In my day, you’d be grateful if you received an apple and an orange for Christmas. No, not really, but that’s what my dad told me. However, the morning I found an AT-AT and Slave I under the tree, I truly did piss my pants with glee. Nowadays, kids want everything and are grateful for nothing. The little shits.

Except for this child, that is. Looking for all the world like the offspring of David Blaine, you’re not sure at first whether he’s apoplectic with rage to the point of tearing the heads clean off the necks of his siblings, or simply a mentalist in the making:

He’s happy about getting the Wii, right?

[Gizmodo]

Talk about commitment. Or not, as the case is with most of us. With very few exceptions, we’ll screw over our New Year resolutions within the first week, if not the first few hours (if you’re thinking about the no drinking / chocolate / pizza resolutions, just don’t bother starting). So meet Rick Jelliffe, who decided that 2008 would be the year of living smaller. That’s a concept we could all do with right now, but how many of us would see it through with Jelliffe’s tenacity?

I caught public transport only. I got rid of extra lightbulbs. I baked my own bread. I didn’t buy any gadget. I didn’t buy any CD. I didn’t get a flatscreen TV. No home phone; no home internet; no cable TV. When my kettle broke, I didn’t replace it: I use a pot. When my contact lenses broke, I didn’t even replace them (which means that when I saw the Benjamin Button movie last week, Brad Pitt looked the same in every frame, unfortunately.) When my socks had a hole, I repaired them; I didn’t buy any clothes, and I avoided wearing clothes that would need dry cleaning or special treatment.

Jelliffe admits he earned less in 2008 as a result, quite possibly a result of not bothering with mobile phones for long stretches of time, and turning down a book offer too. While he admits good luck played some part in his experiences (no major illness or family complications) the experiment does seem to have led Jelliffe to a less restless, more placid lifestyle.

Most telling though, were Jelliffe’s comments on modern day commodities:

Simplicity is great if it is coupled with quality household goods, but terrible with commodity goods that bust all the time. I am using my grandparents’ knives: they use a kind of steel that has not been produced for about 70 years now: they are thin blades that never need sharpening and cut as well as a carving knife. They are great examples of the kind of quality I am looking for: when you know you will be eating with a sharp knife, you don’t need to make concessions in your cooking.

Simplicity does not let us escape entirely consumerism, in the sense that it leaves one free from considering things: indeed. it seems to merely lift the game. If I want my knives to be in continuous use for fifty or one hundred years, they need to be good. And the quality equation only makes sense over commodity goods if they are beautiful or excellent.

You may not want to live such an extreme lifestyle in 2009, but is there a lesson to be learnt from paying a little more for quality, even when money is tight?

[O'Reilly] via [lifehacker]

Yesterday, it was estimated that 600,000 jobs would be wiped out in the 12 months, today the Independent reports that it’s a million. Plotting these values on a graph, we can conclusively prove that there will be no jobs anywhere in the world by next Wednesday and furthermore, money will cease to exist, as will France, Wagon Wheels and Bella Emburg.

Fortunately, there is one job being advertised at the moment. The downside is that you’re not welcome to apply unless you know something about architecture and nothing about politics, although nurses and teachers are very welcome to apply. Click to see your new dream job (as in, the only job available anytime soon). (Read more…)

Gutted that you didn’t receive a traditional Christmas jumper last week? You probably felt out of place in the pub on Boxing Day, stood there in a perfectly normal sweatshirt that you’ve had for months and that doesn’t make you look like some kind of gaudy, vertical technicolour yawn.

Don’t fret – you can alleviate your fears and become one of the gits with this Christmas jumper generator. Here’s a tank top we made earlier, in all of about 11 seconds. Bitterwallet – never letting Christmas die. Even when it’s begging for it.

So you’re a stinking alcoholic who, assuming you could actually stand, couldn’t stagger out the front door to buy a Christmas tree, because it’s buried behind dozens of empty beer bottles. In the words of Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth… good news!

Just in time for Christmas Day - your very own beer bottle Christmas tree! Think of the children’s smiling faces when they see Daddy wasn’t too smashed to remember Christmas after all, then witness their screaming horror as you drunkenly stumble into it and lacerate every inch of your sweating flesh. Merry Christmas kids!

[lifehacker]

People, it’s Christmas Eve! Jesus! Have you even wrapped ANY presents at all yet? No, me neither.

Now you can save valuable time AND enjoy the thrill of deploying a half-arsed firearm with the Christmas Cannon. It’s a far more personal alternative to boring old wrapping paper – and you could probably tweak it to fire sausages into your gob once the festive season is over.

Boom!

[Indestructables]

Apple are such spoilsports sometimes. There you are, a cleverclogs graphic designer with far too much time on your hands, who develops a novelty way for iPhone users to enjoy some mild titillation:

Alas, iBoobs is likely to be nothing but a YouTube demonstration for the time being, because Apple has denied it access to the iPhone Apps Store. But frankly, did you expect anything else?

[Gizmodo]

Just because the Bitterwallet office is full of Mac-loving folk, it doesn’t mean we get dragged into the inane fanboy skirmishs of Mac vs PC. For example, we quite like Microsoft’s I’m a PC campaign, promoting the world’s great and good PC users, by highlighting their astounding, enlightening or perfectly routine lives.

That said, you’ve got to wonder what the blithering hell Microsoft are thinking by asking Tron Guy to appear in one of their official ads:

Seriously, would you consider buying a PC on the basis of this? What it says about Microsoft products is that they’re out-of-touch, stuck-in-the-past, slow, laughable, desperate to fit in and strictly for losers.

Having said that, we’ve just visited Tron Guy’s website and checked out his blog. Forget what we said - any guy who buys no less than six guns for reasons other than hunting is categorically not a loser. No way. Great guy. Wouldn’t hear a word said against him.

Good call, Microsoft.

Last night I proved to the world, or at least the cat, that I was the greatest sportsman that never was, as I smashed the baseball clean out the stadium. With all my bases loaded, I cruised to a grand slam. Magnificent.

This morning though, my right knee felt like it’d been fed through a mincer. The Nintendo Wii, then - virtual fun but capable of causing real aches and pains, not only according to my right knee, but The Sun as well, so you know it’s true.

According to the daily bastion of truth, ten people a week in Britain are hospitalised from playing Wii games, which is causing concern with doctors. Wii-itis - yes, it’s got a lazy name already, folks - causes sufferers “excruciating pain in the right shoulder or knee”.

Dr Dev Mukerjee, of Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford said: “There has been a 100 per cent increase in patients complaining of Wii-itis. I’ve seen many patients aged between eight and 13 — and I’ve seen adults. It’s possible that Wii-itus may lead to rheumatism and arthritis in later life. Patients often have inflammation of the shoulder or wrist.”

Hmm. Treatment includes cortisone injections and anti-inflammatory painkillers and according to the paper, recovery takes up to three months. As if that’ll wash with the HR department.

[The Sun]

We’ve talked about the possibility for years, and found ourselves frustrated by Apple’s lack of validation in our beliefs - that the world would be a better place with a smaller, leaner, meaner MacBook. Until now.

Introducing the MacTini:

[Funny Or Die]

Fancy a noseful of this?

Just when you thought that nothing could be worse than a male fragrance that smells of barbecued meat…

Now the makers of Football Manager 2009 have jumped on the burgeoning ‘disgusting body spray’ bandwagon by bottling the smell of a football team’s dressing room. Sweat, snot, Deep Heat and jockstraps will be among the ingredients of the optimistically-named ‘Scent Of Success’

Sports Interactive, who make the game, claim that the fragrance has been harvested from the changing rooms of a host of successful teams. The idea seems to be that bedroom bosses will apply the odour while they’re playing FM2009, to give added authentic feel.

The scent will be given away with future copies of the game. Still, it sounds infinitely more pleasant than a bottle of Jade Goody’s whiff-juice.

Comments left by readers of websites can be curious things. Sometimes, they’re a dreary procession of ill-advised, pig-ignorant semi-formed thoughts spewed out by reprobates who choose to take out their frustrations on their keyboards because the real world has hit back at them one time too many.

Occasionally though, they can illuminate our lives with beams of wry humour, especially when a collective entity gets a subject between its teeth and refuses to let it go, like a rabid dog with a cuddly toy clenched between its jaws.

One such example is here – the comments left by Amazon ‘customers’ who have supposedly shelled out £48.93 for a 20 inch canvas print of irksome TV celebrity and brother of Jonathan, the one and only Paul Ross.

The praise is fulsome and near constant. As we write this, there are 51 comments, but the list is growing longer by the hour. Plump up a cushion and spend a few moments reading through them all. Better still, join in and add your own. Some of our favourites follow after the jump…
(Read more…)

Earlier today, I bought four cards from Clinton Cards. Nothing too overtly fancy or showy, nothing that you’d need to hand in at the post office because it wouldn’t fit in the post box, just four ordinary-ish cards.

Do you know how much I paid? Seventeen pounds and fifty six frigging pence. The sales assistant seemed to know he was robbing me blind, he seemed almost shame-faced about it but there you go. Business is business and if you’re in the greetings card game, it’s a massive business at this time of the year.

What would soften the blow a little would be a card that has a secondary use. Because let’s face it, they don’t really. You give one to someone and if it’s special enough to them, they might put it in a drawer somewhere and forget about it. If not, they’ll bin it and wheezing Mother Earth grows ever so slightly sicker.

But now there’s this – the edible Christmas card. It looks like an unheated oriental pancake and we can’t imagine it’ll taste much better either, but it’s a start. It’s made from potato starch (mmm, starchy…) and printed with edible ink – and has a big picture of some sprouts on the front. Oh.

So it’s probably not very appetising and it certainly isn’t aesthetically pleasing. Back to the drawing board with you Oxygen Design – wake me up when you’ve mastered a chicken balti flavour. Probably in time for my 60th birthday. But thanks for trying - I’ve got a craving for shredded roast duck with hoi sin sauce in pancakes now…

The marketing people at Burger King have added further weight to the theory that they spend their days sniffing butane gas and giggling like teenagers, cracking jokes that nobody else really gets.

Hot on the heels of the ad campaign where remote tribes are urged to try their first ever BK burger,  they’ve now unleashed a gent’s scent – Flame, a body spray that smells like a barbecue.

The accompanying website tells us that, “The WHOPPER® sandwich is America’s Favorite burger. FLAME™ by BK® captures the essence of that love and gives it to you. Behold the scent of seduction, with a hint of flame-broiled meat.”

Mmm, sounds, er, rank actually – and don’t get us started on the “alluring” snap of the BK King, presumably drenched in half a tin of the stuff. Fortunately, it’s only available to buy in the USA at the moment. Guess we’ll just have to stick with our Lynx Africa for now. Form an orderly queue please girls…

[Telegraph]