http://www.bestweekever.tv/2008/07/09/other-places-youd-expect-to-see-the-title-tomb-of-the-dragon-emperor/

I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the poster for the latest installment of the Mummy franchise, The Mummy: Tomb Of the Dragon Emperor. That's right -- an actual, major motion picture is actually giving itself the actual title "Tomb of the F*cking Dragon Emperor" (F-word optional).

I always figured that if I ever saw that title, it would've been on one of the following:

Rush Album

Magic: The Gathering Expansion Set

Choose Your Own Adventure Book

Nonsensical Japanese Translation

Nine-Year-Old's Drawing

http://www.bestweekever.tv/2008/07/09/yes-id-love-to-see-a-different-kind-of-snake/

If you watch as much porn as I do, you're more than familiar with the contrived introductions they use to get to the dirty stuff. (And again, if you're like me, you just don't care.) But now, Defamer has unearthed the most incredible introduction to a porn I've ever seen. GET READY TO GET ALL TINGLY DOWN THERE!



The best part is right at the end when you hear the Hungarian woman say "Okay".

http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2008/07/377406.shtml

Activists are pointing out that the CRC will encourage further oil dependency. They are concerned about the CO2 impacts of the CRC and Interstate 5 expansion as well as the reliance on oil-based transportation infrastructure at time when oil supplies are falling and prices are rising dramatically. The theatrics are intended to poke fun at the City Council's support of the CRC, despite the city's prominent green image.

The dramatics will take place as the City Council hears public comment on the CRC. The City Council has already pledged its support for the CRC, much to the dismay of community members opposed to the project who intended to utilize forum for a genuine debate on the project.

The performance is orchestrated by Cascadia Rising Tide ( http://cascadia.RisingTideNorthAmerica.org) and the Convergence for Climate Action ( http://www.climateconvergence.org)

Background: The CRC is an investment in public works intended to accommodate more driving. Specifically the CRC is designed to enable a 30% increase in individual car traffic.

The state of Oregon has stated a goal of reducing global warming pollution to at least 75% below 1990 levels. Transportation-caused global warming pollution is responsible for 40% of all regional global warming pollution. Given these facts, activists believe the money should instead be invested in reducing driving through public transit, carpooling, greater support for biking and other programs.

Additionally, the I-5 freeway has caused negative health impacts on low-income communities and communities of color along the freeway: increased driving will lead to further pollution. By contrast, research shows that land use and transportation plans that encourage less driving help prevent chronic diseases associated with obesity, such as diabetes and heart disease, and respiratory illness, including asthma.

The event is a lead up to the 2nd Annual Convergence for Climate Action which takes place July 28 - August 4th in Coburg, Oregon. The Convergence focuses on climate and energy issues in our region, including the CRC, the Bureau of Land Management's forest plan revisions, the removal of the Klamath dams, sustainable agriculture, and liquefied natural gas development along Oregon's waterways.

So,I am looking for a non crowded place to hang out around some water and trees.
Last summer some friends and I drove up to Washougal, Washington and found a really cool spot with NO PEOPLE anywhere.
I would ask one of those friends where exactly that was, but we no longer speak to one another.
So, now I turn to you, DP, Please point me in the right direction!

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/330945491/elfquest-to-become-a.html

Tavie sez, Possibly spurred by the new interest generated when Elfquest started offering their entire series for free online - Hollywood Reporter says that after almost 30 years of false start, Elfquest is finally going to become a movie. I'm cautiously, but intensely, excited. This series was originally designed with animation in mind, so a good, traditionally-animated feature film with the creators' involvement/blessing will be a dream come true for a lot of fans."

"Elfquest," the cult comic by Wendy and Richard Pini, is heading to the big screen courtesy of Warners Bros. and Rawson Thurber.

Thurber will write, direct and produce the feature, whose format is undetermined.

Link (Thanks, Tavie!)

See also: Every issue of Elfquest free -- oldest independent comic goes online

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/330930410/new-world-heritage-n.html

The World Heritage Committee added eight natural sites and 19 cultural sites to UNESCO's World Heritage List of cultural, natural, and mixed properties that have "outstanding universal value." The new natural sites include:

* Joggins Fossil Cliffs (Canada)
* Mount Sanqingshan National Park (China)
* Lagoons of New Caledonia: Reef Diversity and Associated Ecosystems (France)
* Surtsey (Iceland), image at left
* Saryarka - Steppe and Lakes of Northern Kazakhstan (Kazakhstan)
* Monarch Butterfly biosphere Reserve (Mexico)
* Swiss Tectonic Arena Sardona (Switzerland)
* Socotra Archipelago (Yemen)

Twenty-seven World Heritage sites added (UNESCO), World Heritage 2008 photo gallery (UNESCO)

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/330919582/building-festooned-w.html

DeviantArt's FilthyLuker produced this fantastic be-tentacled building installation somewhere in France with collaborator Pedro Estrellas. FilthyLuker's terse description: "Octo-pied Building: a house with tentacular cancer." Link (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Our GM rocks as a player, he's one of those people who does the math, walks the walk etc, so it was no surprise that after many years of playing he accepted a position with a serious raiding guild on another server.  I am around all the time, it's the curse/blessing of being a work from home mom. There's also that old saying that the best person for a job is usually one who doesn't ask to do it. 

Without any discussion aside from him asking 2 of our officers, he offered me the job.  No one else wants it or is around enough to make it viable for them to do effectively.  So, here I am with a decent sized guild who's going through the summer slow down on top of losing a few of our core raiders  over the past months for a variety of reasons.  We haven't been able to get 25 together in a month, although we're continually doing Kara/ZA whenever people are around. 

I'm pushing the recruiting on all angles...yes it's coming wait for it...  and I really don't know what else to do.  Any suggestions?  I should say that so far everyone in the guild is being really supportive, there are a few that are pushing the buttons to see what they can get away with, but being a casual guild where raiding is not mandatory, they don't have much ground for bitching....if you don't like it...don't stay.

If you are 70 horde side on Skywall, Khans is looking for just about everything.  While we are casual in that we only raid 3 nights a week and there is no mandatory attendance, we do expect people to bring consumables/flasks etc and be ready to go at 5:30 server time.  Nights right now are usually Wed, Th, Sun, Mon  (that's 4 but sundays are only if we have the numbers)  You can app at khans.guildportal.com or yell at Mayfield in game.  We will be moving the site hopefully this week, I'll have the new info on gportal when it does.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/blogspot/MKuf/~3/330892906/introduction-to-google-ranking.html

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

In May, Udi Manber introduced our search quality group, the group responsible for the ranking of search results. He introduced various teams within "Quality" (as we like to call the group) including Core Ranking, International Search, User Interfaces, Evaluation, Webspam, and other teams. In this post, I want to tell you more about one of these: the Core Ranking team.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Amit Singhal. I'm a Google Fellow in charge of the ranking team at Google. I've worked in the field of search for the past eighteen years, having been introduced to search in 1990 as a graduate student in computer science. In the academic world, the field of search is known as Information Retrieval (or IR). After spending a decade as an IR researcher, I came to Google in 2000, and have worked on Google ranking ever since.

Google ranking is a collection of algorithms used to find the most relevant documents for a user query. We do this for hundreds of millions of queries a day, from a collection of billions and billions of pages. These algorithms are run for every query entered into most of Google's search services. While our web search is the most used Google search service and the most widely known, the same ranking algorithms are also used - with some modifications - for other Google search services, including Images, News, YouTube, Maps, Product Search, Book Search, and more.

The most common question I get asked about Google's ranking is "how do you do it?" Of course, there is a lot that goes into building a state-of-the-art ranking system like ours, and I will delve deeper into the technology behind it in a later post. Today, I would like to briefly share the philosophies behind Google ranking:

1) Best locally relevant results served globally.
2) Keep it simple.
3) No manual intervention.

The first one is obvious. Given our passion for search, we absolutely want to make sure that every user query gets the most relevant results. We often call this the "no query left behind" principle. Whenever we return less than ideal results for any query in any language in any country - and we do (search is by no means a solved problem) - we use that as an inspiration for future improvements.

The second principle seems obvious. Isn't it the desire of all system architects to keep their systems simple? Well, as search systems go, given the wide variety of user queries we have to respond to in multiple languages, it is easy to go down the path where more and more complexity creeps into the system to serve the next incremental fraction of the queries. We work very hard to keep our system simple without compromising on the quality of results. This is an ongoing effort, and a worthy one. We make about ten ranking changes every week and simplicity is a big consideration in launching every change. Our engineers understand exactly why a page was ranked the way it was for a given query. This simple understandable system has allowed us innovate quickly, and it shows. The "keep it simple" philosophy has served us well.

No discussion of Google's ranking would be complete without asking the common - but misguided! :) - question: "Does Google manually edit its results?" Let me just answer that with our third philosophy: no manual intervention. In our view, the web is built by people. You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms. The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by us. We believe that the subjective judgment of any individual is, well ... subjective, and information distilled by our algorithms from the vast amount of human knowledge encoded in the web pages and their links is better than individual subjectivity.

The second reason we have a principle against manually adjusting our results is that often a broken query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to our ranking algorithm. Improving the underlying algorithm not only improves that one query, it improves an entire class of queries, and often for all languages. I should add, however, that there are clear written policies for websites recommended by Google, and we do take action on sites that are in violation of our policies or for a small number of other reasons (e.g. legal requirements, child porn, viruses/malware, etc).

Stay tuned for my followup post, where I will discuss in detail the technologies behind our ranking and show examples of several state-of-the-art ranking techniques in action. Let me just conclude this post by saying, our passion for search is stronger than ever - and as a search researcher, I have the best job in the world :-).

I'm standing around on my bank alt posting auctions.

Guy: why r u drssed like that
Me: How else would I dress?
Guy: ure wearing a tux a monocle a mood ring and u have a fish
Me: Yep!
Guy: why
Me: Because it's stylish.
Guy: but its also pointless
Me: So is World of Warcraft, ultimately. And life, since you die at the end.
Guy: that makes no sense, so ur saying a corncob should go to the afgane border and make a bunch of peanuts into cranberries?
Me: ... You lost me at peanuts. I'm allergic. Bye now!

To the person who left the carton of ice cream on the table of crackers: No. You fail.

To the person who left the ice cream sandwiches in the cheese cooler: Close. But you still fail.

To the person who left the piece of brie in the ice cream freezer: See above.

You gotta love Ellen!

http://ellen.warnerbros.com/2008/02/steve_spangler_do_not_try_this.php

EDIT:

If you click on this link, and it takes you to the Ellen home page, click your back button, and then you will see the actual page. You might also have to sit thru a 30 second commercial first, but trust me, its worth it.

A good friend of mine in Berkeley (CA) who is not part of these social circles, needs someone to help her navigate MySpace and Facebook to promote her new novel. She's willing to pay for a couple of hours of coaching.

If interested, let me know at kith at spicejar dot org.

(Real content coming soon. I promise.)

http://www.bestweekever.tv/2008/07/09/the-denial-is-so-thick-its-almost-painful/

Also, Jamie Lynn Spears has gray hair now.



(via Dlisted)

Yesterday's (or possibly the day before...I read it yesterday, at any rate) post about people leaving stuff they don't want all over the bloody store reminded me of this one lady I dealt with at my last job. I worked in handbags/accessories at America's Department Store...not as bad as leaving out perishables, but still annoying...

It was fairly usual for people to put bags down in the wrong place, and I honestly didn't mind that much when they did because it gave me something to actually do. Usually people stuck things on whatever table or shelf was closest, sometimes they would actually put things with the right brand, or with something that looked similar but wasn't the exact same bag. I would go around and sort things out and put them back. No big deal, right?

Well...standing around behind the counter one day, I notice a bag in the middle of the floor. I go pick it up, put it back where it goes, then see another bag right in the middle of the floor. Just lying there forsaken, waiting for someone to trip over it. I pick it up, and spot another one. There's just a trail of bags, winding through the department like Hansel and Gretel's breadcrumbs. I go around the whole department, pick up the bags, put them away. As I'm doing this I notice a lady trying on a bag and looking in the mirror. As I watch, she walks a few steps away from the mirror and drops the bag in the middle of the aisle.

This was only mildly annoying. What turned it from mildly annoying to kind of sucky was that she swept through the department three more times, doing the same thing each time. Sometimes with the same bags. It just seems like common sense to me: Don't leave things in the middle of the floor! Please!? Someone may trip and get hurt.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/330914651/solarpowered-cthulhu.html

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, a majorly cool Etsy find by our John:

Etsy user tinyminds makes cheap, wonderful solar-powered robots for between $60-$80 each, but the one pictured here is christened after Lord Cthulhu, H.P. Lovecraft's sickly spawn of the stars. The Cthulhu bot sleeps until he soaks up enough light... at which point, he begins to madly thrash around his many sucking, tentacled limbs. "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn..." as the ancient prophecies write. Roughly translated? In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits recharging.

Link, Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

So last night was my first group healing in an instance. A guildie brought his level 26 warrior to tank Black Fathom Deeps and we dredged up three DPS from the LFG channel: a hunter, an enhancement shammy, and get this... another priest. I flat out said "I'm main healing, the other priest does DPS or gets out". Back up healing is fine, but I want to be the main one doing the healing since I need practice at it.

Before we even get to the instance, the hunter announces that he doesn't have a pet... it ran away during the last instance. My guildie and I (with T6 raiding hunters as our mains) did the /facepalm. *grumble* So we tell him to go get one now and we'll summon him when he's ready.

We head on in to the instance and the hunter also announces he's tanking. I should add that the instance is listed as 20 to 27. The hunter is 23, the other two DPS are 20, and the tank and I are 26 and 28. I "politely" point out that hunters only tank instances they are over-level for and since he's not high enough, he's not tanking, the warrior is. No comment comes back.

My guildie and I are on vent and I flat out say that if the hunter pulls stuff, I'm letting him die. He's on the bottom of my "to heal" list.

We get inside and start pulling. Yeah, the hunter is meleeing stuff and not focus firing. A few times, he also pulled extra groups without checking what the tank was up to. We were able to hold it together otherwise.

The priest would psychic scream whenever he thought we were in trouble. More often than not, it just got us into *more* trouble.

The stupid hunter kept greeding on items, even though we had said "need any BoP items, pass if you don't need them, since the priest will DE them and we'll roll on shards later". I'd have to watch and see if anyone else needed the item, if not, I had to need it to make sure the hunter didn't get it for vendoring.

At one point, the hunter ran ahead and pulled mobs. He yells into party chart "Heal me!" The other priest responded first, pointing out that he shouldn't have run ahead and I was behind still gathering up stuff. That's when I took the opportunity to respond: "One of the best ways to guarantee never getting heals is to demand them". No one demanded heals after that. XD

We made it to the end, killed most (or all) of the bosses, but I missed out on two quests, so we have to go back for them (need them for the Darnassus rep). I'm not sure if we'll do another group or just get a 70 to zerg through it for me.

It wasn't the *best* pug, but it wasn't the worst I've been in by far. I think I got the hang of healing and when to pop which heals. I did accidentally shield the tank at one point due to having shield on hotkey and basically not targeting myself first. That I was aware of being a no-no ahead of time and it was a complete mistake. The other priest shielded him though when he thought he was taking too much damage, which led to "Don't shield me!" comments from him. I cycled between watching his rage bar and his health if I found he was taking a lot of damage... no reason to shield him if it means zero rage.

I did also notice what healers mean about "not getting to see the instance". >_< I spent the entire time watching profile boxes on my screen and clicking on them to cast spells. I still haven't installed a healing addon, but I will... it'll make things a little easier I think.

But I did it! :D No deaths, a pretty solid run. No upgrades for me (a staff did drop with nice stats, but I had picked up a blue from the a few days earlier and the other priest seemed to want it so I passed). I wound up with some nice mats that the blues sharded into since everyone ran off and didn't seem interested in them at the end. :D

OKAY.

SERIOUSLY people.

YES, WE HAVE MONKEYS AT THE PETSHOP. YES, we do primate rescues. YES, the two spider monkeys and the tufted capuchin look like the cutest cute things to ever be shat out by the Gods of Cute. And YES, there is a window into the back room where their enclosure is so you can see them and laugh at them and then hopefully spend money so my bosslady can A) PAY ME MORE BECAUSE I REALLY HATE ALSO WORKING AT STARBUCKS D: and B) Support herself, her family, the monkeys in question, and keep this amazing 10,000-square-foot petshop in business.

However.

NO, they are not friendly with strangers. In fact, Molly would be more than happy to attempt to maul you, as the scars those of us who work with her bear will testify. NO, you cannot follow me into the back room. NO, NO, A THOUSAND TIMES NO, THE MONKEYS ARE NOT FOR SALE.

Also, wtf at the logic of "WHY DO YOU HAVE THEM HERE IF THEY ARE NOT FOR SALE?!!!!! D:"

Because obviously if it's in the store, it's for sale.

I think the pygmy rattlers would disagree, good sir.

http://www.bestweekever.tv/2008/07/09/simi-lebrities-wall-e-gads/

By now, it's been pretty much unanimous that Wall E is one of the greatest animated movies ever. But today, it sort of became clear to us who Wall E is a dead ringer for...



Click after the jump at your own risk for an uncensored version.



Why, it's our favorite faceless cat, Chase!! See, if you look at little Chase like a small, furry Wall-E, he becomes painfully adorable, no?

You can read the daily musings of Chase over at Chasenoface dot blogspot dot com.

http://www.bestweekever.tv/2008/07/09/madonna-throws-britney-a-bone/

Britney Spears is going to appear in some video footage for Madonna's new tour. Shooting is expected to begin today and Spears' reps say that the video will be very "deep". I believe it. I had the great pleasure of seeing a Madonna concert a few years back - and it's no joke. The videos she plays (on gigantic screens) are frighteningly weird and are definitely making an attempt at being deep. The one I saw was reminiscent of the video from The Ring. If we're lucky, we'll see Britney dancing around on a horse carcass and then throwing herself off a cliff.

But what fascinates me about this whole situation is how it came about. Britney and Madonna have worked together in the past, but since Brit's downward spiral, I imagine this video is a charity move on Madonna's part. Because let's face it: this is essentially like playing an extra in a video that appears while Madonna changes costumes.

Anyway, I imagine the conversation went down something like this:

Madonna: No sweetie, you can't actually be ON stage with me. [Britney begins shaking and crying.] Oh...no no no...it's all right, shhhhh - don't worry about it, maybe next time okay? [Madonna reaches out to comfort Britney.]

Britney: [Violently smacking Madonna's hand away] No! [sobbing] Don't you touch me, Madonna!

Madonna: Oh dear. Ummm...

Britney: BRITNEY WANT TO DANCEY ON MADONNA TOUR!

Madonna: But you don't have it any---

Britney: BRITNEY WANT TO DANCEY!

Read the rest of this intense scene after the jump.



Madonna: Oh my, okay okay...[suddenly getting an idea] HEY! I've got a GREAT idea...why don't you be in my VIDEOS? You wanna be in a special video that plays on a 50 foot screen floating above the audience? Huh?

Britney: [sniffling] 50 foot screen?

Madonna: Yes, it's sooo big and it moves too!

Britney: [calming down] I like moving.

Madonna: I know you do. Now why don't you come over here and wipe some of that lipstick off your forehead.

Britney: [smiling] I gonna be in Madonna video!

Madonna: Yes, yes you are. It's going to be REALLY deep.

SCENE.

As always, feel free to use this scene for acting class / auditions.