They might be aiming at an easy target, but they really nail it:

A particularly inane trope:

In case the point isn’t crystal clear: you can’t do that. There are no image enhancement programs that let you know what the data missing at the point of capture is.
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I was catching up on a softer world recently, and came across this comic, which I think is one of their best.

I’ve always had a soft spot for good genre parody, regardless of genre, and The Unfeasibly Tall Greek Billionaire’s Blackmailed Martyr-Complex Secretary Mistress Bride is pretty damn hilarious. You can read the first chapter in HTML, or the whole thing at Scribd.

I know I’m something of a Federer partisan, but wow, does this commentator take it to a ridiculous level (note that the translation may not be entirely accurate). There’s some excellent tennis in there too, but the commentary really is amazing.

Slate V came up with this clever clip about what the Super Bowl might look like if famous filmmakers directed it:

So now straightforward hugs are wrong? I can’t tell if this is parody. An insistence on “side hugs” to avoid any possibility of contact between crotches is pretty insane. In particular, it seems so obvious that such a restriction could only be necessary for people who are completely obsessed with sexual (and/or sexualized) contact, and that its adoption or promulgation is more indicative of serious problems than a hug could possibly be.
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I wasn’t previously familiar with Stewart Lee before, but I found this clip (via Lenin’s Tomb) right on the mark:

Via my friends Jeff and Gordon, a short animated clip that’s just too good not to share:

More accurately, Club Deportivo O’Higgins. I had already thought about visiting Chile, but now it seems like I should not only do that but try to see this team play a match, preferably at home.

Naturally, they’re based in Rancagua, capital of The O’Higgins Region.

(Yes, somewhere back along the line, I’m distantly related to Bernardo O’Higgins.)

Not real cheese, but the cheese of amazing overacting. I got this from my friend John Summerlot, and had to share it due to the sick fascination it engendered. It’s a compilation of David Caruso’s one-liners from the beginning of CSI: Miami episodes. (Note: I can’t stand CSI, or CSI: Miami, or the other offshoots, but that didn’t seem to impede the pull of this particular set of clips.)

The NCAA is the National Collegiate Athletics Assocation, the governing body for American college sports. One of the responsibilities it has taken upon itself is the policing of student amateur status, to make sure that colleges do not entice star athletes to join their progams with money or other bribes. I already considered this a ridiculous situation, but realized today that I underestimated just how ridiculous it was.
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I’m not sure why, but this Rémi Gaillard video strikes me as hilarious:

He has a couple of other ball-striking videos, as well as a whole lot of other videos, including live-action Pac-Man.

In a recent MetaFilter thread about some more expanded Taser us after a judge ruled it was okay to Taser an uncooperative suspect in order to get a DNA sample from them (with passing mention of some grandmother tasering thrown in), I came across a comment that I thought was fantastic:

Remember when you could tell that Spock’s political system was eeeevil because of his willingness to use the agonizer?
—mwhybark, comment on ‘Niagara County Judge: tasing a suspect into compliance with DNA test = okay’, metafilter.com, 05 Jun 2009

Via Bruce Schneier comes news that four American states have banned smiling while having your driver’s license photograph taken. Yes, really. Because facial recognition software that they’re apparently using to try to cut down on fraud doesn’t like it:

Dull expressions “make the comparison process more accurate,” says Karen Chappell, deputy commissioner of the Virginia DMV, whose no-smile policy took effect in March.
—“Four states adopt ‘no-smiles’ policy for driver’s licenses”, Thomas Frank, USA Today, 25 May 2009

Sure, the explanation that they need to do this to prevent fraud sounds rational, but really, preventing people from smiling? I think it’s hard to find a better metaphor for “soulless bureaucracy”.

I saw this Robot Chicken clip on a mailing list I’m on recently, and I just can’t resist posting it:

Direct link: Le Wrath di Khan

(And no, I haven’t seen the new Star Trek movie yet.)

The Rapture might turn out to be a fake; also, certain books about the Rapture might be fake but contain real Rapture-related messages.

The second link is a lot more fun to read than the first link, but that’s just my opinion.

Detailed in this excellent Ask MetaFilter thread. I’m not sure why I don’t own that movie.

I know this has been all over already, but still, best way of announcing that you’re leaving your job ever.

Pensecola Christian College, an unaccredited (except for nursing) university, has about 4500 undergrads, and they apparently have to abide by rather stringent regulations. Some excerpts:

Married personnel should refrain from physical display of affection realizing that our college students are not allowed to have physical contact.
—Bruce Gerencser, “Pensacola Christian College Rules and Regulations”, Bruce Droppings, 17 April 2009

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I support not bailing out the banks, and I’d love to see more transparency around the Federal Reserve, but I still think the recent “Tea Party protests” are primarily astroturf campaigns, are hypocritical insofar as their participants mostly don’t seem to have protested massive spending under the last eight years of Republican government, and are primarily an attempt to generate “right-wing” publicity.
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The following video, put out by some bunch calling themselves “The National Organization for Marriage” (a name that really makes no sense given their aims, as they appear to be trying to prevent a lot of people from getting married), is an awful and misleading hodgepodge of fearmongering and bullshit, combined with plerny of earnest faux-martyrdom. I love how they convince themselves that not being allowed to practice bigotry in the public sphere is an infringement on their religious freedom—and maybe it is, but then so are the laws that get in the way of religious practices of human sacrifice.

Anyway, that’s all pretty obvious… what I can’t quite get over is how, in this video attempting to unite the forces of anti-gay prejudice, they end by touting “a rainbow coalition of people of every creed and color coming together in love”. I swear the the rider “to protect marriage” is spoken faster and more quietly than the rest. It’s both funny (in a wrong way) and appalling because it’s always appalling to see bigots attempting to appropriate the language and symbols of tolerance. I have to say, though, that as appalling as the message is, these jokers strike me as mostly laughable.

The Guardian reports that residents of a village in Buckinghamshire phsyically prevented attempts to add street view images of their town to Google. Perhaps because I’m a sneering, post-ironic, San-Francisco-values, technocrat elitist, I find this extremely amusing. This line just makes it better:

Jacobs said there had been three burglaries in the last six weeks: “If our houses are plastered all over Google, it’s an invitation for more criminals to strike.”
—Maev Kennedy, “Coy village tells Google Street View ’spy’ to beat a retreat”, guardian.co.uk 3 April 2009