Pirates who attacked a ship off the coast of Somalia got more than they bargained for when it turned out to be a naval vessel - from an international force against piracy, Nato said.

The pirates apparently mistook the FGS Spessart for a commercial merchant ship when they targeted it in the Gulf of Aden, between Somalia and Yemen.

(via The Daily Express)

It’s not a new idea, but it would be nice if they sent a few more merchant-ish naval vessels into the area, to thin the herd.

Reina says, “You can call yourself an artist all you want, shutterbug; the bikini stays on.”

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We’re planning a bad-movie marathon for some upcoming weekend. I’ve already acquired DVDs of some of my more memorable college rentals (in particular, Video Vixens and The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik Yak)), but our planning reminded me of two others that weren’t available last time I checked:

…and now they’re mine!

Also overpriced and underpowered, but isn’t that always the way for sexy young things?

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The oddly-named band Bump of Chicken has had a number of hits in Japan, with their songs being used in commercials, games, anime, and, of course, my reading class. Not all of it is to my taste, but I liked the latest one enough to pick up the album last time I was in Kinokuniya.

The designer was an asshole. The front, back, and spine are snow white, with lightly embossed text. Until you get it out of the shrink-wrap, it’s almost impossible to tell that there is text on the cover, much less figure out what it says.

But the fun doesn’t end there. A while back, I complained about the moron who decided to print the liner notes for Aya Matsuura’s latest album in 6-point gothic kanji, including one illegible song that had white text on a light-gray, color-halftoned background. The halftoning made sure that you couldn’t even scan it and blow it up to a reasonable size; the text just disappeared into the dots.

The person responsible for the liner notes in Present from you avoided the halftone trap by printing the lyrics on a nice, clean white background. In 6-point metallic silver ink. Unless you’re under carefully-diffused lighting, you can’t even get an entire line of text to show up clearly at the same time, and the eyestrain from reading 6-point reflective type is insane.

The only good news is that metallic silver is a spot ink, not a process color, so if my scanner can cope with the reflections, I can blow it up to a decent size and hack the contrast into something legible.

Reading Sayumi‘s mind, I hear: Mommy, please let me come home. I don’t like it here any more. I promise I’ll finish school and clean up after my pets and marry a nice salaryman, just pleasepleaseplease get me out of this contract.

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What moron decided that browsing the iTunes Store should involve a “svipp” sound every time a new page loads or you switch tabs? Including the act of leaving the store to go back to your music?

[Update: …and as mysteriously as it arrived, the sound has gone away again…]

Fans of Japanese music often scour the net looking for printed lyrics. Many of the sites that host them “protect” their content from being reprinted elsewhere, usually with lame Javascript hacks.

The oft-reviled uta-net.com goes high-tech, wrapping lyrics in a Flash app. I’d never looked into the specifics of their method, because everything I was looking for was available somewhere else, but today I had a song from 1968 that was obscure enough that they were the best choice.

I’m a fairly clever fellow, says I, so surely I can use one of the many free SWF-decoding tools to crack this open, even if it’s compressed and obfuscated. So I downloaded the Flash-encoded lyrics, and, just on a whim, opened them up as a text file. I found this: