11 herbs and spices

Breaking news!
KFC secret recipe has been leaked!
Turns out the secret was the chicken!
Oh, and MSG.

via Internet Today

LAX landing

Despite how beautiful this is, L.A. still scares me.

Do the creep

New music video from the Lonely Island boys. Awesome.

Featuring John Waters. Epic awesome.

via Portable

Kids gotta learn

Love it. This guy is doing Golden Book style prints of scenes from popular movies.

Case in point: The Big Lebowski.

Want.

Comparing US states to countries

The Economist has a nice little tool up at the moment, enabling you to compare the GDP and population of every US state with it's closest international equivalent. Here's a few examples:

• Texas, with a GDP of $1,144695bn, is closest to the entire country of Russia which has a GDP of $1,231.89bn.


• Kansas, with a GDP of $124.92bn, is closest to New Zealand, which has a GDP of $117.79bn.


• And our own Australia, with a GDP of $994.25bn, is outshone by the great state of New York, with a GDP of $1,093.219bn.

Despite economic hardship, individual US states are still out-performing most entire countries in the rest of the world. This tool really shows the wealth disparity between the United States and a large percentage of the global community.

First published on Oxfam Blogs

Oxfam's campaigns - what you thought

Towards the end of last year, we asked your, our loyal supporters, what you would like from us in the big digital world of online campaigning. It's an area we've dabbled in before, with the highly popular Talking Kev campaign in the lead-up to the Copenhagen climate talks, our ongoing discussion space A Climate For Change and the Make Poverty History Wishing Tree, not to mention our ongoing blogs and actions.

But we're still keen to improve this area of our work, and that's where your input, thoughts and comments come in. Thank you to those of you who responded to our request. For those of you interested in what the collective thoughts were about our work, here's an overview of some of the main findings:

Over 90% of you access the Internet at least once a day


You are generally most interested in the Make Poverty History campaign, with Climate Change, Close the Gap and Fairtrade campaigns close behind.


Most of you would like to influence key national leaders through our campaigns (a sentiment we can definitely agree upon, and look forward to improving.


You'd like to see us strengthening and improving our work with other NGOs in our online work, as well as exploring new and different ways of educating.


More than 2/3 of you have never been a member of a political party.


Nearly 90% you are already on Facebook, with a range of other social networks also coming up as strong contenders for ways to engage with our campaigns.


Of course, this is just a sampling of the many results we received, but interesting nonetheless. We're keen to take your thoughts and make them a reality, so watch this space for new and exciting campaigns and ways to interact with our work! 2011 will be a new year in many respects - particularly in the online and new technology fields.

As always, you can contact us to become more involved. If you have a specific interest or talent in digital campaigning, we'd love to hear from you!

Follow our work on Facebook and Twitter, and make sure you are signed up to receive our Activist email alerts for ways to take action.

First published on Oxfam Blogs

In your face, Skywalker!

WANT!

I require this t-shirt for the next time I attend a sci-fi convention.

Score the goals comic book

SCORE THE GOALS: Teaming Up to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals’ is a 32-page educational comic book featuring 10 football UN Goodwill Ambassadors, who become shipwrecked on an island on their way to playing an ‘all-star’ charity football game. Whilst on the island, the team has to tackle the eight MDGs along their journey towards being rescued.

The comic book is primarily aimed at 8-14 year old children and provides a fun interactive way to help them understand, familiarise and reflect about the eight MDGs as well as inviting them to take action through several activities provided in the adjoining educational guide.

Currently the comic book is available in English (.PDF, 5.7MB), French (.PDF, 4.6MB) and Spanish (.PDF, 3.4MB). Other languages (including Arabic, Chinese and Russian) will be made available in the near future.

First published on Oxfam Blogs

Dead Space 2 and yo momma

Marketing: Win!

To promote the release of the super-violent video game Dead Space 2, the producers released a video featured real mothers and their horrified reactions to seeing footage from the game.

The tagline? "Dead Space 2: Your mom's gonna hate it."

Love it.

WANT

The Death Star cookie jar.

Want.

Every Penguin Classic

Holy shit.
Penguin are selling their Penguin Classic series.
In one lot.
All of them.
All 1,082 of them.
Every Penguin Classic ever published.
And it's only $13,413.30
Want.

Howl

Hey! How did I miss this?
Howl - the story of Allen Ginsberg. Looks pretty cool.

Working for free

My job(s) are usually quite hard to define. I'm a campaigner, a strategist, a communications and media adviser, an engagement specialist or an activism coordinator. But originally, I trained as a graphic designer.

Working in the world of NGO's, political parties and start-up independent projects, I often get suckered into offering these design skills for free.

Therefore, I am so pleased that Jessica Hische has produced this handy flowchart, enabling the decision about whether to offer your services for free to be made quicker, easier and guilt-free.

Take heed people, and listen to the almighty flowchart!

Sequels vs Originals

Box Office Quant have categorized every sequel, with the originals’ Rotten Tomatoes scores on the X-axis, and the sequels’ scores on the Y.

Films at the center line are sequels with the exact rating as the original; films above are sequels that have surpassed the original; films below, ones that fared worse.

Only one American film/sequel combo both score 100%: Pixar’s Toy Story and Toy Story 2.

The Hipster Huckleberry Finn

In response to the recent announcement that a new edition of Huckleberry Finn, was to be published with every instance of the word 'nigger' changed to 'slave, author Richard Grayson has come up with an edition with every occurrence of the N-word replaced by the word "hipster."

Jim was monstrous proud about it, and he got so he wouldn't hardly notice the other hipsters. Hipsters would come miles to hear Jim tell about it, and he was more looked up to than any hipster in that country. Strange hipsters would stand with their mouths open and look him all over, same as if he was a wonder. Hipsters is always talking about witches in the dark by the kitchen fire; but whenever one was talking and letting on to know all about such things, Jim would happen in and say, "Hm! What you know 'bout witches?" and that hipster was corked up and had to take a back seat.

The Hipster Huckleberry Finn is available for $18.99 but is, like, not available as an e-book yet, which means you have to, like, actually read it. And not in that re-printed Penguin Classic style either. Ghod! So un-cool.

When asked why he did this, Grayson said:

"People have talked about the sanctimoniousness of what this new edition is doing, and I just think it's funny to take it further. It doesn't seem any more ridiculous than putting zombies and vampires in Jane Austen. You could probably replace Injun with Eurotrash, too."

I'm on it.

Next up: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, with all the "android"'s changed to "unicorn"'s. Nobody steal my idea.

The Alphabet

The Alphabet - an animated adventure through the alphabet of fonts.
Beautiful.

via Holly

Dinner for One

I remember reading about this last year, and it still freaks me out now. Germans are weird.

Every New Year’s Eve, half of all Germans plunk down in front of their televisions to watch a 1963 English comedy sketch called Dinner for One. Written in the 1920s, performed on the Vaudeville circuit right through to the 1960s and eventually recorded for television in 1963 on the live TV show Guten Abend, Peter Frankenfeld, Dinner for One has been broadcast on German television on New Year's Eve for the past 39 years, without fail.

Apparently it has also spread to Scandinavia, where it is typically watched on December 23, as well as Switzerland, Austria, South Africa, Australia (?), and Latvia. The show has been broadcast more than 230 times. Even though Dinner for One is, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the most frequently repeated TV program ever, it has never been aired in the United Kingdom or the United States, and most of the English-speaking world is ignorant of its existence.

via Slate

Personally, I spent this New Year's Eve in bed, watching the latest Doctor Who series on DVD, falling asleep before 10:30.

Oh yeah.

I know how to party.

Maru 2010

Awesome. Check out this list of Maru's best photos and videos from 2010.
That cat is epic.