Chia Pet ... Reborn!

It's cute. It's grassy. It's completely unnecessary in your life. Cha-cha-cha-chia? No, it's Nyokki. Raise a toast to progress.

White Chocolate Maggots

Take a break. Relax. And visit Strange New Products, a site that hunts down the insane and inane. It features everything from white chocolate maggots to corporate sponsored Porta Potties. Yum! Have some fun checking back often.

How close do you live to cement?

Read today on Design Observer:

If your front door opens onto a sidewalk, you're probably a Democrat.

If your front door is more than 25' from your street, you're probably a Republican.

Gasp! She Returns!

Well, it took turning a corporate monologue into dialog to get me to return to blogging. I can't resist sharing this with the few of you still diligent enough to read this (thanks Miss B!). If you've ever walked through the pedestrian tunnel north of Grand Central, you've experienced a distracting advertisement haranging you as you walk. Garble! Grawk! Yell, yell, yell!

Well, designer Ji Lee is fighting back — at least against print advertisements. He launched The Bubble Project whereupon he placed bubble stickers (the kind used in comic books) on ads throughout NYC. Passersby wrote comments in the space provided. The results, both hilarious and unpredictable, were captured in Lee's recent book Talk Back: The Bubble Project.

Now if only there were a mute button in that pedestrian tunnel.

Anybody seen Wag the Dog?

This story about the bumbling Abu Musab al-Zarqawi almost seems too ridiculous to believe. Hmmm... anyboy ever seen Wag the Dog?

Running With Diapers

Read this little tidbit today: 5-year-old runs marathons. I find this more sad than exciting. He's like Little Hercules, who ended up with an abusive dad and claims of steroid drug use before he hit his teens. The article says they're already preparing him for the 2012 Olympics. Shouldn't there be a child labor law against this?

We all scream for ice cream (ball)!

Chalk this one up as awesome but useless: today I learned about this cool ice cream ball from L.L. Bean. You put the ingredients in one end (cream, sugar), the chemistry in the other (ice, rock salt) and move the ball around for 20 minutes. Voila! You have ice cream. Totally cool, right?

Problem is, when I tried to think of someone who could use this cool gadget, I couldn't think of a single person. Sure, it'd make an entertainment group event for one party, but would the excitement last for 20 min? And what about subsequent parties? Wouldn't your friends get tired of you forcing them to work out just to get dessert? Sigh. Excitement dissipates...

Hanging Head in Shame (But Bopping to Good Tunes)

OK, I was just about ready to give this up. Things got busy at work, and I just wasn't focused on my Cool Stuff blog anymore. But then I come across something like Pandora and can't keep it to myself. Credit Dora for the link. This is the coolest music service: name one song or one artist and, using the research from the Music Genome Project, the site predicts other music you'd like and plays it for you as streaming radio.

I typed in one of my favs, Metric, and have subsequently listened to "Unsatisfied" by Nine Black Alps, "Rock & Roll Queen" by Subways, and Slip & Slide by Tiny Amps, none of which I've ever heard before.

Now all they need is a desktop widget so I can always check there to see what song I'm listening to (instead I have to figure out which web browser window it's sitting in). Nonetheless, this is brilliance of technology in its simplest form.

This appeared on the This Is Broken site, a place where people report wacky things they see that don't work. I thought this was too funny not to share. Once you understand the explanation, it becomes even funnier.

This is Not an Advertisement

So I don't go in for product recommendations, and I have unfortunately not gotten the chance to test this out, but Microsoft's new mobile PC is, at the very least, a product to watch. Looks fairly innovative anyway. Not quite the iPod of portable computing, but maybe that's iteration #2. For more details, CNet has answers.

Is Your Site Red or Yellow or Green?

When searching on Google or Yahoo or whatever, you can now get a sense of the safety of the site you’re going to visit before you go there. Site Advisor tells you how often a site will e-mail you (i.e., whether they could be a source for spam), whether downloads are clear of adware, and whether they link to other sites rated green for OK to go. I’m a huge fan since it saves me from having to guess whether a site is legit from a security/privacy standpoint. This plugin is for Firefox or Internet Explorer.

Holy Magma, Batman!

Did you know a giant collapsed volcano is called a caldera (think cauldron). You know one better as Yellowstone. Here’s the Wikipedia jaw-dropper: “When Yellowstone Caldera erupted 630,000 years ago it released 1000 cubic kilometers of material, covering half of North America in up to two meters of debris.”

Understand Racism in the '60s

I find that, having not lived it, it's hard to truly understand the Civil Rights Movement and just how awful things were. For a taste of that, view these photos uncovered recently by The Birmingham News. It's time, as a nation, that we face our past and have a national dialog about how far we have left to go.

Boingboing.net has a brief summary of the photos' origins.

Two Scientific Ideas Dramatically Shift Thinking

These two discoveries blew me away. The first argues that the Black Death plague in Europe contributed to a 300 mini ice age. The theory argues that after such a huge number of people died so quickly, trees sprang up on unused farmland, lowering carbon dioxide levels.

This gives some awful sense of balance to the way global warming, cited as a possible cause of the destructiveness of recent natural disasters, has taken so many lives — some kind of tragic buffering capacity.

The second discovery also requires an adjustment in thinking. Viruses may have been part of the evolutionary origin of life. Woah. I can't describe it as well as the Discover article can. Stuff in there made me feel like we're still in the Dark Ages. But I can quote this stunning statistic:

Scientists estimate that they have discovered and documented less than 1 percent of all the living things on the planet. But for every organism in that unidentified 99 percent, at least 10 times as many unknown viruses are thought to exist—the vast majority of which are harmless to life and yet integral to it.

I'm Seeing Red! (And hearing techno.)

Based on research that humans are able to associate music with color, a student at the University of Birmingham in England has created a music player where you create playlists based solely on the color (or as he would say colour) that you've assigned to the song. Once you've assigned enough songs, a color palette up top tells you where you're collection falls in the color scheme. Eventually, he's hoping to match people's musical palettes and allow you to download color associations from other people who categorize songs the way you do. I sense a match.com / iTunes cross-sell in the future...

This is very very very beta, but it's kinda fun to download, explore and create playlists with similar songs. I think it works because colors have moods, as do songs.

Hello? What's That? Oh, just a New Yorker

Even if you're not living in the continuous loony bin that is New York, you can get a kick out of Overheard in New York. People basically report on this website the conversations they overhear. Hysterical and a tad dumb. Yay USA!

Me Talk Pretty One Day?

I just discovered this site (Engrish) that basically mocks the number of products out there with bad English (many of them Asian). Enjoy!

Keep Track of Mud Puddles' Changes

So I'll be the first to admit I'm an irregular post-ee on here. But I still love shooting out little messages of stuff I just find so ridiculous, brilliant, or novel that they must be shared. (Even if no one ever sees them, I feel TONS better).

But I'll bet it's a pain to come check here all the time, only to discover I've gone into hibernation again. I've finally got a solution for that, and it's brilliant! It's called RSS and it uses XML.

Woah, you say. What the #@*$ is RSS and XML. You're in luck, because I've recently gotten hooked and I'd love to tell you. Put simply, it's a new technology that allows you to keep track of new content on a website. Most major websites now offer this, although only 6% of web users are utilizing it.

Luckily, becoming one of the early adopters of this technology is not that hard. First you need a reader. I recommend either Bloglines or MyYahoo (you have to have a Yahoo e-mail first, I believe). Here's the best part of all: the reader you choose can tell you when all your favorite sites are updated, not just mine. That could include all the blogs you read or the news sites you keep track off. So in the instance of my site, you'll only have one place to check whether I've added anything. And that place will also tell you whether your Aunt Bertha and your cousin Ronny have updated their blogs, too. Plus get updates to the NY Times home page without having to scan their current page to see if anything is new.

These readers usually show a headline and then a summary so you can decide if you want to click to go to the site the feed is from.

Here are the steps to be the coolest kid on the block:
1. Get a reader (recommendations above). This requires signing up — not a download for the two I'm recommending here — and should take less than 5 minutes.
2. Then tell your reader you want access to this feed by copy-pasting this link in: http://wallowmuddy.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Please note that if you follow this link, you'll get a bunch of gibberish, something you'll notice on other sites offering RSS feeds. If that happens when you're trying to add other feeds, just copy- paste the address from your browser into your reader. Your reader can read what your browser thinks is an error.

Did I confuse anyone? Just holler if you want more details. Then rock this RSS Thang.

I Hate This Idea: Standardized Tests in College

Urgh! Bush is trying to put standardized testing in colleges.

I've tried three times to write this post. This idea is just so dumb that I can't seem to be clever in talking about it. I just don't see it's value, what's driving this movement for change and why why why why anyone in higher education would support it.

Are we just looking for another method that we're behind Europe in the value of our education? Are state schools' financials going to change depending on their test results? Oh no oh no oh no! Now we're just controling the professors and forcing them to create a standardized (boring) curriculum. Please no!

Coretta Scott King Wiretapped

This ABC News article offers an excellent understanding of the history of wiretapping in this country and its detrimental effects on just one person: the recently buried Coretta Scott King.