Porn parodies of Oscar-winning movies

In honor of the Academy Awards tonight, here’s a list of funny porn parody titles for Oscar-winning movies.

Actual porn parodies of Oscar-winning movies (and the titles they mock):

A Beautiful Behind (A Beautiful Mind)
American Booty (American Beauty)
Backside to the Future (Back to the Future)
Bitanic (Titanic)
Breast Side Story (West Side Story)
Bust Side Story (West Side Story)
Dances with Foxes (Dances with Wolves)
Diddle Her on the Roof (Fiddler on the Roof)
Dun-Her (Ben-Hur)
Forrest Hump (Forrest Gump)
Good Will Humping (Good Will Hunting)
My Bare Lady (My Fair Lady)
No Country for Old MILFs (No Country for Old Men)
On Golden Blonde (On Golden Pond)
Pump Fiction (Pulp Fiction)
Riding Miss Daisy (Driving Miss Daisy)
Saving Ryan’s Privates (Saving Private Ryan)
Whore of the Rings (The Lord of the Rings)

Phone books deserve to die

Who still uses phone books? Seriously.
Maybe older people still like the yellow pages and the white pages. But anyone younger than 50 has no use for them. When most people need the phone number of a business or person, they go online and search for it.
And yet new phone books keep getting printed year after year. Apparently there’s still advertising money to be made from those living fossils.
I’ve written about the pointlessness of phone books twice before, in 2009 and 2011. I guess every two years it really bugs me that they still exist.
It’s only a matter of time before phone books stop being printed. The sooner the better for the environment.
You can request that directory companies stop sending you phone books at the National Yellow Pages Consumer Choice & Opt-Out Site.

Related reading: 

Remember phone books? (Spine Out; Oct. 11, 2010)

Old Telephone Books: Possibly the world’s largest online collection of phone books.

Photos: Pile of phone books by Mental Floss; creative use of phone books from CollegeHumor.com.

Business cards becoming passe, replaced by LinkedIn

In years past, a business card was the best way to give someone your professional contact information.
But business cards quickly become dated. People change jobs, job titles, mailing addresses, phone numbers and e-mail addresses.
Online businesses like Plaxo cropped up to store business card information and try to keep it updated. But they were supplanted by LinkedIn, which now leads the space. LinkedIn gives people a way to maintain their own professional face online with a lot more information than business cards can hold.
Business cards haven’t completely gone away, but the trend is clear. The next step is for people to hand out business cards that have only their names and LinkedIn addresses.
The demise of business cards will turn the paper IDs into collector’s items. Some old business cards from famous people already are. I’ve included a few here, including the first business card of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, up top. Below are cards from Albert Einstein, Apple’s Steve Jobs, Google’s Larry Page and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey.

Websites for business cards of famous people:

Business Cards of 10 Famous People (Stock Logos; Sept. 5, 2011)

Business cards for Charles Lindbergh, John D. Rockefeller and Howard Hughes. (CharlesLindbergh.com; Feb. 1, 2002)

5 Business Cards That Changed the World (PsPrint; June 16, 2010)

Abraham Lincoln’s business card (America’s Library)

The Business Cards of Tech Giants (NextDayFlyers; Feb. 25, 2011)

First business card for Twitter creator and Square founder (Twitter; Jan. 25, 2012)

U.S. needs to stop printing $1 bills

The main reason $1 U.S. coins have failed is because the federal government hasn’t had the will to stop printing one-dollar bills.
Given a choice, most Americans will stick with what they know. One-dollar coins seem strange, but people would get used to them if that was their only option. Instead, they cling to their one-dollar paper currency.
The inability to make the tough decisions is perhaps the U.S. government’s biggest failing. Occasionally the federal government needs to take a hard stand on common sense issues, like it eventually did with the analog-to-digital TV transition. If they had more backbone, we’d be on the metric system like the rest of the world.
As recently as last November, Congress was considering whether to eliminate the $1 bill. Doing so could save taxpayers $4.4 billion over the next 30 years, the AP reported.
A $1 coin can stay in circulation for 30 years, while paper bills must be replaced every four or five years on average, the AP said.
The federal government needs to buckle down and make the change.

Related reading:
Wikipedia entry on United States one-dollar bill.

Photo: U.S. $1 bill by Wikimedia Commons. 

Time is running out for the U.S. penny

Americans are finally realizing that it no longer makes sense for the U.S. to make pennies.
The cost to manufacture a penny is double its monetary worth. Common sense dictates that the U.S. should discontinue the penny. But sentimentalists are clinging to the idea of the penny and could prolong its life. But they’re delaying the inevitable.
During a Google+ Hangout interview on Feb. 14, the most popular question posed to President Barack Obama was why the U.S. has not stopped making pennies, according to Townhall.com.
“I don’t know,” he said. “This is not going to be a huge savings for government, but any time we’re spending money on something people aren’t going to use, it’s not necessary.” Obama said. But Americans might be too attached to pennies, he said.
Cutting the penny out of U.S. currency would save the government $100 million over a decade. The cost to mint a penny is 2 cents, as of 2012.
The public policy website PolicyMic has a good list of pros and cons for eliminating the penny. The arguments for getting rid of the one-cent coin greatly outweigh the arguments in favor of keeping it.
In short, pennies are a waste of resources, a drag on productivity and a hazard to children and pets if swallowed.
The only entities that benefit from the existence of pennies are metal producers and Coinstar, which makes a business of redeeming pennies and other coins.
Some businesses already have stopped taking pennies or opted to round bills to the nearest nickel. They include some outlets of Chipotle Mexican Grill (see New York Times and NJ.com articles) and Dunkin’ Donuts (see article by Minyanville).
U.S. businesses and governments still will account for cents, only the penny would go away. You’ll still see odd-number cents show up on your statements and for electronic payments and those cents can add up. But with financial transactions going increasingly to electronic payment options, the penny is becoming irrelevant.

Related reading: Wikipedia entry on the U.S. penny.

Photo: Pennies from Wikimedia Commons.

The 12 best LFL players

The official blog of the LFL women’s football league recently posted a list of the best players in the Legends Football League, formerly the Lingerie Football League. Unfortunately they didn’t include any photos or weblinks. I’m here to rectify that.
LFL 360 picked three quarterbacks, three wide receivers, three running backs and three defensive players for its best players list.

Best quarterbacks

Ashley Salerno of the Los Angeles Temptation

• Ashley Salerno LFL fan page on Facebook 

Nikki Johnson of the Las Vegas Sin

• Nikki Johnson on Facebook 
• Nikki Johnson LFL fan page on Facebook 
• Nikki Johnson on Twitter 

Anne Erler of the Green Bay Chill

• Anne Erler LFL fan page on Facebook

Best wide receivers

Jessica Hopkins of the Seattle Mist

• Jessica Hopkins on Facebook

Melissa Margulies of the Los Angeles Temptation

• Melissa Margulies on Facebook 
• Melissa Margulies on Twitter 

Theresa Petruziello of the Cleveland Crush

• Theresa Petruziello on Facebook 
• Theresa Petruziello LFL fan page on Facebook 

Best running backs

Marirose Roach of the Philadelphia Passion

• Marirose Roach on Facebook
• Marirose Roach on Twitter

Tamar Fennell of the Cleveland Crush

ChrisDell Harris of the Chicago Bliss

• ChrisDell Harris on Twitter 

Best defensive players 

Liz Gorman, who played last season with the Tampa Breeze and is currently a free agent. (See top photo.)

Lauran Ziegler, who played last season with the Orlando Fantasy. LFL 360 lists her as now playing for the Jacksonville Breeze.

• Lauran Ziegler on Facebook 

Shanae’ Thomas, who played last season for the Philadelphia Passion. LFL 360 lists her as now playing for the Atlanta Steam.

• Shanae’ Thomas on Twitter 

Mail boxes, stamp collecting threatened by Post Office demise

The eventual extinction of the Post Office threatens a lot of things. Some of those things already are moving to digital alternatives, such as personal letters and cards, bills, magazines and catalogs.
Other things will become museum pieces and anachronisms.
Here’s a list of 10 things that will go away or be dramatically changed by the end of the U.S. Postal Service:

Mail collection boxes

When the U.S. Postal Service inevitably recedes from the American way of life, so will those ubiquitous blue metal mail collection boxes on street corners.

U.S. Mail trucks

Also going bye-bye will be those cute white U.S. Mail trucks with blue and red trim.

‘Mailbox baseball’

Gradually homes won’t need mail boxes either. So vandals who like to play “mailbox baseball” will have to find a new target for their aggression.

Stamp collecting

Stamp collecting will continue, but as a rich person’s hobby, not as a pastime for average Americans. Children won’t be starting new collections because there won’t be any new stamps produced. And artists won’t have the Postal Service as an outlet for their work.

Postcards

When the Post Office goes away, so will postcards. Picture postcards from vacation spots like Las Vegas, Hollywood, Miami and New York City will become simply collector’s items.

The expression ‘going postal’

Someday we’ll have to explain to our kids what the expression “going postal” means. Maybe some other location will get a reputation for workplace violence and get its own expression.

Computer icons of letter envelopes and mail boxes

In the near future, it won’t make sense to use icons like letter envelopes and mail boxes for email programs. They will make about as much sense as using an LP record player as an icon for music application.

Netflix DVDs by mail

Netflix sees the writing on the wall. It knows that the future of its business is in streaming video, not DVDs by mail. It has stopped advertising its U.S.-only DVD service in favor of streaming. The number of DVD subscribers has plummeted in the last two years. Changes at the post office, such as stopping Saturday delivery and raising postage prices, will only accelerate this decline.

Letter-sized envelopes

If people no longer send letters, there can’t be much of a market for letter-sized envelopes.

Post Offices as objects of civic pride

Getting a post office in your small town used to be a sign that your village had arrived. Soon many of those rural post offices will be shut down to save money.

Photos: U.S. Mail truck from Wikimedia Commons; U.S. Postal Service mail boxes from Wikimedia Commons; Stamp collecting stamp photo from Encyclopedia Britannica Blog; Netflix mail envelopes from Netflix PR.