One area of life in which the letters have long been used to indicate something far from jocularity is in the area of accommodation for elderly people, Nursing Homes, Retirement Homes and the like. In these institutions staff members often use the acronym to refer to “Little Old Ladies”.

Staying in Ireland, and going back a few hundred years in time, LOL has long stood for “Loyal Orange Lodge”. The Religious/Political/Paramilitary “Orange Order” is a body existing to protect and further the cause of a Protestant understanding of the Christian Faith and the maintenance of the Union between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The Order has branches in all parts of Ireland and these are known as Lodges (Loyal Orange Lodges), and they don't cause anyone to Laugh Out Loud, especially if they are neither Protestant nor Unionist.

LOLs also pop up in Scotland, Canada, USA, Australia and even in India, founded no doubt, by loyal subjects who don't really want to live in the blessed Kingdom.

The members of the Lodges demonstrate regularly. These demonstrations take the form of a military-style march along main roads by hundreds of members making a nuisance of themselves and preventing people from going where they want when they want. They dress up in black suits, bowler hats, and they wear orange sashes round their necks. Bands kitted out in colourful uniforms usually precede the marchers, with pipes, accordions and drums. They often play Christian hymns as they lead their suited brethren. It's all a bit dark and menacing but part of the culture, and if you take it a certain way you probably would laugh out loud.

Golfing Humor Mouse Pad

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“Long and Straight and a Little to the Right” by Brett Cameron Doyle a best-selling author and cartoonist, provides us with a little golf humor for the desktop. Learn more about B. C. Doyle here.

Teacher's Aid Mouse Pad

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Who said that you can't teach an old dog new tricks? Just don't point your finger in the face of a hungry dog or if you just polished off a can of Vienna Sausages. You get the point and if not, you do have five other fingers, two pinkies and two thumbs to get your point across the next time around.

HAY! Mouse Pad

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”HAY! is for horses. Aren't you glad that you are a jackass?” This is tribute to my granddaddy, because he use to say this all of the time when I would visit him at his house. The mouse pad isn't all that humorous, but that old thyme saying is at least to me.

Punk Poodles Mouse Pad

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Stray dogs really do go bad as this Homeland Security surveillance clearly proves.

Star Trek's Dirty Little Secret Mouse Pad

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What happens behind close doors, stay behind close doors. Captain Kirk's dirty little secret is revealed.

No More Confusion Mouse Pad

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This is the perfect mouse pad for people who just need a user's guide to get started using their new mouse pad.

Cat and Mouse

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This is a cute spin on mouse pad humor, but I suspect that some people just will not get it.

Pac-Man Humor Mouse Pad

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Anyone who has ever played Pac-Man should get this joke. Of course, it is usually the other way around after realizing that after all of the clever maneuvers have only caused your Pac-man to become cornered.

Mouse Trap Mouse Pad

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I don't know, but for some reason I find some humor in this mouse pad. It looks so real that I would probably only use it as part of a practical joke at the office - I really never liked the job anyways.

Custer's Last Mouse Pad

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General Custer's last stand didn't go exactly as it was planned as the history books have recorded it and now, this mouse pad reminds of us that things in our lives could be a lot worse.

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First we need to address the very term "nerd". What exactly is it? We know that it usually has derogatory connotations (though that may be changing, see "Nerd Pride" below). Usually a nerd was someone whose life passions were not shared by the majority of the population. Their heroes were not shared by the ubiquitous "man in the street" (who would simply not get the joke in the picture above). In fact most people traditionally saw the interests of a nerd as strange and somewhat weird. However, with the advent of the internet, nerds have increased in number exponentially. The nerd herd has arrived.

Drag and Drop

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Often at High School nerds were partly classified by their disinterest in sport and their acquisition of knowledge considered intellectual and somewhat esoteric by other student (who usually didn't know what esoteric and intellectual mean, but hey). Rather than engaging in social activities the nerd could often be a loner. Occasionally they were lucky enough to meet others of their genus - Nerdus Sapiens - and were allowed to take over a table in the cafeteria. This was not, as some would think, an attempt by the majority to include the small nerd herd. Rather, it was a form of deliberate and insidious social exclusion.

Disrespect to Nerds

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As such nerds were often considered outcasts by "normal" members of society and the term, when used, was an insult. Such was the ferocity of public opinion against the nerd that slights against the herd were, for example, casually used as cheap marketing ploys (see above). Replace the word with a derogatory label based on gender, color or religion and you can see just how offensive the above advertisement truly was.

Nerd Sex

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Nerds had therefore to cultivate their own language (see above) which could be understood only by other members of the herd. A rebuse interpretation of the above would be “As you get to the University of Chicago, the amount of sex expected approaches zero.” If you failed to snigger at that or had to wait for the "translation" then you probably do not fit in to the nerd category. Many people would not accept the truth that nerds did, in fact, engage in the Wild Thing and until recently the nerd was often regarded as something as if not more virginal than a certain icon of Christianity.

The Nerd of July

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Nerds celebrate occasions just like any other substrata of society. They do make a special effort to make it their own, of course, but can often be misled and occasionally ignorant of the history of their own kind. To trace the origins of the word we must pay homage to that wordsmith of wordsmiths, Dr Seuss. His 1950 masterpiece "If I Ran the Zoo" contains the first printed instance of the word. Gerald McGrew, the narrator, maintains he would collect “a Nerkle, a Nerd and a Seersucker too” to be housed in his imaginary zoo. That was way back in 1950. As such, "If I Ran the Zoo" can be seen as the Holy Book of Nerd-dom.

The Nerd Bathroom

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It is of little surprise that most nerds are unaware of their own history. After all, their obsessive behavior is such that they have been know to adapt rooms in their domiciles in order to pursue interests that many would find unusual or even unsettling (see above). Dr Seuss had no idea what he had started and soon the word spread to wider (adult) society.

Nerd Army

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This was the beginning of the appearance of the nerd as a specific genus. It is strange that perhaps there had been no previous discovery of the word (though there was “bluestocking” for the female of the species way back in the eighteenth century). However, in 1951, Newsweek magazine pointed out the widespread use of the word in Michigan in the country known as the United States of America. The Army of Nerd was beginning to burgeon.

Nature or Nurture?

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The debate still rages as to whether nerds are born or are, rather, the result of some aspect of their upbringing. Many illiterates have produced nerd offspring and are unable to pinpoint what happened to make their child a nerd. Some blame themselves and they often create support groups in places such as New York and San Francisco. That is leaping forward a little in time, however. By the early years of the 60s, the term had gone viral and appeared throughout the USA in television, radio and other media. The word was reported in far away places such as Scotland (where people have red hair and strange accents). Globalization of the brand was not far off.

Nerd Pride

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Nerd Pride was not yet born, however. It would not be until the late 1980s that Pride and Power would become part of the nerd lexicon and it would be the new century before it was formally celebrated. Back in the 60s the term still meant something ever so slightly different. The nerd had yet to step, like a shy and nervous gazelle, in to the full light of societal inspection. Instead, the word simply meant someone who was dull. Other synonyms at the time would include "drip" or "square". Man.

Nerd Day Cake

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It was the decade of the seventies, one of grace, delicacy and high culture, where the word truly came of age. The decade that gave us The Osmond Phenomenon, Wonder Woman on TV and Gerald Ford as President also brought the word nerd to maturity. Social ineptitude, overt bookishness and an extreme interest in Star Trek came to embody the word. Or vice versa. It was a strange decade.

Nerds Give the Finger

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For a long time, for over a decade, the term nerd was not one that anyone - even the true nerd - would wish to have thrown towards them. Nerd Pride was not even nascent and the finger of nerd was spotty, bespectacled and book-toothed. The seventies, THE decade of the stereotype, saw the TV show Happy Days popularize the term like never before, even if its use was not in a fifties fashion (the decade in which the show was set). The Fonz, played by Henry Winkler, is responsible for the misappropriation of the term. May he burn in Hell.

Motivational Poster Nerds

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Nerds today should be aware, as they go about their way, of the debate that still surrounds the origin of the term. Many people claim, rightly or wrongly, that they originated it. Science Fiction author Philip K Dick claimed it as his own in 1973, even though he used the alternative spelling "nurd". This was later discovered to be untrue, having appeared in that form as far before as 1965 in a student magazine from Troy, New York. Something of a shame for nerd culture, as only Mr Dick could possibly surpass Dr Seuss in terms of sheer kudos as "High Originator of the Term".

Nerd Tattoo

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Although never recorded on paper (an old fashioned medium for education), many maintain that the word derived from the word "drunk" spelled backwards. A "knurd" would be someone who chose to study and be conscientious in their pursuit of academic achievement rather than being a hairy beer-swilling jock (whose very presence at a seat of academic learning makes them a walking talking oxymoron). Another version of the word, "gnurd" was widespread during the early seventies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT is often considered to be a kind of beacon for the global nerd diaspora, so this may well have some truth in it.

Nerd Pet

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Further etymological debate abounds. Some say that the word's origins are inextricably linked with the popular 1930s - 1950s ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. One of his dummies was called Mortimer Snerd and was a very dull witted chap. This is fairly close to the original meaning of the word however it was normally associated with boring rather than stupid. Others speculate that the word was adapted from the 1940s widespread term "nert". This was itself born of the word "nut" and meant someone who was stupid, crazy or both. This is improbable.

Spell-It-Out Nerd

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Thanks to the decade that was the seventies, the stereotypical image of the nerd was truly on the rise. In TV and film, the nerd is mostly presented as a white male (though in the UK's "The IT Team" one is Black British) with skin problems, braces and baggy trousers and thick lensed glasses. Some linguists posited the idea of the nerd as "hyper-white" as the depiction of nerds often involved their usage of arcane and old fashioned language. This supposed rejection of African-American oral culture through something approaching linguistic fascism by the nerd herd has, as an idea, been supremely trounced by the inexorable rise of the nerd of color in the nineties and noughties. The rainbow nerd is here to stay.

Nerd Art

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Typical of the nerd is their obliviousness to negative perceptions of them by others. When their interests lie in subjects that are of mystery or little interest to others, this was often translated in to disdain and a deliberate attempt to socially exclude them. This disdain has been typically turned on its head as the herd community reached critical mass in the early 1990s. As technology, mathematics and science become more pivotal each year to the survival of Homo sapiens, so the nerds have increasingly become self aware of their own importance to the continuation and constitution of society. Nerd Pride was born. The nerd is King.

Nerd Love

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It would be remiss not to mention Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate and Doctor Who here, pivotal as they are to nerd culture. They are the holy grail of nerd existence and those fully wishing to understand the herd should take time out to study these TV shows in depth. Secondary study can also be found in role-playing games, notably Dungeons and Dragons. Tertiary academic pursuit in the understanding of the nerd should, necessarily involve Comic Book 101 and Trading Cards 101. Without a full and proper knowledge of these three vital strands of their culture, the nerd can never be properly understood or appreciated.

Nerdtivity

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The new century has brought with it new demands and those often best equipped to deal have been the nerds. The era of the nerd is upon us and the tenor of the age is one of celebration, almost, rather than of ostracization. This is the dawning of the age of nerd-quarius. The computer and internet have helped in this and many nerds have accumulated wealth beyond the dreams of avarice as a result. The majority of parents do not now despair if their offspring show signs of nascent nerdiness. Rather, many see the nerd as intelligent, interesting and socially acceptable. Many women see the male nerd as excellent marriage material, due as much to his genetics as his wealth. This evolution in attitudes has happened at the same time as a weakening in the societal emphasis on the negative side of nerd-dom. TV shows such as "Ugly Betty" and "Chuck" show the nerd in a positive - even sexually appealing light.

The Nerd Evolution Timeline

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So, we come to the age of the nerds. Darwin versus the Bible is an irrelevance to most nerds as they believe in an alternative evolution (see above). More and more, society in general believes that it is not a bad idea, after all, to be intellectual. Kids' TV shows often encourage young viewers no to care about the anti-intellectual peer pressure of latter day Biffs. Slashdot even has a tagline directed at the community - “News for nerds. Stuff that matters.” Incorrectly attributed to Bill Gates, the quote "Be nice to nerds. Chances are you will end up working for one" has become common currency. There is even, in Spain, a for real Nerd Pride celebration which since 2006 has been celebrated on May 25.

Nerd in ad kitchen

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Of course, all this means that there are now huge amounts of people who pretend to be nerds. This can be seen in the rise of Nerdcore as a whole. However, a word of warning to the pseudo-nerd. The real deal can sniff you out as an imposter immediately. If you borrow the image, concept and culture of the nerd so you can stand out as an individual, remember that this is a contradiction in terms to the Nerd de Verity. As such you will be shunned on discovery!

So, the nerd has come a long way in the sixty or so years since the word made its first appearance. What the next sixty years holds is anyone's guess, but it promises to be more than interesting. Where the nerd herd goes next may well determine the future progress of humanity. Only time - and the internet - will tell.

And that concludes my list. 

Anyway, I used to hate spam. But, after a while, you begin to realise that some things cannot be fought against, some things are inevitable. Death, taxes, another series of Big Brother and, now, spam.

And so, I have learned to love spam.
The 'sender' names alone are reason enough to rejoice. So, here, for your amusement and because I'm at a bit of a loose end right now, are my top 12 spam 'sender' names.

1. Filbert Ethelbert. The parents of this poor unfortunate clearly had a thing for Berts. Sesame Street fans, possibly.
2. Bill Till. There's a time and place for rhymes. Filling out a birth certificate is not one of those times.
3. Granny Just. Sounds like a geriatric vigilante. "Go ahead, punk, help me across the road."
4. Eal Sph. In case you're wondering, the surname is pronounced, erm, 'sph', I suppose.
5. Dwain Swane. See 2.
6. Krogh. A good drinking buddy of Conan the Barbarian.
7. Margery Justice. The prim and starchy, middle-aged assistant of Granny Just.
8. Dusti Debra. Debra must spend an awful lot of time in libraries. Not moving. An awful lot of time.
9. Bald Jackie. "Sorry, which one is - oh, yeah, there he is."
10. Bendicity Sangbang. I just don't know where to begin with this one.
11. Bald Septimus. "Sorry, which of these Roman centurions is - oh, yeah, there he is."
12. Austin Lung. International Respiratory Organ of Mystery.

Hera an entire office building in downtown Tokyo is converted in to a giant game of Tetris. An absolutely amazing feat, it must have involved hundreds and hundreds of office workers with split-second timing! Seriously thought, the ability to programme an office's lights led to this fantastic display. A serious Tetris aficionado must have been the mastermind behind this!

OK, so the “voiceover” is slightly annoying here, but you have to give it to the people who set this up - it must have taken a heck of a lot of organizing! Best probably watched with the sound turned down unless the compulsion to go out and find the “voices” involved and tear out their throats becomes too much!

Although shot from afar (probably for the best) this video shows that Tetris can indeed be translated in to all forms of art - here we have miming "ninjas" performing the game, much to the adulation of the audience!

This will amuse you - and you don't even have to speak Japanese to get it, such is the visual appeal of Tetris. A Japanese show host decides to show off his Tetris skills but at each level the game conspires against him and he has a hard job keeping up with the technology!

Ah, these crazy Europeans, what won't they do to the art of music? Here we see the Tetris music given the full Euro Trash treatment. The most annoying thing about this song is, like the original game music (itself a rip off), it will stay in your head for hours, if not days afterwards.

Just as Alien Versus Predator was just a matter of time, so it had to be that the Stickman and Tetris at some point had to cross paths. Who (or what!) will come out on top when the Stickman finds himself in a game of Tetris?

Just for the sheer silliness of it, this video deserves inclusion here! The three madcap young folks certainly know how to get the party started! I can just imagine their friends imploring them to do it again and again. Excuse me a second, a gentleman in white coat wants a word with me.

Ah Japanese game shows, what would we do without them? Here, the contestants have to play human Tetris and fit themselves through the provided holes in order to avoid a soaking. Not as extreme by any means as any number of Japanese game shows, this is still an insight in to the psyche of the Japanese nation. And you thought Yoko Ono was the exception?

No, surely not, you have to be kidding, right? Set in the future when Tetris has evolved in to a mega game where the shapes are "driven" by humans, a man sets out to avenge his professional Tetris playing brother's death. I have no idea if this is a spoof or not. I really hope it is!

Some people are so obsessed by the game that when they get married their cake is in the shape of, you guessed it. It takes all types to make a world, as my grandmother used to say when confronted by things and people she did not or could not understand!

YouTube was started by 3 former PayPal employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. Before being employed PayPal, Hurley studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Chen and Karim studied computer science together at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. So thats our brief history lesson. Now time for the fun part, the videos.

I am going to write these videos in a random order, so if a video is first, then it is just the first that I wrote down, im not saying its better or anything. So, here we go.

1. Rejected Cartoons

   Yes, I know it's childish, and pathetic, and cheesy. But at the same time it is dangerously funny! Poisoning the mind of young children, oh, WHAT FUN!!!

2. Eduardo Spatulahands 

   The miraculous, breath-taking, adventure of Eduardo as he gets tricked by some evil guy into drinking "un-poisoned" Mountain Dew. Now, he must live his live with SPATULAS FOR HANDS!!! (Please note, the title "Eduardo Spatulahands" was PROBABLY copied from Edward Scissorhands, but I didn't make the movie so don't sue me).

3. Ferrets

   Makes you think about the good things of live in this cheesy video.

4. Crazy McDonald 

   I'm scared of McDonald's now!

5. Amazing Accidents

   Don't ask me how they happened, just watch and enjoy....

Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed some of these videos, they are to be enjoyed you know. I will be writing soon, and they will be coming to a computer near you! So till then, breathe on!

Lots of new laptops come with a security fingerprint scanner. That's a great idea. Since everyone has a different fingerprint, the only person who could use your laptop would be you, or rather, the person with YOUR finger. So that brings to light the question, is it really a good thing to make things with fingerprint scanners? If everything were to adopt this technology, such as cars or houses, criminals would have life a lot easier.

Imagine a world where everything is electronic. You don't have to worry about keys, passwords, anything. It's all stored on accounts with your fingerprint on record. You don't have to worry about carrying a credit/money card with you. You just push your finger up against a monitor at the check out and you purchase whatever your buying with your fingerprint. Sounds convenient. But now imagine a man in a mask grabbing you and slicing off your finger. They can now drive away your vehicle, get access to your property, and spend all of your money. (They'd probably shop online, its a little suspicious to carry around someone's finger in stores) Finger theft would be identity theft to the extreme.

So what do I suggest we do? I think the obvious solution is to use eyeballs instead of fingerprints. I say this for a number of reasons. Your eyes have unique "prints" just like your fingers. It would be a lot harder for someone to scoop out your eyeball without damaging it, let alone a lot more gruesome. Lastly, eyeballs are more slippery, and the eye thief would probably drop them easier, causing the eye to roll around and get dirt on it. Nobody likes dusty eyeballs. Eyeballs also dry out. I know I said lastly earlier, but I thought of that reason after I said lastly, and was to lazy to edit it.

Moral of the story: guard your fingers like they're attached to your body.