The Lego arcade

Lego. There really is nothing you can’t do with the stuff. I’d wager it is entirely possible to create some kind of mecha-transformer-tank-killatron which could crush France with one foot whilst nuking China, taking a dump on Switzerland at the same time. Don’t believe me? PAH!

Anyway, returning to reality, this video is awesome. All your arcade classics from Pac-Man to Asteroids are represented in colourful plastic block form, and pretty well done too. Makes me want to play some of these again. Well, until I realise how extremely dated they are these days.

This gives me an idea for more Lego video games. We already have the official licensed Lego Star Wars and Lego Indiana Jones games, and Lego Harry Potter is on its way. Apparently they’re also making a Lego version of the music game Rock Band, and I have literally no idea how they conjoined those two ideas and though it would have anything but a disastrous outcome, but meh. Their problem.

No, my ideas are much better. How about Lego War on Terror? I, for one, would love to see Osama bin Laden Lego-ised, or a version of Operation Shock and Awe where the most dangerous thing likely to happen would be to tread on a plastic block in bare feet in the dark. Maybe that’s just me though…

Woman throws away $1 million in mattress

How would you feel if you lost $1 million by throwing it away into a landfill. Now make it an accident, beyond your control. Feeling bad? Pissed off? Annoyed? Distraught? Well, now add to the mix that it wasn’t you who lost your million dollars… it was your daughter. I think by now you would happily be contemplating murder, yes?

Well, exactly this has happened in Israel after a woman decided to ’surprise’ her mother with a new mattress for her bed while she was out one day. Having happily thrown the old mattress out, having had it taken away to the dump, she thought her mother would be completely won over with the new present and love her for ever and ever. Well, no.

What did happen is when her mother arrived home, she fainted on the spot. When roused, she let slip that the old mattress contained her life savings to the tune of $1 million. Upon this, her daughter left (rather hurriedly) for the local dump where the mattress should have been taken. But of course things never go smoothly, as it had already been taken away to a landfill site.

This is where the woman is now situated, searching night and day for the literal bag of money she threw away. Quite possibly the most expensive gift she will ever have given…

Beatboxing flute action

This is something you don’t see every day. There have been a fair number of beatboxers over the years, not all of them good. Well, here is one act which laughs at their inadequacies whilst holding a flute and knocking out some phat beatz…

OK, so he isn’t like the second coming of Jesus or anything, but he is pretty good. Makes you wonder how you learn this kind of thing. Was he sat there playing his flute one day (hur hur) when he had a sudden urge to burp or something, then realised he could mix it up a little with some beatboxing. Who knows – either way, he’s pretty good.

So you’ve been on the big wide webbernet, mooching about and generally filling up your cache, history and logs with a nice trail showing just how much you like Donkeys Gone Wild and Big MILFs. But oh no! Your mother/father/sister/brother/wife/girlfriend/boyfriend/husband/dog wants to use the computer next! You need to rid it of all of those dirty little things left over from your little ’session’ – what do you do?

Some (pussy) privacy experts would suggest clearing the cache, history and so on, with maybe a few extra tips. Here, we believe in ultimate security. You may have caught a previous post about data destruction, recovery and thermite (yum) but that isn’t all you can do. If it is a laptop, you can set it on fire using nothing but its own components! Watch and learn…

Of course, this could happen naturally due to extreme heat exposure, a very dodgy battery or smashing the battery with a hammer. We don’t suggest you actively try to do any of these things, because as you can see it gets very serious very quickly. Do it to someone else’s laptop by all means. As long as you have their permission, of course.

One thing about this video is that it makes me wanna check my laptop batteries to make sure they’re actually more than just a cheap improvised explosive in plastic wrapping. Now, where are those battery suppliers

Fun things to do with mail spam

Everyone gets spam, its like a law of the universe or something. But when you think back, we always got spam. Way before the invention of e-mail, we were (and still are) getting inundated with leaflets, pamphlets, print adverts, TV commercials, radio spots and informercials until we could virtually memorise them. Trust me, if I found myself in a torture cell being told I had to recite the latest Yellow Pages advert or I would find myself strung up on the nearest available flag pole, I’d be pretty safe.

So, it stands to reason that you should be able to do something to retalliate. Threatening to blow up the headquarters of every mobile phone company in the country unless they start making real adverts, not just putting some text with a song which sounds like a 5 year old with attention deficit disorder made it using only their mouths without ever actually using real words, may well get you in trouble (yes, I’m looking at you T-Mobile). No, there has to be a more subtle way.

  • Get the address of the sender (usually a PO Box somewhere) and sign them up on all the business mailing lists you can find. Give them a taste of their own medicine (assuming they have a receive-capable box).
  • Most of these mail-outs include a return envelope of some description, usually with free postage. Take advantage of it! Send them back something, anything, so they have to pay the postage – they count on most people not bothering to reply, so if more people do then maybe they would see their money slipping down the drain!
  • Take the above one step further – I’ve heard of people managing to send large, bulky items back to the spammers filling your mailbox with useless tat. Stuff like bricks, crushed drinks cans and even lead weights have been used, just to drive up the cost of the postage which gets bounced back to the spammer. If any of these actually work, tell me!

These are but a few tactics. Why not get ingenious – as long as it isn’t biological in nature or an illegal item, you shouldn’t get any hassle for it.

The evils of sprinklers

Sprinklers can be great fun, we all know that. Kids love to dance around in them when the weather is hot, dogs love to play chicken with them and they keep your lawn all nice and lush. However, they are the mortal enemy of the water board who impose hosepipe bans as a mere cover for their efforts to remove sprinklers and their kin from the face of the planet. Trust me – its only a matter of time before you see United Utilities workmen marching into B&Q to ‘purify’ the garden equipment aisles…

But aside from that, here we have a perfect example of what you can do with sprinklers: save your pool from birds crapping in it. Pool tarpaulins? Pah! Old hat, behind the curve and all that. What you really need is to blow some money on a motion-sensitive sprinkler system to hose down all birds who go near your pool. Well, those big enough for it to detect. And they can still crap in the pool – from a height, before they’re blasted, whenever really. But yeah, this will totally teach them a lesson!

This makes me wonder how dangerous this guy would be with something like residential fire sprinklers. There would be soaked pets for miles around.

Security camera gold

Security cameras are everywhere these days. Can’t even walk down the street without having about 3 of them watching you at all times. However, they do have their uses – like catching hilarious moments on tape for people like us to laugh at. This first video shows how winding someone up by throwing stuff at them like a 6 year old boy in school will elicit the same response as it did back then – a punch in the face. So, remember that the next time you launch across your desk at work like a WWE wrestler laying the proverbial smack down…

But that’s not all folks, as we’re about to find out. Sometimes it isn’t just the people who wind you up to breaking point – the entire office and its furniture does. Seems all that sets this worker off is someone knocking over a stack of papers. That then gives him plenty of reason to start throwing monitors, keyboards, paper, ornaments and dividing walls at anyone and everyone who gets in his way. I particularly love the bit at the end. When he is non-responsive to a co-worker trying to calm him down and lashes out, said co-worker decides to deal with him the old fashioned way: take out his legs and send him plummeting to the floor. Enjoy!

Imagine the future possibilities for hilarity with the rise in IP security cameras being purchased by people, absolutely petrified that some little scally will make off with their 52 inch flatscreen widescreen HD-ready uber-view TV which is bolted to the wall in their tiny council house. I for one can’t wait to see domestic disputes, usually over who actually owns that tree which overhangs someone’s garden, boil over into outright warfare whilst being captured on camera. Would definitely mean a new age of You’ve Been Framed clips, that’s for sure!

You may well have seen this before, but it doesn’t stop it from being awesome. People with expensive houses are always looking for good intruder alarm systems these days, and cars are no different. In this case, the jumbo marshmallow toaster you see attached to the bottom of this BMW is a feature you can get to protect your car from pesky thieves – but only in South Africa. Seems they’re the only people mad enough to allow it in the first place!

Anyway, this got me to thinking. Seeing as this is an extreme way to stop people stealing your belongings, what if there were more comical ways? What about some kind of Inspector Gadget style contraption with a big robotic arm which comes from the top of the car, whacking a great big fishing net over the person trying to nab your wheels, keeping them restrained until the cops come round while making sure they’re visible to any passers-by, showing them up for the thieving scum they are…

Or, how about this – a giant cannon which sprays foam out which is fast drying and damn strong. Coat the bottom of their bodies and watch them be unable to move, like some kind of chavvy human statue. Something like the foam you see in the awesome Stallone film Demolition Man when the car crashes into the lake… Yeees, eeexcellent.

Fun with vehicle tracking

Bet you never thought you’d see that as a topic, eh? Well, now you have. More to the point, there is a whole lot of fun you can have with vehicle tracking systems. Take this guy for instance: he put together quite possibly the world’s largest delivery order, intended for a case containing a GPS tracking unit. Then with a little help from DHL, the case takes his planned route. What happens is this:

As you can see, he has managed to create a self portrait (well, sort of) using nothing but the path his case took, tracked by the GPS unit inside.

This got me thinking, what else could you do with vehicle tracking systems like this? Sure, this is probably the world’s biggest drawing (seeing as the canvas is the world itself – can’t get much bigger than that in the world itself) but what about more detailed, slightly less weird looking pictures (come on, that arm is just messed up)?

Anyway, one idea I had was for some kind of TV show where the prize is your freedom. I think I saw something like this on TV years ago (Tarrant on TV to blame here). It was a Russian TV show, where the object was to steal a car and then try to escape from the police over the next 60 minutes or so (details are a little fuzzy here). In the end, I’m pretty sure that if you didn’t manage to escape and actually ended up getting caught, that was it – you actually went to jail for car theft! Escape and you won the car you just stole – the perfect balance of trying to escape whilst not destroying the prize in the process. Of course this could all be tosh and my memory is deceiving me like a politician over expenses claims.

Now, think about it. Add in some vehicle tracking, maybe a police helicopter or two and give the person a car to steal and head start – whoever lasts the longest without being captured wins the game. Sure as hell beats any other ideas for reality TV shows, and you get to put away some budding criminals in the process. Yeah, one gets away as free as a bird, but compared to the current system of nearly all criminals getting away with it, what’s to lose?

5 of the best police chases

Everyone loves police car chases. The fact that there are about a thousand different TV shows around the world showing nothing but police car chases is testament to this. In fact, the only people who don’t like police chases are the ones being chased, and even then it is only if they get caught in the end. So, what better than a quick run down of a few of the best police car chases in recent history? Nothing, that’s what. Here they are in no particular order (before someone complains about it).

  • The most recent on this list is a chase which covered 57 miles in Minnesota last week in a brilliant choice of vehicle: a garbage truck. Maybe this guy had been playing a bit too much GTA4, but the same could be said for the cops too – after popping all his tyres, the truck just kept on going. To get around this, the police drew alongside and began to shoot the buggery out of the engine of the truck with a shotgun, all to no avail. In fact, the guy was only caught when he stopped of his own accord to run away – only to be chased down by a bunch of police dogs, who made sure he was subdued by treating him like a jumbo dog toy. Unsurprisingly, the man was drunk.
  • Back to Britain this time, or to be more precise, Wales. A police chopper is flying around Cardiff when they see what they think is a UFO. They proceeded to chase the thing as far as Devon before they realised they were running out of fuel and turned back. The pilots are adamant that what they followed was not of Earthly origin, but I remain to be convinced. Cos, you know, the Welsh are pretty funny looking. Anyone could mistake them for an alien – I know I do, frequently.
  • What do you do if you’re caught driving a limo with no licence? Why, take off from the police of course, get up to 155mph and then decide to do some stunt driving by going 40mph in reverse. This would possibly be the funniest chase I have seen for a long time if it weren’t for the fact that there was a passenger in the limo during all this – brown trousers time, methinks.
  • Again, another guy who played a bit too much GTA took it into his head to steal a tank and go on a rampage. Yes, a goddamn tank. I don’t know where he got it from but if there is any chase you don’t wanna be the lead cop on, its this. You ain’t fishtailing this guy, thats for sure.
  • Finally, a true police chase involving a Porsche 911, a suped-up VW Golf and the Dutch police. This one goes through so many stages it is hard to follow – first the guy is in his Porsche 911, being chased by police. He manages to pull away a fair bit and confuses the officers chasing him, but not for long. They catch up and find him ditched in a barrier when he rejoins the motorway. Despite the fact his bodywork is now trashed and his engine is leaking vital fluids, he takes off again while even more pieces fall off. Then a massive twist – he meets up with another person who is in a Volkswagen Golf R32, where they swap cars. Turns out the other person is his wife – she takes the Porsche one way and he takes the VW the other. Needless to say, the cops caught up with him in the end. They found drugs and weapons in the Porsche, right underneath his 2 year old kid. If there was ever a guy who deserved a good kicking, I think he is it.

So there you go, a collection of some the best chases. Got any more suggestions? Send em in!

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Someone once asked me what this site was about. I told them to shut up unless they had something useful to say. Do you want this person to be you? Didn't think so. Stop worrying and just enjoy.

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