I had no idea that Chuck Norris was such an interesting guy. Here are 30 Facts about him for you to chew on.

I laughed out loud at most of these.

Chuck Norris sold his soul to the devil for his rugged good looks and unparalleled martial arts ability. Shortly after the transaction was finalized, Chuck roundhouse kicked the devil in the face and took his soul back. The devil, who appreciates irony, couldn’t stay mad and admitted he should have seen it coming. They now play poker every second Wednesday of the month.”

[via notinmybook.]

Almost a year ago, I switched completely to Firefox for all my web browsing needs. There was a time when I used Safari on OS X and Firefox on PC, but I like Firefox so much, especially the new G4 optimized 1.5, that I have switched completely. Both Safari and Firefox offer tabbed browsing, which I can no longer live without. When I am running IE, even for testing, I can’t stand the new windows for even a second. One feature I miss in Firefox from Safari though was the “x” close buttons on each tab. I think the single close button is asinine.

Today at work I was thinking about it and decided that this would be the first Firefox extension I designed and built. I gave myself 24 working hours to research, design, and program the extension. Of course, I checked the extensions database to make sure one didn’t already exist.

Well, of course it did, and I no longer have an extension to build, thanks to Stephen Clavering and Tab X. A tiny, simple install, like most Firefox extensions, Tab X removes the “x” close button from the right side of the tab bar, and adds one to each individual tab. just like Safari. I couldn’t be happier with this.

Speaking of great extensions, this new one for del.icio.us is utterly brilliant, finally integrating del.icio.us bookmarks the way they should have been all along.

This is stunning/revolutionary news. Amazon owned, Alexa, the web crawler that powers Amazon’s A9 search service among other things, has decided to open up the entire web index to anyone who wants to use it via web services. Welcome to the Alexa Web Service Platform. They are charging nominal fees for bandwidth consumption, storage space, etc, but this basically means that anyone, any startup, can begin offering customized search services starting today, without ever having to set up the enormous server farm that would normally be needed to crawl the whole web every day. Alexa currently spiders 4 to 5 billion web pages per day. It means that if you have an idea that relies on Google-like ability to see what’s out there on web, you can do it starting today, for an estimated cost of a few thousand dollars “to process the entire web”.

This is a BIG deal.

Read John Battelle’s initial story.
WSJ.com has it as well.
Wired News, as usual, has great coverage.

[via kottke.]

Best video of an Atomic Situp of all time. Other than it’s perfect execution, the soundtrack is peeerrrrrfect.

“Hello darkness my old friend…”

[via smithappen.]

I have written about Parkour before. It is the French-born art of running and jumping and flipping and climbing around urban environments. It is utterly incredible to watch, and it is quickly spreading around the world. This new video, Dvinsk-Clan, Le Parkour features a crazy young Russian guy in one of the best examples of Parkour I have ever seen. You MUST watch this.

[via del.icio.us.]

Yahoo! finally bought del.icio.us! I KNEW this was coming. I just wasn’t sure if it would be Yahoo! or Google to do it. Yahoo! is making a ton of great buys/hires lately, Flickr.com, Upcoming.org, Tom Coates (plasticbag.org), AJAX and RSS in webmail, new Maps, and now del.icio.us.

With a market cap worth roughly half that of Google’s, and stock price under $42 a share, I think, personally, this stock is a must-buy. We’ll see.

Yahooo-ooo!

English translations of Japanese phrases done by non English speaking Japanese people are more often than not very very funny. As is the case with the airport navigation assistance sign that reads ‘Retarded flights restaurant”. Gold.

But I need to ask myself constantly which would be weirder? If it’s possible that there isn’t at least ONE English speaking person in Japan that may clue everyone in on the fact that they’re fucking up so badly? Or that it’s possible that they do know, but they just don’t give a shit?

Either way, it’s comedy for the rest of us, I guess.

I have resisted linking to this video of the most ridiculous Christmas lights display I have ever seen. This is 10x worse than the Griswalds, and 20x worse than the D’Antonios who used to live across the street from me when I was a kid. This guy is using a whole computer controlled system for syncing the music with the light blinking.

Today, Carson Williams, the creator of this display in Dayton, Ohio, shut the $10,000 display down after it started causing traffic backups and one car accident. Bah-Humbug. I figured there was no better way to honor his efforts than to at least keep the internet video viewing up.

[via everyone.]

It appears that the initial reports were completely true. 50 “I got shot 8 times” Cent took $500,000 to play at some rich, Long Island, 13 year old, Jewish girl’s Bat Mitzvah a few weeks ago. Her father, David H. Brooks, is a rich manufacturer of bulletproof vests for the Army (how ironic) and spent $10 million on the party which included performances by Aerosmith, the Eagles, Stevie Nicks, 50 Cent, Ciara, Kenny G and Tom Petty. They booked out both floors of the Rainbow Room, had a stage built, and installed multiple Jumbotrons.

The absolute best part of the whole sell-out thing was that the gangsta rapper, 50 Cent, found the time to work in the lyrics, “Go shorty, it’s yo Bat Mitzvah! We gonna party like it’s yo Bat Mitzvah!” Sell-out bitch.

Photo evidence of the whole night is up on this Kodak Easyshare Gallery. Oops! The gallery is now removed. Luckily Manny and The Superficial pulled many of the good pictures down.

[via superficial and manny.]

Le Papillon is a stunning animated short film by Antoine Antin & Jenny Rakotomamonjy. This watercolor and brush stroke illustration style is gorgeous, and perfectly suited for this ancient Japanese material. Don’t miss this one.

[via drawn.]

Not for the faint of heart, this video is basically a collection of people getting very, very hurt trying to do stunts. It’s like Jackass on crack. Some of the is shit is absolutely unbelievable. Enjoy.

[via manny.]

This middle aged guy’s webcam video rendition of “What Is Love?” is definitely going to be the next big thing on the internets. I just laughed so hard, I gave myself a splitting headache. You’ll know what I mean by the title “Lu..!” in just a few minutes. Enjoy.

[via my favorite new website, savemanny.com]