The world's tallest LEGO tower is now in Windsor, UK. It's 100 feet tall. I was in Windsor a couple years ago and never knew there was a LEGOland there. odd. I love the tower and the English dude at the top of the tower.

Though it does seem a bit improper to have cables holding up the tower. I want to see the world's tower LEGO tower made COMPLETELY out of LEGO pieces.

huh?

best General Grievous drawing ever by Mister Bubby at "I am the Giraffe" blog

Here's the second in my series of General Grievous blog filler. It's a slick Master G toy. photo by HamSalad. (I knocked out the background and did some color correction to his photo.)

I'm a couple days behind on blog posts. Last week was super busy for me at work. This week I'm "on vacation" doing house projects. So... I'm gonna fill up some empty blog posts with none other than General Grievous from Star Wars. Spike TV seems to be playing the Star Wars films all the time; which is a great thing. I caught Episode III the other night where Obi Wan takes down Master G. Great stuff.

Do a Flickr search for: General Grievous costume. You'll find some great home-made stuff. Here's one of the better ones photographed by Soo-Mahn at a masquerade ball. See the man behind the costume peeking through the middle of the costume? Here's a different angle of the same costume taken by kwc at Comic-Con. And this photo is quite intriguing by janna7. It's Master G outdoors and the photo is blurred. It has a kind of photojournalistic quality.

It's a car. No. Wait. It's a tent.
via swissmiss

Today's headlines declare that candy monster,Mars is buying fellow candy monster, Wrigley for 22 billion dollars. There's been a big stir the last few months about Trib owner, Sam Zell, selling the naming rights to Wrigley. I always felt that Wrigley got free pub for having Cubs park keep their namesake since the Wrigley family sold the Cubs in 1981. It's about time they fork over the dough for the naming rights. But now that Wrigley is part of Mars, so we should see Wrigley Field change to Mars Field. Fork over the dough, Mars. Give Cubsdom some of that 22 billy. I'd love to see the famous Cubs park marque change to a Martian green. See my fancy photoshop work above. Oh yea.

here's a fun shelf that sticks to your wall with magnets. ohgizmo.com makes a good point in that any sort of electronics including "VHS tapes, cassettes, reel-to-reels and floppy disks" would be a bad idea to keep on the shelf. Though I don't think I'm gonna be standing in line to buy these shelves any way seeing as they range from $1200-$2100 just for a shelf.

I was visiting bbc.co.uk and was amused by their weather forecast. Rather than saying, "partly cloudy", they say "sunny intervals". I much prefer "sunny intervals". It's a glass half full kinda thing. So proper. I love London.

Congrats to the Chicago Cubs for getting their 10,000 victory Wednesday evening. I watched the last few innings. It was a thriller. Basically, the Cubs were losing 5-4 in the 9th with one out and a runner on first. Aramis Ramirez smacks a two-run homer to put the Cubs ahead 6-5. The Rockies somehow scored a run in the bottom of the 9th. I missed that due to a crying baby. Ryan Theirot drives in pinch-runner Mike Fontenot for the game-winning run. Carlos Marmol went on to shut out the Rockies in the 10th and lock in a save and the Cubs' 10,000th win.

Thanks to the magic of Tivo for making the image above possible.
larger 1000 pixel wide image at Flickr.

It took my brain a few seconds to process this. It's a Nintendo game cartridge that has a Nintendo console built into it. I love it.

via technabob

In observance of Earth Day, I took the stairs when leaving work rather than using the elevator down 24 flights of stairs. I do that every once in a while. Good exercise.

How do you pronounce the word, "robot"?

I've always know to say "ro-bot". Two co-workers were discussing a riddle involving two robots and both of them have been saying, "ro-but" and it's been driving me absolutely crazy. They keep saying it over and over. "ro-but, ro-but, ro-but" Aargh! For the record, I corrected them and they still are saying "ro-but".

Since 2001 my fanstasy baseball team name has been the "Khans". I like using historical references for my fantasy sports teams. My football team is called "Fighting Tokugawas". Recently I was struggling to find words that rhyme with "Khan". Rhymezone.com saved the day and gave "Juan" as one of the rhyming words. Wouldn't it be great if one of the ruthless Khan rulers was named "Juan Khan"?

I did some google action on "Juan Khan" and much to my surprise there's a fella in Indonesia that is Juan Khan. He even has his own Friendster page complete with photos.

I resized the "clapping hands" Yahoo! emoticon to 300 pixels wide.
The original is below.

I'm not sure if Kevin Royden designed this font or if he just posted it on his tumblr from elsewhere on the internet, but I am in the camp that believes this is the BEST FONT EVER.

So you probably heard about the cougar that was shot dead by police in the Roscoe Village neighborhood in Chicago. The big topic of debate has been whether it was necessary to kill the cougar. I don't think that's issue at hand. I'm offended by the quotes provided by the police at the scene. They have gone on record as saying that the cougar was attacking them and that's the reason why they had to shoot it. I don't buy it. It's been reported that 18 shots were fired. 18. Lemme get this straight. There's a cougar attacking you. You need 18 shots to kill it? Gimme a break.

Let's say I buy their story. For a cougar to be attacking something or someone, the cougar would need to be within a somewhat close range of the subject it is apparently attacking. So why did it take 18 shots to take down the cougar? Either the Chicago police who killed the cougar are incredible terrible gunsmen with absolutely no aim or they are liars.

JA3 cleared up this issue for me. I am sorry, Chicago Police.

If my next baby (and there's no second baby coming yet) is a boy, I'm going to work on getting him to make his word to be "nunchucks".

Let me just start off by saying that there is no rhyme or reason to how UPS charges what it does to ship items via UPS Ground. I had a discussion with a manager at my local UPS store a couple weeks ago about their formula and it would confuse most ivy league mathematics professors. The equations used are seriously the size of a large novel. He showed me.

With that said, I recently "saved" over $20 when I shipped a painting. It was an 18 x 24 x 1.5" painting wrapped big-time in bubble wrap in a box that was 22 x 32 x 9". The package was only a couple pounds. The cost to ship via UPS Ground to Washington rang up as $35. I just shipped a identically-sized painting in a similar box a couple weeks prior for about $16. The manager of the store heard me complaining about this and told the employee to see if 6 or 7 inches (instead of 9) would drop the price. Sure enough 7" dropped it to $13.

They then had a handy perforating tool that they used to score the box and bring the box down 2 inches in height. I was very happy that they offered to size down the box for me. (Actually, I had already sized it down from 18" to 9" but that's beside the point.)

So...
$35: 22 x 32 x 9"
$13: 22 x 32 x 7"

Size matters.

Check out muxtape.com before it gets taken down. You can listen online to others' "mixes" of songs. FREE. FREE. FREE. FREE. There's no mess of worrying about downloading files. You just click and listen.

senorwizard's page is purely ai-ightly tight.. It's the first link that I clicked on and the only mix that I've listened to so far. Now how do I find a way to download these tasty songs?

a ton of public transit logos via mic-ro.com. coo. However the Chicago and Chicagoland's Metra is not represented. Just the CTA.
They also have a small collection of views from different trains around the world. Chicago has three photos. Oh, and photos of stations, too.

I am happy to announce that I have achieved my 50th victory in Facebook's Wrestler game. The win came against none other than my brother Matt Maldre, aka Stegosaurus Smash. This victory has added meaning because I dropped Stego's record below .500. ***Insert evil laugh***

We were going back and forth rather consistently throughout the match. Exchanging blow for blow. Then all of a sudden the match got weird. It was my turn and I attempted a simple leg drop and it failed. Uh oh. Momentum swung heavily in Stego's favor. However, he couldn't maximize; for his first move, the trusty clothesline, failed. At this point the match came back to even steven with a slight edge to Stego. We both had about 30 health. I had about 35 momentum to Stego's 65 momentum.

What move shall I pull? Stego had seen just about all my tricks from my wrestling bag. I figured I would rub it in with a clothesline seeing as Stego just failed in his attempt at that move. Bam. It succeeded. Now our momentums were even. I hemmed and hawwed about my next move. I was truly stumped. There could any number of moves he decided to block.

Then perfect move shone upon me like a Calumet EGT 1000 watt 120 volt 3200 kelvin Lamp bulb. The Tongan Death Grip. I recently purchased the move to block a different opponent who used it all the time. I never used the Tongan Death Grip. I was fearful for its low success rate. Here's the official description of the move:

Dart your hand under your opponent's chin and grab a hold of a pressure point above the throat, squeezing the nerve. Difficult to achieve, but low risk and produces solid damage.

Success. Stego was destroyed. His health dropped from around 25 to 11 and his momentum was shattered to about a 12. I knew I couldn't pin an opponent with an 11/12 rating. However, at this point I felt so confident that any simple move would finish him off. One simple leg drop followed by a pin and victory was mine.

Every year my twin brother and I have a fantasy baseball league with just the two of us going back to 1992 (with a break from 1994-1999). Every year we alternate who wins, except last year I broke the streak. I am the first person to win back-to-back seasons! Thank you! Thank you! Please hold your applause for I have even greater news.

The 2008 season is featuring the first ever team expansion (besides the 1993 addition of Rob Frey). Please welcome our sister, Kristina to the league.

Below is a list of the championship seasons
1992 erik
1993 matt
2000 erik
2001 matt (I drop Bonds right before he goes on his monster 73 homer tear. whoops.)
2002 erik
2003 matt (I got married two months after our draft. I was distracted.)
2004 erik (Darth Pujols and Barry Bonds carried my team. I gave in to the Dark Side and won.)
2005 matt (I was leaving for London the day we had our draft. Another major distraction.)
2006 erik (The Ryan Howard Explosion. I predicted he would win the homer title before the season when he was an unknown.)
2007 erik (I supposed to lose this season. It came down to the final day of the season. I had a baby girl born in the summer which should have been enough distraction for me to lose. She must be a lucky charm.)
2008 WHO WILL WIN?

This is the place where we will have our talk about the league. Feel free to listen in, or maybe even drop a comment.

My wife had an open snack bag of 100 calorie Mister Salty Milk Chocolate Covered Pretzels sitting on the couch. I took a peek inside the bag and my wife said, "get your own package". I replied, "why are you calling me a 'bitch'?" She said, "what!?!" I said, "You said 'Get your own bag, bitch'". She corrected me by saying, "I told you to get your own package". Much laughter ensued.

Download, print, and construct your very own finger puppets of U.S. presidential candidates Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain.

What happened to poor Barack's ears?

Been surfing the net and came across this somehow. It's a plush hybrid toaster cute animal cell phone holder. Judging from the site it appears to be Japanese. Chalk that one up to another great reason why the Japanese are so cool.

I'm not about to completely and utterly lose my mind by supporting the Mets like Matt Maldre at spudart.org; however I have to side with New York City when Steve Jobs and Apple are getting all fussy about the GREENYC logo. I'm a long-time Apple fan, but it seems like the next thing you know Steve Jobs will require people to pay royalties any time they want to go to a grocery store and buy an apple.

The Perspektiva Lamp is a new concept from Transparent House based on an idea of incorporating an iconic item into the form and function of a useful everyday object while maintaining certain artistic qualities. Transparent House chose a vintage camera and flipped the whole notion behind the camera: instead of taking in light, the camera is now the source.

This is just flipping cool. And it glows too. (It's the moon, man.)

Take an internal hard drive, plop it into this dock and whamm-o, you have an instant external hard drive to use. Works on Windows and Mac. Not shown in the photo is the power cord and the usb cord. It reminds me of the old Atari 2600 console. (Gizmodo says it reminds them of Ninteno, but the way the hdd sticks up looks like Atari to me.)

It's $45 (not sure of shipping costs) at geekstuff4u.com. A bit pricey considering you're leaving your hdd completely exposed to settling dust and such. I'd entertain buying the dock for about $25. Gizmodo also points out that there's now one with a USB hub which seems a bit unneccessary.