Category Archives: Internet

Have a ball — visit the Blue Ball Machine.

Where does Ann Bartow find these things?

A little while ago I noticed a Wikipedia entry for a cute neologism, “Snowclone”, which was defined as something like, “the some-assembly-required adaptable cliché frames for lazy journalists” or “cliches that exist as templates, i.e. 'an X shade of Y' or 'X is the new Y'”

The primal snowclone appears to be “If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z.”

Wikipedia used to have a cute entry for these, but to my shock it is no more. Go to the entry for Snowclone, and not only has the entry been deleted, but it has been replaced with a note saying “This page has been deleted, and should not be re-created without a good reason.”

Well, ok, I can always go back to the page history and at least copy the cute definition and examples, right? Wrong. Where I would expect to find the old versions, I find instead a stern note: “This article has been deleted. The reason for deletion is shown in the summary below, along with details of the users who had edited this page before deletion. The actual text of these deleted revisions is only available to administrators.”

Apparently, while I wasn't looking “This article was successfully voted to death on VFD early this month.”

Snowclone melted. But I'm sure it will be back.

Meanwhile, get your snowclone links while they're…still hot.

It’s Halloween today, which means you shouldn’t trust everything you see.

This is an amazing optical illusion.

And this optical illusion is almost as amazing.

One of my (heretofore) secret vices is that I read Kevin and Kell online every day (via the Herd Thinners Incorporated site). It’s a very funny Internet-themed online comic strip, but really getting the jokes sort of requires that you go back and read Kevin & Kell from the start.

I mention this because today’s strip’s daily sponsor ($5 donation) is Larry Niven (or someone pretending to be Larry Niven), and the message of the day is “Kzinti Diplomatic Corps/let’s do lunch.” Which will be very funny to some, and incomprehensible to everyone else…

(Note to super-purists: Yes, I understand that if Hroth is invited too then it’s not as funny.)

Susan Crawford has been having way too much fun. (Note: I had to open IE to view it.)

First there was this…but now there’s this.

(Click, it’s worth it.)