The inevitable result of too much Rock Band drumming. That’s the little finger on my right hand, with blisters on the finger itself and on my palm. I think perhaps I hold the stick too loosely.
A few weeks ago, I was frantically drumming away when I was confronted by a really loud CRACK from my foot. These Rock Band pedals are basically a pretty weak design; the return spring pushes against a point about halfway up the pedal, and the orange plastic insert (see the picture) weakens the black plastic baseplate because it fits into a cutout. Lots of people report the pedal snapping at that point, and the v2 Rock Band drums have a steel reinforced plate instead of plastic.
Fortunately, mine was only cracked, not broken right off. Lacking the time (ok… the patience) to return it, I bought a £3.08 mending bracket from B&Q and forced the self-tapping screws into the pedal with some brute force and ignorance. In the foreground of the shot you can see the Victorinox Swiss Army cybertool I used. Et voilà, one reinforced pedal!
Clearly, this bacon reputation thing is getting out of control. I swear, I’m not obsessed by it, but people keep sending me these cool links… The lastest is from Richie (his blog is well worth adding to your RSS incidentally) who sent me this link to bacon cups:
These are actually a good deal less ridiculous than my other recent food-related entries. For a start, BLT is a classic flavour combination; secondly the portions are human sized; and thirdly, apart from a few rashers of streaky bacon, it’s not unhealthy at all. Lettuce and cherry tomatos? Yeah, pile that stuff on.
Nevertheless, that is some damned cunning bacon engineering, Megan, and for that I salute you. Bravo!
Yet another Xbox succumbs to the inevitable RRoD. It’s always amusing when it happens to a demo one though. “Hey, please buy our… remarkably unreliable console!”
What do you think? 
The flat colour on the dots around “.co.uk” needs work (probably a simple emboss effect to bring it into 3d) and I need to edge the whole thing somehow (probably just round off the corners). Other than that, I’m pretty pleased with this. Comments? For starters, how many of you know what this is?
One of the things I like about Twitter is how often it scoops my RSS reader. On my laptop I run the TweetDeck client, which can maintain regular polls of search terms into search.twitter.com. One term I search on is “O2″, dating back to the iPhone 3G launch hassles when I was monitoring the stock levels in Twitter. This search term meant I found out about the O2 MMS security problem several days before it hit the tech news, and it showed up something else interesting today: the contents of a customer survey that O2 had emailed around.
Finding an invite to the survey in my own email, I had a look. After a bunch of waffle about various things (”are you aware of visual voicemail? How many times a week do you use the App Store?”) I got to the stuff about MMS. From memory, the broad outlines of what the survey wanted to know were:
We’ve seen rumours that AT&T might be bringing an MMS app to the iPhone; I would suggest that O2 are in the early stages on considering this option too.
Look at what I find myself about to eat! That’s what thinking about bacon all day does to you.
I think I’m getting a reputation, because people are sending me stupid foodstuffs now. Still, it’s a blog post that practically writes itself, and I am nothing if not lazy, so here goes.
Chris brought another mention of chicken fried bacon (here called country fried bacon, but it looks the same to me) to my attention. The article itself is just more of the same lunacy I’ve already covered, but the comments are recommended:
Please don’t turn bacon into a meme. By their very nature, memes are fads and come and go, blow up and become passe. I swear to God, if any fucking hipster looks at me sideways for enjoying bacon in 2010, I will lose it.
Amen, Tower18!
However, Rupert upped the ante with this act of lunacy from holytaco.net (which, it seems, was all over Digg for days before I saw it; I guess I’m just not hip enough). Please do click through to the original article, because whoever ate this monstrosity deserves the hits; but these (blatantly stolen) pictures should encourage you:
You see, in bacon weaving — as with so much in life — the line between madness and genius is “fill with cheese”.
Take a look at this screenshot of this listing on Amazon:
There are two key bits of information here:
“Price: £24.99 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK”
“All listed prices on applicable products sold by Amazon.co.uk now include the new, reduced VAT rate of 15%. This has been applied automatically to the price of your item so you don’t need to do a thing.”
Hmmm. So, yesterday, did this item sell for £25.53? Did it? Or have you, Amazon, in fact, swallowed the VAT increase and kept the price the same?
Lying gits. I’ve emailed them about this. They said this:
Thank you for contacting Amazon.co.uk with your concerns.
I understand that you are disappointed that the price of “Mad Catz Universal Rock Band 2 Triple Cymbal Expansion Pack (Xbox 360)” did not decrease following the reduction of the UK VAT rate. Amazon.co.uk has included the new rate for all products that are subject to the standard rate of VAT and this has resulted in the prices falling on hundreds of thousands of items.
Occasionally one of a number of factors that we use to determine price can cause a price to stay the same or rise, but expect to see price reductions across the website as a result of the new VAT rate.
We make every effort to keep abreast of the changes in the status of items, and we feel that having an on-line computerised catalogue allows us to update it more regularly. Publishers do, however, change the list prices of titles regularly and with so many titles in our catalogue there will unavoidably be a few instances where an item’s price may have changed without our knowing it.
Please accept our apologies for any disappointment. We will not be able to offer any further discount on “Mad Catz Universal Rock Band 2 Triple Cymbal Expansion Pack (Xbox 360)” but I hope you will be able to take advantage of the many discounts we do
offer on your next visit to our store.
So that’s… no answer at all. Bah.
This time, unlike the Luther burger and chicken fried bacon, the stupidity is not in the concept. No, this is just a cheeseburger. Nothing daft there, right? Wrong! The stupidity comes with the scale of this cheeseburger:
ABCNews sent a reporter to try and eat this monster. He even took a competitive eating champion with him to help him out, who — unlike that tiny Japanese guy who can eat a squillion hotdogs a second — looks exactly how’d expect an American competitive eating champion to look. Right down to the meat sweats:
SPOILER WARNING: they failed. Some bafflingly huge numbers:
Still, if you’re not hungry for burgers, the same ABC article brings news of the biggest pancakes I’ve ever seen, several restaurants that do 72oz steaks, and some place that that does a 21-scoop ice cream special sundae where ” our scoops are really big, they’re like baseball sized”. Again, in all cases, if you can finish the food, you dine for free.
And yet America has an obesity problem! What an odd coincidence that is.
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