DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

(This weblogging thing is a whole lot easier than keeping a journal.)

The Moller Skycar: "No matter how you look at it the automobile is only an interim step on our evolutionary path to independence from gravity." (Thanks to Aaron for the link.)

The $50,000 communications satellite "PCSat" has antennas made from a metal tape measure from Home Depot. See also the PCSat site, which has photos.

Jacque Harper points out that SatireWire has a seemingly endless supply of great content today:

• Bush Faints After Choking “The” Pretzel, Not Choking “On” Pretzel
• Surprise Settlement Evenly Splits Microsoft; One Firm To Make Software, Other To Make Patches
• The Sou’wester Alliance: Afghanistan’s Forgotten Warriors

The Earth at Night — an awesome photograph (or composite) of the planet at night, depicting the spread of industrial civilization. Be sure to click the photo on the page above. This is part of NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day series. (Thanks to Chuck for the pointer.)

JWZ contributes an amusing-but-sad anecdote about public urination. I have to admit the main reason I’m mentioning that here is I’m looking forward to having lots of Google users, in a quest for “public urination” information, surf here in a few weeks.

Domain registrar Dotster announced a nice privacy option today: “you can now choose to have your personal information removed from the bulk Whois list that Dotster is required to provide to other registrars.”

I am sure this won’t stop most spam, but it appears that it might stop spam from other domain registrars, such as buydomains.com.

Dotster explains:

All ICANN accredited registrars, including Dotster, are required … to provide Whois customer data to any competing registrar upon request and upon payment of a fee. By logging into your account and choosing
the remove option, your personal information will not be included
in this list if we are asked to provide it to a competitor.

Kudos to Dotster for working to protect my data, rather than selling it as often as possible. (Thanks too for making this opt-out a simple one-click link in the announcement email.)

I saw Pixar’s latest animated film, Monsters, Inc., a few weeks ago, and was somewhat disappointed that there were no “outtakes” during the closing credits. Today Pixar has re-released the film, including outtakes. You can sample the outtakes at the Monsters, Inc website.

The Pixar Theater hosts the original outtakes from A Bug’s Life and Toy Story 2.

In related news, if you have Apple’s Quicktime software (free for MacOS and Windows), Apple’s movie trailers page is just awesome.

Even if I liked stock car racing, I don’t think I could have brought myself to watch the Pork The Other White Meat 400.

That name is a real mouthful, wouldn’t you say?

I was surprised to see that porkracing.com is a real website — I pictured a satirical description of, I don’t know, kids pushing slices of ham around an oval track.

But maybe it is already silly enough to offer access to both race schedules and pork recipes in one place.

Although he denies that he’s a “cheese whiz,” which incidentally is the best pun I’ve heard since MeFi went crazy with horse humor a few weeks ago, reader Chris Thompson wrote in to point out that the World Cheese Index indeed has entries for the letters I’d missed in my cheese alphabet.

Kraft’s Cheez Whiz is no doubt a fine product, and I have no intention of disparaging it here, even if it is listed on Ray’s List of Weird and Disgusting Foods and contains as many types of preservatives as types of cheese and in addition to making a tasty snacktime treat, doubles as an effective laundry detergent.