How To Spot A Psychopath

When I read Michael Ciuffo’s “Rip-off Photography” article, I did not immediately see everything wrong with the picture for which this unfortunate gentleman’s mother paid hundreds of dollars.

OK, he looks like a huge dork. But I look like a caveman in photos. Big deal.

At a glance, you can see that the lighting on his face is strangely even, and he looks significantly airbrushed too. But there’s more. Read the article for the rest. It’s as entertaining as those Celebrities Before And After Photoshop pieces, in its own way.

(Don’t miss Mike’s ultimate guide to building a minifridge into a 1998 Toyota Corolla, either!)

By the usual standards of terrible studio portraits, though, Mike got off pretty lightly. List of the Day’s Great Olan Mills Photos will scrub from your mind all memory of Mike’s embarrassment, replacing it with things indescribable.

(When I was a kid, I had hair exactly like that of one of those children. Not for a thousand dollars would I tell you which one.)

What’s a good portrait look like, you might ask?

Well, here’s a picture my friend Katy took of me in 1998.

(I’m happy to say that I still look pretty much exactly like that, if a bit fatter now.)

On film, ambient light, subject significantly toasted on nitrous oxide at the time. Perhaps that’s what warded off the Caveman Curse.

Katy’s photo doesn’t try to make me look like a matinee idol, or some insecure housewife posing for chaise-lounge-and-feather-boa “glamour” pictures. That, by itself, is half the battle.

I do feel obliged to mention, however, the pinnacle of my own experiments in self-portraiture to date.

If you click the mercifully small thumbnail, you’ll get a 1024-pixel-wide version. I’m not even going to provide a link to the 2048-pixel-wide version; edit the URL yourself if you simply must see it.

All you need is a fisheye lens, and you too can see yourself as an urRu!

The Gizmodo dudes took TV-B-Gones to this year’s Consumer Electronics Show.

There’s only one thing you can do with a TV-B-Gone, and CES is full to the brim with big-screen TVs over whose remote receivers nobody thought to put a piece of tape.

So the inevitable happened.

Frankly, I found the older Apple Remote Front Row prank more amusing, but the sight of a video wall full of advertising going dark still warms my heart.

But man, check out some of the (500-plus!) comments on the Gizmodo page. Plenty of people just think it’s funny, but there are many others accusing the pranksters of destroying the livelihood of the poor working stiffs at the show, endangering Gizmodo’s own precious press “access”, and thereby mis-serving their readers by reducing the chance that Gizmodo will be able to keep on covering the latest and most exciting developments in the world of high technology.

Bull, if I may coin a phrase, shit.

First up: Gizmodo are working stiffs too. They paid to go to the stupid show in the God-forsaken sweaty spangle-hole that is Las Vegas, and once they got there they couldn’t quite figure out why they’d bothered.

I’m only peripherally associated with the gadget-blog world, and can only imagine how spiritually corrosive it is to be right at the coalface of Western society’s ceaseless pursuit of boundless superconsumption of stupid crap, every day of the damn week.

I give a standing ovation to anybody who can cope with this strain by merely turning off a bunch of flatscreens, rather than taking systematically directed advantage of Nevada’s easygoing firearms laws.

Former Gizmodo head Joel Johnson wrote, memorably, about the issue of gadget-mania a while ago. It is, as he says, insane to ceaselessly pursue every latest new gizmo, when long experience has taught you that new gizmos are always just as buggy and disappointing and unlikely to turn your life around as every previous device.

Devices that actually can change your life for the better do exist, but they’re less than one per cent of the market, for reasons cogently explained in the above-linked Ten Reasons We’re Doomed piece. And, hell, wait five years and you’ll probably be able to pick up a bugless version for ten bucks. If you haven’t been given six months to live, mellow out and see if you can’t have just as much fun with a toy from yesteryear.

Secondly: I’m not sure exactly what Gizmodo (a site with Google PageRank eight, versus only six for dansdata.com) would have to do to get public relations people to shun them.

I don’t think urinating on each and every PR person they met would quite do it.

Stabbing them might.

Turning off their video walls? That doesn’t make the cut.

Oh, and when I used to do trade-show stuff years ago, we’d get at least one dude a day who thought it was fun to just yank cables out of the back of our gear. If the cable had a screw-in plug, you’d better leave it unscrewed, or a whole computer could be taking a ride off the top of your chintzy glass display case.

We freakin’ dreamed of an attack that could be defeated with a few squares of electrical tape.

UPDATE: Gawker staffer banned from CES OMG.

(Said “staffer” is Richard Blakely, who did indeed do the dastardly remote-control deed but is not actually even one of the standard Gizmodo writers, so won’t necessarily have any need to go back to CES anyway, even if they don’t completely forget about the ban.)

And here’s Joel Johnson again, on the subject “Do Gadget Blogs Hurt the Environment?”

UPDATE 2: Brian Lam, Gizmodo Editor, cordially invites the haters to lighten the hell up.

Thanks to a poster on the invaluable Healthfraud list, allow me to present FairDeal Homeopathy: The world’s only scientific homeopaths.

A while ago I read a webcomic, which I sadly failed to bookmark, in which a thoughtful gentleman explains to his girlfriend that now she doesn’t need to worry any more about whether he owns some creepy piece of medical equipment or other. Because see, he does!

[UPDATE: Here it is! First date, not girlfriend. Bone saw. In the back of his car.]

Apropos of which, here is my bone chisel.

It’s very sharp.

(Actually, as surgical implements whose names start with “bone” go, this thing’s pretty mild.)

(See also: My artificial hip!)

I passed a junk shop today - the same one where I bought my cheap Curta, actually - which had a display of cheap scarves outside.

After what I can only imagine was long cogitation, the proprietor of the shop decided to render the name of these items on the sign thusly:

“Scarfe’s”.

(Quotation marks mine. “Misused” quotation marks would, of course, have iced this particular cake very nicely. But you can’t have everything.)

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.