So, you want to make sure your 6 year old son isn’t raped in the mouth? Well, there’s an app for that.

Source: itunes.apple.com

Well, I guess it was only a matter of time, wasn’t it. What with 3rd party apps giving the iPhone/iPod Touch a billion and a half frivolous and feckless capabilities (such as fart machines, low-volume rape alarms, light sabers, even a bloody abacus), it was never going to be too long until somebody released something especially for all the hysterically paranoid mums and dads out there. Thanks, ThinAir Wireless, you bunch of douchebags.

If the delicious scaremongering marketing blurb alongside the app doesn’t immediately make you bury your children underground in fear, £0.59 ($0.99) will buy you Offender Locator, an app with the ability to browse the US sex offender registry. You can track your current location with the iPhone’s GPS (or type in an address yourself), and the app will identify any filthy paedophiles in the locale and helpfully display them on a map. You can even drill down to each pervert’s individual profile, complete with name/address, photographs, and previous offences.

Knowledge = Safety

They know where you and your family are… Now it’s time to turn the tables so that you know where they live and can make better decisions about where to allow your kids to play.

I don’t know. I’m not advocate for paedophiles or anything – the death penalty is too good for them – it’s just… well, this seems like rather too much to me when you can just check it online. Sure, if you’ve got kids and you’re moving to a new house, or they’re starting at a new school, fair enough. But how exactly is this app going to help protect your children? Why on earth do you need a portable map of sex offenders? If anything it’s just going to make you more paranoid knowing that there are 15 offenders within a 5 mile radius of your child’s school, and besides gathering together a lynch mob to clean up your zip code, having knowledge of the offenders’ existence is going to be about as helpful as a chocolate teapot.

You know what might work better? Actually being a responsible parent and teaching your kids to stick together and not to talk to strangers. You know, rather than blaming schools, the government, and the police because you thought an iPhone app would be sure to maintain the absolute safety of your children.

Little drummer… robot

Source: technology.todaysbigthing.com

This little drumming robot is so cute!

It walks about until it detects an object (I’m assuming through sonar due to the little blips it makes, but I know nothing of robotic drummers), lays out a little rhythm, then moves on.

Awesome. If this is the future, I’m in.

Washing Machine Simulator

Source: newgrounds.com

Pretty exciting little Flash game, this. I scored over 3 million laundry points.

Calling salad dodgers everywhere

Source: blog.epromos.com

No, I’m not about to repeat my rant about fat people needing a stick to wipe their arse. Thankfully.

Thanks to Wendy for linking me to this… uh, original product, the Magic Salad Plate.

The brainchild (brainplate?) of Four ‘n Twenty, a brilliantly named Australian pie company, the Magic Pie Plate hopes to prevent those disapproving looks you can get at parties if your diet consists entirely of meat pies. Why bother keeping up the appearance of being health conscious by eating salad alongside your trusty pie, when you can just use a plate pre-decked with fake tomatoes, lettuce, cucumber and onion?

I can only see one problem with this – I love salad. Also, as Wendy points out… they’re not exactly going to be the easiest things to clean. Or stack.

Already the gimmick value of the plate seems to have worked – apparently 25,000 were sold in the first few days, and Four ‘n Twenty’s pie sales have gone up around 25%.

(Also, no, this wasn’t an excuse simply to mention Australia the day after England managed to scrape a draw in the first Ashes test – having been thoroughly outplayed over the last five days – just to rub it in. Although if the post did have that effect, it is very much an unintentional bonus. Ha.)

Inexplicably odd (yet somehow brilliant) Korean comics

Source: booru.nanochan.org

I love anything weird and wonderful, and these comics certainly fit the bill. Don’t worry though, they’ve been translated from Korean.

I first saw them a few weeks ago, in Korean, and had no idea what was going on. Now they’ve been translated, I still pretty much have no idea what’s going on.

Check them out, though; if only for the WTF value. They’re by Yang Young-soon, and the series seems to be called Asaekkiga.

23% of American ADULTS cannot name a scientist, living or dead

Source: virology.ws

OK, so it’s a pretty well-known fact that I’m not particularly fond of America. I don’t so much dislike Americans – they’re not all bad people of course – but the way the country is run on a diet of capitalism, misplaced national pride and the ‘bigger is always better’ ethos has the capacity to breed some pretty scary forms of ignorance. Ignorance is one of the most dangerous characteristics to spread about, as ignorance plus enough national pride and encouragement invariably leads to racism, closed-mindedness and intolerance. This is, sadly, the international view of the modern American, and the reputation for ignorance only gets worse when the results of surveys hit home in devastating fashion:

USA Today’s Snapshot for 29 June was a survey in which 1000 adults were asked to name a famous scientist. Here are the results:

47% named Albert Einstein
23% could not name anyone
6% named Marie Curie
4% named Louis Pasteur
4% named Thomas Edison

Now, maybe it’s because America is a relatively young country and doesn’t have such a history of scientific powerhouses. Oh, wait a minute.

I don’t know… you could probably find comparable areas of the UK where general knowledge is about as poor; the survey was carried out by, uh, L’Oreal (“here comes the science!”); and I imagine that the area surveyed could possibly have been along the bible belt, where of course they don’t believe in science… but still. I imagine that if they took the same cross-section of people and asked them to name a Britney Spears single, a Michael Bay movie, or any celebrity who has gained more than 20 pounds in the last year, we wouldn’t be seeing even a mention of “x% could not name any one“. The level of ignorance required to be unable to name a single scientist – living or dead – kinda… scares me.

On a happier note, here’s a video of a very confused (and very cute) dog, trying to work out how the hell he can see his feline friend on a screen AND have him in the room with him at the same time.

Ahhh. I feel a bit better.

I don’t think the world is ready for this.

Source: mspaintporn.net

The URL says it all, really. Enjoy a wide range of pornographic images, sorted by category, with wonderfully detailed descriptions… created by ‘artists’ wielding only the almighty MS Paint.

Not safe for work, but certainly good for a laugh.

My favourite? Well, I’ve always been one for a bit of metaphysical porn, which is why “Rasta splooges on a nun and takes a poo on the Bible” really got me going.

Um, yeah.

DontEvenReply.com – emails from an asshole

Source: dontevenreply.com

Found this site this morning, and I enjoyed it so much that by the time I realised how long I’d been on there, I had read almost the entire archive.

This guy (known variously as “Mike Anderson”, “Timmy Tucker”, and a slew of pseudonyms) trawls Craigslist-style personal ad sites and sees how far he can string along people who put up advertisements with increasingly insane offers and situations. Some of the victims almost deserve it (for example, the person posting asking for Jewish-only sperm donors online, what the hell?), but the majority of them are simply caught in the wake of one of the most epic trolls I’ve seen since BloodNinja first donned his robe and wizard hat.

The pranks range from answering an ad from someone trying to sell a truck by accusing them of running over the family dog; all the way to the somewhat macabre propositioning of someone offering a babysitting service to sit at his grandmother’s death bed and force her to sign a will before switching off her life support machine.

Either way, they are thoroughly entertaining, especially when the victim isn’t sure whether or not he’s being serious. Recommended.

Make more of your money

Source: bextim.com

The co-founder and president of The Booklyn Artists Alliance, Mark Wagner, makes some pretty sweet collages from chopping up and rearranging American currency.

Some of these are absolutely incredible! My favourites are the Statue of Liberty, the Apple, and the fucking Mona Lisa. I know fuck all about art, but I know these must have taken some effort to make.

Every time you use this product, humanity hits a new low

Source: todaysbigthing.com

While the advert itself isn’t particularly disgusting, the product (and imagining the kind of people who would need to use one) very much is.

I have only a few questions:

1) Exactly how much of a lazy fatass do you have to be to require an implement to assist you in wiping your ass?

2) Aside from an increased capacity for hamburgers and the ability to dress up as a manatee for a costume party without a great deal of effort, what the hell are the ‘advantages’ of being a morbidly obese person, claimed by the man 40 seconds into the video? I mean, most of the disadvantages are fairly clear just from looking at him.

3) How about you LOSE SOME FUCKING WEIGHT instead of plunging to such depths of self-humiliation? While it’s not a general rule, I think that by the stage you require a stick to clear your arse crevice after splashdown, it would be a fairly good moment to take a couple of steps back (or, I guess, roll back a few inches) and take stock of your food intake.

Not healthy, America. Not healthy.

It’s about time obesity was considered a true illness. Why is an addiction to cigarettes considered disgusting, yet an addiction to hamburgers creates unique consumer products? Where’s my cigarette holder that enables me to smoke 40 cigarettes at once? If you’re catering for the fat fucks who can’t stop chewing, how about a few ‘revolutionary’ inventions for the people who can’t stop smoking?

Personally I’m far more disgusted by the sight, sounds and smells of a fat person eating nearby in a restaurant than I am at somebody lighting up a cigarette a couple of tables away.

Do note that it’s obesity that disgusts me, not simply being overweight. Most people are a little overweight, but it takes a special kind of laziness and disregard for any kind of proper nutrition to become a true fatass. It’s all very easy to say this as somebody who is often described as ‘painfully thin’, but if I ever got fat enough even to consider spending $20 on a butt-wiping stick, I’d be pretty disgusted with myself.