How To Spot A Psychopath

My flabber was quite significantly gasted when someone posted an ad for the anti-nervous-tension drug “Pre-Tense” to the Healthfraud list.

I looked at it, and I of course immediately thought it was a joke. The pill is called “Pre-Tense”, after all. And the sales spiel is headlined “Nervous Tension a Weakness?”, which is straight out of the old patent medicine ads.

But no - Pre-Tense actually seems to be real.

It’s made by Indigene Pharmaceuticals, which is a real company. And there’s not a hint of a joke anywhere on the pretensepill.com site, besides the preposterous name. And yes, you can really buy the pills, direct from Indigene if you’re in the States, or from other dealers.

And Pre-Tense may actually do something, since it is alleged to contain herbs (including valerian) which may indeed have some (very) mild relaxant effect.

But the drug’s name, I feel compelled to repeat, means “the act of giving a false appearance”, “pretending with intention to deceive” or “a false or unsupportable quality”.

It’s like that episode of Brass Eye where all of those celebrities sagely warned about a “made-up drug” called “cake”:

I found the following in the “Super Gift Ideas” catalogue of local auto-parts-and-random-crap dealer Supercheap Auto.

Yes, it’s the Hot Stuff Singing Steering Wheel Cover, possibly the single stupidest thing some disbelieving dude in China has ever been called upon to make for idiot Westerners.

(The pièce de résistance is, of course, the misspelling of Donna Summer’s name.)

“While stocks last”, huh?

God, I hope they last.

I made a thing.

You’re welcome.

Newspaper “formulae” for one thing or another have a terrible, and richly deserved, reputation.

But the formula for the Moby Quotient, whereby one may calculate “the degree to which artists besmirch their reputations when they lend their music to hawk products or companies”, would be highly amusing even if the article about it hadn’t been written by Bill Wyman.

(Regrettably, the Bill Wyman in question is this guy, not the famous metal detector fellow who once dabbled in music.)

I get a lot of commercial spam from Chinese manufacturers who’re under the impression that I’m a “reseller” of just about anything I’ve ever reviewed. And then some.

These e-mails are usually not very literate, but sometimes they break through into unintentional poetry.

I just got two copies of this one:

From: “RISING TRADING CO”
Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2007 12:45:22 -0800
To: <cs@110220volts.com> [I presume my address was way down in the BCCs somewhere]
Subject: Christ Ma’x Promotion MP4

Dear Friend,

How are you doing? I hope that everything is good!
Are you searching the rivalrous and commercioganic products? Please have a look our this new model mp4 player, it has some rivalrous features in market:
1 : 1.8″ TFT display + card reader function .
2 : Built in outside speaker
3 : Built in RF function(optional).
4 : With the good handle housing which use the flash metal facture.
Its picture and details information is as below,please reference:

[A picture of a Keepin’ It Real Fake version of an iPod Nano was meant to be included here - but I had to dig the file out of my embedded directory and rename it to be able to see what the heck it was. It was originally called “ui=1&amp;attid=0.1&amp;disp=emb&amp;view=att&amp;th=1168aff0f2e8de23″.]

Main Function and features:

* Exquisite & fashionable flash metal and thin design;
* 1.8″ TFT screen, 260K TRUE color display;
* Built-in FM radio & With FM recording function (optional) ;
* RF(Radio Frequency) transmit function ,the sigBnal can be accepted by your car FM, etc.(optional)
* Built-in outside speaker (optional);
* Support card reader function;
* Support DRM(digital right management)(optional).
* Built-in lithium battery .
* Capacity supported: 128MB to 4GB;
* Supports MP3, MP4, WMA, WAV, etc;
* Supports TXT electronic text reading ;
* Supports WAV recorder format;
* 7 EQ modes: moral , rock, pop, classic, soft, jazz, bass;
* Supports ID3 synchronous lyrics display;
* Support Multi-languages.(more than 20 kinds).

It went on, but that’s the end of the funny stuff.

What do you imagine “moral” EQ does? I wasn’t aware that you could make NWA sound like Perry Como just by changing a frequency response curve.

Here in Australia, we’re famous for giving things, places and creatures goofy names.

I mean, just pick one letter. Wagga Wagga. Wallabies. The Wollemi Pine. Wollongong.

(And when Monty Python did their sketch about the Bruces from the University of Woolloomooloo, Australia, the silly-named place they chose was actually not some tiny town in the boondocks, but a spot in the middle of Sydney.)

So, when a rather rotund bird I’d not previously seen showed up at our feeding table, I was optimistic.

Surely, this plump creature with its habit of thrusting out its neck comically would have a ridiculous name.

Could it, perhaps, be a Wonga Pigeon?

Wait - perhaps it was a Wompoo Fruit-Dove!

But then I found out that this white-headed pigeon is actually… a White-headed Pigeon.

Oh well. Can’t win ‘em all.

Herewith, Wikipedia’s surprisingly learned article about Opposite Day.

(When it was nominated for deletion in 2005, only one voter was concerned that the vote might in fact be happening during Opposite Day.)

This Lego vignette/comic is funny, true, and an effective deployment of a microscale Millennium Falcon. I don’t think you could ask for more.

(See also the classic “I’m naked! No clothes!“)

Incidentally, the old #4488 Mini Falcon is a great set, and pretty easy to make up from stock pieces, though you’ll of course miss out on the big printed dish if you make it that way. The comic refers to the gigantic #10179 Falcon, by far the largest Lego set released to date.

Lego have really milked the old Falcon since they got the Star Wars license - there’ve been no fewer than four quite different Falcon sets.

One of the Evil Mad Scientists discovered that it is possible to use ask.com’s search string suggestor to frighten yourself. Just type in an innocuous start to a question, and Ask will suggest umpteen possible ways for it to finish, chosen from the input of Ask’s impressive cohort of users-too-dumb-to-just-use-Google.

This looked to me like a rich vein of entertainment waiting to be mined, so I had at it with a number of bland and innocent sentence-starters.

What is a metaphor? A metaphor is a tree in a golden forest.

(Coincidentally, that’s also the meaning of life.)

Who is God? I’m betting on either Jeeves or the Vice President.

There’s evidence pointing both ways.

Apparently, people really miss Jeeves.

Only the third-last one there actually worries me. But it’s a biggie.

Hey, it’s Metaphor Guy again!

And now I’m envisaging a freshly re-fertile woman sitting, hopefully, in a hot tub.

(I’m not sure where the frozen cheese fits in.)

After you leave home at 16, kid, this list contains a bunch of great suggestions for what to do with your life!

Look! It’s the ask.com Magic 8-Ball!

I’m hoping this is just one really worried girl, and not a whole flock of ‘em.

OK, now it’s starting to get depressing.

I don’t see why John Cena’s marital status has anything to do with your plans to give him your bronchitis and pneumonia.

I think we’ve found the Words That Start All Questions From A Stoner…

…but now we’re back in Scarytown.

(The Evil Mad Scientists are now running a competition for the best/worst ask.com suggestions!)

Many blogs let you look into the life of someone else. Sometimes that life is quite interesting. And sometimes that life is described with a combination of honesty and prurience which, I’m not ashamed to say, particularly appeals to me.

I can’t quite pin down what it is, besides Not Safe For Workitude of one kind or another, that leads me to particularly enjoy these blogs over others. I mean, Random Acts Of Reality seems to contain all of the same ingredients, and I like it a lot, but it doesn’t quite make it into the same category as these three:

I Am a Japanese School Teacher (first article here).

The Tard Blog, another tale of education against all odds (and also the quickest-to-read of the three, in case you’d like to try to get something else done today).

And the incomparable True Porn Clerk Stories.

About a trillion people already know about these, but I think there’s a reasonable chance that even dedicated Net dorks aficionadoes haven’t seen all three of them.

(If they’re all new to you, you can of course completely kiss your productivity goodbye.)