Are you in the market for a “Summer Fun” Wii bundle to get your Independence Day started right? Oh, yeah? Fantastic, ’cause GameStop has just the packages for you. For the low, low price of 9.99, the aforementioned bundle consists of a Nintendo Wii console, a water gun and… wait, what? Amazingly enough, GameStop has seen fit to bundle a {content}.25 water gun with a Wii and call it a bundle; heck, it’s even limiting them to two per household. If that’s not strange enough for you, there’s also the Pirate Tattoo bundle and Take a Bath with a Buddy (a rubber ducky, just so we’re clear) bundle. Talk about really taking advantage of that whole “freedom” thing.
Read - Summer Fun bundle
Read - Pirate Tattoo bundle
Read - Take a Bath with a Buddy bundle
[Via Joystiq]
Filed under: Gaming
GameStop hits the sauce for the 4th, offers up bizarre Wii bundles originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 04 Jul 2009 10:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Celebuspawn and wakctress Rumer Willis is slated to play a “punky lesbian named Gia” this season on 90210.
Never had one of those at West Beverly before.
Her character works on the school newspaper, the Blaze News, and will be rubbing elbows with Jessica Lowndes and Jessica Stroup’s charactrs, Adrianna and Silver. But which one will she hit on?!
While the character is only slated for one episode, perhaps if she pulls it off, she might get a longer gig.
Hmmmm….
We’d rather see her go lez on Melrose Place with Asslee Simpson!
[Image via WENN.]
Greta Van Susteren, FOX News’ serial stalker of Sarah Palin, was in shock over the announcement that Palin quit her job. When asked about what this means, she said…
Greta:…It’s hard to tell if she’s giving up or gearing up and that I don’t know…
Greta whined about all the ethics complaints that were filed against Sarah Palin and said that she could get disheartened. Really? She QUIT her job and quit on the people of Alaska. She’s proved that she’s unfit for duty. And it’s not only me saying it.
Some Republican strategists expressed skepticism about Palin’s decision. “I’m not smart enough to see the strategy in this,” said John Weaver, a senior party strategist. “Good point guards don’t quit and walk off the court.”
If she can’t handle criticism from bloggers, then how could she handle al-Qaeda? And conservatives like Greta should stop complaining about attacks on her and her family because they started the trend by holding her family out as public political props, and have never stopped. I’m not condoning the personal attacks in any way — we avoided them at C&L and kept our criticism focused on her abilities (or lack thereof) and her public behavior as a candidate and a public official. It’s up to you to decide how she’s been treated.
But conservatives are total hypocrites on this issue and the media allows them to get away with it. They’ve made their living out of smearing anyone on the left. The Clintons have been subjected to the lowest attacks possible. I haven’t seen anyone write widely published books that calls her a lesbian, or have I missed that one? Or that she murdered someone like, oh…Vince Foster.
On the September 19 and 20 broadcasts of his nationally syndicated radio show, Rush Limbaugh resurrected his scurrilous suggestion that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) had then-deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster murdered while she was first lady.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. And then we can talk about the scurrilous and wingnutty “birther” attacks on President Obama, but you get my point.
Even Villagers are wondering what she’s doing.
In a rambling press conference, the Alaska governor never really explained why this day was better than all other days. If she’d waited three days, she would have owned the news cycle. Perhaps she was declaring early independence?
The larger reason for Palin’s early departure was that she was having no fun. Ever since she returned to Alaska from the national stage, being governor has been a chore. Her political opponents have launched 15 ethics charges against her. The state economy has turned sour, and she got into an ugly squabble over federal stimulus funds. It’s much more enjoyable to travel the country waving to adoring crowds of GOP activists…read on
Her presser was eerily similar to that of disgraced Gov. Mark Sanford. She was rambling on about sports analogies and Abe Lincoln.
Max Blumenthal writes: Did a Scandal Sink the U.S.S. Palin?
Many political observers in Alaska are fixated on rumors that federal investigators have been seizing paperwork from SBS in recent months, searching for evidence that Palin and her husband Todd steered lucrative contracts to the well-connected company in exchange for gifts like the construction of their home on pristine Lake Lucille in 2002. The home was built just two months before Palin began campaigning for governor, a job which would have provided her enhanced power to grant building contracts in the wide-open state.
SBS has close ties to the Palins. The company has not only sponsored Todd Palin’s snowmobile team, according to the Village Voice’s Wayne Barrett, it hired Sarah Palin to do a statewide television commercial in 2004…read on
If there’s not a scandal brewing, then there’s no way she’ll stay out of politics. Will she end up hosting FOX & Friends, maybe do a little dancing on ABC?
We wouldn’t expect anything less for the King of Pop!
The specs for Michael Jackson’s coffin have come in and it is elaborate, to say the least.
Costing a whopping ,000, the casket is solid bronze, plated in 14-karat gold. The custom designed casket’s interior is flame blue velvet and the exterior will have a mirror finish.
A resting place fitting for Michael Jackson.
It must suck to have so much money and still your shit don’t work!
Brad Pitt was out and about on one of his custom motorcycles Thursday when the thing gave out on him. This is like the second time now, isn’t Bradley?
You should have that looked at, Poppa Bear.
With no working transportation, Brad had to schlep all the way to his gated community, with paparazzi in tow! How in embarrassing!
Please note that his helmet is inscribed, possibly by a child, with the words “Daddy’s Helmet.” That’s rather adorable.
[Image via GSI Media.]
If the world required that you complete an expert DDR jam each morning only moments after you awoke, there’s a solid chance the global death toll would far outpace the birth rate. Thankfully, all that’s typically necessary is that you actually listen to whatever device you’ve got ringing. If you’ve noticed lately that said noises just aren’t cutting it, here’s a little puzzler that’s pretty much guaranteed to either get you up or entangle you in infinite frustration. The £9.99 () Finger Dance Alarm Clock sounds at a user-determined time, and once your weary eyes begin to focus, you then have to use your digits to follow a lighted dance pattern in order to shut the cacophony off. It’s half torture, half genius — precisely the way we like it.
[Via OhGizmo]
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
Finger Dance Alarm Clock: it’s like DDR, in an alarm clock originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 04 Jul 2009 08:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Recently, I’ve noticed something. If you send me an email, the likelihood that I’m going to respond is pretty small. But if you send me a message on Twitter, the likelihood that I’ll respond is much higher. Certainly, part of it is that I get fewer messages on Twitter. But you might be surprised at how close it’s getting in volume when you add @replies to direct messages. The bigger factor for me, is the length of the messages.
If I open up an email and see it filled with paragraphs of information, guaranteed my eyes are going to glaze over. Certainly sometimes it’s an important message that I do need to read, but most of the time it’s just a core message filled with paragraphs of bloat. I don’t want or need the bloat, I need the core message. And that’s why I love Twitter. You simply cannot go over 140 characters. And more often than you may imagine, that’s enough.
Now, on the face of it, plenty of people will disagree with me on that point. But think about it. In an age where we’re bombarded by tons of information, from multiple angles, all day long, there is something beautiful about brevity.
I used to read screenplays for a living. Trust me when I say that there is no shortage of people who can blather on about something to seemingly no end. But the skill in writing a screenplay often came down to if you could convey what you needed to convey in just a few lines. It’s not an easy thing to do — at all. And while it’s not quite the same because it’s even more compact, Twitter forces you do to a similar thing in its own way. And Twitter is hardly the only form of communication that has done this.
Most users know by now that the 140 character limit of Twitter is actually tied to the limits of text messaging. Text messages can only be 160 characters long (Twitter needed to reserve the extra 20 characters for usernames). But do you know where the 160 character limit comes from?
The LA Times ran an excellent piece a few months ago about Friedhelm Hillebrand, the father of the modern text message. He dreamed up the 160 character limit while working at a typewriter in the mid-1980s, trying to see how long sentences needed to be to convey something. He found 160 characters was a the magic number he kept arriving at. But the deciding committee for SMS still wasn’t sure until they looked at postcards and found that most of those had messages of 150 characters or less.
And so you see, while you may think Twitter’s character limit is silly or frustrating, it’s actually borne out of two other forms of communication that are widely accepted and used the world over. You may not think of Twitter being just like a postcard, but in some ways it is — one that you can instantaneously send to many friends or acquaintances at the same time. And minus the cost of a stamp.
Even with the rise of technology, the lure of the short message remains. And that was the key reason why I found Twitter compelling when I first started using it over two years ago. I never thought of the limitation in a negative sense, but rather as something that could inspire creativity in messages. And could even spur communication.
It’s liberating to know that you only have 140 characters or less to respond to something. For a lot of messages, that removes a huge burden of trying to say enough to the person you’re talking so that they don’t think you’re being rude. With a 140 character limit, a correlation between briefness and rudeness doesn’t exist.
And that’s why more and more I’m finding myself telling people, “Just message me on Twitter.” It’s a two-way street. I don’t want to have read you go on and on about something that could be said in one line, and you won’t have to listen to me go on and on about something in response. Again, it won’t work for all messages, which is why Twitter or something like it will never kill email, but for a lot of messages, it works just fine.
Characters and time are saved. It’s a limitation that is liberating.
[photos: flickr/pink sherbert photography & inlaterdays]
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Via Media Matters, more proof that professional windbag Rush Limbaugh has run out of anything that might even charitably be considered as a legitimate thought. Only the truly brain-dead among his fans will swallow the latest uttering:
While fans the world over mourn the passing of the King of Pop, the King of Talk, Rush Limbaugh, put the death of Michael Jackson this way: He “flourished under Reagan,” “languished under Clinton/Bush, and died under Obama.” Over on MSNBC, both David Shuster and Chuck Todd poked Limbaugh for his unsavory take on the tragedy, with Todd quipping, “It’s always Reagan, right?”
Meanwhile, El Rushbo’s pals over at Fox News knew exactly how to interpret the wall-to-wall coverage of Jackson’s death. An actual Fox News chyron alleged a “cover-up” because the media were devoting more coverage to Jackson than cap-and-trade legislation. Lord, the fun one could have using this very rationale to pick apart the stories Fox chooses to cover. I guess when you’re a hammer, everything is a … wild conspiracy designed to frighten your audience and fan the flames of their paranoia.
[Via PMP Today]
Continue reading Keepin’ It Real Fake, part CCXIX: Gemsta’s Vaino knock-off
Filed under: Laptops
Keepin’ It Real Fake, part CCXIX: Gemsta’s Vaino knock-off originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 04 Jul 2009 06:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Filed under: Cellphones
Researchers use Bluetooth to track festival goers, make fun of their ‘hippie dancing’ originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 04 Jul 2009 04:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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