If you placed a button in a public place marked “Destroy the Universe“, how many people would push it?  It turns out, almost everyone.

Two true stories (apart from names) both founded on the fact that Australians speak funny, strewth.

Bob is an American who married a Basque woman, and now lives with her in Spain in the Basque country.  One day, he walks into a bar, and runs into a rowdy gaggle of Australian guys.  He asks them what brought them to this part of the world. They shout enthusiastically, “we’re here for the wives, mate, the wives.”  He’s a bit surprised at this, but figures that that’s why he’s there himself, so why not?  Only towards the end of a mutually enjoyable conversation, which in retrospect was entirely at cross-purposes, does it become clear that they’re actually surfers, there for the “waves”.

At the same time as all this was happening, an entirely different group of Australians were busy drinking outside an entirely different bar in Italy.  As the group got merrier and merrier, they wanted to spread their sweetness and light to the locals by toasting them, but couldn’t making themselves understood.  They button-holed a likely-looking passerby, and loudly demanded of him “HERE MATE, HOW DO YOU SAY CHEERS?”  The man looked at them blankly, so they spoke more loudly and slowly “CHEERS … HOW … YOU … SAY … CHEERS?  CHEERS?”  Finally the man’s face lit up, and he told them the magic word.  They thanked him, and he nodded politely and scurried off, obviously glad to escape the crazy foreigners.  The Australians spent that night and the remainder of their vacation boisterously toasting their host country with their new found vocabulary.   Only on the flight home, in conversation with a bilingual fellow traveler, did they figure out that “FORMAGGIO!” (”cheese”) was not in fact exactly the word they’d been looking for.

Cheese mate!  Enjoy the wives!

We remember being impressed by the (now apparently defunct) Fez Pigeon site, which added a cute little hat to a webcam view of a pet pigeon. We are pretty confident that most people, if they reflected for just a moment, would find that this is exactly the service needed to fill that gaping hole in their lives they don’t even know they have. To evaluate interest in the automatic putting of hats on things, we’ve developed a webcam puppet that does exactly that. Plug in a webcam, load the puppet, and click on something in the scene that would look better with a party hat on it. And behold! The hat appears, following the object as it moves. You’ll have better luck if the object is nice and simple, with good color contrast with the background.