scribblista

Ah, Ecstasy

If you're not quite ready for the week yet, you can stall a bit longer with this interactive quiz at Details. Can you tell whether these people are having orgasms or foodgasms?

Starring your favorite Food Network chefs and assorted porn stars. Our only question is: How'd they forget to include Nigella Lawson?

You're No One Till Someone Thinks You're Gay

Just ask anyone who's anyone: Oprah, Jake Gyllenhaal, Marcia Cross, Anderson Cooper (er... well, nevermind), some football player named Michael Strahan, Superman, Spongebob Squarepants, pretty much everyone who's ever been on ET, and of course, Tom Cruise. (er... well, nevermind.)

The New York Times has a fun piece about the fine art of denying the gay rumor and how celebrity publicists finesse the tricky balancing act.

The article did not, however, look into whether publicists start the gay rumor themselves to get that much more buzz for their client. Not that there's anything wrong with it. 

Wikiality Doesn't Bite

Reality is harsh. Wikiality is easy. 

Wikiality is what exists if you make something up, add it to Wikipedia and a bunch of people decide that it's true. [Bloggers should be ridiculously wealthy, don't you agree?]

Anyhoo, Stephen Colbert coined the term last night on The Colbert Report, just before he decided to reorder the natural order of things by super-imposing wikiality over reality.

He asked viewers to pop online, find wiki articles about elephants and add a fact that he'd invented: The world's elephant population has tripled in six months. Naturally, lots of folks went onto Wikipedia and edited the online encyclopedia to say that the world's elephant population had tripled. The video clip is up on YouTube.

We haven't verified this with the National Geographic yet, but we're pretty sure that the world's elephant population did, briefly and spontaneously, triple for about 20 minutes last night.

Meanwhile, Stephen Colbert has been blocked from Wikipedia. [And the Wiki-king wants a free ticket to New York so he can appear on the show.]

Beever Art

[As personal dominatrix physician to Scribblista, I have prescribed her a couple days bedrest for a recent carpal tunnel flare-up. Now that she is tied to the bed indisposed, I am making a one-time guest appearance.
--- Enjoy! Dr. Oll]

If seeing is believing, then Julian Beever—famous English artist—has just added you to his list of republicans fools. Using pavement as canvas, Beever bends two-dimensional chalk drawings into startling 3-D objects. This sidewalk performer is not working for nickels either; he counts Coca-Cola, Sony, and Rembrandt art supplies among his patrons.

[Ed. note: We here at Scribblista would like to  thank Dr. Oll for the guest post. If she ever gives up her day job involving whips and chains treating sick people, she is welcome to join our staff, although blogging does pay a bit less than medicine.]

Ancient Artifacts, c. 1983

It is pretty dang charming to happen across a blog that is devoted entirely to pencils.

The posts include pencil reviews, recent accomplishments by a pencil and pencil-of-the-month club.

We figure that being blogged about is probably the most high-tech thing that's happened to the humble pencil since the advent of fill-in-the-football questionnaires.

 

You Decide

We caught the highly enjoyable Thank You For Smoking yesterday, which features a fantastic cast: Aaron Eckhart, William H. Macy, Robert Duvall, Maria Bello, Rob Lowe.

And then there's Katie Holmes.

It reminded us of the spate of bizarre photographs we'd recently seen of Tom Cruise's soon-to-be Stepford wife. If you click here, here and here, you'll learn that in the cynical world that is the blogosphere, some folks think that her belly looks a tad, well, fake. 

And what do we think? Hmmm, what do you think we think...

Famous or Freaky?

A picture is worth a whole lot more than a thousand words once it's seen the magic that is Photoshop.

If you need proof, check out some of the latest entries for "Celebrity Sideshow" -- one of Worth 1000's many Photoshop contests which ususally involves mashing up incongruous images. In this case, it's Hollywood finding its inner beast.

Those who are unfamiliar with Worth 1000's site - and have the time to poke through the many contests - are in for a treat.   [via cityrag]

And The Addiction Begins

Our long-standing penchant for crossword puzzles, Boogle and Scrabble is poised to blossom into a full-blown obssession now that we've happened onto Babble.

They post a new Babble board every 24 hours, and then let the games begin. Originally, we didn't think it'd be fun to compete against the rest of the Internet ... but it turned out that we were so very, very wrong!

We're registered as Scribblista, should anyone dare to want to take us on.

[via Boing Boing]

Psychoses: An Illustrated Guide

We like to think that most of us can proudly claim at least one or two major personality disorders.

Generally, these mental health quirks are cataloged in the DSM-VI, the shrink's official manual defining the many different flavors of crazy. Sadly, it's a total bore to read.

But we just discovered the mental illness picture book by magazine and advertising illustrator Boris Artzybasheff.

His Neurotica collection, part of his 1954 book As I See, is a fine catalog of crazy. It proves that, when it comes to mental disorders, pictures can say so much more than words. 

For instance, this depicts "Repressed Hostility." --->

               
Below are some others. Can you guess what they represent? [Click pictures to enlarge; click here to see if you got them right and see more images. Or just tell what each looks like to you.]

Hollaback Girl, Defined

A bad thing happened the other day. We inadvertently got that Gwen Stefani song Hollaback Girl stuck in heads. The riff that goes: Few times I been around that block, But I ain't no Hollaback Girl, I ain't no Hollaback Girl looped around in our heads forever.

The most infuriating part was that we have no idea what hollaback girl means.

We blamed ourselves for our cluelessness. Clearly, we hadn't been around that block as many times as Gwen and, therefore, missed some vital piece of street slang.

So, we gave in and Googled it. And guess what: No one knows what it means. She made it up.

There's an entire Wiki page devoted to the topic:

Stefani never explained what the term hollaback girl means. In a line-by-line analysis of the song's lyrics, OC Weekly reviewer Greg Stacy speculated that "Gwen is apparently the captain of the cheerleader squad; she is the girl who 'hollas' the chants, not one of the girls who simply 'hollas' them back". [It's a tongue-in-cheek analysis]

Urban Dictionary claims that hollaback girl means, "someone who allows people to treat him/her like a doormat and walk all over him/her", and credits the term's invention to Stefani.

We also learned that the song is No. 1 on Maxim Magazine's list of 20 Most Annoying Songs Ever.

At last, something we do know.