davidgagne.net — The personal weblog of David Vincent Gagne

Okay, this is just awesome. Ron Howard directs Chevy Chase (as Gerald Ford), Dana Carvey (as George H. Bush), Darrell Hammond (as Bill Clinton), Will Ferrell (as George W. Bush), Dan Akroyd (as Jimmy Carter), and Jim Carrey (as Ronald Reagan) in a presidential reunion visit to Fred Armisen (as Barack Obama) and Maya Rudolph (as Michelle Obama) in the White House to try to convince the current President to push the Consumer Protection Act through Congress.

• It’s still early, but I think I’ve found a winner for Best Site of 2010:
  Nelson HaHa.
• Without a Single Throw, Tebow Rules the Combine
• Unrelated Captions are what you get when the pictures have nothing to do with their captions.
• Put your flight jacket on one of these really cool airplane hangers.
• “Inspection showed multiple lacerations and puncture wounds all over the body which could not have been caused by any other attacker than a bottle-nosed dolphin.”
• Matthew David Lopez, 18, was taken to jail on charges of wearing a mask or hood on a public road after the age of 16 years old and resisting arrest without violence.
• The Boneyard
• Apple has a new great section on their site that teaches people how to switch from PC to Mac.
• “Jenny McCarthy is back in Time magazine this week to warn more parents about vaccines and blaming medicine for giving her son autism, even though there’s no scientific evidence of any kind to support those statements, and mountains of data proving she is 100 percent wrong. … [D]octors must shake their head and think, ‘I can’t believe I’m arguing with a chick who is only here because she sold pictures of her vagina to a magazine.'”

• Babies with Laser Eyes is a website featuring exactly what you think it does.
• Someone with plenty of free time on his hands compiled a list of the thirty most important cats of 2009.
• The Mariana Trench is very, very, very deep.
• Do you remember life before Google?
• Make sure to view Greg Rutter’s Definitive List of the 99 Things You Should Have Already Experienced on the Internet Unless You’re a Loser or Old or Something. And then take a look at Greg Rutter’s Second Definitive List of the 99 Things You Should Have Already Experienced on the Internet Unless You’re A Loser or Old or Something.
• URL-shorteners have become quite popular lately. You’ve probably heard of (or used) TinyURL, a service that lets you convert really long web addresses into shorter ones for use in Twitter posts or email messages. ShadyURL is sort of — but not quite — totally unlike that. It’s a service that takes a web address and converts it into one that looks suspiciously like spam or a virus link. Why anyone would ever want to do that is a mystery.

• Runmeter (iTunes) looks to be a very slick iPhone app for tracking runs. I can’t run the LA Marathon this year because it conflicts with Kelly’s bachelor party in Las Vegas, but I’ll probably grab this for training for the 2011 race.
• Speaking of iPhone apps: The guys at AppAdvice really are on the ball. So far it’s the best blog I’ve found for discovering new apps. They write terrific reviews and always find the gems hidden in the glut of the tens of thousands of applications and games currently available in the iTunes store.
• I have become completely addicted to Ikariam, a web-based Civilization-style game. It’s free to play, though I guarantee if you start you’ll quickly get hooked and want to pay for the premium features. (I’m on the Ny shard if you decide to give it a try and want to look for me.)
• If you’ve been thinking about building a laptop-controlled robot made with LEGOs that can solve a Rubik’s Cube in 12 seconds, just give up. It’s already been done.
• Kottke.org has a cool post with video showing a slew of television shows that you probably never would have guessed were shot on a green screen. Did you know that The Mentalist (allegedly set in Sacramento), Monk (allegedly set in San Francisco), and CSI: Miami (allegedly set in Miami) are all mostly filmed here in Los Angeles?
• Have you subscribed to The Impossible Cool yet? Once or twice each week this blog posts a fantastic (and rarely-seen) photo of a cultural icon. Check out this killer image of Sean Connery. See also: Iconic Photos

• If you are (a) a man or (b) a woman, you should read Kay S. Hymowitz’ Love in the Time of Darwinism: A report from the chaotic postfeminist dating scene, where only the strong survive.
• Fascinating facts can be found with a statistical analysis of graffiti found at the University of Chicago Library.
• I never knew there was a name specifically for the edges of uncut book pages.
• In 1959 the Santa Susana Field Laboratory suffered a partial radioactive meltdown, leading to the contamination of the neighboring hills in Canoga Park. Now a group of Oak Park tenth-graders — Teens Against Toxins — are trying to reverse that contamination with a bake sale. (The cities of Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks, Oak Park, and Chatsworth all have extremely high rates of cancers similar to only one other place in the world: Chernobyl.)
• There are literally hundreds of t-shirts in my closet, and I swore I wouldn’t get any more. But I must have this one. (Maybe I will have one of my other ones turned into a sleeve for my MacBook Pro.)

• I’d like to see these foods do battle in some sort of Clogged Arteries Marathon: Deep Fried Butter and Krispy Kreme Cheeseburgers vs. KFC’s new Bacon and Cheese Wrapped in Fried Chicken Breasts sandwich
• Did you think the Super Bowl ads were too sexist? The Google Search was my favorite, but it’s tough to not love the Letterman/Oprah/Leno one, too. (The story behind it is great.)
• I happen to think it’s pretty sweet that the highest-paid employee in the city of Madison, Wisconsin is a bus driver.
• Seeing a space shuttle launch in the night sky is truly epic. It’s much more awesome — and I mean that with the full force of the word — than a daytime launch. If you never got the chance, you probably won’t.
• Curious men could count soon count their sperm from home. Good times!