Comma Dot Comma

Why write anything when you can get it generated for free? A collection of random text generators:

They fight crime! The perfect set-up for your latest noir novel or screenplay. Don’t like it? Just click “try again.”

Microfiction Assignments: Quick! Follow the directions to create a masterpiece… all the plot points are present. (Thanks to nate).

These five text generators were collected by the guy over at Communications from Elsewhere.

Brag Generator: Perfect for your pre-drag-race speech.

Teenage Poetry: The tears, the roses, the staring at cloudy horizons.

Postmodern English Criticism. This one generates a whole nonsense paper with footnotes. My coworker sent around an excerpt of this ,side-by-side with an excerpt from Stanley Fish, and most of us couldn’t tell which one was which.

Time Cube. Why read the rants on the real crazy-guy-time-cube page when you can randomly generate a similar excerpt here? You don’t get the big red letters, but the rest is there.

Band Names. It gives you a choice of several, but you can always refresh to get new options.

Slate has a new blog– “blogging the Bible” by a guy who hasn’t read much of it. The inaugural post is interesting, haven’t got into the rest yet.

Interesting things I’ve happened upon in the last few weeks.
Some people really love their flashlight collections.

What ninjas think about the fighting scenes in Matrix (“It’s like a brick, trying to be Jupiter”). askaninja.com.

What do you get when you cross 200 liters of Diet Coke with a bunch of Mentos? Some pretty good choreography. (Link via nerdygirl).

I’ve often been the victim of mood oglers (warning: lotsa cussing), but I never had the term for it before now. In a moment of obsession I read cancerbaby’s whole blog a few weeks ago. She died last month. Here’s another really good, but sad, post by her, about marriage and stuff.

Google. The famous once-darling, now-devil “do no evil” company and flagship search engine. There are so many fun things to do with its products.

• www.googlefight.com — let your favorite search terms go head-to-head (fyi: love beats death, God beats porn, feet beat boobs).
• www.googlewhack.com — find a two-word phrase that only returns one hit.
• www.googlesightseeing.com — weird things you can spot on Google Earth.
• www.answers.google.com This one is actually sponsored by Google, but you can pay someone to look up any old random thing you need to find, say, a particular large heart-shaped card.

This week I’ve been entertained by fake movie trailers. It turns out careful editing and inspired music choices make all the difference.

The grandaddy of them all is The Shining, recast as a feel-good family comedy.

And here’s Sleepless in Seattle as a thriller.

And here’s Brokeback to the Future, the title of which speaks for itself.

The best “easy-listening” internet radio show for people who thought they had very discriminating musical tastes in college, and would never say “easy listening,” preferring the term “chill”:

Metropolis at kcrwmusic.com

It’s mellow enough not to distract and interesting enough to keep the energy levels up. The DJ will play a remix of some Coldplay song, then something from India, then some latino techno, then something funky. He makes it all seem like it belongs together.

The best “work’s boring, better listen to something interesting” internet radio:

The Cool As Folk station on music.yahoo.com

It’s where I get my Decemberists fix, among other things.

The best “work is really boring, I gotta laugh at something” internet radio. Well, this one’s not music but hey you can’t go wrong with

This American Life

The best “I’m on a deadline and got to go into The Zone” internet radio show, although sometimes this one gets a little too creepy (in a Matrix II mosh-pit-scene kind of way). All electronica.
Nocturna on kcrwmusic.com

CDs that also serve this purpose, making me listen to them over and over obsessively for days on end even if they are only 30 minutes long:

Neilsen Hubbard, Sing into Me — The sweetest Christian-tinged folk you can imagine.

Mia Doi Todd, The Golden State — “Gravity and entropy, they have it out inside of me”

The Violet Burning, Strength — electric guitar you can disappear into.