Your Favorite Music Artist Is Gay?

Countless musicians and artists – from Jay-Z to Frank Sinatra – are gay. According to this site, at least.

There’s gotta be a way to get this list pulled. [sigh]

I Got My Job Through Second Life

It seems as though Second Life (the popular online digital world) is the latest trend in cutting edge corporate recruitment.

From Fortune.com:

What Second Life brings to the party that few platforms or games before it have is a chance to blend the boundaries between reality and virtual reality, a possibility that has helped boost the number of registered accounts to 2.6 million.

And just as the way we surf the web changed, the way that corporate America does business has changed in this middle space. Case in point: the most radical dotcom 2.0 recruitment wave is happening in virtual reality thanks to Second Life. Instead of posting a resume on Monster.com that will hopefully net a flesh-and-blood job interview, your avatar can be interviewed and hired all within Second Life, often for jobs possible only in virtual reality.

Still don’t believe that corporations would actually look to Second Life as a source of solid, qualified professional applicant leads? Think again:

The core team of Electric Sheep Company, a 27-person operation, was plucked from Second Life, not from a pool of PR applicants or professional computer programmers.

“We hired people we had never met in the real world because we’d spent a year looking at the work they produced within Second Life, and the way that they approached the community,” says Constable. “To a certain extent we knew each other… We knew that in Second Life, they were the best.”

As more of real life pushes into Second Life, corporations and even individuals will tap long-time denizens and gamers for their skill.

If the pontificators are correct, we may all need virtual suits for job interviews.

Want A House?

Mount Madonna School, a private, non-profit school, is raffling this $1,800,000 Dream House, three blocks from the ocean, in Santa Cruz, California. Proceeds from this raffle benefit Mount Madonna School in its continued effort to provide high quality education to students from preschool through high school.

Raffle tickets are $150. The Grand Prize winner chooses either the Dream House or $1.5 million in cash. Over 300 other prizes are also available. 1 in 100 chance to win a prize.

Early Bird Drawing:

All tickets purchased before February 28, 2007 at 5pm PST will be entered into an Early Bird Drawing in addition to being entered into the Grand Prize Drawing. The Early Bird Drawing will take place on Saturday March 17th.

Not a bad deal at all. Show your support!

The Simpsons Go Anime + Futurama

From:

To:

The above piece The Simpsonzu by *spacecoyote is a satirical look at The Simpsons if they were anime characters. See also [this] similar Futurama composition:

Pretty impressive, eh?

Giant Space Invaders

From Boing Boing:

Attendees at FOO Camp — an invitational geek weekend — created a giant scene out of Space Invaders that’s visible from space, which was subsequently photographed for Google’s sat photo database (they also made a giant Cylon).

“…one of the fun things that happened over the weekend was that Chris DiBona announced that Google were going to be doing a flyover of the campus and that we should take the opportunity to make some interesting art projects that would subsequently be visible from Google Maps and Google Earth. So we did.”

This has got to be the greatest thing I’ve seen since Mario Brothers Live:

[NEW] The “What You Need?” List

Allow me to present to you the much anticipated “What You Need?” section of MungoPress (see page in above navigation). WYN is a list of sites that contain everything you’d ever find helpful while viewing, designing, creating, browsing, and more – completely free of charge*. I will continue to add to this list as I see fit. Without further ado:

• Buttons, Badges, + More – 3,700+ buttons/badges for all of your site and blogging needs.
• Stock.XCHNG – Contains over 200,000 high quality stock photos by more than 15,000 photographers! Need a wallpaper for your desktop? Need a pic for your commercial website design? Looking for inspiration? Have a look around.
• DaFont.com – 7,000+ completely free fonts. They even publish brand fonts like Puma and Pepsi. Both Windows and Mac approved.
• YouTube – An extensive database of Flash videos. Need a video to go along with that blog post? Search and embed it with ease.
• DatPiff – Indeed, I am a huge fan of hip-hop. Want to catch the latest mixtape released by your favorite artist(s)? Listen to and download them completely free of charge (and legally).
• CNET Downloads – Generally free software downloads. Safe, trusted, and spyware-free.

Have a suggestion? Send it to: mungopress (at) yahoo.com

Please include a URL along with a brief description of what the site has to offer WYN.

*unless otherwise noted

Ultimate MySpace Profiles

Honda recently ran a contest to find the Top 20 Ultimate MySpace Profiles. The results are in, and I’ve taken the liberty of posting some of my personal favorites here:

• dana killer?
• Audra
• PetriSpace
• Alien

My personal all-time favorite? Kevin Turner’s at: http://www.myspace.com/kevturner007

Er… Kids These Days?

From CNN.com:

A charter school alerted authorities to a 29-year-old sex offender who tried to enroll there, pretending he was just 12, in what sheriff’s officials said Friday may have been an attempt to lure children into sexual abuse.

The Yavapai County sheriff’s office also said Neil Havens Rodreick II conned two men he was living with and having sex with into believing he was a young boy.

One of them, 61-year-old Lonnie Stiffler, called himself Rodreick’s grandfather when he tried to enroll him at Mingus Springs Charter School as “Casey Price.”

“This is the weirdest case I’ve seen in 18 years,” sheriff’s spokeswoman Susan Quayle said.

It gets worse:

Stiffler and Robert James Snow, 43, “were very upset when the detectives told them they had been having a sexual relationship with a 29-year-old man and not a pre-teen boy,” Quayle said.

In the words of Susan Quayle: “If it wasn’t so sad it would be funny.”

[Does Stiffler have a twin? Hmm…]

Killing Time?

The following list consists of the Top 5 sites I visit while killing time:

1. Break.com is a leading entertainment channel for guys fueled by user created media. Have a video of your co-worker Susan falling for the Maze prank? Upload it for a quick $400. Break.com was the first site to pay you for entertaining original content and [they] continue to make it easy for you to earn money.
2. TechCrunch is a weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies. In addition to new companies, [they] will profile existing companies that are making an impact (commercial and/or cultural) on the new web space.
3. Apple.com has an updated archive of all the latest Movie Trailers. You can even watch them in High Def. Subscribe to their RSS feed to keep up with the newest premieres.
4. Damn Interesting is, simply put, a collection of damn interesting things. [Their] primary aim is to collect and dispense interesting facts and ideas, whether they appeared in the past, the present, or the (anticipated) future. Yahoo! Internet Life called it, “…the original and still the best.”
5. YouTube is a place for people to engage in new ways with video by sharing, commenting on, and viewing videos. [It] originally started as a personal video sharing service, and has grown into an entertainment destination with people watching more than 70 million videos on the site daily.

More Than Honorable Mentions go to MySpace and WordPress. Heard of ’em?

No More Sick Excuses

More than 80 school districts around the country have decided to start their high school days later, in an effort to aid sleepy teenagers:

Most high schools begin their day around 7:30 a.m., which leaves many teenagers nodding off in the morning. In fact, at least 20 percent of high school students fall asleep in class on a typical day. The problem: Teenagers need a lot of sleep — about nine hours each night, experts say. And most of them aren’t getting enough.

To help sleepy teens, some school districts have tried delaying the opening of the high school day. Educational researcher Kyla Wahlstrom, from the University of Minnesota, has been following districts that changed their start times, tracking the effect on schools and students. The Minneapolis school district, for example, changed its start time from 7:20 to 8:40 a.m., giving its 12,000 high schoolers an extra hour and twenty minutes each morning. Wahlstrom says the students have benefited from the change.

What exactly will this change accomplish? Educational researcher Kyla Wahlstrom, from the University of Minnesota says:

“Students reported less depression when there was a later starting time. And teachers reported that students were more alert and ready for learning. Parents reported that their children were easier to live with because their emotions were more regulated.”

Additionally, Wahlstrom found a decrease in the number of students who were dropping out of school or moving from school to school.

If a student is dropping out due to lack of sleep, aren’t they already a pretty helpless cause? What ever happened to getting to bed earlier? Buy a Serta and suck it up.