you from wickedly making another copy of some portion of the data that has already been stored on your own hard drive when your Web browser asked the server for the page, and the server cheerfully sent it.

(See also, people who make Web sites and then demand that you not link to them.)

Via The Daily WTF’s most recent instalment of Error’d, though, comes what may be the Greatest BS Right-Click Warning Ever:

Every listing from this seller has this. Just scroll down to the main product description and click your wicked pirate terrorist right mouse button somewhere on it, and you will immediately receive your very own copy of this fascinating alert box.

Right-click over and over! Send dozens of “reports”! Wheeee!

In case you’re new to all this, and wondering: No, nothing’s actually being “recorded” or “reported”. The alert is created by a little snippet of JavaScript that tells the browser to do something when you release the second mouse button. In this case, the code pops up the alert with the stupid message.

It works in the same way as this, which also pops up an alert when you click on it. (It’s also not unlike the system used for “security” by the subjects of another Daily WTF story.)

Unless you’ve got JavaScript disabled, that is, in which case it won’t do anything at all.

If you throw caution to the wind and view the source of any of this eBay seller’s item pages - using that advanced hacker tool, your browser’s “View” menu, or perhaps just by right-clicking somewhere else on the page but the main product description - you’ll see that the high-powered enterprise-computing code that creates this very serious warning is part of a rather long single line.

As entertained DailyWTF commenters have observed, that line is, in the case of the listing I looked at anyway, a magnificent 40,076 characters in length.

Some text editors will choke on lines longer than 32,768 characters, you know.

So that’s even more security, right there!

The other day, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter took pictures of the Apollo landing sites. This gave various news organisations the chance to remind us all that if you ask the man in the street if he believes there was ever a man on the moon, there’s a discouragingly decent chance that he’ll tell you he doesn’t.

The new pictures won’t make any impact on the conspiracy theorists. You could bundle them into a flying saucer, fly them to the moon, and hover 10 feet above the footprints and Apollo descent stages, and they’d say you obviously must have come there in that same saucer half an hour ago and set all this stuff up. I mean, it’s been 40 years and the footprints haven’t even blown away yet! How dumb do you think we are, man!

Clearly, the only way we’re going to stop hearing from these people is if we give them something to talk about which they find more exciting. Ideally, I’d like them to become convinced that this supposed “moon” doesn’t actually existd at all, but I think that’d be a tough sell. If we guide them carefully, though, we may still be able to make the next We-Never-Actually-Did-X conspiracy theory much more entertaining than the unutterably depressing moon-hoax one.

How about this, then:

We never split the atom. The Manhattan Project was a fake.

Or it was real, but it was actually a collaborative research project between the US Government, Henry Ford, Walt Disney, Howard Hughes and the reptilian cabal that really ruled both Britain and Nazi Germany. Under the cover of so-called “atomic” research, this covert “xenofascist” project developed the occult death-from-a-distance technology that was what really killed Kennedy, when he was planning to spill the beans on that disappearing destroyer.

This, naturally, means that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not hit by atomic bombs. It’s possible that there was actually a huge conventional bombing program using giant pyramidal strategic bombers, flying from their bases just inside the South Phantom Pole, and given almost unlimited range and maneuverability by the use of a hybrid orgone/Vril fuel source, with antigravity lifters for propulsion. It’s clearly more likely, however, that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki events were actually the result of an earth-penetrating electrical seismic concentrator, based on Nikola Tesla’s well-known power-broadcast and earthquake machines.

Tesla refused to help the xenofascists combine his technologies, which is why they had him killed in 1943. If he had helped, the earthquake gun would presumably have avoided the embarrassing misfire on its first activation. That shot missed not only by 3,900 kilometres in distance, but also by some 37 years in time, and caused the Tunguska event.

(So Tesla and Tunguska are connected - just not in the way everybody thinks!)

Where was I? Oh, yes.

“Nuclear power” is actually produced by means of black magic, but it’s hard to tell exactly which kind, on account of the Malicious Animal Magnetism that so horribly destroys anybody who looks inside one of the “reactor vessels”. This explains why the original promises that nuclear power would make electricity too cheap to meter came to nothing; it turns out that the sheer quantities of alchemical ingredients, large animals, human blood and, of course, babies you need to keep the Old Things from escaping a “nuclear” power plant make such plants very expensive to run.

Oh, and “nuclear medicine” is also a hoax. The supposed “shielding” around “radioactive” items is just more camouflage for sacred geometries and resonant crystals.

And as for nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, which has the word “nuclear” in its name and so must have to do with radiation and atoms splitting and stuff, those supposed “superconducting magnets” do have liquid nitrogen in them, but it’s just to stop anybody from using a hacksaw to discover what the device actually contains. Inside, there are actually carefully broken-in audiophile-grade power cables, wrapped in a helix to match human ethereal DNA, and all running from a single button cell covered with so many battery-boosting stickers that it could power a small town.

Right. All we need to do now is boil this down into a bumper sticker.

If you go the Australian Taxation Office’s security-certificate-renewal page, and choose not to trust their own certificate, they send you to this page:

I chose not to trust ‘em quite a while ago, actually. I suppose it was inevitable that they’d cotton on eventually.

Since I’ve once again failed to come up with an idea for an April Fools article - I really have, this isn’t me trying to sneakily slip one past you - I shall list neat ones I notice today in this post.

Trossen Robotics had the first joke I noticed today, with their revolutionary Keepon USB.

The only one that’s really grabbed me so far, though, is Hexus.net alerting us all to a new “dead-pixel pandemic“, nicely done with a ton of class=”deadPixel” DIVs instead of the lame background image I would have used if I’d thought of it.

Other neat jokes I notice will be added to the post here:

1: Pre-eminent zombie-apocalypse browser-game Urban Dead has a corker; I think you see it the first time you re-visit Urban Dead after the start of the 1st.

Basically, everything is back to normal and it was all just a horrible dream.

2: Famous hive of scum and villainy eztv.it is currently redirecting to ezsports.tv - “Your source for the best sports!“

3: Gmail Autopilot^TM.

4: Retro Thing Ceases Publication of Color Edition.

5: Winner of the “most highbrow” award - “Time variation of a fundamental dimensionless constant“.

6: A series of joke woodworking items from Lee Valley, some more obviously preposterous than others:

Variable Gang Saw
Full-Round Spokeshave
Honing Guide Mk.XXXXII
Pouchless Tool Belt
Dodeca-Gauge
Low-Angle Jack Plane

They have a distinct Chindogu aspect to them, and are very well done.

(Feel free to point out any good ones you’ve found in the comments!)

Slashdot always do an online-jokes roundup article in addition to their annual front-page-of-nonsense-and-unicorns, but it of course isn’t quite time for that yet, since it’s still March 31st in the States - actually, as I write this, it’s just barely April 1st on the East Coast of the USA. It’s already the afternoon of April the 1st here in Australia, though.

There are a few April-Fools-type articles (not all of which were actually published on the appropriate day) on dansdata.com. My favourites are the kitten review and my campaign to Save The Unsecured Access Points.

Dig back, though, and there’s the one that gave this blog its name, “Black Computers Faster - It’s Official”, “U.S. Marine Corps announces new ‘Geek Corps’”, the New Intel “Sextium” processor, and that picture of me wearing the Errorwear Guru Meditation shirt back in October 2001:

(You could probably make a shirt that actually did that, now.)

And then there’s the EMPower Modulator, Wine Clip, Batterylife Activator, Guardian Angel battery and so on which, like the Firepower pills, ought to be jokes, but aren’t.

There are several things I should be writing now.

Instead, I made this.

This is Graeme Garden (recently the voice of the demonic Mr Bibby in Bromwell High) being a film director, in “The Making of The Goodies‘ Disaster Movie”, published in 1977. For Christmas, my sister got me my very own copy.

When I was a kid, a significant amount of my interest in (my uncle’s copy of) this large but slim volume stemmed from the fact that it has some boobies in it. But it actually still stands up perfectly well today. The more dated a joke in it is, the more historically interesting it’s likely to be. (Take, for instance, the running gag about Keith Moon’s boundless destructive power; Moon died the year after the book came out. There’s also a lot of jokes about surgical supports; improved hernia treatment techniques mean almost nobody has to wear a truss any more.)

Back in the Seventies, The Goodies was overshadowed by Monty Python’s Flying Circus almost everywhere (various Pythons and Goodies have collaborated in other projects), but here in Australia the show developed a huge following. This was because although The Goodies is immensely silly, it is also actually a show for grown-ups. But the Australian Broadcasting Corporation put it to air, almost completely uncensored, in an after-school time slot. There were endless re-runs of the show on the ABC in the Eighties, surprising and delighting the young audience, who got to see risqué jokes and lots of violence. (For much the same reason, the Monkey TV series is also tremendously popular among Australians approaching middle age.)

You can now get some Goodies on DVD, too. They’re not necessarily going to be exactly your cup of tea if you weren’t raised on them (see also: Vegemite), but there are a few episodes that really are just brilliant. Like, for instance, “It Might As Well Be String”:

(There’s more info about the surprisingly large number of Goodies books here.)

From: ron <starrwulf@yahoo.com>
To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: website
Date: Tue, 17 Mar 2009 08:44:53 -0700 (PDT)

[Quoted from my first magnet review:]
The earth’s natural magnetic field is about 0.5G, depending on where you are - it’s weaker at the equator and stronger at the poles. It’s also slowly declining at the moment, which is something that it does periodically; geological evidence shows that it’s actually reversed several times over the planet’s life. The mental giants at the Institute for Creation Research use the decline of the field strength to prove that the planet’s only a few thousand years old.
In case you’re wondering, this, like various other of their proofs, doesn’t stand up too well.

;;;perhaps if you had listened to the explaination instead of hiding behind your evolution, the science of it would have made sense to you. Dr. Carl Baugh or Ken Hovind [Links mine! All spelling Ron’s!] do a good job of explaining the science of it and other things the so called ‘mental giants’ of evolution ignore or deny out of hand. sorry to see your science falls short of what true science is suppose to be.

otherwise, your site is informative for the little i have read of it… between your evolution and earth magnetics belief, i am surprised you dont believe in perpetual motion, too.

I think there’s something in that for all of us, don’t you?

(Just in case some other green-ink-and-underlining correspondent is all het up about me linking to searches of infidels.org and talkorigins.org in the above quote, here’s what the homosexual Satanists of Wikipedia have to say about Carl and Kent. {Apparently his friends call him Ken. Who knew?})

Presented as received, emphasis theirs:

From: “rachel” <rachel@infronts.com>>
To: <dan@dansdata.com>
Subject:
Date: Mon, 2 Mar 2009 01:39:08 +0800

Dear Dan,

Have a nice day£¡

I am happy to present hot selling items for you reference. A lot of clients are interesting in this item, so I try to send them for your reference. Hope it is helpful for you!

Here is our Solar USB Dick for your reference,hope you are interexted in.

Feature:Animation Display
Operating sysrem:Windows 98/SE, Windows ME, 2000 XP and Mac OS9.1
Drivers: Only Windows 98/SE need the driver

Logo is made by Pc software and displayed on LCD screen, when there is light logo blink thus to attract people’s attention.

[blah blah blah, picture of USB thumb-drives with a solar-powered capacity-display thing on the side]

Pirce: FOB shenzhen

500PCS
128MB USD3.15
256MB USD3.45
512MB USD3.75
1GB USD4.25
2GB USD4.65
4GB USD7.60

MOQ:500pcs , More qty will be more cheaper.
Product material: Plastic Housing
Product size: 62*25*13mm
Packing: each in a color box,100pcs/48*36*29cm; G.W./N.W.:12.5*11.7

This offer is firm for 1 week.
Please add USD0.30 for ROHS.
Printing logo: logo set up charge: USD100.00/design.
Sample delivery time is 3-5 day after order confirm.
Delivery time: 7-10 day after sample approval.

Should any of the items be of interest to you, please let us know. We shall be glad to give you our lowest quotations upon receipt of your detailed requirement.

Rachel
IFS electronice company limited

Web:www.infronts.com

Yep, that’s an electronice solar dick all right.

(I bet they’ll print whatever famous computer-product-company logo you like on your 500 solar dicks.)