It labels itself the Dullest Blog in the World and yet I’m unable to tear my eyes off it.

A sample entry:

Drumming my fingers on the arm of the chair

I was sitting down on one of the chairs in my house. My hand was resting on the arm of the chair. I started to drum my fingers on the arm, thereby making a barely audible sound.

Frank Bruni, who was the food critic of the New York Times since 2004, gives some dining advice in his last column for the newspaper. Responding to what is the best and safest way to navigate a menu, Bruni offers this:

Scratch off the appetizers and entrees that are most like dishes you’ve seen in many other restaurants, because they represent this one at its most dutiful, conservative and profit-minded. The chef’s heart isn’t in them.

Scratch off the dishes that look the most aggressively fanciful. The chef’s vanity — possibly too much of it — spawned these.

Then scratch off anything that mentions truffle oil.

Choose among the remaining dishes.

His other answers are interesting but once you’ve reached the end you’re going to be hungry.

Going back to Snow Leopard, Apple’s “screw tightening” upgrade to the Leopard OS being released tomorrow.

Here’s the hands-on review from David Pogue of the NYT.

In any case, Snow Leopard truly is an optimized version of Leopard. It starts up faster (72 seconds on a MacBook Air, versus 100 seconds in Leopard). It opens programs faster (Web browser, 3 seconds; calendar, 5 seconds; iTunes, 7 seconds), and the second time you open the same program, the time is halved.

“Optimized” doesn’t just mean faster; it also means smaller. Incredibly, Snow Leopard is only half the size of its predecessor; following the speedy installation (15 minutes), you wind up with 7 gigabytes more free space on your hard drive. That, ladies and gents, is a first.

And MacWorld’s roundup of coverage, from the lesser known features to comparisons to Windows 7, Microsoft’s similar “maintenance” release due in October.

If you work with any previous versions of Adobe Creative Suite on your Mac, be careful if you’re planning on upgrading to Apple’s new Snow Leopard. Adobe has come out and said that they will only support their latest release, CS4. This means if you’re using CS3— which was only released two years ago— Adobe will not assist you with any sort of installation or stability issues, be it a widespread problem or specific to your system. Their solution is of course to upgrade to the aforementioned CS4 for $700. But considering Adobe’s track record lately, you may lose support for that suite in a couple years as well.

The Actor Believability Matrix rates the credibilty and believability of different actors in similar roles. It’s not based solely on how bad or good the movie is overall, but how the actor carries himself and if he’s naturally a good fit to play such a role.

For example, Ed Harris makes for a completely believable astronaut while Tom Hanks ranks just a hair lower. Both actors played solid roles in the film Apollo 13. Mark Wahlberg on the other hand, gets the lowest rating as a believable astronaut for his role in Planet of the Apes. Sadly Wahlberg gets the lowest believability marks in a couple sections.

Glorious creatures.

Martin Strel, a 55 year old Slovenian, recently completed his record swim down the 3,274 mile Amazon River. Strel has been swimming all his life, including the English Channel, the Mississippi and the Mediterranean. The Amazon, however, offered the most life-threatening perils:

Tarantulas, giant millipedes and scorpions would drop off the trees into the river, often getting entangled in his hair. Birds would fly down and attempt to peck at his face. Larvae burrowed into his skin and his face was stung by wasps. Some days he even had to wear a pillowcase over his head, with slits for the eyes and mouth to protect his face from the heat.

Then of course there was the candiru, a fish any man would fear:

…otherwise known as the vampire fish, a parasite with a vicious tactic. It is attracted by the scent of urine and enters the body by swimming up the penis. Once inside it locks itself on with a series of spikes and feeds off blood and tissue. Surgery is the only way to remove it.

Strel’s exploits are the subject of a documentary titled Big River Man.

What’s going on at Kentucky Fried Chicken lately? They recently debuted their new “grilled” chicken option— which ironically is infused with beef products— and now we have the Double Down Chicken sandwich. The inside is stuffed with melted, gooey cheese, the Colonel’s special sauce and two pieces of bacon. Instead of using a bun, the sandwich is capped with two thick wedges of fried chicken.

The shit my dad says may contain some fabrications, but it’s still one of the more entertaining Twitter feeds out there.

You need to flush the toilet more than once…No, YOU, YOU specifically need to. You know what, use a different toilet. This is my toilet.

Why worry? Each of us is wearing an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on his back.

A one-time stock photography model keeps seeing her face staring back at her over the years, hawking tea, online dating sites and mobile phones. She’s got a great sense of humor about it.

This story reminded me of something. Driving through the empty expanse of California’s central valley once, we passed a giant billboard for an Asian massage parlor, with a young Japanese girl’s face smiling down on Highway 99, seemingly eager to massage every greasy trucker passing through. It was a stock photo that could have been used for any product or service— ice cream, accounting software, laundry detergent— but someone paid the licensing fee to plaster her exuberant face on a sleazy massage billboard in the middle of nowhere.

We wondered, what if that girl happened to drive past the billboard bearing her likeness one day? Would she regret her decision to sell her face for a few bucks? Would her family be ashamed of her? Or maybe she actually did work at the parlor and really enjoyed her job.

It’s the 25th anniversary of the film Buckaroo Banzai this month. It may be time to gather everyone ’round the TV and have another viewing of this fine cinematic gem.