With all the billions of dollars that pour into the Olympics, you'd think that the least the host committee could do would be to come up with a decent mascot. But no! In a classic case of overthinking something into oblivion, cities obsess over the stupid mascots for years, until they create some sort of awful mutant-by-committee. This year is no different: the WSJ reports that the Beijing mascot (five assorted weird animal-like creatures, pictured) is disliked even by the artist who created them. Throughout the 70s and 80s, mascots were fairly normal: a tiger, an eagle, a bear, a beaver, a gay dachsund. But in 1992 abstraction took over, and the whole enterprise went off the rails. After the jump, pictures of the Olympic mascots from '92 onwards. They suck:

CONFONZ — That damn Monster is still outside your house, peeking in the windows. Every once in a while, it knocks on the window and quietly suggests that you need a new job. Well, it seems as though that Monster's got its own window knockers, and they're carrying cash. Earlier this week, the dot com's stock price leapt up like frogs in a dynamite pond. All over rumors of an impending buyer. After the jump, we look at the most recent round of rumored ruffian buyers.
As if it weren't bad enough to work for a company's who's mascot has some strange trumpet-based nose, now the poor folks who run this fairly successful site have to worry that they're going to be snarfed up by the Tribune (Note the Favicon defaults to a Sun logo...) company, or worse yet McClatchy. Both of these newspaper companies are desperately poor, thanks to years of losing marketshare to Craigslist, of all places, and the mind boggles at just how, in fact, a company that's biggest paper is the Miami Herald could afford to buy such a successful startup.
Of course, the real sexy buyout rumor is, surprise! Google. Just imagine how excited all those vets working at Military.com will be when their shares get swapped for 10 times their current value! Of course, rumors of Google buying Monster are vastly overstated. In all actuality, it's far more likely that Gannett will end up the buyer. It's another newspaper company, but at least it already owns web properties, namely, Careerbuilder.com.

Andy Smith tells me that Cal Henderson fairy domains are a tradition. Thus: [AsifCalneededanotherdomain.com]
Watson contextual search (a search that checks out what you're working on) looks pretty rockin'. But dudes, why are you slumming around with this Job for Jeeves campaign? It's more desperate than the Petsmart puppet. [A Job for Jeeves]
Dude, never try to out-cool Steve Jobs. Intel tries to one-up Apple's six-button remote with a voice-recognition remote, but the demo turns into a little one-man shouting match. [Bit-Tech.net]
A Google hiccup shakes up the Internets, and keeps us from data-mining SiliconBeat. [SiliconBeat]
Note to self: When approaching VC Fred Wilson for startup funding, rent your offices by the hour. [A VC