Mug with temperature sensor (link roundup)

Heat activated mug tells you when your batteries are fully charged.

Relatedly, here's a heat-activated mug featuring Tim Burton's Toxic Boy:



I didn't see it on sale anywhere.

And a few more links:

1. Mignola-esque mermaid.

2. Spiral man.

3. The US Foreign Service Institute has made available online language courses for every major language (except English). Via.

4. Burger King has Iron Man kid's meal toys right now.

*Previously: Very cool and absurdly expensive coffee mug.

*Buy heat sensitive mugs at Amazon.

10 items or fewer

Trader Joe's sticks it to "less." Via.

*Previously: Rent a plastic foam wedding cake for less than half the cost of a real cake.

*Buy neon signs at eBay.

Tiny candles (link roundup)

"5-Minute Candle" pack - - $6 for a set of four.

And a few more links:

1. The fact that Obama carried his own umbrella while in China impressed citizens used to seeing officials being served.

2. An explanation for why it's so difficult to translate Beowulf (which was originally written in Old English).

3. Twilight Moms: "If these were 40-year-old men screaming for 17-year-old girls, someone would call the police."

*Previously: Candles that burn green, orange, pink, or purple.

*Buy Obama toys at eBay.

Scholarly journal accidentally puts Chinese brothel ad on cover

The Max Planck Institute's latest journal focuses on China, and the editors wanted the cover to feature something from a classical Chinese text. But they somehow ended up printing text from a handbill for a Macau strip club. Among other things, it said "Hot Housewives in action!"

*Previously: Hot tub ads targeted at swingers.

*Buy "Chinese For Dummies" at Amazon.

What's the German word for blowjob?

CEO Michael O'Leary discusses Ryanair's new transcontinental service, which will offer extremely cheap economy fares, and very luxurious business class fares. The female translator becomes a little flustered when he explains just how luxurious business class will be:



Here's the Wikipedia entry on O'Leary, which includes this:

In 2004 he purchased a hackney plate for his Mercedes-Benz to enable it to be classified as a taxi so that he could legally make use of Dublin's bus lanes to speed his car journeys around the city.

Via.

Interesting: "Octothorpe" is a name for the telephone handset symbol #

Link.

Email is killing the hyphen

The hyphen is slowly disappearing, a victim of increasingly high-speed emailing that leaves little time for additional keystrokes. In the most recent edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, about 16,000 compound words that once took hyphens have lost them, including fig leaf, leapfrog, pot belly and test tube, reports Finlo Rohrer for the BBC. The editor of the Shorter OED says the dictionary’s changes follow real-world usage.

Link.