Useless Superpower: Selective Telepathy

I had an idea this morning of a super power that would not only be completely useless but would also be a little annoying. What if you were telepathic but the only thoughts you could hear were other people’s earworms?

For the uninformed here is the definition of an earworm from Wikipedia:

An earworm is a piece of music that sticks in one’s mind so that one seems to hear it, even when it is not being played. Other phrases used to describe this include musical imagery repetition and involuntary musical imagery. The phenomenon is common in normal life and so may be distinguished from brain damage which results in palinacousis.

I think it might be an amusing aside to a character in a story, they experience some really weird incident and gain a super power but it’s completely rubbish… Maybe I’ve been watching too much Misfits…

Can anyone see any benefit to this super power? Or can you think of a more rubbish/pointless power?

Feel free to leave comments.
Incidentally the reason I put the definition of an earworm in this post is because when I told one of my colleagues of the idea he thought I was talking about this:

Abdul Is Not A Name!

f0rbseh:

Cap’s being all gentlemanly and then Hawkeye appears leaping through the eye with a wisecrack.Oh Hawkeye, never stop being awesome! 
[Taken from The Ultimates 02 #12]

See, not an asshole. Ok Clint is being a bit ridiculous here but his family are dead and he has been tortured by this point.
Cap is just being a gent’.

Disregard the content of this, yeah sure the idea is that Captain America is trying to be a nice guy to the terrorist super hero or something (I don’t read the Ultimates so I don’t know what is going on).

The guys name Abdul Al-Rahman that’s not a real name!!!! Abdul means servant of, it’s actually “Abd” the “Ul” part is actually a prefix for the next word and just means “The”, Abdulrahman is a name it means the servant of  “Al-Rahman” or The “Rahman”; Al-Rahman being one of the 99 names of God meaning the merciful. The name Abdulrahman means servant of God, Abdul Al-Rahman means The The servant of god.

WHICH MAKES NO SENSE!

Sometimes Abdul is used as a a short form of Abdullah, literally Abd-Allah servant of Allah, servant of God. But not many people would use it like that, and they wouldn’t use a shortened version of their first name if  they were then going to say their family name.

Just because it sounds Arabic doesn’t make it okay! It irks anyone who speaks the language and enrages them, especially since you aren’t strictly supposed to use Abdul as a prefix for anything other than one of the names of God. Some people name their children Abdul-Rasool, servant of the prophet, but that is frowned upon and considered blasphemy in most circles…

/rant

The image is apparently from Ultimates 02 No. 12

Image From Pocket Full of Geek

Twitter Wine! Kinda…

05.jpg

I was skimming through the website of Yiying Lu The person who designed the Fail Whale and noticed that she’d done the design for the label of ASDA’s own brand California wine…

I can only find the “California Fruity White Wine” on ASDA’s website but that doesn’t mean they don’t have the others in store.

Hows that for a nice bit of social networking trivia?

Update: I’ve also found the Rose, Zinfandel and Juicy Red on ASDA’s website.

Fail whale Cake

The “Fail Whale” is a fairly iconic image that anyone who’s used twitter has probably seen at some point, unless you never use the web interface or have been really lucky. This cake was created by Mariana Pugliese a cake designer from Buenos Aires.

Interestingly the Fail Whale was designed by a Chinese illustrator Yiying Lu and was originally an elephant:

elephant

You can learn more about how this iconic image came about by watching the following interview with her:


Cake via Gadget Sin

Garbage: “Not Your Kind of People” Initial Impressions

I’m going to say this now before anyone points this out, I am conscious that this post is going to reek of “it’s not as good as it used to be” and “anything new is rubbish”, I’m not a music blogger, I don’t want to be a music blogger, in fact I’m probably rubbish at blogging about music in general but this is something that I wanted to blog about and if you don’t want to read it well… Just don’t.

I bought the new Garbage album today, I’d listened to a couple of the tracks on YouTube and my impression was they sounded okay, but there was something wrong with them that I couldn’t put my finger on. I’ve now listened to the whole album twice in the background while working and I think I’ve realized what the problem is.

I don’t think I could have listened to any of the previous Garbage albums for the first time in the background. Shirley Manson’s voice exudes so much power and (for want of a better word) sex that you are drawn into it, or at least it did…

There are hints of that power in some of the songs, “Battle in Me” for example has it’s moments and, but it never quite reaches the intensity of their previous albums. “Man on a Wire” Is, I think, one of the closest songs to their old levels of intensity but it’s still only a 10 when to be honest I expect Garbage to have turned it up to 11. This album is Garbage by numbers it’s unmistakably Garbage (the band obviously not refuse) and it’s not half bad, but it’s what to me makes Garbage not just another band and that makes me sad.

Note as I’ve been listening to it in the background I’ve not been listening to lyrics, which I probably should have, Garbage normally have quite evocative lyrics, but to me Garbage are about the music and Shirley Manson’s voice. Mostly Shirley Manson’s voice actually, and what’s wrong with this album is Shirley seems to be phoning in her voice, it’s beautiful but like I said before it’s jut missing that extra level of sex.

I have no doubt that this album will grow on me, but it should’t have to… At this point I should probably make some kind of joke about this album being “Not My Kind of Garbage” but to be honest I can’t be bothered. I’m not angry, I’m just a little disappointed.

Are Microsoft Doing The Home Media Center Thing Right?

I just saw an article on Edge saying the Microsoft are testing a build of IE9 for the Xbox 360. This lead me to think, maybe Microsoft’s home media hub strategy is working quite well. The infiltrated our homes as a pure gaming device, not having spent much on making the console a media centre apart from video playback from (DVD and DivX) and music playback.

Keeping things simple at the start meant that the X-Box 360 was (and still is) substantially cheaper than it’s Rival the PS3, which meant it got higher market saturation. Now that they have built up a large install base they have started adding features like Streaming Video and now a browser.

Compare and contrast this with Sony’s strategy of releasing a super expensive console  with everything built into it, by gradually adding features Microsoft have sneakily put a media hub into the homes of gamers, and can now negotiate better deals with content providers as they have a large install base.

I own both a 360 and a PS3 and I’ll admit that the only thing I use the PS3 for it media playback (And playing Final Fantasy XIII, but that’s a different story, I initially bought the console because FF13 wasn’t going to coming out on the 360).

Now the X-Box Costs so little and Microsoft are even talking about releasing it as a subscription service ($99 for the console with a 24 month contract), it will probably live on past the release of the next version of the X-Box and continue making them money as a media hub for people who use it to consume media rather than just play games. Then when people upgrade they can take whatever media features they want with them, I doubt MS will reduce the feature set with the Next-Box 360 they’ve already got the licensing agreements, and a revenue stream.

I think it’s possible that Microsoft and Sony had a Tortoise/Hare race going with this generation of the console war, and it’s looking like Microsoft’s Tortoise strategy has has beaten Sony’s Hare brained plans…

Tiger Beijing Zoo



Tiger Beijing Zoo, originally uploaded by Ohmzar.

I took this photo a couple of years ago while on holiday in Beijing. I really like it it’s almost like a proper photographer took it… Apart from the water bottles strewn around it…
Then again I wasn’t going to go in there an move them so given the circumstances I think it was a good effort.