Context: Une maquette publicitaire de St-Valentin vraiment laide sur mon bureau, avec deux coeurs, un bouquet de roses rouges, un beau ruban, du Lorem ipsum et des carrés pour situer les futures images.

Elle: il t?a laissé ça. Pour savoir si tu veux placer une pub.
Moi: c?est quoi ça?
Elle: c?est une publicité dans un journal régional.
Moi: y?a rien de vrai sur cette pub là. Et y?a même pas de liste de prix ou de format [?], pis [?], pis [?]
Elle: ben oui, une chanson de St-Valentin.
Moi: quoi?
Elle: ben oui, le texte?
Moi: c?est du lorem ipsum ça, c?est pas une chanson!
Elle: t?es sûre???

Comment aller sur la lune? Facile! Suivez la flèche!

Octopus Studios' tropical/freshwater fish-tanks assembles into a kind of fishy habitrail, wherein bulbous spheres of water are connected by diagonal tubes. Link (via Geekologie)

Comme vous le savez, c?était le Red Bull Crashed Ice samedi passé à Québec ? Je suis certain que vous ne saviez pas que le Red Bull c?était déplacé à Trois-Rivières? Oui oui! « Ben voyons PM, il est bien trop tard pour nous le dire! T?es ben moron! »

Malheureusement pour vous, de toute façon, pour assister à cette représentation du Crashed Ice à Trois-Rivières, il fallait être invité au carnaval chez Ty.Lire l?article au complet ?

Michael Quinion is a former BBC radio reporter and the author of the book ?Port Out, Starboard Home: The Fascinating Stories We Tell About the Words We Use? (see US version). He has a keen interest in etymology, the study of the origin of words. Michael?s following text from his website, which appears in similar form in the book, tries tracing the origin of the word ?gadget? (used with permission).

This takes me back. As a callow young broadcaster, I was sent one day to a small village behind Brighton to talk to an old man who for many years had been Rudyard Kipling?s chauffeur. Among many other things, but for no good reason that I can now recall, he told me with great emphasis that Kipling had invented the word gadget about the year 1904.

I now know better. However, his assertion isn?t wholly wide of the truth, since Kipling did to some extent popularise it, in his Traffics and Discoveries of 1904: ?Steam gadgets always take him that way?. There?s evidence, though, that the word had by then been around for many years, most probably among seafarers. Kipling may have picked it up during one of his journeys to India.

The seafaring origin confirms that a story often told in the US is also false. This holds that gadget comes from a Frenchman named Gaget who was involved with the construction of the Statue of Liberty, a gift from the people of France in 1886. He was said to have sold miniature bronze versions of it in New York, each with his name on the bottom. Everybody wanted one of these Gagets and a new word was invented. That?s a nice try, but no cigar. The name of Gaget is indeed associated with the construction of the statue, since the workshop in Paris that created the copper outer skin of the monument was that of Gaget, Gauthier & Cie. And miniatures of the statue were sold, though none with his name on them, so far as I know. But otherwise, the story is false, not least because gadget? despite Kipling?s book ? was not widely known until after World War I.

We now think of a gadget as being some small mechanical device, ill-defined perhaps, but certainly ingenious or novel. The evidence suggests that it was originally one of those hand-waving terms for something one temporarily can?t remember the technical name for ? a thingummy, a whatsit, a what?s-his-name, a doohickey or dingus. There is anecdotal evidence, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, for this sense having been around since the 1850s.

The origin is rather obscure, but a plausible suggestion is that it comes from French gâchette, a lock mechanism, or from the French dialect word gagée for a tool.

The writer who put gadget on the written map was one Robert Brown, whose Spunyarn and Spindrift, A sailor boy?s log of a voyage out and home in a China tea-clipper appeared in 1886. He wrote: ?Then the names of all the other things on board a ship! I don?t know half of them yet; even the sailors forget at times, and if the exact name of anything they want happens to slip from their memory, they call it a chicken-fixing, or a gadjet, or a gill-guy, or a timmey-noggy, or a wim-wom ? just pro tem., you know?.

[By Michael Quinion | Origin: Where Did the Word "Gadget" Come From? | Comments]

Last summer I found myself with a dozen pumpkins and no plans for what to do with them. I ended up giving some away, and using the rest for porch decorations. After a couple of hard freezes, they were ready for the compost heap from which they sprouted about a year ago. I retrieved some seeds (a messy job after the pumpkins go soft) because I have real plans for them this year. I?m going to experiment with geometric pumpkins!

The first time you see square watermelons, your instinct may shout ?Photoshop!? but they are really square. Not a genetic variant, these are made the old-fashioned way. They are grown in boxes, and take the cubic shape gradually as they grow. It?s a labor-intensive process, but the end result fits nicely in a refrigerator, and wastes no space in the truck. And they won?t roll around! They?ve been growing them in Japan for years, because space is at a premium. The watermelons are at premium prices, too.

To achieve such results, you have to have a proper box, made of tempered glass or durable plastic. Transparent boxes are best, or else you won?t know exactly when to harvest, or even worse, waste your equipment on a rotten fruit! K-mac Plastics sells boxes especially designed to grow watermelons in, complete with proper drainage.

Keep reading for even stranger shapes

If you can grow cubic watermelons, why not other shapes? The next phase would be pyramid-shaped watermelons. And if you can grow pyramids, why not face-shaped watermelons? It?s been done.

The idea can be carried over to other types of garden produce. Have you ever heard of a cubecumber? The shape is even more impressive when you slice them for unsuspecting guests.

You can order a kit that helps you to grow your own square tomatoes. Grow Big Strange and Nasty Plants has five projects for kids, with a giant pumpkin project and an insect-eating plant as well as a cube tomato kit.

You can also buy molds for your garden. Vegiforms offers two-piece plastic molds with faces on them. The garden elf shape and the ?pickle puss? shape work with eggplants, zucchini, and other roundish vegetables. The diamond and heart shapes are longer, and produce the shape when you slice the cucumber or squash. There?s even a mold in the shape of an ear of corn, so you can disguise one vegetable as another!

Square pumpkins have been done. John Muller won the ?most beautiful pumpkin? award for his box-shaped pumpkin in 2005.

The greenhouse at Disney EPCOT in Florida grows vegetables in the shape of (what else) Mickey Mouse.

This photo, supposedly of ?miraculous? roots that were pulled from the ground in the shape of two people, has been making the rounds for quite some time, most recently at the Daily Mail. Skeptics say they couldn?t have grown that way, that they must?ve been carved. But the filament roots seem real. Once you know how it?s done, it seems simple (but isn?t). With the right mold (possibly dolls), the real miracle is getting the roots to grow so large!

I saw instructions at one time about getting a pumpkin to grow inside a square milk carton, but it seems you would have to support the outside to keep the plastic from bending. Hmm. I may experiment with getting a tomato to grow in the shape of the inside of a jar first. However I decide to do it, rest assured I will take pictures for you!

Digg This!

Errrrmmm... qué?

(from Jon Witte)

Although, as a programmer, Joel certainly appreciates detailed error messages, sometimes "an unexpected error occurred" will do...

In addition to attaining a whole new level of smugness, Rogier found himself much more popular after getting a new iPhone. As in, two billion new email messages more popular.

The good news here is that the airplanes themselves don't run Internet Explorer. Well, I mean, probably they don't. Right?

(found at the Seattle airport by Mike K)

"I ran into this one while trying to run the HP CDROM check for my laptop," wrote Nick M. "Fortunately, closing the door to my office seemed to solve the problem."

  Un Britannique propose aux automobilistes excédés par les milliers de radars automatiques de prendre leur revanche. Une précision, le radar est factice.

Spike Priggen of Bedazzled found this funny old ad that shows how an uptight dad stopped beating his child after switching to decaffeinated Sanka. Link

Today is LEGO's 50th birthday, or rather the anniversary of the patent approval for the original brick. Joel Johnson has more at Boing Boing Gadgets, including a timeline of LEGO technology advances. From LEGO.com:

The LEGO history began in 1932 in Denmark, when Ole Kirk Christansen founded a small factory for wooden toys in the unknown town of Billund in the south of the country. To find a name for his company he organized a competition among his employees. As fate would have it however, he himself came up with the best name: LEGO ? a fusion of the Danish words ?LEg? and ?GOdt? (?play well?).

Flashlights are generally there to help you out in a time of need, such as when your power goes out and you need to fumble around in the dark. A flashlight that lights stuff on fire because it's so powerful might be neat for goofing around with your pyro friends, but something tells me that if you accidentally burned your house down trying to find candles you'd be pretty pissed about buying such a ludicrous item. Luckily, at $300 it's way too expensive to be a good substitute for matches, so your house is probably safe for now. Hit the jump for a video of the firey flashlight in action.

Suffice it to say, don't shine this in your eyes or you'll become blinder than Ray Charles in a closet. [Product Page via I4U]

Un jour, ça va nous arriver?

La brique en plastique Lego, née au Danemark et empilée par les enfants du monde entier, souffle lundi ses cinquante bougies, résistant à l'épreuve du temps.

Une Américaine a été arrêtée pour avoir cherché via Internet à engager un tueur à gages pour assassiner la femme légitime de son amant.

Cisco a annoncé lundi une nouvelle plate-forme de transfert de données à extrêmement haut débit, le Nexus 7000, un commutateur capable de transférer 15 terabits de données par seconde.

Postes Canada s'est de nouveau retrouvée au coeur d'un débat épineux hier, alors que le député de Bas-Richelieu-Nicolet-Bécancour à la Chambre des communes, Louis Plamondon, a dénoncé publiquement l'émission de timbres rendant hommage à des artistes de la chanson au Canada.