NBA Slam Dunk Contest

Watch this video of the recent NBA Slam Dunk contest. Competitors are judged not only by the athleticism of each slam, but also the ingenuity of each attempt.

Included are a couple of fantastic dunks from the Knicks guard Nate Robinson, who at 5ft 9in seems too short to catch as much air as he does (shown in the centre of the picture left).

3D Painted Rooms

This is one of these sites that makes you think: "cool"... yet "pointless". Still a very interesting set of photos of cleverly painted rooms.

Thanks to Kukla.

Day Tripper

I know it's wrong to laugh at others' misfortune, but this is a pearler. When Nick Flynn made his habitual trip to the Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge, he didn't bank on smashing up the exhibits.

He tripped up on his shoelaces, and his 13stone weight fell firmly on 3 ancient Qing dynasty vases, valued at £75,000. He knocked them to the floor, and only one escaped being shattered.

Experts are looking at reconstructing the vases, which could take several months.

Engrish

Another rewarding trip to the Engrish site, to look at the recent additions yielded this beauty. What, you may ask, is Engrish?

"Engrish can be simply defined as the humorous English mistakes that appear in Japanese advertising and product design.

Most of the Engrish found on Engrish.com is not an attempt to communicate - English is used as a design element in Japanese products and advertising to give them a modern look and feel (or just to "look cool"). There is therefore less emphasis on spell checking and grammatical accuracy (note: the same can be said for the addition of Japanese or Chinese characters in tattoos)."

This has often amused me - I saw a girl at a concert last night, who by all appearances looked pretty cool. She had the hair and clothes of the archetypal "rock chick", plus the obligatory couple of tattoos on her shoulder. Closer inspection revealed them to be a couple of Chinese symbols. Heaven only knows what these symbols actually mean, but she was probably told they represent her name in Chinese, or "Harmony", or something equally laughable.

In the same way, David Beckham got a tattoo on his arm of his wife's name ("Victoria"), in Hindi. However, as this article points out, the editor of a Hindi magazine spotted that the tattooist had actually misspelt it. They had actually spelt it Vihctoria", probably because they were English, and did not know Hindi.

Thanks to J-walk

T-Shirt Folding machine

This French site shows how you can make a T-shirt folding machine from four bits of cardboard. It looks pretty cool on the video, even if it doesn't look the most portable of devices.

Mobile Cooking

According to this website, you can cook an egg in three minutes using two mobile phones. As if we weren't already scared that excessive mobile use was bad for the brain, some nutter only proves it. Perhaps using mobile phones made them mad in the first place.

Tag Nuts

I was struck today by the way disparate news stories can somehow present similar themes. A recent National Audit Office report states that by tagging criminal offenders, prisoners can be released early from jail, presenting a cost-effective alternative. A small electronic tag around the ankle can be used to enforce home curfews, and restrict the offender's behaviour, predicted to save about £9.3 million.

However, when offenders break their curfews, the system to respond and enforce it is inefficient. It can sometimes take a while for anyone to notice that an offender is missing, and even longer to then track them down.

Also yesterday, the Government was defeated in a Bill in the House of Commons. Although the government has only lost one parliamentary vote since 1997, this one was very close, with only one vote separating both sides of the argument.

The Bill targeted extending the Race Hatred law to include belief. Many protestors, including numbers of Government backbenchers, saw the changes as being too wide ranging and restrictive. Comedians, including Rowan Atkinson also attacked it, suggesting that the Bill would make it impossible for comedians to tell jokes about religion, constraining artistic liberty. As such it has been seen as an affront to freedom of speech, a fundamental backbone of democracy.

What makes it more gutting for the Government is that the first vote was undecided, and the second vote meant that the Bill was overturned by a single vote. Worse, Tony Blair is reputed to have voted in the first vote, but not the second. Ouch!

Perhaps they should put a tag on him, to make sure he attends critical ballots in the future! Even so, it may well have taken the authorities forever to find him!