Every once in a great while I see people talking seriously about Bigfoot’s existence and shake my head.

And big surprise (not) that we shouldn’t believe in the most recent phony Bigfoot sighting either, cooked up by a car salesman and now-fired police officer:

On August 12, [Steve Kulls] said, Dyer and Whitton "requested an undisclosed sum of money as an advance, expected from the marketing and promotion." Two days later, after signing a receipt and counting the money, Dyer and Whitton showed the Searching for Bigfoot team the freezer containing what they claimed was the carcass: "Something appearing large, hairy and frozen in ice," Kulls wrote on the Web site.

Credit Mr. Kulls sleuthing who runs the site SQUATCHDETECTIVE.COM (pictured above) for giving me the best laugh of the week. Just look at the Squatchdetctive homepage and try not to at least smile. I especially enjoyed the tagline: "Investigation of The Bigfoot Enigma"

Umm, what enigma? I’m not some super outdoors guy but I’ve got grandparents who have been all over the Pacific Northwest and when I was younger I tagged along. The Pacific Northwest is supposed to be Bigfoot territory, right. In my grandparents 80-odd years in these parts and my nearly 40 years, we’ve never encountered Bigfoot.

I’m willing to believe (but not in a freak-like way) in the existence of extraterrestrial beings but it’s a big hairy no, no, no on Bigfoot. I’ll take my chances with Loch Ness being more real than Bigfoot.

But back to the laugh of the week, SquatchDetective (SD). The flaming logo which doesn’t have a transparent GIF background looks like it was cooked up using some online generator. The SD badge with ‘Bigfoot XING" looks like just the type of road sign we’d encounter while out hunting wild mushrooms or elk.

Add to that the Squatchdetective MySpace page and SD radio show every Monday night at 9pm EST. I’m curious what type of callers a show like the Squatchdetective gets? I decided to record my Squatchdetective eyewitness report, please listen to my terrified Bigfoot Utterz and see if it makes the cut.

I need your help solving the enigma!

It’s been awhile since I’ve seen a comedy in or out of a movie theater that’s made me laugh out loud. This past weekend I tried unsuccessfully to convince my wife to see the latest Star Whores, pun intended, "Clone Wars" (which might be a blessing considering the many unfavorable reviews). Second choice was "Tropic Thunder" with Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black and Tom Cruise.

source: box office mojo

Whatever you want to say about Robert Downey Jr’s offscreen problems — and he’s had many — his acting skills are superb. You can see why he keeps getting solid starring roles. In Tropic Thunder he goes into an area that seems almost universally taboo in this day and age, blackface, and yet he pulls it off. His portrayal of an actor who can’t get out of the grips of his role had tears in my eyes during some spots. Ben Stiller’s lead character has similar same hang-ups, a victim of one too many sequels and trying to get past a role he played that was panned, but loved by his a niche following.  Jack Black’s character was famous for fart movies and has an unhealthy penchant for drugs off screen. I’m not a big Jack Black fan but this was him at his funniest.

Tom Cruise sporting a beard and some heavy make-up plays a movie exec with an anger management problem. Cruise should do more comedies and get away from the whole action and drama movie scene for awhile.

The backdrop of the movie is the making of a Vietnam era war flick penned by a character played by Nick Nolte of 48 Hours fame. The trio of Black, Downey Jr and Stiller are dropped into a jungle where cameras will catch their every move. Away from all the pampering actor trucks and special favors given to stars. It takes a humorous amount of time before these actor soldiers realize they aren’t shooting a movie, they are embroiled in a real conflict with drug harvesters that require real soldier actions.

There aren’t enough movies that make fun of themselves and do so creatively. Example: before the Tropic Thunder movie started there were previews of the movies the characters in Tropic Thunder are playing. Talk about spoofing where you sleep. I’m going to take a few points off for parts that could have moved a little quicker. Pretty much all the parts right before the ending sequence were too slow narratively and could have been edited out to make the movie tighter.

As far as controversy and the parts that could make you cringe: I didn’t find the humor surrounding the mentally retarded character ("Simple Jack") that Ben Stiller’s character played funny. I’ve never found humor involving the mentally challenged or disabled people humorous. Maybe it’s because I know people are disabled and there’s nothing funny about being disabled.

It seemed like if "Simple Jack" had really existed, this movie would have drawn protests far greater than Tropic Thunder has done and rightfully so. And if filmgoers are to believe Stiller’s character would take on such a blatantly offensive project, why would he do it when his action movie sequels were less dangerous content? Plausibility problem for me, nevermind whether or not one thinks humor about the disabled is funny.

As the LATimes opinion piece aptly points out:

The "retard" jokes are a harder case, and I don’t quite buy the rationalization that Ben Stiller’s performance as "Simple Jack" derives all its laughs from its lampooning of Hollywood’s naive lionization of the mentally challenged. Yet it’s funny in a sophomoric, guilt-inducing way. I confess that I laughed both at "Simple Jack" and the Downey character’s advice to Stiller’s character never to "go full retard" if he wanted an Oscar.

The action movies Stiller’s character were most popular for ("Scorcher") seemed much more plausible and easier territory to score with laughs. I think Stiller and company could have used the action movie character scenes with more humor and am somewhat puzzled why that wasn’t used instead. It seemed more like a cheap shock jock type device rather than a vital part of the film. As for the protesting groups, I think you have somewhat of a point, but you probably did more to promote the movie than hurt ticket sales. It didn’t work for me. A friend had to tell me you were protesting, but I probably would have been more intrigued to see if the film was offensive if I’d known you were protesting. That’s always the danger with drawing too much attention to something you hope others won’t pay to see. Controversy sells tickets.

Tropic Thunder is a comedy worth seeing. The LATimes review reminded me that it borrows somewhat from Galaxy Quest in that the actors extend their roles beyond the screen, but I think it’s a different enough twist that it’s still creative.  Grade: A-

Damn, who invited the Toxic Avenger over to take a swim in our pool? This photo was taken last week — before the end of summer cleaning.

Not the greatest timing either, it took a couple days to make it swimmer-friendly. Just in time for the scorching heat weekend. Dumping chemicals in, straining and filtering like mad. Go filter, go! Never did it get the water clear, but at least turned it blue.

And this morning, I’m trying the Mountain Dew like soda called Mountain Breeze and am struck by how similar it looks to the pool water last week.

A disgusting (algae-ridden pool) and tasty green (soda), take your choice. I don’t care much for Mountain Dew, but Mountain Breeze isn’t bad. Do you have a favorite soda clone? Or is it all original or nothing? Water or lemonade, heck limeade since we’re talking green, would be better for us.

Ok, if there is a joke here somewhere then I don’t get it.

What is the deal with this Swedish Furniture Generator? I’ll have to ask my friend Marcus from Sweden to explain or in the meantime, maybe some other readers might get the joke. Or is the joke on me and this is a useful tool of some kind?

Talk about a sceptic start to the morning with pun very much intended in the title. I woke up and learned that my name looks like ‘toilet’ when using the Side View Generator.

Is it worse than my 18 year old son’s name Jowlstar from the side which might be clitoris. Or how about a few friends in IRC? Lestat is like defect. Darkmoon = burglary. JohnnyRS = dishonor.  Forser = terror. My lovely wife Kara = fear.  MakeYouGoHmm wouldn’t fit, so I tried the alternate spelling MakeUGoHmm and that looks like omnivorous from the side. I’m not sure how accurate this tool is, especially since names are limited in size, but it made me smile. Hope it does the same for you.

Added this to the list of the 43+ other web generators. Hat tip to Ben Parr.

Note to prospective pot growers: the park is not a wise place to grow marijuana.

Especially not parks using radio transmitter equipped, chronic curious turtles:

A few weeks ago, her little turtle brain guided her to a sun-splashed clearing deep in the woods. And that’s where she was on the afternoon of July 14 — at the northern end of the 1,754-acre main park, far from any trail — when Ferebee, for the first time in nine days, decided to pay her a visit.

The National Park Service picture makes that rado transmitter look uncomfortable for the turtle. Maybe she was trying to find some pot to get away from the pain of that foreign apparatus? With that stony shell, maybe she doesn’t even notice?

Maybe next time the alleged harvester of sorrow, a “kid” as the story describes, decides to grow chronic he’ll check out former drug agent Barry Cooper’s DVD Never Get Busted Again. Haven’t seen the flick but I’m guessing there isn’t a scene about being on the alert for turtles with radio transmitters.

This could get me ejected from the Tablet PC club, but it’s videos like this one by Rob Bushway at GottaBeMobile which make Tablet PC evangelists look silly and detached from reality. I’ve met Rob, he’s a good guy, and am hoping he’s not seriously pushing this musical keyboard application as something useful? This has to be tongue-in-cheek.

Playing a keyboard — that doesn’t even allow multi-touch — on a Tablet PC is a sad substitute for making music with a real keyboard. $2,000 will buy you pro-quality keys. Heck, you can get Pro Tools Lite, USB interface and a PC notebook computer to record your jams for that much scratch. Rob writes:

"I’d like to see folks with regular laptops do this …"

My answer? What regular laptop user would want to?

I’m not knocking the fun/cool factor for an application like this, it looks neat, but I can’t see a person go out today and buy a Tablet PC because they want this type of application. Is it a gimmick or intended to be a useful music device? Is this a motivator to buy a Tablet PC for you? This doesn’t make me scream “I gotta be mobile.” Heck, it would be a lot less expensive for somebody to make music using the Guitar Hero controller. Don’t laugh, some folks already are. Isn’t there an iPhone musical keyboard application that does have multi-touch?

I don’t see anybody doing any serious music creation or live playing on their non multi-touch Tablet PC keyboard screen. Please somebody, anybody, prove me wrong. Not even in the next Revenge of The Nerds sequel. LOUIS! GILBERT!

When are we going to see a new search engine that blows us away? Not today.

Having a series of vanity queries armed and ready for quick testing of new search engine, Cuil, I chuckled at one of the prominent results of querying tdavid’s blog. Look, there are two of four results (50%!!!) for my aging, forgotten, seldom used Netscape.com profile page:

LOL, one result is a freaking PHP array dump! Where’s the QA testing? Thanks for the chuckle, Cuil. If not for the humor of seeing this PHP array dump, I’d probably never have written this post. An array dump for non-developer readers is the contents of an array output to the browser page. Something that should never be shown in a totally unrelated search result like my vanity search above.

People can argue against basing the quality of search engine results on vanity searches, but in my experience you should search for something that you know the best results and I can tell you with 100% authority that a search for ‘tdavid’s blog’ should not reveal results for dead netscape.com profile pages and PHP array dumps. Ok, Cuil gets a few points for getting this blog as the top left blog, but they lose on every other result on the page. Clipmarks? Metacafe? Performancing? Political Base? Those aren’t my ‘blogs’  nor any place I’d recommending sending anybody looking for my blogs. Heck, Cuil would be more timely using my FriendFeed or Twitter pages, both of which have been updated in the last 24 hours.

I don’t know what the Cuil bot is smoking, but it must be some good stuff.

Don’t even get me started on people foolishly, predictably comparing this to Google. Cuil has a few small things going for it: one is that the search results are not the traditional search results that too many SE are copying from each other these days. But having scaling problems at launch is rarely anything to be excited about (and I’m not helping by piling on with this post, sorry Cuil).

I wrote earlier on a FriendFeed comment my feelings on THE search engine that will someday replace Google. The only thing I’d amend in the following quote is that it could be two PEOPLE, not only "guys." Think I’ll go back and edit that to say ‘people’ instead. It is cool (that’s what ‘cuil’ sounds like) to see that Cuil was created by a husband wife team like Flickr:

The next true "Google killer" (and I despise the use of the ‘killer’ label) will be two guys in their garage somewhere, just like the original Google and it will look *nothing* like the current search engines. We haven’t seen it yet, but will someday and it will blow us away.

I can’t wait for the day to read and write about this search engine. The search continues.

The world needs more thinkers and tinkerers like Hiroyuki Manabe, who wants to find the next great phone interface, via Wired:

Manabe wired a pair of headphones to a system that detects the electrical currents produced by the rapid movement of his eyeballs. The invention is so precise that he can actually turn up the volume on a music player by rolling his eyes up or down, and he can fast forward tracks with a couple of quick eye jerks to his right.

This type of eye-powered interface could also be helpful to the disabled. Although the prototype looks ridiculous and needs serious fashion tweaking, I’d like to see more eye-powered devices.

Could be a few problems though if it tied too much activity to blinking as we tend to blink our eyes a lot of times every day. If it’s 16 times a minute, or 15,360 times over the course of 16 hours (hey, we have to sleep the other 8, right?), that’s a whole lot of unintentional activity. I’m lucky if I consciously think about blinking once a day, never mind over 15,000 times.

But you could do some sort of switch for closing your eyes and keeping them closed for a period of time. Close eyes and hold for five seconds to play Metallica "Enter Sandman" for example.

Here I have these glasses on every day, why can’t I get an eye-powered or eye-enhanced set of glasses that help me multi-task easier? Such a contraption might border on looking like some Borg apparatus and make even Manabe’s headphones look cool.

How about using our eyes to control a 3D viewer like PicLens (left) someday? Is Piclens neat browser eye candy or a glimpse at the future?

Sunday morning and what else to search for on the web? The Jesus Christ middle finger gave me an itch and decided to scratch for more image queries for middle fingers and share the results. Google Images 1 - 20 of about 1,530,000 — yowsa, if you can believe their ‘estimation’ they have the most middle fingers of any place on the web:

Flickr middle finger as slideshow (Flickr shows 10,140 results). This would be one to put on one of those picture frames above your TV — or on your TV — to freak out guests. Flickr competitor Zooomr only has 7 middle finger pictures.

At least 3,335 are showing their middle fingers on Photobucket:

The middle finger photoshopped out of flames seems to be one of the more popular pictures. Popular at Imageshack too which has 4 versions of it in the top 10 results out of 267 total pictures.

I would show you the results for Smugmug but as of this writing they are having Amazon S3 image hosting problems:

Historically, Amazon has been very stable.  We’ve seen three of these in our entire history with Amazon (>2 years), including this one.  I expect, like the last two, that service will be restored shortly.

Don doesn’t seem to think this is a middle finger image moment. Those paying for Smugmug might think so. Moving on, webshots has 19,627 middle finger images and hey, not a one of them is that flaming finger.

I checked AOL pictures but didn’t turn up any middle finger photos. Am I doing something wrong there? Oh, and yes, there is at least one middle finger picture here. This makes 21 posts out of 4,777 where the words middle finger have been used over the last 5+ years this blog has been in existence.

Did I miss a good place for more middle finger images?