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Joel Spolsky posted a funny contest:

Ebay affiliates are going completely nuts abusing Google sponsored links. Let's have a little blogger fun before Larry & Sergei (or ebay) figure out how to shut them down.

I'm proposing a little contest. Who can find the most horrifying genuine affiliate advertisement on Google? Here's my entry:

Post your screen capture on your own blog and link back to here.

(A quick explanation, before you freak out: people who think they are extraordinarily clever sign up as ebay affiliates and then buy entire dictionaries full of keywords on Google. These keywords link back to their site, so they can track it, and then on to ebay. They pay Google a small fee for each clickthrough and earn a small fee from ebay for each sale made on ebay, and profit on the difference.)

Mysteriously, this posting has disappeared from Joel's site, as has the image of his search (which suggested a great selection of African slaves). I got the text from my aggregator. Whatever the explanation from that may be, I probably set off some alarms while digging up the following searches.

Illicit Goods and Services

(MDMA is another name for the drug Ecstasy)

Stuff You Might Not Actually Want

Wouldn't you love to meet these singles?

Dictatorship and Coups d'Etat

Read these headlines in order:

Finally, If Only it were So Easy…

Within an ongoing discussion about politics:

Person 1: "That's dangerous. I mean, you do that, and then you have blah, and then foo, and eventually bar.

Person 2: "I don't buy slippery slope arguments."

Person 3: "Good point. I mean, you buy one, and then another, and eventually you're just mindlessly accepting all slippery slope arguments."

I'm at a great catered lunch at BloggerCon, on the outrageously gorgeous campus of Stanford University. It's been a very exciting morning, and I'll be writing down my thoughts on the sessions and people I've met in the near future. But for now, a funny story.

Yesterday I was at Williams College, my alma mater, participating in a panel session on careers in computer science. I left Boston for Williamstown in the morning, hung out at Williams until about 4pm, and then drove to the nearby Albany, NY airport for my weekend at Stanford. My friend Sam, also from Boston and attending BloggerCon, was going to get a rental car and meet me at the airport.

My plane arrived a bit early, so I called Sam to let him know. He was still picking up the rental car, so we decided I should head toward him and meet him there. "Hop on a shuttle."

Well, hopping on a shuttle took a while. I was starving (no dinner!) so I stopped at Subway. Then I looked around for the shuttle buses. Whoops, wrong level! The shuttle to the rental car center is on the third level and is a tram. The tram goes for 20 minutes across the huge airport, and lets me off on level three of the rental car center.

"Hi Sam. I'm staring at the Hertz counter and you're not here."

"Oh, I just got the car, you can just step outside and meet me."

"OK, I guess I have to go down to the first level to do that."

"Huh?"

"You know, the first level. Sorry it took so long by the way, the tram travels for a long time. This airport is so huge! It makes the big dig look simple."

"Oh, you're at the San Francisco airport!"

"Eh?"

Apparently, I gave Sam my airline and flight number, but not the destination airport. In case you're wondering, a trip from Oakland to SFO at 1:15am on Saturday morning takes about 20 minutes.

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Launched in October 2001, www.tshirthell.com is the most visited t-shirt website on the Internet. The site averages over 75,000 unique visitors and over 400,000 page views daily (source Alexa.com).

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(… as of the time of this recording.)

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Blow your mind.

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Perhaps immature, but still TOTALLY AWESOME

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Hey, just as I was typing that response about frassle bugs, and actually checking off my "bugs" category, a little summer insect landed on my screen. Right next to the "bugs" label in fact. He even stood still long enough for me to take a picture. I hereby christen thee the official frassle bug bug.

Oooh, he just walked a bit! He must like the backlight.

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• The title is a required field.
  This is by design; frassle often displays only the title of a note. It would be possible to default to using the first few words of the body, but requiring the title is not unusual.
• If the title is left empty, an error is displayed and the link and body of the post are not preserved.
  This is a bug.
• In the publisher, if I add a block, and go to advanced style options, then click save, I get a pagekit error
  This is a bug. Fixed.
  
• If I specify a category for a block, then later rename that category through manage categories, the block no longer works correctly — I assume.
  Your assumption is correct and points to an interesting problem. The interactive noteset builder, when ready, will reference categories by ID# rather than by name, avoiding this problem.
• Tree pane does not expand correctly on the post page in firefox when you expand the tree with +s
  Is this a firefox bug? Or can we work around it by setting a width for the div that contains the category tree?
• How do I use more than the ten most recent items in publisher?
  Prepend the noteset expression with something like: !limit=50
• I cannot make any aggregated content from my LJ site appear on the my blog in the publisher
  Fixed in this specific instance. This was an instance of subtle bug having to do with the use of a space at the end of the URI for that feed. To be fixed in future by stripping trailing spaces from URIs.

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Via the Autoblog, here's something you should try to avoid doing even though it looks pretty cool. Still, that's some pretty good air for a Mercury Sable.