DOOM! You know, for kids.

April Foolery

• The UK Guardian announces their abandonment of print issues in favor of news delivery via Twitter. This is much funnier in England where their newspapers are not being shut down right and left. 
• Think Geek presents the Tauntaun sleeping bag. Dan is extremely excited that they might actually make this product. When I told him they will probably only be sized for children, he yelled: “Then I’ll see you in hell!” But he looked sad.

Recession News

• There are reports of a link between the declining economy and a decline in shark attacks. Apparently, the recession means fewer people at the beach, so fewer people eaten by sharks. Also a contributing factor: fewer rich people, which are the tastiest as far as sharks are concerned. 
• Professional gamers are losing jobs too. We use the word “job” loosely here. I mean, I used to play Counter Strike 40 hours a week too, but I didn’t refer to it as “a job” so much as “being a college freshman.”

Stupid Things You Can Buy

• An ugly mailbox shaped like a desktop computer will cost you $230, more than the price of some actual computers. Also, coincidentally, more than the price of your dignity if you’re the kind of person who wants a mailbox that looks like an ugly computer. 
• The Peerkaru is a terrifying garment that, for $80, allows you to carry your small child like an alien symbiote. 

Video Gamery

• A Quebec outlaws video games that don’t contain French in the title or include French text or voice overs. Given the standards for video game dialogue these days, I think I would actually prefer to play more video games in French. 
• Turbo promises to be the first video game movie not based on an existing video game. It also promises to be just as stupid as video game movies based on existing video games. 

Daily Recommended Steampunk Image

• Ocean battle between steam ships and a cyber octopus. Steam punk and octopi, two great tastes that taste great together? 

We traveled to the furthest aisles of the internet-supermarket to bring you this, your daily recommended allowance of DOOM:  

Animal Kingdom

• New research suggest that crabs can feel pain! This make me feel slightly better about that one time a crab broke my heart. 
• Willie the Quaker parrot receives an award from the Red Cross for alerting his owner about a choking child. I hope that the award was of the edible variety otherwise this seems kinda silly. (Or it could be a big giant medal, as long as the governor has to place it around Willie’s neck!)
• A Komodo Dragon kills an Indonesian fisherman. Doombot has a long standing policy to not trifle with the world’s heaviest lizard. We refuse to even make fun of them on the internet because a) they’re dragons and b) we totally saw Reign of Fire. In the theater. With a bunch of Komodo dragons. Who were angry about the film’s anti-dragon bias.
• In other parrot news, Gordo the skateboarding parrot of Baldwin Park California has apparently been kidnapped.  (Next week’s story: rumors emerge that Tony Hawk commissioned a bird-napping,  but authorities are not sure what manner of parrot he could possibly be interested in.)

Institutional Trickery

• Everything at an Associated Supermarket tastes just like chocolate! Sloppy reuse of design templates or the most brilliant supermarket flyer ever?
• There are no vampires at Boston Latin School. You know exactly what kind of press release I’d issue if I was part of a sinister vampire conspiracy controlling private schools? 
• Microsoft sued over hostile behavior toward gay employee. Unfortunately, there appears to be some bleed-over between Microsoft employees and Xbox Live denizens. 

Gadgetry

• The new X12 stun gun freezes people from 88 feet away. I’m all for new non-lethal tools to have at our disposal, but can we give them names that don’t make them sound like a SuperSoaker? 
• A pipe flies though the windshield of a car on I-5 in Washington state. In an unrelated story, Kai has further testing to do on his pipe-shooting railgun before we bring it to market. 

YouTube Video of the Week

• Cadbury creme eggs plus Rube Goldberg machine equals pure, delicious genius.

Once again we plumb the depths of the internet to bring you your weekly helping of DOOM:

Arachnaphobia

• What may have been the world’s deadliest spider, the Brazilian Wandering Spider, was found in Tulsa Oklahoma Whole Foods, though a follow up story later in the week has other experts contending that this may have been a far less lethal variety. Doombot experts agree that, lethal or not, giant spiders do not belong at the grocery store.
• A bite from a recluse spider allows a Georgia man to walk again. This news should give hope to several groups, including those who believe in reincarnation, those who believe in Jesus, and the slightly smaller subset of those who believe in Jesus being reincarnated as a spider. JESUS SPIDER!

Financial Meltdown

• A NY Times piece suggests that AIG executives should keep their bonuses.
• Iowa senator Charles Grassley suggest that AIG executives should consider suicide.

Gadgetry

• A Finnish computer programer has missing finger replaced with a USB drive. I want to use the term “thumb drive” to explain what the device does, but it kind of muddles the whole point I’m trying to clarify, doesn’t it?
• Scientists have developed a laser gun that destroys mosquitos by locking on to the unique audio frequency of mosquitos in flight, and then shoots their wings off. Given that the scientists already call this a ”weapon of mosquito destruction” (WMD), and the design team included a scientist who worked on the cold war era Star Wars project, all avenues of snark appear to have been explored. 

Animal Kingdom

• Cattle apparently respond to magnetic fields and can be confused by the artificial fields generated by power lines. The take away is to avoid using cattle as compass bearings in areas where artificial magnetic fields might be present. 
• A free-tailed bat perishes the way we’d all like to go, clinging to Discover space shuttle during liftoff. 
• The BBC continues to be my go-to source for pink animals with coverage of a pink elephant in Africa. 

Spy Games

• A 1988 photo shows current Russian prime minister, former KGB agent Vladimir Putin posing as a tourist (complete with dorky camera around the neck) during a visit from Ronald Reagan. 
• Apparently DNA computing is used to decrypt powerful encryption schemes (who knew?), scientists now suggest it can also be used to encrypt information. 

SciFi Fandom

• The NY Times shares with us a story about men who furnish their homes with replicas of the Captain’s chair from the original Star Trek series. We’ve already hit our Kobayashi Maru joke limit for the month, so what more is there to say? 
• A Star Wars fan constructed a LEGO scale model of a Mon Calamari cruiser that weighs in at 52 pounds and 7 feet in length. We will not make a “it’s a trap” joke here.*

YouTube video of The Week

• Brought to our attention via Doombot fan-club president Jordan, we bring you: Extreme Sheep LED Art.

* Instead, we will make it here: IT’S A TRAP!

With Tony off collecting rattlesnakes and other dangerous animals, the task of compiling your weekly list of links falls to the rest of the Doombot crew. Please to enjoy.

Things That Happened a Long Time Ago

• Lincoln’s Pocket Watch Reveals Long-Hidden Message. That message? “GO TO THE OPERA INSTEAD.”
• Female “vampire” remains unearthed in Italy. The remains had a brick inserted in the mouth, supposedly to prevent the vampire from eating her way through her burial shroud. Unfortunately, the “scientists” in question were apparently not smart enough to realize that vampires don’t leave remains, meaning the real vampire is right behind you.

Frozen Goods

• Five human heads discovered in ice chests in central Mexico. It’s a little bit like Deal or No Deal, except instead of money you get a human head. Every time.
• The $35,000 NitroCream N2-G4 is the world’s most advanced ice cream maker, perfectly recreating the signature taste that the Amish perfected over a hundred years ago.
• Maytag Recalls Refrigerators Due to Fire Hazard. To be fair, the engineers missed their first day of refrigeration design class, which contained the all-important rule “Refrigerators are about keeping things cold.”

“Don’t touch that, 007″

• One-eyed filmmaker plans to shoot documentary with a tiny camera in his prosthetic eye. Unfortunately, for the next three years he will not be able to wear sunglasses or blink.
• The Jetpack: An Idea Whose Time Has Never Come, but Won’t Go Away. Yet another another activity where years of geek anticipation end in an anticlimactic 30 seconds.
• US Forgets How To Make Trident Missiles. “This is like James Bond destroying his instructions as soon as he has read them.” Jesus Christ, this guy doesn’t know his James Bond from his Mission: Impossible. No wonder they forgot this shit.

Taking Back the Streets

• Amateur crimefighters are surging in the US. Sadly, the likes of Black Owl and Mr. Invisible do not seem to be able to do anything about the problem of severed heads in Mexico.
• Rumor: John Woo’s Stranglehold to get the film treatment. The action video game, produced by John Woo as a sequel to his classic film Hard-Boiled (starring Chow Yun-Fat), is reportedly being turned into a movie that will neither be directed by John Woo nor star Chow Yun-Fat.

YouTube Video of the Week

• 100 Movies, 100 Quotes, 100 Numbers. A parody of the AFI top 100 lists featuring movie quotes containing numbers. This gives me new impetus to complete the list of “100 Years, 100 Mustaches.”

Once again we present our weekly feature in which we share stories of doom and general strangeness, culled from the far reaches of the internet. 

Above and Beyond

• Illinois Declares Pluto a Planet. Surprise surprise, Pluto was discovered by a man born in Illinois. The Illinois legislature then goes on to make the erroneous claim that Pluto is the only “planet” discovered by Americans. In retaliation, the other 49 states are declaring objects to be planets willy-nilly, including [Eris](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eris_(dwarf_planet)), [Ceres](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_(dwarf_planet)), and the Death Star (which is neither a moon nor a planet and rather, as most astronomers agree, a fictional space station.)
• Asteroid barely misses Earth. As opposed to most stories of these sort that take place hundreds of years down the road this sounds like an actual “close call.” Not that we [couldn't see this coming](http://www.theonion.com/content/opinion/do_we_really_want_another_black), right?

Silly things you can buy

• Nunchucks with built in flash light  and flame lighter, perfect for the inevitable ninja zombie apocalypse. 
• The world’s first intelligent water bottle that reminds you to, uh, drink water.
• At long last, Star Trek fragrances, featuring such unique scents as Tiberius, Red Shirt, and Ponn Farr. We might have suggested Kobayashi Maru.

Terrifying Animal News

• The Telegraph reports a pink dolphin observed in Louisiana, raising the inevitable question of why I have to rely on UK news sources for off-color animals found in America.
• A Nebraska man place a cat inside a bong. This is too terrifying to warrant additional comment. 

Military Issues

• Erik Prince CEO of Xe (formerly know as Blackwater Inc.—and let’s be honest, that’s fooling exactly *nobody*) resigns, probably to spend more time kicking puppies with his family.
• A German site features the best in urban camouflage, or how to disguise yourself as stack of papers at Ikea. To be fair, this technique has been in use by the Swedish military for centuries—turns out it’s extremely effective against people armed with rocks.
• The US army reports their first kill by a pilot-less drone. Great. Robots that kill people. I think we all know where that leads.

YouTube Video of the week

• Saturday Morning Watchmen. For those in search of acid flashbacks to the ’80s cartoons they watched as a kid.

Dan and I are resurrecting an old feature of this site, The Daily Doom, in which we share with you stories of doom, weirdness, and general strangeness from all corners of the Internet. 

Of course, by “daily” we mean the lesser-used secondary definition of “weekly.”

Animal Kingdom:

• The bird -to-human-child exchange rate is established when a Louisiana woman attempts to trade two children and $175 for a bird. According to one long time Doombot commenter, “That sounds about right.”
• In what could possibly be the first move in an imminent cephalopod uprising, an octopus at the  Santa Monica Pier Aquarium disassembled the water recycling system in its tank, flooding the aquarium with 200 gallons of salt water. 

Partisan Politics:

• Vice President Biden, appearing on a talk show to promote the stimulus bill, blanks on the name of the website and asks an aide for the website “number.” Biden later attempted to repair his gaffe by appearing in the White House press room to say “209.225.35.43, bitches!”
• Recently elected RNC Chairman Michael Steel says the party needs a hip-hop make over, and promises a public relations campaign that will be “off the hook.”I don’t think we can add anything to that.
• Obama vs Optimus Prime (important: not real!) – Who will wrest control of the Matrix of Leadership?

Fictional Space Issues:

• Recent developments in the soon-to-be-wrapped-up Battlestar Galactica have some bloggers suggesting that things are being slapped together and that the overall story has some gaping holes…. Nahhhhhhhhh.
• In other Battlestar Galactica news, Universal Studios released stills from the upcoming Caprica spinoff. The show promises to bring you all of the soap opera entanglements and dearth of likable characters you’d expect from BSG, but without all those pesky scenes of space combat. 

Bonus Doom:

• A jaunty fan-made musical number based on H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth, a personal favorite of mine. Link via Jason via Warren Ellis. 

I feel like Amazon is usually ok about recommending me things I should buy based on past purchases. Sure most of them are not items I’m particularly interested in, but at least I can understand why they are pointing me in a given direction. Most of the times they are pretty mechanical; you bought a graphic novel by Alan Morre can we interest you in every other graphic novel by Alan Moore. Today I received an email (not just a recommendation while surfing the site, but an email) telling me this:

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased or rated Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow or other games in the Nintendo DS > Adventure category have also purchased Bratz Ponyz 2. For this reason, you might like to know that Bratz Ponyz 2 will be released on September 9, 2008. You can pre-order yours by following the link below.

The idea that a game with two superfluous Zs in the title exists, and event merits a sequel, is already a lot to take in, but the idea that their system has decided this game is a good fit for me is almost to much to take. In their defense this is based on past customer behavior and it is likely that there is a connection between vampires and ponies that I am simply to naive to be aware of.

The official description of the game is too ridiculous not to post here:

Join the Bratz Ponyz for a whole new Ponyz adventure where players compete in the prestigious Ponyz Town pageant, “Passion for Fashion”. Players explore, collect accessories, buy jewelry and compete in a series of mini games (trials) as they make their way around the different islands. Between each mini game, players can freely explore the many island in the pony archipelago meeting and interacting with the inhabitants of the pony world – going on treasure hunts and finding many new fashion items for your pony! Fashion, pageantry and horses! What more could you wish for?

The answer of course is vampires. I can always wish for more vampires.

It’s been a while since we had a good Daily Doom post, but I came rapidfire across three links that will be of particular interest to those who follow three of the major sci-fi establishments:

Things have been on the busy side, but I’ve had a bunch of links that I wanted to email around. Then I figured: hey, there’s a blog, I could just do that instead. This is your Daily Doom for March 22nd, 2006. Don’t all thank me at once.