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This year at SXSW, there will be a special screening of the upcoming film by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, Grindhouse. A month ago, SXSW put out a call to film makers to submit a mock trailer of a fictitious exploitation movie. Rodriguez will review all of the submissions, and the top trailer will open up at this special presentation of Grindhouse.

For the layman, an exploitation film is generally characterized as a movie featuring excessive sex, drugs and violence. Think El Mariachi and Sin City, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Anyway, my buddy Nate got together with some of his co-workers from Superfad and pulled some long nights these past few weeks producing their submission for this contest.

Titled Maiden of Death, it hints at a plot involving a young punk rocker who’s brutally raped and murdered. Making a deal with the Devil, she returns to life as an avenging angel wielding a shotgun/chainsaw Gibson. At one point the maiden cuts a car in half with her guitar and the final shot shows her pounding out a power ballad on top of a mound of corpses.

Its completely over the top, and its one of the best Grindhouse trailers posted to YouTube. Enjoy!

Apparently, all of those super tough interview questions that Google has become infamous for aren’t used when screening designers.

Google always updates the logo on the homepage based on certain holidays. This Valentine’s Day was no exception. Sure enough, when I pulled up their site, the “g” is a chocolate covered strawberry.

But as TechCrunch points out, there’s something amiss. Take a look for yourself:

Maybe its Adobe’s fault for not having a more robust spell checker in Photoshop?

Update: Not to point fingers, but it looks like the typo falls squarely on the shoulders of Dennis Hwang.

Update: I owe Dennis an apology - it turns out that the lack of an “l” was completely intentional.  Most likely, its a reference to a particular line of poetry, “I did but see her passing by, yet I love her till I die.” by Barnabe Googe.

Ever taken or given out your phone number to someone at a bar, only to seriously regret it the next day? If you have, then no doubt you’re familiar with the beer goggle effect.

I first encountered beer goggles my freshman year at Penn. However, I’ve never seen it quantified like this. In a nutshell, a group of researchers at the University of Manchester have actually developed a formula for calculating the beer goggle effect.

The equation is straightforward enough, so I went ahead and put together a simple spreadsheet to help you determine what your beer goggle effect is on a normal Friday night.

As for myself, I figure on an average night out, I get minimal beer goggles with a rating of 10.0.

I’ve mellowed out since college, and tend to hang out at dive bars, having maybe 4 beers total. Smokiness is not a factor, since smoking indoors has been banned in Seattle. Most dive bars are relatively dark, so I set that parameter at 35. My vision is pretty bad - even with contacts I’d rate myself at 0.9, and 3 meters seems like as good a distance as any to check someone out.

What rating did you end up with?