stuff from India!! who wants stuff from India!!

if you want something form India, something reasonable that is -- I'm not bringing back no five legged cows and/or monkeys -- let me know. um leave a comment on this post and I'll try to bring you something.


That is, if anybody reads this besides the people I force to -- you both know who you are.


you've got two days to tell me because then I am out of here.

my first five legged cow

Today i saw my first five-legged cow. The bad news: I didn't have my camera with me. the good news: it looked just like this




well, without the hat.

to give credit where it is due, i stole this picture from here.

English Lessons

English phrases to know in case you get mugged by George Costanza.




Added bonus: jazzercise while you learn!

"Unicorns are the new Chuck Norris, but Hobos are the new Unicorns"

Hipster Olympics! saw this this morning on Laughing Squid.

and in this corner...

I’ve enjoyed being a spectator to the flame was between the Language Log and the Freakanomics blog this week – alright, so it hasn’t quite risen to the level of a flame war, but it has been entertaining, even if both sides have been friendly and good-humored about the whole affair.

It started when Stephen J. Dubner from Freakanomics came across a semantics abstract while googling for “They Might be Giants” and “bellybutton lint.” Unfamiliar with the terms of art from the linguistics community, he took author David Beaver to task for obfuscation and a veiled swipe at the field of linguistics, suggesting that such research, while amusing, doesn’t amount to much.

Well, someone tipped off David Beaver to the blog post and he responded on the Language Log, after which Dubner concedes defeat (imho).

I mean, really: who hasn't read Karttunen?

Good Bye YouTube

The user created content and the communities that arise on the site are the most interesting aspect of YouTube, imho.

Here’s something where I feel like I walked into the middle of an awkward situation and I have no idea what is going on, but I'm intrigued nonetheless. This appears to be a farewell video from a frequent YouTuber living in Mexico City. He's leaving his YouTube community because he received threatening phone calls from individuals that seem to know quite a bit about his and his family’s daily habits.



I really like the fact that I have no context in which to place the video (not unlike how I felt the first time I went to a conference on formal semantics). Is he for real? Overreacting? Seriously in Danger? I really can't tell, but this guy clearly doesn't buy it:



Others take him at his word and are clearly pissed at the people threatening him.



I gather from the comments on this and related videos that supexcellency has been participating in youtube debates on religion and other touchy subjects, and somehow this activity, in his mind, has drawn the wrong kind of attention. He asks that you leave comments so that YouTube will take action, but if these threats hves something to do with the Mexican Mafia, as he seems to imply, I really don’t know what he expects from youTube. If this guy really is in danger, I feel bad for him.

It will be interesting to see how this develops. He posted his video about 18 hours ago and says he will leave it up for about 24 before deleting it. Does anyone know more about this story?

Update: it looks like he already pulled the video, but there are plenty of "Re: Good Bye YouTube" videos replying to it.

Friendly reminder:

Rescue Me is the best damn show on tee-vee.



If you're not watching this show yet, get you on it -- it's on season four already, for crissakes.

Finland = Winland

Many of my friends will tell you that I am fascinated with all things Finnish, so it really shouldn't be a surprise that I couldn't resist reposting this video of Gregorius after seeing it on Boing Boing.



disclaimer: I blatantly stole "Finland = Winland" from the youtube comments.

I love google reader

Google Reader is awesome. Not only will it pull together RSS/Atom feeds from various blogs, it will display your reading trends.




it looks like I do most of my blog reading at lunchtime -- and I'm okay with that. Now if only Jor would update her blog occasionally, I'd be happy. And I can't believe that Bruce Sterling doesn't have a feed for his wired blog. That must be a deliberate choice to force readers to visit the site instead of reading it via RSS.

Bad move -- that just means I probably won't be reading it much. I think providing feeds will actually increase traffic; for the blogs I do read through google reader, I often visit the site to poke around more.

edit: All of my post titles and labels started showing up in Devanagari and i don't know how to turn it off. Damn the google!

new edit: I figured out how to turn it off.

getting to the bottom of unexplained monthly $10 charges on my bank statements

I was looking at my bank account online and noticed a $10 charge that I didn't recognize from something called "reservations rewards". Looking back over my transactions, it seems I've been charged this $10 every month since December. Turns out it is a company that scams people by opening a discount window when you buy stuff from particular websites. I think it got me buying movie tickets online. Here's the thing, you don't have to type in your cc number for them to get you. This is how it works:

• You buy something online from a site that you trust.
• A window pops open telling you can get a $10 coupon for the site you just bought something from, you just have to give them an email address.
• The fine print says that putting in an email address is equivalent to an electronic signature and that you are agreeing to allow the site you purchased from to send all your cc info to Reservations Rewards.

It gets better:

• Reservations Rewards sends you an email stating if you don’t cancel they will charge $10 a month from now on (and it doesn’t appear that you even get anything for this ten bucks).
• Even better, your spam software will most likely filter out this email so you will never see it.

So I’m going to call my bank when I get home tonight (and it is business hours in the US) and get them to dispute the charges. From what I’ve read, it’s better to have your bank or cc company dispute the charges instead of calling the company directly as this will cost the scammers an extra $25.

I feel foolish for taking this long to recognize the scam. Obviously you should check all the charges to your account, and call your bank about anything suspicious. And it’s probably a good idea to disable pop-ups too.

Here’s a link to a consumerist.com article about the scam.

You can search for Reservations Rewards online and fine a lot more information as well.