Well as we do, we’ve been emailed a list of men inspired rules that have passed from email account to email account, waiting for someone brave enough to publish.

No one has (well they probably have but we couldn’t find it on our google search… ok so we didn’t get past the first page but that’s SEO in action isn’t it?) so we kinda figured we’d give it a burl… plus it means that today the Saturday can tick a post submission that kinda amuses and entertains without any effort other than a copy and paste. Yay! So here they are….

These are the Man rules!

• Men are NOT mind readers.
• Learn to work the toilet seat. You’re a big girl. If it’s up, put it down.. we need it up, you need it down. You don’t hear us complaining about you leaving it down.
• Sunday sports It’s like the full moon or the changing of the tides. Let it be. (Except for MIdnight who just doesn’t get the sports watching thing… which kinda disturbs me on one level… the dusty barely used one).
• Crying is blackmail.
• Ask for what you want. Let us be clear on this one: Subtle hints do not work! Strong hints do not work! Obvious hints do not work! Just say it!
• Yes and No are perfectly acceptable answers to almost every question.
• Come to us with a problem only if you want help solving it. That’s what we do.
• Sympathy is what your girlfriends are for.
• Anything we said 6 months ago is inadmissible in an argument. In fact, all comments become Null and void after 7 Days.
• If you think you’re fat, you probably are. Don’t ask us…
• If something we said can be interpreted two ways and one of the ways makes you sad or angry, we meant the other one.
• You can either ask us to do something Or tell us how you want it done. Not both. If you already know best how to do it, just do it yourself.
• Whenever possible, Please say whatever you have to say during commercials…
• Christopher Columbus or Captain Cook did NOT need directions and neither do we.
• ALL men see in only 16 colours, like Windows default settings. Peach, for example, is a fruit, not A colour. Pumpkin is also a fruit. We have no idea what mauve is.
• If it itches, it will be scratched. We do that.
• If we ask what is wrong and you say “nothing,” We will act like nothing’s wrong. We know you are lying, but it is just not worth the hassle.
• If you ask a question you don’t want an answer to, Expect an answer you don’t want to hear.
• When we have to go somewhere, absolutely anything you wear is fine..Really
• Don’t ask us what we’re thinking about unless you are prepared to discuss such topics as FOOTBALL or motor sports.
• You have enough clothes.
• You have too many shoes.
• I am in shape. Round IS a shape!

Ladies…. please re-read. And then go make dinner before finishing the washing… chaaa!

My future post will be on the perils of modern dating, regrets of failed relationships, why I am just so very very lonely, and what are women really all about with all these lists and expectations.

OK. As you could imagine like everyone we get lots and lots of ‘funnee’ emails flood through our inbox before coming to rest in our trash thingo. But sometimes… you come across one that you kinda think… yeah. This really does need to be shared with a health warning.

And today we have two… both kinda funny and both playing on cultural stereotypes which is always a riot… particularly in the Han province and in most scenic destinations in South America… and the Pacific… central Africa… Millwall… Compton… Brighton LeSands. Enjoy.

Q: Doctor, I’ve heard that cardiovascular exercise can prolong life. Is this true?

A: Your heart only good for so many beats, and that it…don’t waste on exercise. Everything wear out eventually. Speeding up heart not make you live longer; it like saying you extend life of car by driving faster. Want to live longer? Take nap.

Q: Should I cut down on meat and eat more fruits and vegetables?

A: You must grasp logistical efficiency. What does cow eat? Hay and corn. And what are these? Vegetables. So steak is nothing more than efficient mechanism of delivering vegetables to your system. Need grain? Eat chicken. Beef also good source of field grass (green leafy vegetable). And pork chop can give you 100% of recommended daily allowance of vegetable product.

Q: Should I reduce my alcohol intake?

A: No, not at all. Wine made from fruit. Brandy is distilled wine, that mean they take water out of fruity bit so you get even more of goodness that way. Beer also made of grain. Bottom up!

Q: How can I calculate my body/fat ratio?

A: Well, if you have body and you have fat, your ratio one to one. If you have two bodies, your ratio two to one, etc.

Q: What are some of the advantages of participating in a regular exercise program?

A: Can’t think of single one, sorry. My philosophy is: No pain…good!

Q: Aren’t fried foods bad for you?

A: YOU NOT LISTENING! Food are fried these day in vegetable oil. In fact, they permeated by it. How could getting more vegetable be bad for you?!?

Q: Will sit-ups help prevent me from getting a little soft around the middle?

A: Definitely not! When you exercise muscle, it get bigger. You should only be doing sit-up if you want bigger stomach.

Q: Is chocolate bad for me?

A: Are you crazy?!? HEL-LO-O!! Cocoa bean! Another vegetable! It best feel-good food around!

Q: Is swimming good for your figure?

A: If swimming good for your figure, explain whale to me..

Q: Is getting in shape important for my lifestyle?

A: Hey! ‘Round’ a shape!

Well, I hope this has cleared up any misconceptions you may have had about food and diets.

And remember:
Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways – Chardonnay in one hand – chocolate in the other – body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming “WOO-HOO, what a ride!!”

AND…..

For those of you who watch what you eat, here’s the final word on nutrition and health. It’s a relief to know the truth after all those conflicting nutritional studies.

1. The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.

2. The Mexicans eat a lot of fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.

3. The Chinese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.

4. The Italians drink a lot of red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.

5. The Germans drink a lot of beer and eat lots of sausages and fats and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.

CONCLUSION:
Eat and drink what you like. Speaking English is apparently what kills you.

I think it’s time we kicked off the Voodoologic Caption Slugfest competition again!

Our image for this round of the Slugfest is the priceless example to the left, which I have tentatively titled “Man in flippers with bus”.

As before, please submit your captions over in the Voodoologic Forum, rather than in the comments below.

Do your best, or even your worst, you devious Voodoologic fiends, and earn the lifelong admiration of a group of people you wouldn’t like to get stuck sitting next to at a dinner party!

In all that time, I have also been hunting for the perfect creativity companion — by which I mean, the one piece of software that will make working with all of this material easy and intuitive, that will support me as I move around, edit, append, and link characters, places and ideas together into a huge mess a cohesive framework.

Unfortunately, in more than 20 years of downloading and testing application after application, I still have a yearning chasm where ‘perfect creative application’ should be.

***

Whenever I think about it, I usually decide that I can’t be the only person in the world who is still looking and still waiting for the software package that will make the process of being creative across a very large collection of interconnected material easy and enjoyable.

When Wikis first appeared on the scene, I thought the day had finally arrived. I was so excited by the idea, in fact, that I built my own reasonably featured Wiki engine from the ground up [1]. It did most of the things advanced Wiki engines of the time did, with a few more tricky bits and pieces added in purely for my benefit, and for a time I was happy.

Until.

Until I realised how difficult it quickly becomes to maintain formatted text when you have to rely on text-embedded markup to provide that formatting. Editing extended content becomes a nightmare, particularly because you only have the limited editing tools available in the standard text area of your favourite Internet Browser.

Of course, there are projects out there that attempt to bring some basic wordprocessing power to web browsers [2], but to say that these match even a small part of the power of your favourite wordprocessor would be to say something silly like, oh I don’t know, “The pen is mightier than the sword,” which is the kind of dangerous nonsense that is made up by people who like to stab other people with pens.

What am I really looking for? I mean, really?

After having played for many, many hours with many, many applications, including a number of ones that have been built purely to support creative writing projects [3], it turns out that what I want is probably quite a simple idea. Or, at least, the joining together of two existing ideas, which might or might not be simple.

I want wordprocessing mixed with Wiki’ing. That’s what I want.

I want to be able to create text, headlines, footnotes, endnotes, tables, insert images, check spelling, and everything else besides.

I also want to be able to create new, related content rapidly, with linking automatically handled. Throw in a panel that shows me all the documents the current document links to, and all the documents that link to the current document and now we’re talking! Add automatic versioning of every save, so that even if I mess up and delete something I shouldn’t have, I can still reclaim it, and you will see me weep with gratitude. Add the ability to tag every document into meaningful tag groups and I will do things that will blow your mind-hole. Seriously.

I don’t even care if this is an online app or a desktop app. Actually, strike that, I probably care just a little bit that it would be better as a desktop app, since what do I do when my internet connection isn’t working; and then throw away that concern because I don’t really care after all.

In fact, if you took an excellent online wordprocessor like Google Docs, and you added these Wiki abilities to it, that’s pretty much exactly what I’m looking for. That’s it. That’s my perfect creativity companion! Or, perhaps the wordprocessing features of an application like PBWiki will mature to encompass some of the more advanced features on which I constantly rely [4]?

The long wait

Of course, this isn’t going to happen today, and probably won’t happen tomorrow. But surely, someday, someone who works at a senior level in the development team of an online or desktop wordprocessor application will have this same idea? It seems like such a natural solution for so many different content-generation project types, let alone purely creative projects.

Still, I’ve been waiting more than 20 years so far; I only hope I won’t be waiting 20 more before I find that perfect [5] thing.

As with any list of this kind, you will probably agree with some entries, disagree with others, and wish like hell that there was some way to perform memory surgery to make you forget you’d seen the remainder. For myself, I didn’t really find the ‘cheap giggle’ covers all that entertaining [2], but there were enough genuinely quirky and oddball covers in the collection to make it worth browsing.

Just for the fun of it I’ve compiled my Top 5 best-of-the-worst album covers below, but if you get a chance, you should look through the original list to see which 5 you’d pick out as your best-of-the-worst.

5. Space Escapade, Les Baxter

At my Number 5 slot I’ve gone with Space Escapade by Les Baxter.

There are many things to love about this album cover, not the least of which are the multi-coloured alien women wearing scanty clothing. You can add to that list the attractive brown and green space suits worn by our space lads — perfect, we can only imagine, for impromptu escapades on possibly hostile worlds. And let’s not overlook the fact that they’re drinking wicked-looking extraterrestrial concoctions through clear plastic helmets without somehow spilling any of it on their uniforms.

Yes, Space Escapade has it all, including a phallic shaped spaceship in the background, as well as a sort-of-purpley-pink chick who looks like she can’t wait until the delicious humans drink the stupefying potion so the serious brain-sucking can begin. The lesson? Multi-coloured alien women are all alike — far more interested in a space lad’s mind than in the blaster-sized bulge in his interplanetary trousers.

4. All My Friends Are Dead, Freddie Gage

At Number 4 we have All my friends are dead, and with a title like that it’s hard not to feel sorry for our man, Freddie Gage. Until, that is, you see the picture below the title.

Seriously, one look at that picture and I found myself wondering whether or not the original title for the album might have been, All my friends are dead… Now it’s time for my enemies too! Aha ahahahahaha! [3] 

Either way, I can’t help thinking that Freddie here maybe knows a whole lot more about why all his friends are dead than he’s letting on, and if I were the police investigating this bizarre series of unexpected deaths, I’d start paying attention to the fact that the only thing that ties all of these corpses together [4] is… yes, that’s right… one Mr Freddie Gage!

Still, maybe this isn’t entirely Freddie’s fault. Some of the blame for this album cover has to go to the designer who chose to place a phrase like “All my friends are dead” in a rather playful font on a bright blue background. That’s not simply wrong, folks, that’s just plain evil.

3. Understand Your’e Swede, Jimmy Jenson

At Number 3 we have the cover I struggled most to justify including in my Top 5, and yet every time I look at it I immediately understand why I think it’s so wonderfully awful.

It’s not just the misspelling in the title, it’s not just the fact that if you spelled the title correctly it still wouldn’t make any sense, and it’s not just the fact that whoever did the album art decided to establish its essential Swedishness by depicting a guy with a sack and an axe and 43 children — it’s the combination of all of these things that make Understand Your’e Swede a true legend in the worst album cover stakes of all time.

Not only that, but Jimmy Jenson has passed onto future generations the pleasant past-time of wondering just what the hell he was getting at. Understand You’re Swede sounds like an angry indictment against all those Swedes who have spent years foolishly attempting to deny their inner Swedishness, while Understand Your Swede would presumably only make sense to the small percentage of the population who actually own one.

An outstanding effort either way, Jimmy Jenson!

2. The Many Facets Of Roger

At Number 2 we have The Many Facets Of Roger, along with a lingering concern about the sexual identity crisis Roger was experiencing when he recorded this album.

Sadly, the album wasn’t titled The Many Different Open-Necked, Navel-Plunging, Hairy-Chest-Revealing Shirts Of Roger, so in each photo of our man demonstrating one of his many facets, we also get another opportunity to admire his glittery, spangly, chest-exposing-and-wide-blue-panel-ey wardrobe choice for that entirely fabulous day. And what can I tell you? After squinting at this album cover for a number of minutes I found myself hoping and praying that this was just what Roger wore in off the street when he turned up for the photo shoot, since that would add a whole other dimension of amazingness to Roger, not to mention his many facets.

And what about the many facets of Roger themselves? I can’t be the only one who has tried to figure out exactly what each of these facets is trying to communicate (from left to right, top to bottom):

1. Girls just wanna have fun
2. This is Serious Roger. No, really. Yes, I know the shirt isn’t helping, but I mean it. Look, just ignore the damn shirt, I’m being really, really serious! Oh, for the love of… Forget the fucking shirt for just a minute and pay attention to… stop looking at the shirt!!
3. Mwaha!! I bet you weren’t expecting me to be hiding in your closet!
4. I call this facet, “And Another Thing, Roger.” I like to use it when I think of more than 1 thing at a time.
5. I… I only wish I could show more than 6 of my many facets… Facet Number 47, for example, is illegal in 12 different countries.
6. It’s crowded in my brain, can I use yours?

1. Orion Reborn

And here we are at my Number 1 best-of-the-worst album cover of all time, Orion Reborn!

The only place to start with this cover is with a quick lesson in ultra-coolness. Pick the least cool person you know — the person who is so uncool you’re surprised he or she simply doesn’t spontaneously combust in social situations [5]. Okay, now… imagine that person wearing a mask…

I’m right, aren’t I? That person suddenly looks cool!

Yes, it’s a simple fact of life that wearing a mask automatically makes you look cool, and there is no-one in the world who looks more cool wearing a mask than Orion up there.

But the coolness doesn’t end with the mask. Oh hell no! Orion combines that mask with a blue satin shirt with pouffy pirate sleeves, a pair of matching blue cummerbund pants, a rock-’n-roll-god-of-the-1950s hairstyle, a fists-on-hips stance and an optional devil-may-care sneer, and what he delivers is pure sensory coolness overload. Seriously, you don’t just want to own this man’s album, you want to wake up one morning and find out you’re even half as cool as he is.

In fact, when you look at the complete package — particularly the hair and the sneer — it’s hard not to suspect that maybe Elvis didn’t leave the building after all, he just put on a mask and was reborn as Orion.

And there you have it

So what do you know, it’s surprisingly difficult to arrive at a list of 5 favourite album covers out of a potential pool of 50 candidates, many of which are just as wonderfully bad as any of the others. In the end, I had to cut more than a few worthy contenders from my list to arrive at the final 5.

Which leaves me wondering… If you did happen to take a look at the entire Sun-Sentinel list, what would you pick as your best of the worst, and why? Or, heck, what do you think of the list I’ve selected above?

As always, the comment section is the place to have your say!

Until next time,

Murray @ Midnight

When the full-time whistle blew, everyone agreed that they’d witnessed a game of footy that would go down in the history books [1]. Grizzled frontline forwards were battle-wearied, sure-footed wingers were numb with fatigue, and up in the nose-bleed seats in the stands noses were bleeding, but only because of a 3rd quarter punchup after a controversial penalty was awarded against the home team.

“It was nothing short of amazing,” Murray @ Midnight, manager and coach of the new team to beat, The Twacknostic Twacks, was quoted as saying. “We went into this round as very much the underdogs, but the management and coaching staff of the team were quietly confident that our training and player acquisition strategies were about to bear fruit.”

And what fruit they bore! From being considered rank outsiders in the opening rounds of the season, The Twacks have steadily improved their game, with management making a series of canny and sometimes surprising trades, many of which have begun paying dividends on the field.

Even so, The Twacks’ Round 5 performance has caught many experienced pundits with their pants down [2].

“Didn’t see it coming,” announced Darren Saturday, manager of the in-form Cavalier Qs at a press conference after the Qs’ own Round 5 win against The Johnsons. “The Qs are currently comfortably placed in the Top 8, but I gotta admit we don’t have a strategy to deal with The Twacks if they heat up at this point. This could change the nature of the game itself, because frankly we didn’t think The Twacks had actually ever played a game of Rugby League before. Women’s Hockey, maybe, sure. Now it looks like those freaky little mothers actually know how to play.”

“Round 6 is going to be a defining moment for The Twacks,” predicted Murray @ Midnight. “We’re going up against the BBs, the number 2 team in the league. I’d be looking for a stunning upset, because if we lose I’m going to throw a 3 hour tantrum and then hold my breath until I pass out.”

“They built a champion team,” acknowledged Darren Saturday during a phonecall earlier today. “While it looks like we’ve been wasting our time building a team of champions. Apparently that’s a bad thing even if you consistently go on winning game after game after game after game after game. I have no idea why.”

Okay, I think it’s time to kick off another Caption Slugfest!

As per the very simple process established in our first slugfest, add your caption [1] for the whacky photo above in the comments section. After a reasonable period of mourning the team at Voodoologic will use cutting edge technology along with whatever their horoscope says for that day to decide the best caption and this will be printed and taped to the wall in a toilet in a secret location known only to the 800 or so people who work there.

Update: 10 Mar 2008

Well, the ballots are in, they’ve been counted, recounted, they’ve had beer spilled on them and, in one memorable instance, they were mailed to a video repair guy along with a death threat, but the team at Voodoologic are pleased to announce the winner of last week’s slugfest:

It was the very last thing that the startled Captain and Co-Pilot saw approaching them at speed as they made a forced landing at Baghdad International.

Some might see this as a controversial decision, since our very own Darren Saturday was responsible for this caption, but as he so eloquently explained in a telephone call at about 3am this morning, “You better pick that one about the airport, numbnuts, or you’re not just toast, you’re frickin’ croutons!”

And I couldn’t have put it any better myself.

Special mention goes to Jacki, because let’s face it, Steven Seagal is so amazingly cool that just typing his name makes me want to sit down and rock back and forth [2], so any post that disses him is just that much cooler.

Thanks to everyone, and I’m already looking forward to the next caption slugfest!