Today's examination of cultural fluff comes courtesy of YouTube.

Ask.com has decided it's tired of playing second fiddle to other, more successful search engines and has decided to start a campaign to let people know exactly how good their search engine is:

You wake up. It is dark.

::LOOK

It is very dark. You might get eaten by a Grue.

::GET UP

The pillow slides off your face as you force yourself to sit up in your bed. Sunlight streams in through the tiny window of your bedroom. Apparently it is not as dark as you originally thought.

From Bruno the Bandit, by Ian McDonald

One Laptop Per Child is, in my opinion, a laudible and worthy goal... to create low-cost laptops that are then distributed for free to children in developing countries.

This is a worthwhile effort. There are people who feel the project is a waste of time, and that people should be focusing on other, more basic problems, but I believe that focusing on any one problem to the exclusion of all others won't solve anything. OLPC won't save the world but that doesn't mean it won't do good things.

That said, sometimes I worry about what exactly people involved in the project expect the children are going to get out of it. Take, for example, the following quote:

"A child doesn't want to play the latest video games. He wants to be able to read a book."
-Michalis Bletsas, OLPC official, as quoted in Linux Today

This quote is offered as an explanation as to why the laptop isn't powerful enough to play the latest and greatest games available on the market today, and it makes me want to bang my head against the wall until I lose consciousness, just to give me a moment of sweet respite from the silliness of the idea.

General Protection Fault, by Jeff Darlington. Now that's when you'll know there's a bubble...

This will a gentle cut, a minor nick if you will -- both because of the approaching holiday, when my thoughts ought to be focused on Love, Joy, Peace and GoodWill Towards Man, and also because I think the transgressor in this particular instance is more guilty of being too close to the perceived problem than he is of any kind of egregious journalistic excess.

That said, this caught my attention because it made the lists on Slashdot, and even the briefest episodes innocuous hyperventilation can suck all the air out of a room if you stuff enough people in it and get them to start hyperventillating at the same time.

Boxjam's Doodle, by the Great Blue One

The last month of the year is a time for quiet, thoughtful introspection and cautiously optimistic speculation on the year to come. Unless you're writing for a computer magazine, in which case introspection be damned -- and as far as speculation goes, caution is for techno-sissies.

In that vein I have decided to put forward my own list of predictions for the year 2007. Ten of them, to be exact: and I promise that my list of predictions is every bit as reliable as any other predictions list you'll read this month.

So without further ado:

EVISCERATI.ORG'S TOP TEN PREDICTIONS FOR 2007

From Superosity, by Chris Crosby.

Over at Ubersoft.net I took Infoworld to task for publishing a list of technology predictions for the coming year that were, as near as I could tell, mind-bogglingly lazy in scope. But Infoworld, it appears, is only a minor-league player in this vast wilderness of hyperbole-riddled pablum, and they have been trumped by another publication whose recent proclamations are so egregious that I was compelled to take Eviscerati.org out of the mothballs a little early (I'd planned on a 2007 revival) in order to do them justice.

CRN bills itself as "Vital Information for VARs and Technology Integrators." One assumes, then, that the information it chooses to publish on its site is information that VARs and people who spend their time integrating technology absolutely must have. The truth of this I leave up to those VARs and technology integrators who actually read the publication, since I am neither -- unless compiling the most recent version of ndiswrapper on my Kubuntu Edgy laptop in order to get wireless access counts as "technology integration." Still, after picking up on this little tidbit from Slashdot, I have to wonder if perhaps the VARs and technology integrators are getting their money's worth when they read this publication.

Like all publications that attempt to convince their loyal readers that they have their finger on the pulse of whatever part of society they are covering, CRN engages in end-of-year navel-gazing. Of particular note this month is their 2006 Products of the Year, a Top Ten list that purports to tell you the ten most important products that were released in 2006.

One of those products? Microsoft Vista.

A razor-blade masthead sits unused, deep in slumber. It has slumbered for 11 long months in this abandoned corner of the web, an eternity by web reckoning, and none who wander by can say if it will ever wake again.

Jamie Robertson of Clan of the Cats, in a comic donated to Eviscerati.org...

From Poke & Gravy, by Alex Salsberg.

Alex has five cartoons in all, and has made them available via links on a page that you must deliberately click to view. The one posted here is my favorite of the lot.

Poisoned Minds, by Alan Foreman. This had to be severely reduced in size to fit the site layout. The original version of the cartoon appears to be missing.