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Failblog.org.

It won two awards at the 2009 Webbies. It's from the same folks who brought you the cats with bad grammar, and the earliest entries are heavy on cats with slices of cheese on their face or otherwise cutely screwing things up. It's generally pretty funny, and is mostly about things breaking and people falling down:

It gets conservative when we get to cultures doing things differently from how we here in the U. S. of A. do things. How do we label ornamentation in a manner that would never be considered OK in the USA?

Should we spend time considering the concept of fasting or looking up the details of Ramadan before judging the poster? That would kill the joke.

You'll see below that transportation is a common theme, and some places do transportation differently from the USA, by which I mean they FAIL:

Not every entry is a photo stamped with the word FAIL. Some pics are captioned WIN--but only when they advance the conservative agenda:

Which brings up an interesting point for many of these pix: especially since it's 100% OK to ascribe personalities to animals or inanimate objects, most could be a WIN instead of a FAIL, depending on our choice of protagonist. Here's a deer WIN:

More on this in a second.

Are you a pedestrian, or at least a non-driver? That right there is a FAIL.

Once we have an automobile and smiling driver, we can bring our perspective back to the WIN in the story:

Most of us like creative solutions to life's problems, and laugh along to original solutions, but that would be change, wouldn't it. And how do we label change?

Maybe the above just did it wrong by not using enough petroleum. This guy got it right: ingenuity + internal combustion engine = Best. Evar.

Now might be a good time to mention the recently-emergent There, I fixed it, a site devoted as much as possible to people doing things like attaching a lawnmower to a bike. By not putting a judgement on the photo, you can decide for yourself whether the inventor's attempts to do something different were or were not done in wisdom.

Now and then, a human being indicates human-ness. They insert humor somewhere where it's not expected, adding a slight, easily-missed touch of levity to our daily grind. What do we call that? A FAIL:

[transl.: No, not without a washer!]

I for one am always delighted to see a sign that has some humor to it, because it's a fight against bureaucratic signs like the following, which you will note is not labeled as a FAIL:

Let me get back to the perspective issue--was it a hunter FAIL or a deer WIN? There are more perspectives than just those in the pic: there's the sign-maker or mowerbike designer, the photographer, and perhaps even captioners commenting on the photo.

All of the above signs and captions and contraptions are a WIN for the person putting forth his or her little innovation. But in the Failblog world, those out there who are trying to break out of their box instead of just plodding along in their cars doing things by the red-white-and-blue book are doing it wrong.

There are many types of humor, and in the last year or so, Failblog has shown us how easily we can slide from humor based on people falling down to humor based on the absurd to humor based on judgement of those different from ourselves.

update: Whether intentional or not, this failblog post, which appeared about 16 hours after this entry appeared, provides something of a response to the above.

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