The latest in a long line of bizarre infomercials and odd products is the Snazzy Napper. The Snazzy Napper is "the snazzy way to sleep while you travel".

As the pitch says, the Snazzy Napper makes sleeping while traveling a breeze.

Use your Snazzy Napper™ and get your much needed sleep anywhere, anytime! It's like privacy in a bag.

That's right! Privacy in a bag! If wearing a bag over your head is your idea of privacy then the Snazzy Napper is for you!

Well here's the story...

A Chinese fishmonger almost died after an eel swam into his bottom.

Li Chang was sitting on the edge of a tank at a warehouse in Guangzhou in southern China when he fell back into a container of live eels, The Sun newspaper reports.

The 43-year-old said he was horrified when he felt one swim up his trousers and into his anus.

He said he was too embarrassed to tell anyone what had happened and continued working.

But colleagues called emergency services after he collapsed.

Doctors performed a five hour surgery to remove the creature and repair the severe internal injuries caused by it moving around.

"The eel had badly injured the patient," a hospital spokesman was quoted as saying.

"If he had not arrived when he did he would have died.

Source: Nine MSN News, 4 August 2010.

After reading that I had a few questions. Exactly how relaxed was the guy when he fell into the container? Maybe it's just me, but I'm pretty sure that if I were to fall into a tank of live eels a majority of my muscles would be quite tense, to say the least. Exactly what sort of 'trousers' was this guy wearing? Was he going commando under there? The eel caused some internal injuries by "moving around", so was it still alive when it was removed?

And, as a tribute to the eel guy, here's a somewhat appropriate number by the Mighty Boosh - The eel song.

Greasy man pulled from Crown shaft

A man who crawled into the greasy depths of the Crown entertainment complex is in hospital after 11 hours trapped in an exhaust shaft that serves the complex’s restaurants.

The 25-year-old climbed into a duct about 11pm and crawled deep into the building before coming to a sticky stop in built up fat and grease extracted from numerous kitchens, Metropolitan Fire Brigade Commander Wayne Garrard said.

When I clicked through to the actual story the inner headline was not quite as vivid in its description. I took a screen shot of the link from the home page for prosperity.

My favorite quote from the story was from the Fire Brigade Commander:

‘‘It looked like a cow had just given birth,’’ Commander Garrard said, describing the state of the extracted intruder.

Like I said at the start... WTF?

However, not everyone is fortunate enough to live in a 'Masterchef' society though, as this clever little ad from Compassion Australia points out.

Preparing and enjoying good, healthy, tasty food is a wonderful thing. No wonder so many people are passionate about it! But for the 1.4 billion people in our world living on less than $1.25 a day, simply feeding themselves is a daily challenge.

People that followed Masterchef closely will probably find it more amusing than others, either way, it's all for a good cause. Check out the Challenge website here.

The new, self titled album, Stone Temple Pilots was released in Australia on 21 May 2010. Needless to say, a quick visit to JB HiFi and I was sold.

The album kicks off with the first single "Between The Lines", a rocky, up tempo little number that provides the ideal opener.

"Huckleberry Crumble" reminds me a lot of a driving 1970's classic rock song. It has got a 'Les Paul plugged straight into a Marshall' vibe and proves that sometimes simple is best.

The fourth track, "Hickory Dichotomy" takes me back to the "Tiny Music..." era. "Dare if you dare" is a dreamy, psychedelic style pop-romp that probably owes more than a little to the Beatles. The following track "Cinnamon" also shares a dreamy vibe, before "Hazy Daze" picks up the rocking pace again.

"Bagman" is another 1970's inspired track and "First kiss on Mars" seems like a massive hat tip to David Bowie.

The album sees the welcome return of the Dean DeLeo, psychedelic, wah affected guitar solo. Throughout the album Scott Weiland seems to be channelling the spirits of the 70's rock gods. For example, there were a couple of moments during the first listen where I thought I may have been listening to Bowie. In my opinion, the music and the melodies are as good as anything the band have released, either collectively or through other projects.

Whether you're a fan of STP, classic rock or just after a cracking good collection of songs, then there is a good chance that you'll like this album. For me, this is the album of the year so far. Maybe I'm just nostalgic, but I don't care, it's just good to have the Stone Temple Pilots back.

Here's the video for the first single "Between The Lines".

I guess that's why I was surprised when I logged in to my analytics today to see that the site seems to have crashed through that ceiling. In the last 30 days Swollen Pickles has received 55,665 unique visits. I decided to go back a couple of months. As it turns out November 2009 (30,459 visits) was the last time unique visits to the site were under 40,000 for the month. Since December 2009, Swollen Pickles has been averaging over 43,000 unique visits per month.

So what have I done to cause the traffic to burst through the glass ceiling? I honestly don't know. Truth be told, I've been less that active on the blogging front over the past six months. Updates have been sporadic at best. Does this mean apathy breeds success?

What are people looking at? Well, it seems the biggest camel toe in the world is a crowd pleaser, with that page receiving 120,153 page views in the past six months. In terms of keywords, "camel toe" is still a big one, with an odd mix of other keywords also popping up in the top 10 keyword list, including the very specific "why is mommy moaning book". Disturbingly, 130 people also came here looking for an "infected penis". Maybe they were really looking for this little guy?

I'm confused. At times it seems as though the posts and pages I put little - or no - effort into are the ones that receive the most attention, whilst the posts I spend time on get all but ignored. Maybe less really is more?

Dexter by Design opens with Dexter and Rita on their honeymoon in Paris. Nothing really important happens. Dexter and Rita return home. A couple of bodies turn up on a beach. Dexter is intrigued and begins his own investigation. Soon his sister Deborah, a Miami PD Officer, is also on the case. When Deborah is stabbed by a suspect and almost killed, and Dexter's new happy family is threatened, Dexter goes into protector mode, to track down the killer and deliver his own little slice of justice.

Dexter by Design was really just that, Dexter by numbers. Where as the first two novels difficult to put down, I have to say with Dexter by Design I had more trouble picking it up that putting it down.While the TV series continues to maintain the edge that drew me in to the character initially, the books seem to have grown a little tired.

It's hard to talk about Dexter by Design without acknowledging it's predecessor, "Dexter in the Dark". My problem with Dexter in the Dark was that Lindsay attempted to explain why Dexter is what he is, and the explanation was way out of left field. You see, in the third book, Lindsay introduced 'super natural' elements to explain Dexter's nature.There was a lot of talk about demons, a cult and the suggestion that Dexter was being controlled by a demon. My problem with Dexter by Design is that it carries on as if the events of the third book never happened. It's like the third book was "all just a dream". Maybe this is Lindsay's way of saying that the third book was a mistake? Maybe it was just a dream? I don't know, either way, not addressing it at all seemed a little dodgy.

Maybe it was just me, but I found that Dexter by Design was missing a little of the twisted humor that popped up in the first two novels. One of the strengths of the first two books was discovering how Dexter observed the world around him and I found that to be missing a little in Dexter by Design.

Dexter by Design is definitely not a 'must read'. If you're a hardcore Dexter fan, you'll probably want to give it a look. If you're just a lover of good books however, stick to the first two Dexter novels and give this a miss.

A friend of mine emailed me the image below (no idea where it originated from*). Hosting a dinner party? Then this little trick could be just what you need to spark things up a little.

* Edit: According to a good reader, Tay, it was originally in Wired magazine.

Kick-Ass tells the story of Dave Lizewski, a teenage who one day decides that he wants to become a real life superhero. Unfortunately for Dave, he has no super power to speak of, which really puts him behind the eight ball in the crime fighting department. In his first attempt at crime fighting, Dave/Kick-Ass is stabbed and hit by a car, ending in an extended stay in hospital. While the trauma results in him having some nerve damage, and slightly reduced sensitivity to pain, he's still not exactly super hero material. Undeterred, he heads back out to fight crime, this time fending off three muggers. These events are filmed by onlookers, which result in Kick-Ass becoming a YouTube sensation.

Dave quickly sets up a MySpace page and begins taking requests from people who need the help of Kick-Ass. However, Dave soon learns that he is not the only superhero in town. Big Daddy - a former cop played by the slightly creepy Nicholas Cage -- and his 11 year old daughter Hit-Girl, are on the trail of crime king pin Frank D'Amico. Kick-Ass crosses paths with Big Daddy and Hit-Girl, only to become embroiled in their plan to bring down D'Amico. When D'Amico wrongly believes that Kick-Ass is responsible for the hits his crime empire has taken, Dave finds himself in some hot super hero water, that he may not get out of... or he might... I'm just to build some suspense and not give the plot away.

While at times Kick-Ass -- the movie now, not the character -- seems to be lampooning the comic book/superhero genre, I was never quite sure whether I was watching a piss take on the superhero movie or watching a superhero movie that takes the piss out of itself. I think I've settled on the former. Kick-Ass is a super hero movie that doesn't take itself super seriously.

Kick-Ass stirred up a little controversy, in Australia at least, due to some "offensive language" and violence. Most of the controversy stemmed from the fact that a majority of the swearing and violence was committed by an 11 year old girl. Yes, there is swearing, yes, there is violence. However, if you've been to the movies in the last five years there is probably nothing in Kick-Ass that you wont have seen or heard before.

All in all, Kick-Ass was an enjoyable popcorn flick. It sits half way between comedy and action movie. There are enough laughs to keep things chugging along, but just when you think you're watching a comedy, something serious and/or sinister happens. It wasn't quite the film I had hoped for, but it wasn't a dog either. I'd give it 3.5 out of 5.

I set up a 'feature' section to highlight some of the lengthier and, perhaps, more worthwhile posts. I also included a 'top 5 most popular posts' section that drags the top five posts as flagged by the Popularity Contest plugin. Perhaps it says a lot about this sites readership, but currently the top 5 posts are all camel toe related. Should I laugh or cry?

One of the bugs I'm trying to fix, but am currently a little clueless about, is incorporating the 'threaded comments' feature that is now a standard part of WordPress. From what I can tell, the threaded comments function is working, it's the styling (CSS) that is letting it down.

As part of this theme I also wanted to play around with Twitter, not because I find Twitter all that useful, but just so I could understand how to integrate it within a website. It seems like all the cool kids are incorporating Twitter into their blogs so I thought I'd have a crack at it myself and see if I could get something going that didn't rely on a plugin. As you can see, if you scroll to the footer, I got it working. My only issue with it now is that when there are long URLs in the 'tweet' is forces the tweet to break it's bounding 'speech bubble'. Not sure how to overcome this. The easy (cop out) solution would be not to post long URLs in tweets, but I'm sure there's another way...

So if you spot any bugs, have any ideas on how to fix anything that appears broken, or even just styling suggestions on how to make this whole beast look a little more aesthetically pleasing, I'd be happy to see people post them here.