Happy Sunday! It’s been a wonderful weekend so far! I hope it finishes off well too! School’s been great! YEAH!

New secrets again! Super!

Stains On Paper is an interesting little web project where people send in papers of liquid stains with memories attached to them. I think this could really turn out to be something fantastic — like a more refined Post Secret. Maybe. Check it out.

Is it me or is it that the more I use Gmail, the more spam I get in my inbox? This relationship between Gmail use and spam count seems to rise exponentially too. So let’s say that for every 5 days I use Gmail, I will get 500x that much more spam by the 5th day than I was receiving on the first day. It’s quite aggravating to deal with. The laws of the internet regarding spam should definitely be reversed. It should be the more I use Gmail, the less spam I’ll get. I think that would be nice.

This is the funniest bit of math I’ve ever seen. Thanks Audrey!

Hahaha, this new video to Sugarcult’s current hit, Do It Alone, is pretty good. If you want to see version 1 of the video for the same song, go here. I have no idea why they bothered to make two videos.
SIDE COMMENT: Why does YouTube keep playing with their video layout? It’s hideous no matter what revisions they make.

Somebody was probably just messing around with the Mat Kearney Wikipedia entry when they wrote that there was speculation that he was a homosexual. That link compares the two latest revisions to that entry.

Here are several reasons why most cop cars are the Ford Crown Victoria. Reasons include, but are not limited to: cheap price, good quality, easy to customize, big room, clear vision, and public awareness. Makes sense, I think. I always do look out for dark-colored Crown Victoria vehicles when I’m driving — and not any other vehicle make — so that I don’t get a ticket for doing something I’m not supposed to do.

The Ford Crown Victoria makes me think back to my pre-Parsons days when I made this simple collage for my home exam. It’s funny now that I think back and realize that really crappy work got me into a school just the same.

I don’t receive a subscription to Time Magazine anymore so I totally missed this very interesting article entitled “Does God Want You To Be Rich?“.

Generations of churchgoers have understood that being Christian means being ready to sacrifice. But for a growing number of Christians, the question is better restated, “Why not gain the whole world plus my soul?”

Known (or vilified) under a variety of names — Word of Faith, Health and Wealth, Name It and Claim It, Prosperity Theology — its emphasis is on God’s promised generosity in this life. In a nutshell, it suggests that a God who loves you does not want you to be broke.

Its signature verse could be John 10:10: “I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.” In a Time poll, 17 percent of Christians surveyed said they considered themselves part of such a movement, while a full 61 percent believed that God wants people to be prosperous.

Normally, I’d ask Ashley if she could score me a copy, but alas, she does not work there any more. Boo hoo! Anybody have an extra copy of this? If somebody could scan this in and send it over that’d be great. :D

Jared usually doesn’t write much about The Office, but I couldn’t help but see this fantastic post about The Office season 3 promos with wonderful hi-res images of the cast. I can’t wait for season 3 to begin! It starts next week, September 21 @ 8:30PM on NBC. Good shows are finally making their slow return to TV!

The New York Times presents: Elegy For An Icon, a photographer’s journal of the former WTC by Keith Meyers. Nice photos to see.
The NYT also has this interesting bit about the “Survivor’s Stairway”, an escalator on Vesey Street that ended up being an escape route for many victims of the attack on 9/11. (I’ll see if I can get that NYT article link fixed — if for some reason the link doesn’t work, go to the NYT website and search for the article title: No Home Yet for 9/11’s ‘Survivors’ Stairway’).

…future visitors might be deceived into thinking that the staircase and adjoining escalators were damaged on 9/11. A newly published book of photographs by Joel Meyerowitz, “Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive” (Phaidon Press), makes it plain that the structure survived almost intact. Most of the damage was done to it as the site was being cleared.

Preservationists argue, in turn, that the condition of the staircase speaks to the full sweep of events, from the attack to the cleanup.

I’m sorry it isn’t better looking,” said Peg Breen, the president of the landmarks conservancy, “but it is what it is. It’s real. It’s there. People did escape by it. It still exists. And I think that stands for a lot.”

There is no doubt that it helped save many lives that day and the National Trust for Historic Preservation is petitioning for it’s preservation.

I love tea, and I agree, full tea leaves taste better than “tea dust”. So it’s good news to me that Lipton, the world’s largest tea company, is moving from cheap tea bags with crap “tea bits” to full tea leaves enveloped in wonderful nylon pyramids! Why is this good news? Well, even if I don’t drink that much Lipton tea on my own, it is a good sign that many smaller companies will follow Lipton because the Lipton brand is so big.
And this is how tea bags were invented??

Thomas Sullivan, the New York tea merchant who is credited with inventing the tea bag about 100 years ago, used the bags at first to send samples to his customers. The idea caught on, and by the 1920’s the tea bag was commercially established.

Wow, I had no idea it was invented like so!

Steady, As She Goes by The Raconteurs is catchy. :) There’s the music video.

Commercials I Hate is such a funny website. You can probably guess what the topic at that site is. The explanations for WHY the commercials are bad are just hilarious. The list of advertising offenses has an interesting take on the whole “spouse hiding the product in purse” and how the spouses always look like they are having some sort of product battle. Just…read…everything. It’s not that much, and I guarantee you’ll find a common ground on something there.
Here’s a little excerpt:

LIQUID POURING AND SPLASHING UP INTO THE AIR
This is shown most often in commercials for cereal,
where the milk pours into the cereal from a stupefying height,
cresting and splashing up and out of the bowl.

This is also shown in ads for Kool-Aid and Nestea.
This is supposed to represent what exactly?
Who pours liquid from way up high and splashes it everywhere?

They also do this in commercials for liquid bleach!
Who would be so careless with liquid bleach?

TOTALLY UNREAL SITUATIONS
These ads show people in situations they would never really be in,
like two grown women grocery shopping together with one cart,
or a girls soccer team eating cheerios
with bowls and spoons on the soccer field.
I saw an ad where a guy eats cereal at an outdoor cafe,
with the cereal box on the table.
People eat cereal at home and that’s it.
Nobody goes out and pays to eat cereal in a cafe.
And on the soccer field? Give me a break!
I’d like to see an ad that shows single people eating right over the sink.
Now that’s a real situation.

Umm, I wish there was a local Dairy Queen here so I could go in and try a Chili Meltdown Grill Burger. My goodness, that looks deathly scrumptious in the TV ad I just saw for it. I am falling for fantastic food advertising. :P

If you have a Yahoo! Mail account, you can go ahead now and try the Yahoo! Mail beta. [via]
I, for one, still don’t think that anybody does email quite like Gmail. I mean, getting rid of folders and implementing an “archiving” of all email instead with labels is just smarter for storing and organizing. Folders are clunky. That’s just one of the reasons I moved on over to Gmail fully for all of my email needs. I still maintain a Yahoo! Mail account though, for stupid experiments and stuff, but until Yahoo! does something extraordinary with their email system, I don’t anticipate another email move in the near future.
I do really like the drag-n-drop features that Yahoo! Mail beta has though. I think that’s pretty neat! But dang, those large animated advertisements are a pain!

“I like to make pancakes. They are so very tasty!”
This is the coolest video you’ll ever see about making pancakes. I ate pancakes the other night because of this video! :)

I didn’t go to Jose Gonzalez at Starbucks yesterday. Long story. I’ll share at another time.
And holy moly, this post is long. It has so many pictures. I think this is the most pictures hosted internally I’ve posted yet on Doobybrain.com. I usually just Flickr it. Oh well, take care. Be well. And don’t eat spinach (for now). Eat more chocolate.