I love flames! And I love overly complex machinery! So imagine my joy when I came across this overly complicated flame-powered Rube Goldberg machine!

It reminds me of a movie line from Tommy Boy:

“I swear I’ve seen a lot of stuff in my life. But that… was… awesome!”

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Damn! Someone over at Google has seriously got it out for me! Why is it that just 30 days ago I reported that I was number 2 for a search for “John P.” and number 12 for the word “John“, but just today I was amusing a friend and noticed that if you search for John I’ve now dropped to number 206! Oh, and Pope John Paul II just passed me for “John P.” But I’m going to let that one slide…

Oh, this is such a huge blow to my ego. I’m just not sure I can keep going on. I’m no longer more important than John Dvorak, Sir Elton John, John Travolta, and the Johns Hopkins University. How do they justify this egregious act!

I’m telling you. Someone over at Google reads my blog and they are manually manipulating results to keep The Man down! Just like YouTube. Those people keep turning off the videos I link to within a day, even if they’ve been on YouTube for a year! And just because of a little copyright violation? Bah!

These big and powerful Internet companies need to stop messing with little old me.

I know that like 10 billion people eat Ramen noodles every day, but I guarantee no one takes the route of preparing them that these folks took on this Japanese game show.

It was apparently a Rube Goldberg competition and they used everything from bowling balls to marbles and included both flames and water. This machine goes on for about 5 minutes and manages to do nothing more than pour some hot water over a package of noodles.

Awesome.
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I’m sure Hrafn would do it, but would you trust this machine with your life? Elie said he wouldn’t do it for $10 million, but frankly I’d do it for like $10,000.

Of course, anyone standing around nearby would need to be wearing a raincoat because I’d be blowing chunks all over the crowd standing by to watch!
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As we each go off this fine Monday to begin the work week I just thought it might be nice to take a look at someone with a legitimately hard job.

Here is a lady, filmed in Germany, who rides around doing crazy bicycle stunts all day. So the next time you’re feeling a little overworked and stressed out, just think about this lady standing on the seat of her bike while riding circles in front of an auditorium full of people.

And incidentally, at first I was thinking that this must be some sort of weighted bicycle in order to have such great balance, but if you just watch how quickly she manipulates the bike you quickly realize that this is just an ordinary bike. Fascinating!
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Man I love this song. George Thorogood is one of the greatest rockers of all time, and this is one of the greatest songs of all time!

I wish I was cool enough that the head nurse would have told the other nurses I was bad to the bone when I was born. Alas, I’m pretty sure that the only thing I got, was slapped on the ass!
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Been a while since I’ve handed out a list of links for you guys, but this week I’ve got some good ones, so have fun with this!

The first one not to miss is the UniQlock. And here it is in action. Mesmerizing. By the way, the girls in the clock do different things at different times of day! So you have to come back and check it out at night, in the morning, evening, etc.
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Folks, this amuses me. By the way, make note of the date. It is NOT April Fools day…

Yesterday when I was on Cali’s show I randomly mentioned that I wished I was like Matt Mullenweg because if you search for Matt he comes up as the first result in Google. The last time I checked “John P” I was like the 90th listing. However, someone watching the broadcast dropped me a note to let me know that I’m actually now the second listing!

It looks like the number one position is occupied by a gospel singer by the name of John P. Kee. So, if anyone out there wants to help me take over as the king of “John P”, just link to my blog using my name (”John P.”) specifically and it might even drive me to the pole position!

Either way though, number two isn’t bad out of 46,800,000 results!

Oh, and incidentally, it looks like if you just search for “John” now, I’m about 12th from the top out of 141,000,000!

That is just crazy! It looks like I’m right after Senator John Edwards and singer John Mayer (whom I’m a big fan of), and before Senator John Kerry, popular columnist John Dvorak, and singer Sir Elton John. Amazingly I’m even ahead of John Travolta, and Johns Hopkins University (which won’t make my sister in law very happy).

Anyway, thanks to all of my loyal readers and the thousands of Web sites that have linked to me!

The Disintegrator is a motorized cordless twin rubber band minigun, capable of firing 40 bands per second.

It’s billed as:

The most devastating rubber band gun ever built

And I’m going to have to go ahead and agree with that claim! And now for a couple of videos of the Disentigrator in action!
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This video, posted as Daft Hands - Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, is exactly one year old and has now been viewed over 20 Million times. It took a lot of creativity and coordination to pull off this exhibition of manual dexterity.

You know how people are always talking about Ft. Knox being really secure? Well, here is the civilian equivalent!

Iron Mountain Inc is a company specializing in data storage. The best known Iron Mountain storage facility is a high-security cave in a former limestone mine at Boyers, Pennsylvania near the city of Butler in the USA.

It has been in operation since 1950, and it is here that Bill Gates stores his Corbis photographic collection in a refrigerated cave 220 feet underground.
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Ok. I saw like 5 seconds of this this clip on Cali and Neal’s GeekBrief.TV and then did a YouTube search to find the original video.

From the description:

I built the ball machine because I thought my dog Jerry, might like it and that it would be something fun for me to build. So after two years of on and off work, with many safety features such as IR proximity sensors to protect Jerry and my son from the machine, I finally complete.

Far from being a replacement for me, I was always right there with him enjoying his fun. And with all the troubles that I went through to build the ball machine, I still end up throwing more balls than that the machine could count! According to the computer, he played with the machine by himself only 3 times in his life.

I recently put this video on YouTube to keep alive my earlier memories of him and (hopefully) provide some “humorous distractions” for anyone that might drop by.

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