Awkward Yearbook Signatures

Awkward Yearbook Signatures is a tumblr blog about awkward yearbook signatures. THey have scans of the signatures, time and date, and a running commentary. Example:

"Give me my money back or I'll kick your ass."

--Longfellow Middle School, McLean, VA, 1994
“Gym class was great”? “You really cracked me up in science”? “Never change”? All such niceties go out the window when it comes to the end of the year and someone still owes you a petty amount of cash.

Incidentally, this site is 20x better when you listen to that one Ben Folds song as a soundtrack.

(From Buzzfeed)

Rorty Bomb

This is kind of a quirky not-really-musical follow-up to the recently posted "Africa" and "Total Eclipse of the Heart" entries. But basically, I like serious blogs with non-serious entries.//Rorty Bomb is a finance/personal blog written by Mike, "a financial engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area. Originally from Chicago, he enjoys economics, sociology, critical theory, tacos, whiskey and center-left politics on the side." 

Mike uses a sparse, words-and-white-background minimalist prefab theme for the blog, which he decorates with a smattering of silly pictures for comic effect.  The blog is named after a difficult-to-pronounce philosopher. Rorty Bomb features timely heavy-duty subjects like the financial crisis (proposing his own gloomy Do-It-Yourself stress tests!) and the impending Iranian Twitter Revolution.

But better yet,  Rorty Bomb includes this gem, which was linked to by the New York Time's Opinionator:

"Good Hangovers

There are too many negative 'I don’t remember last night' hangover stories that involve a tiger in the bathroom and people missing. I want to share a positive one. One night after finals weeks concluded in graduate school, me and my roommate were overserved by the local bar.

I woke up the next morning not sure how the night concluded. I went to check my email and saw 4 emails I didn’t expect from Ebay. Are you familiar with Ebay’s 'Buy it Now' feature? I had received two emails at 3 in the morning saying that I had won two 'Buy it Now' auctions, and two additional emails saying my payment via paypal had been received and my product would be shipping in the morning.

I was quite scared to open those emails, but it turned out I had purchased Toto’s Toto IV (featuring the hit songs 'Africa' and 'Rosanna') on vinyl, as well as a 7″ single for Bonnie Tyler’s 'Total Eclipse of the Heart.' With shipping, this was a total of about $11, perhaps the best $11 I’ve spent in my life.

We pieced together that this purchase was made to settle an argument over me playing Rosanna on the dive bar’s internet jukebox, when Africa was available. My stance, that you should switch up the Toto, was taken as me endorsing Rosanna as a better song than Africa, which is nonsense, though I may have said something akin to 'we really need to hear this on vinyl before we can make a judgement call.' "

Pretty ace.(From mjg)

Xavier Sala-i-Martin's Home Page

It's opposite day here on TOTI, and so instead of best thing on the interwebs today, the TOTI winner is the worst.

Xavier Sala-i-Martin's Home Page wins.  It starts with an incoherent warning:

"Over the years, I have observed an annoying tendency for people to bother the flies in my website. In order to prevent this from happening, I decided to keep an eye (actually, two eyes!) on your mouse. Sorry for the inconvenience, but I had no alternative." Right.

First of all, there's a gloat splash page from circa 2006.  If you click through, you step into vintage web from the 1990s.  Is this the personal web-page of your fourteen-old-cousin? No.  A zebra-hide wearing pimp? No, but closer. It belongs to Xavier Sala-i-Martin, professor of economics at Columbia University.  

According to wikipedia, Xavier  "was recognized with a 'Distinguished Teacher in Graduate Economics' award 3 times, both at Columbia and at Yale, with the King Juan Carlos I prize 2004 (a biannual prize given to the best economist in Spain and Latin America), and the Lenfest Prize 2006 awarded to the best teacher at Columbia University." According to his site, he was also president of Fútbol Club Barcelona. 

 He is likely under consideration for a Nobel prize in economics, and also, for worst sustained use of gifs and layout on a professional web page.  Congrats.  Please hire someone to fix this, Xavier.

(From T.J. and Archana. Blame them.)