402 - with Links!

1. Ye Gods! Queenie's in Danger The rampant racism of the 1930s is evident even in short novelty films in which black dogs are represented as rapists.

2. Furie I don't know anything about Jack Fischer or Matt Furie, but I know what I like and I like robots, monsters and weird animals riding BMX bikes.

3. Post Due Send a postcard: Get a postcard.

4. Water Schmater Make bagels and give them to me.

5. Circumference/Area Did somebody say Pie?

377 - with Links

1. All Beef? After all my accusatiions, Kobayashi decided to show up at Nathan's hot dog eating contest after all. Unfortunately, he faced exactly what I believe he wanted to avoid; Joey Chestnut, who blasted past the record and ate 66 hot dogs. I'm not sure why I can't get behind this guy. I should be supporting the American I guess, but Kobayashi is just so freaking cute that I can't root against him.

2. Films-Within-Films I've been watching a lot of HBO's Entourage lately, so the first fictional movies I thought of were Head On, Queens Boulevard, Aquaman and Medellín.

3. ESP Envy With all the poker, dominos, strongman and lumberjack games they show on ESPN these days, I watch it quite a lot more than I ever did before. Now they're adding Rock, Paper, Scissors coverage to make me watch just a little bit more.

4. Barking Mad Bank Robber What is the best disguise to wear when robbing a bank? I'm not sure, but it turns out that making yourself a tree costume out of leaves and twigs doesn't work that well.

5. Snooze For years I've been wondering why alarm clock manufacturers set the snooze timer for nine minutes. I never worried about it enough to do the research. Luckily, Mental Floss Magazine did it for me.

372 - Contests

1. Digital Build a one of a kind clock using this electronics kit from furni and if it is good, it might make it into their next commercial collection.

2. Scratch You always hear about how winning the lottery is unlucky. In most cases that idea is totally bunk. However, for this girl, winning only $500 actually did cause a couple of problems.

3. Veggie Win $20 by entering your best, easy to prepare, vegetarian recipe. The deadline is June 30th, only three days from now, so hurry up hippies!

4. Dogs I think there is something fishy going on with Nathan's Annual Hot Dog Eating Contest. In May, Takeru Kobayashi's record was broken by American Joey Chestnut, who ate 59.5 hot dogs in just 12 minutes. A couple of weeks later, it was reported that Kobayashi would probably be taking a sabbatical due to the death of his mother. Then, we hear that he will not be competing at all due to sudden arthritis of the jaw. Maybe I'm a cynic, but to me, these excuses sound phony.

5. A Moment of Science Rebecca of Skepchick, in honor of the death of Don Herbert, has posted an interesting youtube challenge. The point is to film yourself doing a Mr. Wizard-esque science experiment and post it for the world to see. P.S. the last frame of the video freezes on a pretty funny face. I've included it for you here.

354 - All Request

1. Sensory Overload 20 questions designed to test your senses and explainations of why most people have trouble answering them correctly.

2. White on White Is Erno Rubik Dead? If he is, I'll bet he's rolling over in his grave.

3. Lionhead Overdubbed music and sound turn your average youtube video into your average work of art.

4. Cheddar Vision Over the last 169 days, 18 hours, 51 minutes and eleven seconds, more than 1,409,500 people have watched a block of cheese develop at the West Country Cheesemakers in the South West of England at the time of writing.

5. iCarta iPod Toilet Paper Holder Listening to your favorite podcast while sitting on the toilet has never been easier.

353 - with Links!

1. Pamela Low: Dead After working as a flavorologist on such products as Almond Joy and Mounds, Pamela Low made her mark on the American food industry and on pop culture when, remembering a rice, butter and brown sugar mixture her grandmother made as a child, she invented the flavor the world would come to know as Cap'n Crunch. I don't think she invented vastly more delicious Crunch Berry, though.

2. MIT for Free Want to get some college smarts without paying for them? Want to have nothing to show for it? The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is offering courses in 35 areas of study, from Aeronautics and Astronautics to Writing and Humanistic Studies, all free for the taking for the benefit of "educators, students, and self-learners around the world."

3. What If I Said "Douchebags?" Two cool-guys play a song...on one single guitar...at the same time. I know it sounds lame, and it sounds even lamer when you hear that the song that they play is the theme to Beverly Hills 90210, and that the cool-guys are likely frat guys (one of them with his hat on backwards,) and that they are overly cocky about their accomplishment, but it is actually kind of cool.

4. Blueprint How much time can you waste moving around little ramp, pipes and conveyor belts to get a ball to hit a target. If you play the levels in order, I'm going to predict that you get bored and quit before reaching the second row. That's what I did.

5. WWKIP Tomorrow, Saturday, June 9th, is World Wide Knit in Public Day. It looks like gatherings of knitters have been organized in pretty much all 50 states as well as many countries across the world. Of course, if you want to , you could just knit while waiting for the bus or whatever. You don't have to attend one of these celebrations. As for me, I haven't even been able to figure out how to crochet properly.

345 - Over-reaction

1. Curfew: Enforced Tasha Scott of New Haven Connecticut, was taught a lesson about sneaking out after curfew when her father, an off duty police officer, mistook her for a prowler as she re-entered the house through a basement window. People talk a lot about the right to shoot an intruder in your home, but I'm pretty sure there has to be a legitimate threat of bodily harm before you are allowed to start firing.

2. Dinner is Served Carl's Junior and Hardees are suing Jack in the Box over a commercial that they claim is defamatory, even though it never mentions them by name and only suggests, never specifically states, that angus beef is somehow related to beef anus.

3. Funny Money Who has never seen a two dollar bill? Well apparently Best Buy employees and the Baltimore police, who arrested Mike Bolesta for attempting to pay for his car stereo installation with, what they assumed was, counterfeit currency.

4. Dinner is Served Again The customer is always right. Remember that the next time a guy wants a bunch of extra chili sauce and you'll hopefully avoid being shot several times in the arm.

5. Deke I can't even summarize this story so I'll just list some keywords. Attack Dog. Outdoor Slumber. Police Brutality. Fictitious Fugitive. Moped.

325 - with Links!

1. Free Mooninites Peter Berdovsky, & Sean Steven, the two "artists" hired to promote the Aqua Teen Hunger Force Movie by hanging up those LED night-lights that caused so much trouble in Boston a few months ago, have finally had all charges against them dropped. Each man spent 80 hours of community service painting a mural in children's hospital and apologized for the panic they supposedly caused. I'm sure the two million bucks that Turner ponied up didn't hurt either.

2. Second Hand The eCigarette is a new nicotine delivery device which allows "smokers" to get the wanted buzz from smoking without the need for the dangerous tar and smoke accosiated with traditional cigarettes. What is this going to do to all the unconstitutional anti-smoking laws that have been popping up lately?

3. Optimism Are these glasses half full or are they half empty?

4. Oh Yeah! Kool-Aid flavored pickles: All the rage in Greenville, Mississippi where it is apparently legal for old women to sell weird food to children out of their kitchens or on their front porches.

5. Be Prepared The top ten most useful knots with pictures and diagrams on how to tie them.

314 - with Links!

1. Drive-In Another invitation to those that know me or live near me or want to travel. The double feature on Friday May 4th will be The Day The Earth Stood Still followed by Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey. Hopefully it won't rain out.

2. Love Intended as an learning aid for prospective heart patients, this interactive 3-D model of the human heart is pretty fun to play around with.

3. Four Inches Tall Although I can't find any evidence of Garth Brooks recording Tiny Dancer, I did uncover a Tim McGraw album which features a cover of the Elton John classic. Anyway, the point is this: Stop reporting on "the worlds smallest dogs" until they are at least a year old and thereby eligible to be considered fro the title.

4. Fake Cancer/Real Donations I've always wondered about those donation buckets you sometimes see on the counters of fast food restaurants.

5. Mosquitotone The world leader in innovative television commercials, KFC, is using weird high pitched subliminal noises supposedly only noticed by teenagers in their new ads. I heard it fine, and I'm no teenager.

310 - with Links!

1. Flying Lessons Ever want to be a pilot? Yeah so did this guy.

2. Gelatinous Mass When trying to find out if this guy was really, really peeling a hardboiled egg, I came across this information about how to peel a raw egg and I really want to do it.

3. Awesomely Puke Inducing Similarly, I'd really like to try this technique of slicing a banana without first peeling it, but there's no way I want to go near one of those disgusting yellow bastards. The smell alone is enough to make me gag.

4. Q-Bert I always thought the Escher-esque quality of the Q-Bert playing field made it difficult to figure out which way to push your joystick. Switch the joystick to you keyboard's arrow keys and the game becomes virtually impossible.

5. Ping Pong Pixel Thomas F. Wilson, most famous for playing the roll of Biff Tannen in the Back to the Future Series sings a song about the trial and tribulations of being Biff.

305 - All Request

1. Chill Out I know winter is pretty much over now, but this has been sitting in my "to-list" box for quite a while now. It a pretty interesting report about the birth of the wind-chill factor, hw it is totally bogus, and why we should stop talking about it.

2. Dirty Dancing TV fisherman, Bill Dance has a lot of bad luck, as well as a laugh track. More and more.

3. The Great Pop vs. Soda Controversy One thing I hate is when people look at old photos and laugh about the hairstyles and clothes they used to wear. Another is when people argue about what to call a sugary, carbonated, soft drink. If you want to avoid this type of discussion it looks like you should move to North Dakota, Montana or the southwest, where there seems to be the smallest amount of cross-over.

4. Charles Has A Licking Problem One word: euthanasia.

5. Fashion Before Function A new kind of crocodile skin belt which doesn't require the crocodile to be killed.