Girls With a Very Big Mouth

What to say about these girls… They should perform in the show: “I have talent”.

Are the German armless?

Have you heard of a great German travel kit, which is sold at all service stations with chewing gums and Snickers, called “Travel Pussy”? Well, here it is a miracle set which costs 4 euros. You can read to instructions for putting it into function. If you ask me this is simply ridiculous. I mean, are the German armless? 

People Through X Rays

X rays are a form of electromagnetic radiation discovered by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen and what Wilhelm didn’t know is that this great invent can be used in art. Because these days everything can be art… Take a look at these interesting, powerful draws!

The 6 Most Unusual Job Searching Methods

By now the economy is slowly starting to recover, but that doesn’t mean that it’s any easier to find a job that will allow you to pay the mountain of bills covering your living room floor. In fact, if you’re looking for a career change you should probably brush up on your interview skills and learn some Do’s and Don’ts of job searching; and as far as Don’ts go this is probably the best place to start.

 

 Weird Worm Podcast – Ep49 – The 6 Most Unusual Job Searching Methods [7:57m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

1.

Ask for a job at gun point

We all know where the good jobs are: in the fast food business, but those damn teenagers are always undercutting the honest working man. It’s time someone did something about it, preferably with a gun! With dozens of Taco Bells robbed every other month (if you don’t believe us just google Taco Bell and robbery) walking in with a pistol in your hand demanding all the tacos you can carry doesn’t seem like a bad idea, and since you already showed that you have initiative and problem-solving skills, why not ask the manager for a job?

Taco Bell manager

Unfortunately, it turns out not even an armed robber is enough to convince a Taco Bell manager to give out jobs in THIS economy. Even better, not only did the robber walk away without a job offer, but he also forgot to grab the money.

What’s interesting is that this is not the only example of a stupid thief applying for a job in the very place he is robbing.

In Burnsville two teenagers applied for a job at a juice store then walked a few feet away and decided to rob a man. Petty thieves might not be the smartest, but robbing someone within walking distance of the place where you just filled a job application with your real name and address, should ring the “this is a bad idea” bell.

However, the prize for most idiotic thief goes to a San Diego man who tried applying for a position as police officer, despite the fact that he was wanted for robbery. He was caught when he walked into the police station in order to interview for the job. Displaying impressive persistence, he kept asking if he could re-apply for the position even as the cops were locking him away.

2.

Walk around with an old time sandwich boards?

Nothing says: “good employee” like walking around with a board.

Since going to interviews seemed too bothersome an unemployed toy maker decided to bring back the good old times of the depression era by standing around with a billboard on his chest. While the tactic didn’t get the man a job, blogs and news companies are milking the story for every penny bemoaning the horrible depression that forces people to sell themselves on street corners. Businessweek.com is even running a reality-like series of webepisodes where the man gets help from a professional coach. Nonetheless he is still unemployed (we don’t want to cast harsh judgments here, but maybe he should invest in some night classes instead of sitting on the street corner.)

On the bright side the same depression era tactic was used by a recent Dallas MBA graduate too lazy to write a resume, and he got a job within a day. Those damn teenagers taking our jobs again!

If anyone out there is motivated by this example and decides to go around with a billboard themselves, keep in mind that you should avoid St. Patrick parades. A man in Indianapolis tried wearing a sandwich board advertising his job experience into a crowd of drunk Irish people (because we all know drunk Irish are great employers) only to be booed and get insulting messages left on his voice mail.

3.

Just pretend you actually work there

John Gaines, a copywriter in Seattle worked on a project as a freelancer, the Monday he was supposed to finish his project he simply picked up some “important looking” papers from the trashcan and sat at an empty desk, surfing the net. If anyone asked him what the heck he was doing still there he just said he was on a secret project. The gimmick worked and the company eventually hired John for no other reason than the fact that he was around all the time.

“Of course I work here, look at all the important looking paper I have.”

To our surprise, this technique seems to work surprisingly well within any technology related job. Ron Avitzur and another programmer were working on a graphic calculator when they were laid off by Apple. Like any good worker they ignored the corporate decision and sneaking back into the office continued working on their project.

The two ignored confused co-workers and security personnel for months to come, all the time using Apple equipment to build their calculator. At one point they even convinced a crew sent to clear the offices that it was all a mistake and they were supposed to be there. Years later, Avitzur owns his own company and still makes the graphic calculators he researched in the Apple labs

The 4 Most Bizarrely Difficult Languages To Learn

So you want to learn another language. Maybe you want to travel, to expand your knowledge, or just prepare yourself for the day when the Feds track you down and you have to flee the country. Learning a new language can be a fun, enlightening and rewarding thing to do, provided you follow one easy step: avoid the languages on this list.

1.

Japanese

According to the Foreign Service Institute, part of the US Department of State, Japanese is the hardest language in the world for English speakers to learn. So put aside the anime and start learning Spanish or something.

No? Well, we warned you

Like Chinese, Japanese has a character-based alphabet. In order to read a Japanese newspaper with a good degree of understanding, you’ll have to memorize about 2000 of the little bastards.

That’s less than Chinese, at least, right? Well, except that to make up for that fact, Japanese also has two different alphabets, each with forty-six characters in them each. They’ll make you learn both of them before you can even start to think about characters. Oh, also keep in mind that the way each character sounds changes according to whether it’s on its own, in a word in front of another character, in a word behind another character, which character it’s next to, and sometimes just for the hell of it.

But that’s not even what makes Japanese difficult. It’s the goddamn grammar. Not only are there more than fifty ways to modify a verb in Japanese (in English there’s three), the adjectives are modified too. So in the English sentence “I was not sad”, the past tense is contained in ‘was’ and the negative in ‘not’. In Japanese, the same sentence (kanashikunakatta) only needs one word because the past tense and the negative form are contained in the adjective. So you need to learn eight billion conjugations even when you’re avoiding verbs.

There’s even a special form of verb to describe how freakin’ insane this picture is.

Oh, and we’re not done. Different sets of verbs, pronouns and even nouns are used in Japanese according to whether you’re talking to someone of a higher, equal or lower social status than you, and using the wrong form of speech can potentially cause great offense. As if social situations weren’t awkward enough already.

2.

Russian

English might be a notoriously hard language, but it’s got one thing going for it: for the most part, it lost its cases a long time ago. Cases are modifications to words that show how they relate to other words in the sentence. Basically, to make up for the loss of meaning that comes with caseless words, English has a very strict word order. So in these English sentences:

A dog bit Bill

And

Bill bit a dog

…the meaning is determined by which comes first, Bill or the dog. In a language with cases, these words can go in any order, because whether Bill was the biter or bitee is determined by which case is used, instead of where his name is in the sentence.

Other languages, unlike English, have retained a lot of their cases. German, for example, keeps case endings on its adjectives. So if you want to use an adjective in a German sentence, you have to determine whether it’s going before the subject or the object or the indirect object or a possessive. Doesn’t seem too hard, right? That’s just four endings to remember. But then keep in mind that German has three genders, which means three rules for every type of noun. So whenever you want to simply describe something as ‘good’ (gut) in German, you have to choose between seven endings. Now we see why Germans are so grumpy all the time.

So why isn’t German the one in this entry? Because although German kept the case endings on its adjectives and a few other types of words, it was sensible enough to drop them on most of its nouns. Not so Russian.

Teaching someone a language should be easy. You point at a book and say ‘book’ and they know the word. But when you’re learning Russian, it’s not so simple: ‘book’ can be kniga, knigu, knigy, knigoy, knig’e, or several other forms according to where it is in a sentence and whether it’s got a preposition next to it.

Another language that does this is Latin. But Russian beats out Latin here, because you have to learn a whole new alphabet in order to speak Russian:

At least you’ll be able to read this!

Also, you’re probably not likely to need to learn Latin these days unless you’re exorcising some demons at the Vatican. But before you do that, remember to brush up on your cases!