You have let me down, internet. Earlier in the week, a to do was made about the artist Sally Davies and her series of 137 daily photographs of a McDonald’s Happy Meal. The upshot is that McDonald’s Happy Meals when left out on the counter don’t really change much (as most food wouldn’t in a low humidity environment). There’s supposed to be a big shock.

Let me tell you, reader, there was. The first time I saw this story. On March 3rd of this year, BabyBites.info posted a photo of their year old Happy Meal (2 weeks later, BoingBoing posted via Consumerist). Three weeks after that, Sally Davies started her daily photo project. I don’t know if Sally Davies was inspired to start her project after seeing any of these stories, but even if she wasn’t I can’t be the only one who remembered we saw similar pictures 6 months ago. It’s not even like this was last year. I’m going to go take a minute, you get back to me when you want to share original stuff I won’t care about 5 minute from now.

Updated:
OK, OK, people have been leaving McDonald’s burgers out forever. Jason reminded me of this, while Hubs reminded me of this Supersize Me bonus. And we must never forget one of the original internet experiments, the stinkymeat project.

I saw Click Track refer to Cee Lo’s Fuck You as the song of the summer. I’d agree, but on the other hand, I don’t remember the last Song of the Summer I liked. Maybe it was that Kevin Costner song from Robin Hood.

Also, I finally had a reason to make a Keep Calm poster.

In the latest issue of Fast Company, there’s a profile of Alex Bogusky, the advertising genius behind some of your favorite viral campaigns of the last campaign. Bogusky, not surprisingly, didn’t like the the profile and annotated the article on his Posterous. This is the one of the better uses of the internet, publicly responding to exactly what you don’t like in an article. On the other hand, I can’t tell if the original article or the response makes me want to throw up more. The profile makes Bogusky come off as something of a douche, and the annotations makes him come off as a defensive douche. Maybe he’s nice in person.

In a story reminiscent of the ‘MetaFilter thread prevents human trafficking case‘ story from May, a Reddit user discovers bullying at a NJ college and alerts the internet. The internet goes ahead and starts to make things right. Way to go, internet, way to go.

Via The Daily What.

Subscribe by RSS or on Twitter or by email or on Facebook or on Tumblr

There’s this nifty tool floating around the internet the last couple days called I Write Like. You put a couple paragraphs into a box, click submit, and get the name of a famous author that you write like. I was wondering how good it was, so I spent a couple hours putting in some paragraphs of famous authors to see what I Write Like would come up with.

The results were mixed. A lot of these writers write like David Foster Wallace even if David Foster Wallace writes like Ian Fleming. I found the Project Gutenberg website with the top 100 ebooks and I Write Like did pretty well with the first couple paragraphs with most of those authors. In any case, I Write Like nailed 14 of the 30 classic authors giving it a success rate of 47%. For what it’s worth, Jersey Shore Nickname Generator is accurate 94% of the time. Note: The tool is fun. This isn’t a fair test.

James Joyce – The Dubliners is like James Joyce.
Stephen King – The Gingerbread Girl is like Dan Brown or William Gibson depending how many paragraphs you take.
William Gibson – Neuromancer is like David Foster Wallace.
David Foster Wallace – Consider the Lobster is like Ian Fleming.
Mark Twain – Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is like Mark Twain.
Ambrose Bierce – An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is like Robert Louis Stephenson. This is my favorite short story, by the way.
William Faulkner – A Rose for Emily is like Margaret Mitchell.
Ernest Hemingway – Hills Like White Elephants is like Ian Fleming. I was pretty sure this one would be right.
F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Diamond as Big as the Ritz is like H.P. Lovecraft.
H. P. Lovecraft – At the Mountains of Madness is like Edgar Allan Poe.
Edgar Allan Poe – The Angel of the Odd is like David Foster Wallace.
J.D. Salinger – For Esmé – with Love and Squalor is like Arthur Conan Doyle.
Arthur Conan Doyle – The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is like Arthur Conan Doyle.
Franz Kafka – Metamorphosis is like James Joyce.
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson is like Robert Louis Stevenson.
William Shakespeare – Hamlet is like William Shakespeare.
Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice is like Jane Austen.
Lewis Carroll – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is like Lewis Carroll.
Alexandre Dumas – The Count of Monte Cristo is like Charles Dickens.
Charles Dickens – A Tale of Two Cities is like Charles Dickens.
Bram Stoker – Dracula is like Bram Stoker.
H. G. Wells – The War of the Worlds, by is like H.G. Wells.
Emily Bronte – Wuthering Heights is like Daniel Defoe.
Agata Christie – The Secret Adversary is like Agatha Christie.
Beatrix Potter – Peter Rabbit is like Arthur Conan Doyle.
Herman Melville – Moby Dick; Or the Whale is like Robert Louis Stevenson.
Mary Shelley – Frankenstein is like Mary Shelley.
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy is like Leo Tolstoy.
Homer – The Iliad is like William Shakespeare.
Kurt Vonnegut – Cat’s Cradle is like Kurt Vonnegut.

Then, in the interest of pandering, I thought I’d look up a few contemporary writers/websites I like:
Jason Kottke is like (this surprises no one) David Foster Wallace.
The Daily What is like Stephen King.
John Gruber / Daring Fireball is like Stephen King.
Andy Baio / Waxy.org is like James Joyce.
Michael Lewis is like David Foster Wallace.
Chuck Klosterman is like Kurt Vonegut.
Bill Simmons is like Stephen King.

Now some pop culture folks:
Tracy Jordan is like James Joyce.
Don Draper’s slide projector monologue is like Margaret Atwood.
The Real Shaq on Twitter is like Dan Brown.
Britney Spears on Twitter is like Dan Brown. (Probably because he uses web addresses in his writing?)
Britney Spears – Oops…I Did it Again is like Stephanie Meyer.
Jawbreaker – Kiss the Bottle is like David Foster Wallace.
Anthony Bourdain is like Dan Brown.

For what it’s worth, when you put this post through the tool, it’s like H.P. Lovecraft. Who did we leave out? Post your finds in the comments.

I’m not sure this is what Biz and Ev had in mind. Last week Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff live-blogged the execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner’s with 3 Tweets. Seems like Shurtleff is responding to criticism by digging in further. His latest Tweet? “Astonishing that no retweet whiner express outrage that Gardner shot 2 men in the face, & a cop; nor one word of empathy for their families.”

The Boston Globe has a story about anonymous online posters posters, and it’s pretty much what you’d expect. Except for the below section where the writer describes an internet experience completely different than any I’ve ever known.

I’ve always loved finding the hidden gems in online comments – the surprising slice of data that makes me question one of my political assumptions, the pithy one-liner that makes me laugh out loud. But those gems seem increasingly rare amid all the yelling and hollow rage and predictable talking points.

Comments on news sites are about 1.5 steps above comments on Youtube. To prove my point, commenter BarackSnoozesOilOozes (whose avatar is a picture of Barack Obama with Joker makeup in the style of Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster) chimes in with:

Another one sided article by the Glob.

They Glob fails to mention that the mods often favor posts by anti-American Democrats who support Obama because that’s how the paper leans.

It took 5 freaking comments, 2 of which are, “First” and “Second” for the comments thread to devolve into name-calling and paranoia. This is my favorite article of the week.

I love business speak as much of the next person, but that doesn’t change the fact that Unsuck It is my one of my new favorite sites. About a gazillion times a day, a business buzzword is Unsucked. Hint: Click back to the beginning. Some of the recent posts are a bit of a stretch.

Hope you all enjoyed the Kottke.org guest editing this week. If so, you should subscribe by RSS or email or check out Unlikely Words on Twitter, Tumblr, or on Facebook.
+++
Hi all. I’ll be guest editing Kottke.org this week, so posting might be a light to non-existent over the next couple days.

For all you new visitors, welcome to Unlikely Words! Take a look around, there’s plenty of internet here. To get you started, here are a few of my favorite posts: Jason already told you about Everything Don Draper Said, Everything John Locke Said, and the Comprehensive Election Round Up, but you might also want to check out Everything Tracy Jordan Said, Marshmallow Peeps On the Internet – A Study, and the Jersey Shore Nickname Generator. I also write @eatBoston about Boston food, and 815 Sentences About Lost, which is self-explanatory. If you want to get in touch, say hi here.

Look, I know I’m a little late to this meme party, but everyone loves a beignet. This meme only works if you look at the words and don’t try to read them out loud.