Y. Karp? Why Not!

According to their website , "Yelp is the fun and easy way to find and talk about great (and not so great) local businesses". The following two videos, pushed to my Flipbook "Gear and Gadgets" feed, are dramatizations of two reviews, performed by actors. Normally, I would just retweet , but these are just so funny, I felt compelled to share them,  Jublerant style. YouTube summary : Professional actor Chris Kipiniak puts the full weight of his dynamic gifts behind this interpretation of an online restaurant review. YouTube summary: Award winning audio-book narrator and actress Therese Plummer (The Good Wife, Law and Order SVU) lends her expressive talents to this rendition of a Yelp review. Follow on Twitter: @ykarp Subscribe to Y. Karp? Why Not! or follow on Facebook (see the side-bar). Add this blog to your RSS feed reader.

Zynga reported a $22.8m loss . Its shares plummeting, analysts are forecasting an uncertain future for the maker of the hugely popular game, Farmville, and six other top games on Facebook. Whoa! Unsatisfactory revenues for the developer of popular games? Yes, because the number of users of largely free games doesn't reflect earnings. Zynga makes its money by selling virtul goods, like tractors for Farmville. Selling virtual goods for a web-based game is a relatively new business model. No inventory to warehouse, no deliveries to make, and no storefront to pay for. Selling virtual bits and bytes (things that don't exist but that people pay for) sounds great, but is the experiment failing? I am tempted to argue that paying real money for a virtual tractor in a game that I don't personally own, is a waste. But consider this - we have been trading in virtual goods for quite a while. Some examples: Virtual money (credits) for online stores - eventually you can exchange ...

Does it get more exciting than this? Shark Week begins on August 12, 2012. If you love these the bone-less, fanged and fearsome kings of the sea, then Shark Week is for you. If you really want to get into the whole shark thing, why not get yourself a robot shark ? Hours of fun and excitement scaring the living daylights out of family, friends and total strangers. But we really do need Shark Week because, aside from  the Chinese who love shark just a bit too much , the ultimate marine predator generally gets a bad rap. But why? All sharks do is maintain the natural balance of nature.  If you happen into their environment, its not  really   their fault if you look a lot like dinner.  From an early age we are brain-washed educated to stay away from sharks at all costs, just like in this poem: A Shark is a Pet A Funny Shark Poem by Kenn Nesbitt A shark is a pet that you don't want to get. There is nothing less fun than a shark. He doesn't have...

I saw a chef walking down the street today. I could tell he was a chef because of his weird-looking pants. Naturally, this got me wondering about who else wears strange pants. [If you receive this post via email, you will have to visit the website to see all the pictures and get the full effect: http://www.ykarp.com ] Chefs If you're a chef and you're late to work, wear your pajamas. Nobody will notice the difference. Golfers Some golfing pants are handed down from generation to generation, never getting washed so as to preserve the luck. Clowns If your jokes are no good, you can always rely on your fashion to make the audience laugh. Mascots Wear this, but only if you have the figure for it. Knights in Shining Armor Sneak up on the heavily armed castle wearing these metal pants. Elvis Don't. Only Elvis can get away with pants like these. Curlers Curling is a strange sport as it is, so what's with these pants? Beefeaters ...

I've been using Tim now since Feb 2012. For those of you who missed that blog , Tim is my Samsung Galaxy Note. He has really changed the way I navigate my online life. Email Email is now more or less instantly downloaded to my pocket. In other words, if you send me an email, Gmail picks it up from my ykarp.com email server. My phone then syncs with Gmail and the phone whistles that mail has been received. The delay is inconsequential, but I do notice that my daily Dilbert email reaches my work computer a minute before my phone does. I love Dilbert cartoons, and I'll take 'em wherever I can get 'em. The emails I write from my phone are also shorter than ones I write from a real computer. That's undestandable given that touch-screen typing is slower and less accurate (actually, I'm writing this blog post on my Galaxy Note in portrait view right now!) Perhaps I shouldn't, but I also forgive myself more for grammatical errors, punctuation mistakes and typos...

Leonardo da Vinci was obsessed with manned flight. He never successfully built a flying machine, although he did design a helicopter-like machine that would have worked, had he built it, and he was reported to have successfully tested the first parachute. But a working flying machine eluded him because he was fixated on flapping wings. Had he thought of fixed-wing aircraft, nobody would ever have heard of the Wright brothers. But you can't blame Leonardo. It is only natural that we look to our environment for clues. The practice of nature-inspired inventions is called biomimicry. Examples of biomimicry abound. Velcro, for example, is an invention inspired by plant burrs. The design of turbine blades is based on the shape of the flippers of humpback whales. Gecko Tape was invented by Manchester University scientists who observed how geckoes are able to climb along ceilings leaving little to no residue. Biomimicry is a brilliant starting point for inventions. It is a sort of challe...