A Few Pointless Links

Absolute comedy (from BoingBoing), tricks of various trades. My favorite?

Butcher

In Australia, the butchers have a secret language called “rechtub klat” that they use to gossip about customers without getting caught. The code is formed by speaking words backward. Old-timers could have entire conversations in the language, but these days a core vocabulary of about 20 to 30 essential words are used. Sometimes, if a word can’t really be pronounced backwards, a couple of letters will be traded around (e.g., “tish” for “shit”), or the first letter might be pronounced separately (e.g., “bmal” is pronounced “beemal”). The most common words are:

—kool, toh lrig
—cuf ecaf
—on erom feeb/gip/bmal
—traf
—toor
—doog tsub
—tish
—doog esra
—gaf

Nothing is more enjoyable than shouting at the top of your lungs to the other butchers that the difficult customer right in front of you is a “on doog cuf ecaf.”

Button Maker from the Kalsey Consulting group. It made the RedMonk and Get Gentoo icons to the right. Now you can make all of your own cool blogging icons.

Googlebar for Firefox. An oldie, but a goody. I know a lot of Firefox folks who miss their Googlebar.

Google Webalerts, while still a beta service, are a big help for monitoring news about me, RedMonk, or my clients. As an example, we have one that searches constantly for “RedMonk” and shoots over matches as they arise. Beats clipping services, that’s for sure. This is a likely forerunner to personal search agents, done very simply. Be nice if the searches could be exposed as RSS feeds, but oh well.