I'll keep it short, because I know no-one wants to hear what I have to say compared to the utter super-coolosity of this. You actually catch a glimpse of Venom! I might actually say something, but only once my geekgasm subsides.
With the US election just about run, the Yak is very disappointed that among all the debates and discussions around the big issues of economics, Iraq (Eye-rack), terrorism, and science, no-one among the elctorate brought argument for the little people. And by this I mean the opressed, the prisoners, the people who can't speak for themselves. Gitmo is one thing, but what about the Garden Gnomes?
For years they have been misunderstood, misrepresented, and often misplaced by drunken students. Finally, people are coming to the fore to stand up for the rights of others. That, after all, is what real democracy is - protecting the rights of minorities.
It is therefore imperative, that no matter where you find yourself, you stand up for the rights of these woodland creatures, and help put an end to the rampant slave trading occuring throughout the world.
For information on how you can become involved, the following sites could be relevant:
Front de Libération des Nains de Jardin (FLNJ) - The international originators of the movement, based in France
Movimento Autonomo per la Liberazione delle Anime da Giardino (MALAG) - AN Italian organisation. More fundamentalist than the others, believing that the gnome's spirits are held captive in porcelain sacofogi, which should be broken to free the spirit.
Freethegnomes.com - A very active American organisation aiming to prevent gnome slave trafficking in the states, and liberate existing captured Gnomes.
Help stop the oppression, slavery, and meaningless use of Gnomes as ornamentation without compensation or consent.
Posted by the yak at 4:40 AM | Permalink | Comments 
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Wednesday, November 08, 2006
These images (click 'em, they get bigger!) were snapped on the coast of Russia (in Sakhalin, near Japan) by a couple of passers by. It is said that the creature was then taken by the Russian special services for further investigation, and it is as yet, still unidentified.
Just as well we got these pictures, or else we might have never known. The Yak thinks there's no point in being polite, and it's time to let the cat out of the bag:
Big Bird is clearly dead.
This thing is not a fish, looking at the bones. It's also not an alligator or reptile - it has skin and hair or feathers. It is time to let the world know that the beloved creature (and the only Sesame Street dude to feature on the cover of Sports Illustrated) has passed away.
We can only speculate as to the cause of this magical creature's death. Evidence collected by the yak however tells an alarming tale:
Someone let the beloved bird go to China to film this documentary! We can only conclude that Bird Flu (more specifically Big bird flu) was the obvious cause of the creature who taught people how to be inquisitive's death.
Our condolences go out to Snuffy, unless of course he really was imaginary, in which case the obvious pun is just too sad to make.
Images apparently via the legendary Englishrussia.com
Posted by the yak at 1:46 AM | Permalink | Comments
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Tuesday, November 07, 2006
The turbine room in London's Tate Modern is one of the features of the building that has in the past received the most schtick. It's big. Too big, many say, for anything to use the space well. The current installation there has given me more to think about than I could try to write down in a brief post, but I would still like to share the thought with you.
Currently Carsten Höller is the artist who has the massive turbine room space at his disposal. He's made these massive slides:
What's interesting about them is not their use of the space (which isn't bad, I guess), but the stress and fun (or better phrased, "simultaneous delight and anxiety") of both watching people slide, or actually sliding through them. They're popular enough that I had to go back there a second time (mornings are best) just to get a spot on the one from the 5th floor.
Wouldn't it be great if things like these were installed all around towns and cities? What would life be like if we could slide around like that every day? I think it's a bit of a reminder to have some fun (or at the very least give yourself a little scare) every day. Much like the people in the famed London Red Bull headquarters must do with this one below...
So anyway, I slid down the gullet of the dune worm sculpture, ignoring its phallic properties. I felt envigorated. Much like a jog, or a walk in the mountain, but with a better more interesting twist. Someone once said that you should do something every day that scares you. This is a minor version. There are hundreds of carrot-up-the-rump people I know who would probably be a heck of a lot cooler if they had to slide to work every day.
**
To slide off the slides in the Modern is free, but to go off the level 3 and 5 slides you need a timed ticket, available in the gallery. They're valid for the time on them, and allow you to slide once. Oh, and no, they don't let you go head first.
**Holler is known for his interactive art, such as Flying Machine that hoisted people through the air and Upside Down Goggles that well, modify vision, shall we say.
Posted by the yak at 11:10 PM | Permalink | Comments
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I was going to say it's my genius, and gloat. But people in a different time zone clearly like Sudoku. Those 9000 hits were in just nine hours. That's of course what I think is weird. Not the number. That happens every day.
So for those of you writing for money and hits, your energies have been misdirected. Ignore breasts and biceps and bountiful blondes, and shove in some seriously sneaky sudoku, and you're set to sip pina colada's while your adsense revenues pay the mortgage and wash your car.
A gift from the yak population.
Update: Scratch that thought. It turns out people are more interested in big bird:
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It's times like these that the internet makes me most happy. When
respectable online publications publish entertaining and interesting stories about the world's hardest Sudoku puzzle, you'd at least expect them to give you a link to it, or a picture of it. Oh, yes, you guessed it. They don't. But I couldn't find it anywhere! So I undustriously hunted, and eventually found the secret formula hidden away in an ASCII-like tomb of Sudoku knowledge. And now, for the first time in propper format, and luckily without any further ado (read the real reporter's background
here), I give you AL Escargot, the hardest rated Sudoku puzzle to date:
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This picture is a recent addition to the soft porn that is trickling into my mailbox in honour of the "win a case of beer" contest started last month. Many of the entries are asking how a yak can objectively (or for that matter subjectively) judge the beauty of human competitors. I've given it a bit of thought, and have had to resort to getting scientific:
If we were to judge the beauty of people out of 10 it would be exceedingly difficult without some kind of benchmark. Because we didn't feel like dabbling in the Ugly Things scale, we started at the top. The ultimate in human beauty, of course, was Helen of Troy. So she'd have to, on a scale of 1 to 10, be as close to a 10 as possible. (We also couldn't use high level binary programming for this, because then even she'd be a 2.)
So using the Troy system of calculation, one
millihelen would be the ammount of beauty requred to launch ONE ship. A millihelen would equate to roughly 0.0010986 units of natural beauty. A
microhelen would be the ammount of beauty required to motivate one sailor.
Err, I hope that answers all your questions. In short, I'll be using this system to allocate points for the one I THINK is the hottest. We take it from there. Ok bye.
Posted by the yak at 3:22 AM | Permalink | Comments
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Monday, November 06, 2006
I leave the internet for a couple of days, and what happens!? After four years of justly convicting Guantanamo prisoners of classified crimes before a fair and impartial kangaroo court of their peers, a power-mad US Supreme Court has ruled that the military tribunals at Gitmo are "illegal" and that the president has to "obey the law." Well this is just the kind of dangerous radicalism that leads to fascism and human rights! What are they going to do with these people, try them in actual courtrooms with lawyers, juries and "evidence"? That way lies madness - or worse, democracy! If the US gives her enemies actual rights they'll turn the deadly power of the justice system against them, smuggling weaponized due process into American cities, crashing the Fifth Amendment into skyscrapers, setting off radiological writs of habeas corpus in Times Square!
And how are we going to fight the terrorists in the first place with our military tied up in bureaucratic red tape like the "Geneva Conventions" and the "Bill of Rights"? We can't give up our right to torture people while the enemy's still torturing people - that's unilateral disarmament in the torture race! We've already got an atrocity gap here, people! Oh sure, we're doing alright with our cutting-edge waterboarding, hypothermia and "beat them to death" programs, but we'll never catch up in this fight if we don't get access to their top secret beheading technology! It's a simple question of action and response. When they blow up a mosque, we massacre a village! When they chop off someone's head, we send someone else off to Uzbekistan to get boiled alive! That's the GWOT way! But none of these vital tools will be at our disposal if we've got activist judges shutting down our Pentagon torture programs and our secret CIA prisons and our crack commando baby-rape squads!
That's why George W. Bush has to take this case to the highester court in the land: the court of George W. Bush. It's a tough bench alright, but Bush can win this one as long as he exercises his constitutional right to ignore the Constitution. The legal technicalities are pretty complicated but I believe it involves filing a writ of la di da di doo da according to the precedent of I Can't Hear You v. I'm Not Listening. Only then can the forces of freedom protect America from the hordes of Democrofascists that would menace her with their savage civil liberties!
God bless America.
Posted by the yak at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments
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Friday, November 03, 2006
I'm confused. Again. You humans are weird. Please, someone, anyone, tell me how this advert is supposed to encourage abstinence:
- Maybe Charlize wants all hot-blooded teens to furiously masturbate themselves half to death, thus losing any urge they might have had to hump pre-maritally.
- Maybe we're supposed to realize that Charlize's legs don't fit into the ideal ratio of 1.55 thigh to 1 calf (as some yak with too much time on his hands discovered here), and if you abstain, you might find the PERFECT woman
- Err, emm, aw stuff it, can't think of any. But I certainly won't be going to the teens-4-christ website if I really wanted to abstain, just in case they throw another couple of half-naked legs-spread randy-looking porno pics of gorgeous women at me.
While we're on abstention, prophylactics
have come to the blogging world recently, with the launch of South Africa's new easy-to-pop-on condom brand
pronto. Not to be outdone,
Johnson & Johnson have revealed the secret to their female contaceptive patch,
Ortho Evra:
it kills you, thereby completely reducing the risk of pregancy. Now why didn't we think of that...
Posted by the yak at 3:37 AM | Permalink | Comments
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Thursday, November 02, 2006
Ok, so it's been winter. And because of that, I'll forgive you. Even the yak ladies (
dri or
nak) have grown some ultra-thick fur over the winter. But as my inbox reveals, the stalkers are out! It's time to behave like paparazzi, and
snap some pictures of sexy people for a free case of beer!
Just to inspire you, here are some of the leaders so far:
An exceptional sample. And so incredibly seedy. Snapping a woman like that. So unasuming. So naive. So goddam sexy. Not even from the front, but definitely a frontrunner!
Some dude even got his girlfriend to pose for this one by the looks of it... "Honey, it's fine, no-one's going to see it. No, it's just for me to look at when I miss you..." Well, him and the rest of humanity searching for HOT BABE BIKINI TITS ASS FACIAL. Well, now, anyway... (Sorry J.)
And of course, my personal favourite:
What? Yes, I know. But I like mine hairy. Really. They look ridiculous shaved.
Posted by the yak at 7:22 AM | Permalink | Comments
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If there's one thing us Yaks dig, it's gloating. And what better opportunity than the front page of yesterday's Cape Times, which in large, terrifying letters points out the horrible revelation that Cape Town's 2010 Soccer "
World Cup Stadium to be built on golf course"!
If only the reporters of this illustrious and well-respected paper kept up with their
Zonked Yak reading (dated 26 September)they would have known this a long time ago. (Plus they would have been able to make R2.5 Billion, but that's a different point altogether...)
Not the first time the bloggers have beaten the papers by months...
Posted by the yak at 1:17 AM | Permalink | Comments
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They tell us the Amnesty International Ambassador of Conscience Award is a big deal. They would let you believe that it is "their most prestigious honour". It's in all the world's newspapers, so it must be quite important. You'd think then, that the high profile people in charge of choosing and awarding this wonderful honour
WOULD SPELL THE RECIPIENT'S FUCKING NAME RIGHT!Please, behold this beautiful image of Nelson Mandela with his award, as kindly donated to the Yak by REUTERS:
Happy Madiba with his namesake's awardOk, so it's subtle, but it's still bloody WRONG!
The former South African president's name is Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, NOT Rolihlalha. Big deal, you say. But you tell me how great you feel every time you get a certificate with someone else's name on it, or they leave out the umlaut on your u...
We feel your pain Madiba. And now we share in it.
Posted by the yak at 1:03 AM | Permalink | Comments
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