I’ve been on quite a run of epic nerdiness lately — you’re very kind to say you hadn’t noticed, but please, we both know better — and I’m beginning to worry about alienating that segment of readers who don’t know an alluvial damper from a flux capacitor. Therefore, as a favor to all you non-fanboys and fangirls out there, I promise that none of the following links has anything whatsoever to do with Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, or any of the other shows whose titles I used to scribble on my notebook covers back in elementary and middle school…

• Our first item for today earned its place on the drive-by list simply by virtue of its headline: Storm in a C-cup – 130,000 boobs lost at sea. The fact that the story accompanying this headline is so bloody absurd is just gravy…
  It seems an Australian men’s magazine planned to give away inflatable breasts with the January issue, but the shipment of Chinese-made novelties never arrived in Sydney Harbor. The article is unclear as to whether authorities believe the cargo was lost overboard or simply stolen somewhere along the way. While I’m certain the missing items weren’t inflated during transit, it makes me smile to think of thousands of blow-up boobies bobbing in the sea as far as the eye can see…

• Moving on, one of the most baffling, irritating, completely non-entertaining (and yet paradoxically popular) motion pictures I’ve endured in the last decade was the terminally pointless Napoleon Dynamite, so it doesn’t surprise me in the least to learn that this bizarro indie-cult flick is almost single-handedly responsible for screwing up Netflix’s recommendation engine, i.e., the software that tries to guess which films you might like based on the ones you’ve previously rented.
  

  [Computer scientists trying to improve the engine] have discovered [that Napoleon is] maddeningly hard to determine how much people will like it. When [Len] Bertoni runs his algorithms on regular hits like “Lethal Weapon” or “Miss Congeniality” and tries to predict how any given Netflix user will rate them, he’s usually within eight-tenths of a star. But with films like “Napoleon Dynamite,” he’s off by an average of 1.2 stars.
  The reason, Bertoni says, is that “Napoleon Dynamite” is very weird and very polarizing. …
  Amazingly, Bertoni has deduced that this single movie is causing 15 percent of his remaining error rate; or to put it another way, if Bertoni could anticipate whether you’d like “Napoleon Dynamite” as accurately as he can for other movies, this feat alone would bring him 15 percent of the way to winning the $1 million prize [that will be given to whoever improves the recommendation engine by a certain factor].

  The article points out that there are other problematic films (described as “culturally or politically polarizing and hard to classify”), but Napoleon is the worst offender. As I said, not remotely surprising to me. A movie can’t possibly suck that hard without ripping a few holes somewhere in the universe.

• From the “Too Silly to Be Truly Offensive” file, a list of Hitler emoticons. Here are my favorites:
  

  //:=)
  happy Hitler (Saturday, 24 May 1941, when informed uber-battleship Bismarck had sunk HMS Hood)
  //:=(
  unhappy Hitler (Tuesday, 27 May 1941, when informed uber-British Navy had sunk the Bismarck)

  Via Buzzfeed.

• From the “Holy Crap, Everything’s on the Internet” file — I have many files, you know — an item that will probably be of interest only to Salt Lakers and/or tiki enthusiasts, a scan of a menu from the long-defunct Hawaiian restaurant, which used to be located at 2920 Highland Drive (there’s now a camera store at that spot, I believe). The Hawaiian was torn down when I was but a small boy, so I have only dim memories of the place. However, I am certain of three things: there was an indoor lava-rock waterfall near the entrance, there were shellacked blowfish hanging from the ceiling, and, still vivid in my mind after all these years, a simulated tropical rainstorm punctuated your meal every 20 minutes or so. Why don’t they build restaurants like this anymore? And before someone mentions The Mayan, I should add that I mean cool restaurants, not just kitschy places with mediocre food and kiddie appeal. (For the record, I have no memory whatsoever of the other restaurant named on this scanned menu, Johnny’s Tiki Hut.)
• It wouldn’t be a drive-by blogging without a case mod to show off, and this one is especially gorgeous. It’s inspired by a 1940s-vintage wooden radio cabinet, but thankfully built from scratch so no actual radios were harmed in its production. I love old radios, which combined functionality, style, and durability in a way that no modern appliance begins to approach. I wish that old-fashioned aesthetic and value would make a comeback, along with cool tiki-themed restaurants.
  Via Boing Boing Gadgets.

• And now for something completely different: the world’s oldest living animal is believed to be a tortoise named Jonathan, a resident of St. Helena island in the South Atlantic. He appears in a photograph taken in 1900, during the Boer War, and recently sold at auction; investigation into the photo’s background revealed that Johnathan is still alive. He is documented as having arrived on St. Helena in 1882 as a fully mature adult, which would make him in the neighborhood of 176 years old. I was amused to learn that, “Despite his old age, locals say he still has the energy to regularly mate with the three younger females.” He’s the Hugh Hefner of the tortoise world!

Finally, here are a couple items I’ve intended to post for some time but just haven’t gotten around to:

• The iconic red British telephone box is fast on its way to extinction as cell phones (mobiles, in Britspeak) have overshadowed the once-ubiquitous payphone. However, an article from last August indicates that BT (British Telecon, the UK version of Ma Bell) is willing to allow local city councils to “adopt” the boxes for a mere pound, minus the telephone equipment, and maintain them “for aesthetic or heritage reasons.” An additional scheme will enable local authorities who wish to retain a working phone inside the box if they contribute to maintenance costs.
  When I first arrived in Britain way back in 1993, jet-lagged and feeling like I wasn’t really there (or anywhere, really — jetlag is weird), it was my first glimpse of one of those phone boxes that really drove home the truth that, yes, I was indeed in England, living one of my dreams. I’ve been hearing for several years that the boxes were disappearing, and I always thought it was a pointless shame. I’m delighted that someone came up with a solution.

• And wrapping up this edition of drive-by blogging, here’s a place to put on my list of offbeat destinations, a South African bar that’s inside the trunk of a Baobab tree. The tree is an amazing 155 feet in circumference, with the walls enclosing the interior hollow space up to 6.5 feet thick; according to carbon dating, the tree is 6,000 years old, roughly as old as the pyramids. And judging from the photos at that link, it’s a nice, cozy spot for a cold one.
  It’s a neat old world, isn’t it?