Movie Review: Paranormal

Friday night I went to see the movie "Paranormal Activity" by myself. I'd never heard of this movie until I looked at the movie listings for the weekend before. Always on the lookout for a GOOD horror movie I found a trailer.

My first reaction: This looks like it's actually scary.
My second reaction: Yummy can't go see this.

Since Yummy wasn't coming over Friday night I went. I was not disappointed.

I should tell you what I look for in horror movies. "Halloween", "Friday the 13th", "Nightmare on Elm Street", "Saw", these movies are crap. "The Ring", "The Others", things that are actually suspenseful and generate fear instead of nausea from the gore or quick and easy scares from things jumping at you, that's what I want in a horror movie.

A good way to judge a scary movie is from the amount of talking during the movie. People talk more when they get scared. It's a defense reaction. There was a lot of talking during this movie.

An engaged to be engaged couple move in together. Soon after strange things start to happen. She explains that she's haunted. It comes and goes. In the 3 years they've been dating it's been away. Now it's back. The boyfriend buys a video camera to watch the house for strange activity in order to prove there's something strange going on and it's not their imagination.

That's where our movie starts. He's running the camera as she comes home.

The story gets spelled out fairly well. We meet the players, tour the house, hear her story, then the camera gets set up in the bedroom and things start to happen. Long, but not too long, shots from the camera on a tripod build suspense as the viewer tries to watch the whole screen at once for a moving shadow or a flutter of the curtain. Little things at first. Deep thumping sounds at two in the morning. A door that moves by itself. Before long... well, it's a haunted house.

I highly recommend this movie, but I recommend even more watching it in small groups.

Friday links: Oct 16

New nuclear based battery technology. Allegedly safe. Could run for hundreds of years. [link]

A letter from Albert Einstein to the author of 'Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt'. The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. [link]

Pics of 1980 Barack Obama. [link]

Improve Everywhere's massive pack of invisible dogs. [link]

Art made with dead flies. [link]

Good news. Alien races couldn't be more than 1.8 billion years more advanced than us. [link]

Lunatic comments about crashing things into the Moon. [link]

NASA trained 13 women for the Mercury missions in the '60. [link]

Best memo ever. A memo from Matt Stone to the MPAA about some changes to the South Park movie. [link]

NASA's videos of the LCROSS lunar crash.
You don't see the primary impact and follow the probe with the camera right to the end. If you know of a better video, please let me know.

Republican Senator Dr. Bill Frist is right and Bill Maher wrong... on the subject of vaccines.

Dog risks life to safe another dog.

5 Catholic churches closing due to a lack of funds. [link]

The Fun Theory: Turn the stairs into piano keys and more people will take the stairs.

2 year old with genius level IQ. [link]

Smithsonian opening a human origins display in the National Museum of Natural History in March. [link]

7 minute talk about the benefits of vaccines.

Things Barack Obama has made unAmerican. [link]

Al Franken proposes a bill that allows employees of KBR/Haliburton to prosecute when their fellow employees gang rape them. And yet, a bunch of Republicans voted against it.

Wow. Check out this synchronized multi-image projection discussing advanced non-groking jargon speak.

Favorite links from the archives 2

10 more favorite links from my e-mail archives.

I don't care what you say, the research shows that women want tall men. Or, failing that, rich. [link]

"Boot to the Head" with animation. [link]

The Unicorn Museum. Unicorns are mentioned 9 times in the Bible so they must be real. This museum is about them. [link]

Game: Building Houses 2 - a geometry game where you build a shape in 3D space according to how it looks from the top, front, and right side using the least number of pieces. [link]

How to deal with abusive customer service: [link]

Game: How Well Do You Know Your World - click as close to a city or landmark you as you can. [link]

Duct tape used for quick repairs even on the moon. [link]

Fluid that changes color under different magnetic fields. [link]

Google Maps: the movie
Check out the 4 sequels, too.

Go to google.com
Enter "Find Chuck Norris"
Hit I'm Feeling Lucky

Book Review: Mordred

I picked up "Mordred" by Nancy Springer at a library sale. I'm glad I didn't pay for it. That's all the review you really need, but I'll go on.

Mordred is the son that King Arthur had with the sister he didn't know about. He's also the guy who delivers the near fatal blow to Arthur in the big blowout that wipes out pretty much everyone associated with Camelot. This book intrigued me because it's supposed to tell his side of the story. And it does. It's just not very interesting or engaging.

It tells of Merlin's prophecy of how Mordred would kill Arthur, how Mordred was found in a basket in a river and raised for several years by a fisherman and his wife, was discovered and brought to be raised by a rebel king, became a knight of the Round Table, spent his life fighting the assumption that he's evil because he was born of incest, sought the word "son" from Arthur, and tried to battle against what everyone said was his fate.

The book ends rather suddenly when Mordred gives his soul to the one person he trusts, King Arthur, so that he can stop feeling the pain of his life and just accept that he must one day kill Arthur.

It has promise as a story. If they make a Camelot TV series with several seasons to work with it might be worth an episode or two. But this author was not the one to tell this story.

Mah shows

Awhile back I announced the fall TV season schedule. I've been adding links to that page to make it easier to watch online. Alas, if you don't have to follow the schedule you forget when the shows air and get all mixed up. So I'm subjecting you to my new and improved list.

This is when the stuff is supposed to come online, not when it airs.

Monday
The Simpsons (Fox), 8:00 PM/ET [link]
The Cleveland Show (Fox), 8:30 PM/ET [link]
Family Guy (Fox), 9:00 PM/ET [link]
American Dad (Fox), 9:30 PM/ET [link]

Tuesday
Heroes (NBC), 8:00 PM/ET [link]

Wednesday

Thursday
Eastwick (ABC), 10:00 PM/ET [link]

Friday
Flash Forward (ABC), 8:00 PM/ET [link]
Supernatural (The CW), 9:00 PM/ET [link]
Fringe (Fox), 9:00 PM/ET [link]

Saturday
Smallville (The CW), 8:00 PM/ET [link]
Dollhouse (Fox), 9:00 PM/ET [link]
Stargate Universe (SyFy), 9:00 PM/ET [link]

Sunday

Friday links: October 9

I've got a whole lot more open tabs in my browser that I haven't gotten to. This is more than sufficient.

Can you tell Helvetica from Ariel? Prove it. I got 18 out of 20. [link]

Making shelves from shelf mushrooms. [link]

Dark Horse comics' ghost stories for animals available online. [link]

Paper airplane plans. [link 1 link 2]

Complete Bloom County comic collection coming. [link]

Along those same lines, what happened to Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes. [link]

My neighbor has an awesome new bike. [link]

Speakers inside these boxes vibrate. The differing air pressure makes the spoons dance and sing.

Network of satellites designed to detect ripples in space is ready to go. [link]

An urn made from a Sparc workstation. [link]

Good way to break a camera lens. Take a picture of a Delta 4-Heavy rocket launch[link]

Superhero drinks. [link]

A comic to stuff in business return envelopes. [link]

Weirdest cafe ever. [link]

Cat that messes with it's owner. [link]

App that changes sketches into photos by automatically Photoshopping images off the internet. Just watch the video. [link]

Telomeres are a protective cap on the end of chromosomes. Kinda like aglets on the end of your shoe laces. But as the chromosomes divide the telomeres get shorter and shorter. Shortening telomeres is thought to be one of the reasons we age. It may also be why Dolly, the cloned sheep, died young. Since she was a clone her telomeres were the age of the donor. Anyway, the people who discovered telomeres won a Nobel Prize this year. [link]

I saw a guy in Paul Simon's band playing one of these many years ago. It's based on the same principles that make wine glasses sing. But the glass is leaded so musicians who play these have to get their blood checked regularly.

Years ago Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine traveled the world looking for endangered animals. They made a radio program for the BBC and wrote a book, both called "Last Chance to See". I highly recommend the audio book.
Now Stephen Fry and Mark Carwardine have done a TV program by the same name. In this video you see an endangered parrot called a kakapo try to mate with Mark's head.


Game: Blob Wars [link]

You Doctor Who fans know who K9 is. Companion to The 4th Doctor and gift to Sarah Jane (and a few others). Apparently the character, but not the look, belong to a former Dr. Who writer. And he's permitting the character to be used in a new Australian show. Since the BBC owns the look they had to redesign him. Follow the link to see the trailer for the new show. [link]

Disney's version of the Wilhelm Scream. [link]

Golden Age of Video.

Afghanistan

I generally try to avoid political topics (religious topics are a different matter) but today I want to rant about the war in Afghanistan.

You all know what happened on September 11, 2001. Heck, the anniversary just passed was the first one where I wasn't greeted in the morning with "The weather on this, the Nth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, will be..." That was the day that a group of people lacking the technological sophistication to change a light bulb (no, seriously) were declared tactical geniuses who masterminded a scheme to hijack three planes at the same time. For a couple of days the media and government went on about how brilliant these people were while I yelled back at the TV that it could have been The Trenchcoat Mafia for all the skill it'd take to pull this off.

Almost immediately we started hearing from the White House and from Fox News that it must have been the henchmen of Saddam Hussein. They had no actual evidence, then or ever, but they repeated this lie all the same. Eventually, actual intelligence agencies leaked the truth. The terrorists were mostly Saudi Arabian born and raised people who were operating out of Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban.

You may recall that back in the 80's the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and were met with resistance. We sent money, arms, and training to help support the native insurrection. With time they won and drove the Soviets out. We immediately turned our backs on Afghanistan. Billions in arms, but not a dime to help build a school or dig a clean well. It fell into chaos and was eventually pulled out by the Muslim fundamentalist group known as The Taliban. They banned TV and radio. They banned kites. They made women wear burkas and forbade them holding jobs or going to school. They blew up giant Buddhist statues since graven images violate Islamic law. Bush even gave them a few billion dollars to eliminate the opium production. Which, to their credit, they did.

There had been other calls to go to war with Afghanistan. Mostly by women's rights groups. Some from archeology buffs. But no matter how much we did (or didn't) want to invade we had one huge problem - Afghanistan is land locked. We'd have to have permission to fly through someone's air space or use their country as a military base. We couldn't get that for the lame reasons we had.

Meanwhile, back in 2001, The public raised enough of a stink that the government was forced to launch an invasion of Afghanistan. The government didn't want to, but they had little choice. And what AlQaeda had done was awful enough that there wasn't a country in the world that was gonna deny us our war. Most of the world offered up their own military to help us. So we launched a rather puny war that was won in short order.

All this time the Bush Administration was beating the drums of war for Iraq. They were no kind of threat. They hadn't done anything against us that was close to war worthy in... well, ever. But George wanted to prove something to his daddy. Daddy was former head of the CIA, a war hero, a Yale graduate, former Vice-President, and a legitimately elected President. Surely a coke addled, "recovering" alcoholic, Texas public college reject, draft dodger, and deserter who proved repeatedly that he couldn't find oil in Texas or win an election without the Supreme Court canceling the vote counting MUST know more about foreign affairs than a man like that.

Anyone paying attention knew that every claim was a complete fiction, but facts have little place when people are angry. George Jr got his war. And George learned the hard way that everything his father knew was spot on. Daddy knew what would happen if Saddam fell. So did every military strategist in the Pentagon. Donald Rumsfeld's name was used as the punchline of jokes around there.

So, we had a full commitment to a war in which there were no good guys and we were one in a long line of bad guys.

And, we had a slack ass commitment to a war in which we were unquestionably the good guys.

In one war we were seen as the occupying army who destroyed the economy, the power grid, the roads, the buildings, etc. We proved that Osama Bin Laden was right about everything he said about America. He predicted it all and was right. Saddam had kept out Al Qaeda. He was brutal about it. Any sign of terrorism in Iraq was met with nerve gas or worse. But it was peaceful and reasonably prosperous if you're not a religious extremists.

In the other war we were seen as the liberating heroes. They knew what oppression was really about. They may not like America as a concept, but as a liberating force we were awesome and welcome. Schools opened. Women could choose their wardrobe and walk unescorted once again. TVs and radios were pulled from their hiding places under the floorboards (again, really). And kites flew once more.

But, our interest was elsewhere. People who had flocked to the Army in the hundreds to fight the terrorist threat were pulled and sent to occupy Iraq. Their service was rewarded with brand new titanium limbs and/or brain damage. On the plus side, most of the Taliban and AlQaeda fighters in Afghanistan had gone to Iraq, too.

In Afghanistan we were trying to rebuild, but having trouble. Every time we announced a new school had been opened it was blown up. Poppy crops returned in strength. How well they do depends on how much of the irrigation system is controlled by the government. We rebuilt highways that hadn't seen a road crew since the 70's. Those roads are now filled with Taliban and AlQaeda checkpoints that shake down the people traveling those roads. We've eliminated most of AlQaeda in Afghanistan. Largely because they're in Pakistan now. Most of the fighting in the country is against the remnants of the Taliban.

What I'm saying is that the Taliban took control because we abandoned them in the first place. The existing government can't stand on it's own. It's propped up by the few remaining foreign military forces. If we leave the Taliban will move back in with AlQaeda right behind them. And we won't be able to get back in.

This is the war we should have been fighting for the last eight years. It's only going this poorly because we haven't been fighting it. We need to stay. We need to fight this war like we actually want, if not peace and prosperity for these people, to avoid a new den of terrorists.

Exerpts from old conversations - part 3

I'm running very low on my collection of throw away posts.

More great lines from old e-mails.

McDonalds and Burger King? Their stuff tastes like sin. They taste like Dorian Grey's portrait looks. Jesus died to forgive hamburgers like that. Then his brothers and sisters died when Jesus wasn't enough. His cousins got smacked around a bit, too.


ME: So where in the human body is the En Gland located?
WS: Behind the En Garde.


The Mexican and Jap are natural enemies unless raised together from cubs. If you take one of each from their natural habitat and put them in a jar and shake it they'll almost always fight.


Is there anything quite as odd as pulling down your pants on that first day you're wearing new underwear?
"HOLY CRA... oh, right."


ME: I've got a stabbing headache. You know, the kind where you want to stab the next person who comes to you to fix their moronic fuckups.
JW: Well, I'm feeling punchy today so don't do anything to make me punch you.


The creepy voice telling you to "GET OUT!" is that of the building inspector.


I was thinking, we should have a rollout party for the [new textbook]. I want to get a cake shaped like a champagne bottle. That way we can say "Here, [cow-irker], you get the bottleneck."


Wimbledon: It may be the most exciting tennis of the year, but it's still tennis.


There's nothing like mom's apple pie... unless your mother's a tribal Mongolian, at which point there's nothing like mom's yak spleen casserole.

Movie Review: Zombieland

"Zombieland" opened this past weekend. It's the latest zombie movie and it's a comedy. It's not like "Shawn of the Dead" which was a romantic/zombie/comedy. Ok, I guess that "Zombieland" would technically fall under the same classification, but it's not the same.

"Shawn" was terribly British.
"Zombieland" is terribly Fratish.

By this I mean that we sat down and felt the atmosphere of a frat house settle around us as the seats filled. Lots of college aged males coming in groups and talking loudly. From what I'd seen of the trailers this seemed appropriate. As the movie progressed it seemed even more appropriate.

The movie starts with your basic zombie movie premise. The dead have risen and killed off most of the population... who then rose from the dead to help kill off the population. The main character and narrator is an unlikely survivor. He's a video game playing recluse with a long list of rules that he explains to us as the movie goes on. He meets up with Woody Harrelson who is his opposite in every way. He's a loud, crass, live in the moment, gun slinging Twinkie™ lover. So, naturally, they decide to travel together. Then they meet a couple of girls and, after a bit, travel with them.

Together they head for an amusement park in California that is rumored to be zombie free. While in the neighborhood they have an extremely contrived, a bit awkward, but still funny stay at Bill Murray's mansion.

I enjoyed the movie and laughed a lot. Not sure if I want it on DVD. It's a movie that's really best watched with a group of friends. Kinda like how "Saturday Night Live" is funnier with a group than it is when watched alone.

Index - A Bruce story

There was this book that was written 50 years ago. Only 3 copies were produced. All type written on onion skin paper with photos glued to the pages. I had scanned in every picture and every page of text. Someone else had rekeyed the book with a few errors. Bruce was given the job of laying out the new version. He was picked for this task because there was no set style for this book. If he messed up there was no standard to compare to, so it's not really a screw up.

You'll recall the original Bruce story where I kept telling him to go back in to InDesign. It was this book he was working on back then. This woman had sat next to him for probably half the time he'd spent on this book. Mostly it was to keep him on track, but it was also, partially to help him make changes. But she'd gotten tired of her job. It was no longer what she'd been hired to do and wasn't what she wanted to do.

We're down to the index. The original book had an index, but the layout was radically altered. I mean we were using the front AND back of each page for one thing. We needed to correct the page numbers in the index. In our weekly staff meeting the boss asks Bruce how long it'll take him to complete the index. He says it'll take him 3 weeks. I break into a coughing fit.

After the meeting I sit down next to Bruce at his desk. "Sounds like you could use some help with the index. You drive." I picked up a print out of the uncorrected index and a bound print out of my old scans and we started. I picked out any word in pages 1-100, looked it up in the old copy, gave him a few keywords to search for, he took the new page number and put it in the new index. Three days later we were done. Two and a half weeks under what it would have taken him and a day and a half less than it would have taken me.

The boss was annoyed that I'd had so little faith in her pet employee that I jumped in to help and proved that three weeks was way too long for this job to take. When she complained to my direct supervisor my supervisor laughed in her face.

Friday links: October 2

Bridge of recycled plastic is strong enough to support a tank. [link]

What you get when you electrify film. [link]

Piss on you, too! When urine enters the atmosphere. [link]

20 strange moment in TV news history. [link]

Making of "The Godfather" was rough. [link]

The Spiderman lizard. [link]

Twitter and blogging enhance reading and writing skills instead of, as more commonly thought, degrading them. [link]

Gene Roddenbury's Mac for sale. [link]

When you have largely atheist countries where the churches are going out of business and selling their property you get awesome bookstores like this. [link]

Pictoral Webster's Dictionary. [link]

Comic strip making software. Take the tour. [link]

British government advertising watchdog bans ad promoting bad science. [link]
We need a similar agency.

Homeopathic medicine isn't medicine. If your kid dies because you "treat" it with homeopathic you go to prison like these people. [link]

Guy was able to listen in on Apollo 11 communications with homemade equipment. [link]

Robotic pancake picker.

I need a reason to get one of these old diving suits. Maybe I can put a light in the head and call it a lamp. [link]

The Bronte sisters wrote in super teenie script. Like this. [link]

Videos of thieves getting their asses handed to them. [link]

The Chump Tree.

Lizard that uses own ribs as weapons. [link]

Art by fire. There's samples and a video of how it's made. [link]

CMYK - A Bruce story

I'm a busy man at work. The editors all refuse to work with Bruce. I typically have two or three books that I'm working on at the same time because they refuse to work with him anymore. Really. One turned in her resignation when she found out he was laying out her book. The boss finally relented and gave it to me.

Even so, a few months back he was given the images for an upcoming book to redraw (if line art) and resize. I rolled my eyes and continued my work. I really didn't have time to do the art right now and he might even get some of it right. Maybe.

I've done books with him where he did the art and I did the layout. I ask you, how many times should you have to send something back to a person before it's correct? Once? Maybe twice? How about a dozen times? No drawing was sent back less than six times. Most were ten to twelve times. And I wasn't unclear with the problems. I circled each problem in red and then discussed them with Bruce.

Sometimes he'd make a black line CMYK so it was black, but with 4 layers of ink it was fuzzy and raised enough that I could tell what the picture was blindfolded. No, really, I blindfolded one of the editors and handed her printouts of the pictures to see if she could tell what the drawing was supposed to be.

The pictures were never sized right (either 1 column or 2). The fonts were the wrong size and the wrong font. Often he'd change things that were right so they became wrong, but that's true of everything he does.

The editor for this book asked for printouts of the images for this book the other day. He printed five before getting distracted. When he finally gave them to her, the following week, there was a lot missing. He insisted that he never got them, but she had records of the exact date and time she sent them to him, the names of the files, and the folder they were in on his computer. Sure enough, there they were. Both the ones he'd done and the ones he didn't do.

What's saddest about this story is that he used to be able to do this. He'd done graphics work at the Pentagon. He did chapters and drawings here for years. Not the best or the fastest, but certainly passable.

Something else I never made clear is that he's got 22 years on me. He's been tested for Alzheimers, Parkinsons, ADD, and Epilepsy but keeps coming up negative. He was on ADD meds for awhile but they just made him fall asleep at his desk.

Now I have to decide if I'm gonna correct his work when it comes to me or keep sending it back until HE does it right.

Favorite links from the archives

As I go through my old e-mails I find links that are always good.

You want to listen to this story about the toad licking dog. [link]

Scary stories with expired copyrights. [link]

What accent do you have? [link]

101 Dumbest Moments in Business. [link]

Pedal powered scenic track at an amusement park. [link]

Just before Nixon's resignation speech.

Asimo takes a fall. [link]

Honey as an antibiotic ointment. [link]

Theia: name of the planet that is alleged to have smacked into the still forming Earth and knocking loose Luna (the Moon). [link]

How to get awesome milage from your car (if you don't mind a bit of heavy risk). [link]

Movie review: Code 46

A few weeks back I saw a list of under appreciated sci-fi movies. Most of the list was stuff that I'd seen, but "Code 46" was new to me. So I put it on the list of stuff for Yummy and I to rent.

Rent or steal.

Either way.

We stopped at the video store Saturday and was stunned to find that they had it. Naturally, we grabbed it and I flashed the clerk some cleavage while Yummy made a break for it while he was busy vomiting.

I'd never heard of "Code 46" because it was made and released in England. And it was kinda lame.

In the not too distant future we've lost the natural shielding from the sun. During the day you want to spend most of your time indoors or in a vehicle with shielded windows. The big cities are sealed off. To get in you have to have "cover" - an ID that lets you in. To travel you need to have "cover" for where you're going and where you are. "Cover" refers not just to cover from the sun, but the protection provided by the vaguely Orwellian police force, a place in the work force, medical care, etc. There are cities outside "cover" but they're pretty much deserts. Plenty of people and jobs, but not much in the way of plants, food, transport, protection from the criminal element, health care, etc. It's a much harder life.

Code 46 refers to a law where people with 100%-25% identical DNA aren't allowed to reproduce. This means not just with siblings and cousins, but with clones of yourself.

Tim Robbins is an investigator hired to find the source of faked cover passes. He takes an empathy virus to help him read people better and starts interrogations among the people he knows have access to the printer that he know the fakes came from. He deliberately fingers the wrong person and excuses the law breaker. He and the girl who made the fakes have dinner and go back to her place. Soon he's gone back to his family.

Shortly thereafter three people turn up dead who traveled using fake IDs that the girl made. Tim must return and complete the investigation. But she's in an asylum of sorts after she was found with a Code 46 violation.

She was pregnant.

With his kid.

They aborted the fetus and wiped her memory of the pregnancy and who got her pregnant. He turns up, claims she's a witness and takes her away to help her get her memories back.

Turns out that his mom and hers were clones of the same person. Genetically, they're half-siblings.

They run off together to lands without cover. They're tracked down. His memories of the whole thing are wiped and he returns to his family. She is cast out but left with her memories so they'll torment her.

I said the movie was lame, but I kinda like the story. I wanted the areas under cover to be more technologically advanced than they appeared. Oh, sure, they have some neat new toys, but I wanted a bit more. The chase scenes could be enhanced. Explain what cover means a bit more and what it means to be outside the cover.

It's alright, but you can skip it.

Exerpts from old conversations - part 2

While cleaning out my inbox I found lots of old conversations with bits worth keeping. Here's the second batch of several.


In reference to a conversation about her couch-shredding dog.
JC: There are other mammals that don't usually eat couches that you could try. Gerbils, platypuses...
She: Oh, I like guinea pigs, but I've got too many critters already.
JC: Like what?
She: Oh, a fish, a turtle, the dog.
JC: Wow, you're... pretty much working on the whole food chain there.
She: (laughs) I guess I am
JC: Yeah, all you need now is some plankton and a Korean Deli and you'll have it completed.


JC: Acceptance is the first step.
ME: Heavy drinking is the second.


I think the   on my keyboard is broken.


She'd have trouble finding South Carolina on a map of South Carolina.


Discussing high school fight songs: We had "We're gonna get you after school,..." but it didn't have much of a tune to it.


Discussing the band at someone's upcoming wedding:
ME: I think you should get a didgerydoo, an accordion, bagpipes, and a harmonica to perform at your wedding. They'll call themselves the Wind Triangle Federation or WTF for short. My first request is "Flight of the Bumblebee".
JC: If you manage to get a digeridoo, accordion and bagpipe band to play at your wedding, I'll pick up the tab. Hell, I think we might all kick in for it. The flocks of horny, confused geese descending on your wedding reception would be worth the price alone.


JC - Headline from today: "Iraq Kurdish leader snubs Rice over Turkey raid"
ME - Ah, Thanksgiving dinner at the White House.


ME - [JC], I'm gonna take the train into KC a few days before [RJ]'s wedding and we're gonna build his car decoration in your garage. Is there a rebar supplier in your neighborhood?
RJ - Oh dear. Sounds like we'll be driving the '95 Accord to/from the wedding, huh?
ME - Excellent. We were gonna need the make and model to build the mold from.
JC - [AN], You mentioned you wanted 10 gallons of bull semen. Is goat semen OK? There's a few farms out near Gardner that might be able to supply.
WS - Don't forget the wiring schematics for the car.


Cobain's best work was his "Unfinished Symphony for Clarinet and Shotgun".


Headline: "Bush Calls for Direct and Rapid Stimulus"
JC: Why yes, yes it does.

Friday links: Sept 25

How to manage geeks (and in my experience editors as well. In fact, I think most people.) [link]

How bodies are disposed of in Tibet. Kinda nasty. Really. [link]

An Irish ad supporting gay marriage. Whose permission does anyone need to get married?

Article from one of Bush's speech writers. [link]

Peasant Quest - I just introduced Yummy to Trogdor. So I also had to show her "Peasant Quest", the Trogdor game based on classic Sierra adventures like Kings Quest and whatnot. [link]

Lego wall sealant. [link]

The Japanese are coming for us all. [link]

A kinda awesome table. [link]

In the 60's an experiment was done where kids were left alone with a marshmallow. If they kept it for 15 minutes they'd get another. Later in life the ones who held out did better in general than those who didn't.
An article about it. [link]
A video of a reproduction of it.

Chemistry lab blew up. Here's the story. [link]

Selections from the steampunk musical "The Clockwork Quartet". [link]

Terrorist fart joke. [link]

10 easy science questions and how you stack up against most people. Of course, I scored a perfect 100%. [link]

I succumb to a meme. [link]

I've seen this guy's camper bike before, but I hadn't seen what he'd done with the inside. [link]

When you die you can be made into pencils. This way your spouse can keep licking and nibbling you forever. [link]

This video is a test of a rocket designed to be able to launch, hover, move about, land vertically, and then be reused again shortly thereafter. This means that Armadillo Aerospace has passed the first level of the competition to design a new lunar lander for NASA. [link]

The Metronomicon - a collection of nightmare scenes from the Russian subway system. And Yummy won't believe me when I talk about the tunnel dragons in the DC subway. [link]

The history of science fiction getting it right. [link]

Rowan Atkinson recreates his driving from a car roof scene in real life. [link]

Read the text scroll.

We all float down here - people living in the Las Vegas flood tunnels. [link]

From time to time I see something awesome in science fiction that soon gets leapfrogged in the real world. In this case we seem to be bypassing Geordi's VISOR from Star Trek and getting something closer to G'Kar's replacement eye from late in Babylon 5. [link]

Carl Sagan's latest song. [link]

And finally, I've been avoiding videos refuting various religions for awhile, but this video does a good job of explaining why atheists deny what people of any faith see as perfectly reasonable arguments.

Don't do that! - A Bruce story

I forget what he was working on. A picture? A layout? Anyway, it was on the computer. I was summoned to help him with this problem he was having. A simple "I'm trying to do X but can't quite do it." So I ask him to show me what he's doing. He spends several minutes (at least 5) going through a series of steps necessary to do what he needs. Then he does something he shouldn't and ruins what he's been doing. It's just too much for "undo" to fix.

"OK, I see what the problem is. That thing you're doing at the end? Don't."

Obviously, I was a bit clearer than this. What he needed to do involved a menu item at the top of the screen. I remember what he was actually doing involved the keyboard.

So, he runs through the routine again. The whole routine. The thing that fucks up. He does that, too.

"Alright, Bruce, you saw what happened. You did that thing I said messed things up. You've done it six times before I came over. Don't do that. You need to do Y instead."

I prefer to make him do it. If I do it he doesn't learn. If he does the driving then he shouldn't need me next time. So he does the work while I watch.

He does it all again. Repeat another eight times.

I make him go through one. step. at. a. time. with me giving instructions at each step. When we get to the part that goes bad I tell him what he should be doing. He does the other thing, instead.

I've been there for nigh an hour, watching him ruin his file over and over again in an identical way each time. I even took over, showed him what he should be doing, and gave it back to him so he could do it. He still does it wrong.

One last time we go through from the beginning. We reach the last step and I see his right hand leave the mouse and begin to travel across the keyboard to the disaster button. It's like it's going in slow motion. What also happened in slow motion was me throwing myself in front of him and snatching the keyboard away.

"STOP! For the love of god, Bruce! Stop doing that! You know you're not supposed to do that."

"Yeah."

"Then why do you keep doing it? That's what has screwed up your picture every time. That's what has stolen the last hour from our lives. JUST DON'T!
"Now, I'm keeping the keyboard. Put your hand BACK on the mouse. Go right where I'm pointing. NO! That's not where I'm pointing. Anything that isn't right where I'm pointing is wrong. Go. Here."

He did. He clicked on the menu I was pointing at. He went to the option that I named. He clicked. It worked. I gave him his keyboard back and we saved.

Movie review: 9

A few years back an unknown digital artist by the name of Shane Acker made this short film.


Tim Burton saw it and thought it had promise. He offered to back Shane for a full length movie. That movie came out in theaters a few weeks back. I saw it with Yummy this weekend.

The full length movie has much the same story as the short but expanded. The main character, 9, wakes up to find a world where everyone is dead except for the machines. There's not many of them left either. 9 meets some of the others who promptly start getting killed off by a machine that eats their souls. He must convince them to stop hiding and lead an attack on the machines before they're wiped out completely.

Naturally, there's more to it than that. I just don't want to give too much away.

You get to find out where these creatures came from and what happened to the world to get it to this point.

The machines are steampunk-like creations. They're what you'd get if you tried to create modern civilization using World War I era technology.

I will definitely be getting this on DVD when it comes out.

Analemmas: how they differ around the world and star system

Today is the fall equinox.

Some of you will recall the Analemma that I made a little while back. I put a sticker on the window and spent a year marking the location of the shadow at the same time every sunny day for a year.

Someone else went into greater detail about why it's a figure 8, how it changes depending on time of day and geographic location, and how it would appear on other planets. [link]

Book Review: Oryx and Crake

I first heard about the book "Oryx and Crake" on NPR some years back. They brought the author, Margaret Atwood, on and they talked about the book. It caught my interest enough that I wrote the name of the book on a Post-it and stuck it to my monitor. There it stayed for several years before I threw it away. Then I went to the Friends of the Arlington Library Book Sale and found a hard bound copy for $4. I grabbed it.

It wasn't what I was expecting at all.

The book takes place in two time frames.
The main time frame is after the fall of civilization and follows a guy who calls himself Snowman. Snowman calls a tree near the shore his home. He wears only a sheet and wishes for a hat. He is visited frequently by a new breed of human whose tribe lives nearby. He tries to survive in a world where everything is gone except for specially engineered people and animals. He also goes scavenging in a nearby city.

The second time frame is all Snowman's flashbacks. He remembers growing up as a little boy named Jimmy. Back then he lived in a compound that was run by the company his parents worked for. The compound was a high security walled city run by a company that engineered new lifeforms. They had to guard against diseases that other companies in other compounds tried to use to kill off the stock of competitors. They also had the best schools and the best food.

Outside of the compounds is the pleeblands. Their schools aren't nearly as good, nor is their lifestyle. Still, they work and live and get by well enough to be able to afford the medications and age defying treatments developed in the compounds.

Jimmy knew Crake as a kid. Jimmy was fairly average, but Crake was a sort of genius. They were friends. Eventually they met Oryx. They both loved her.

Crake designed the new humans that live near Snowman. He eliminated body hair, imposed mating cycles, gave them insect repellant body odor, and tried to create his vision of perfect humans. Then a disease wiped out almost the entire human population.

There's no real plot to speak of. You're just exploring this new world with Snowman as he tells you his life story and how this world came to be.

I wouldn't put this in my top 10 books, but it really is a good read.

Friday Links: Sept 18

A rather pathetic offering this week. Blame the judicial system.

1961 interview with Shel Silverstein. [link]

Coach takes the football team to be Baptized. Some people really need to be fired over this. [link]

10 best and worst companies for customer service. [link]

My house is too small for a wood burning stove... or is it? [link]

Aw! Look at the adorable calamari! [link]

British government apologizes to Alan Turing. They also explain why they needed to apologize to him. [link]

Turtle prosthetics. [link]

Fence jumping robot. [link]

Student kills burglar with samurai sword. [link]

Snake grows a leg. [link]

Tongue eating parasite. [link]

Even George Bush thinks Sarah Palin isn't worth spitting on. [link]

Papercraft iPod dock. [link]

Photos from an amateur high altitude balloon. [link]

Archeologists discover an ancient city from the 1950's. [link]

Serious weirdness from Craigslist. [link]

What's wrong with Walmart? I hate Walmart, with good reason, but this article has stuff even I didn't know about. [link]

Solar Decathlon: Early results

I decided to walk home from the courthouse yesterday. It's only about 2 miles. Right next to the courthouse is the National Building Museum. In front of the National Building Museum [link] is a strange looking structure that looks like a mobile home from the year 2350. Virginia Tech is building their entry for the Solar Decathlon on the lawn. I hung out there for about an hour and got the grand tour.

You can check out their design at http://www.solar.arch.vt.edu/.

Unlike most solar houses I've seen in the past, they've done away with the solar heating tubes. On a fixed site they'd use a geothermal system for heating or cooling. Since they're not on a fixed site they've made a cooling tower. The system they have set up will use that, in part, to heat the water as well. I gather that the tower won't work so well in the winter while the geothermal system would.

If you look at the house on their site you'll see these metal screens with holes in them. Currently those are lying on the grass. They will be hung in front of large motorized polycarbonite walls filled with the highly insulating material, Aerogel. The holes in the metal shade screen aren't so much holes as disks that are punched out except for two points. They'll be pushed so they pivot on those points to form a pattern.

These screens are two of several mobile screen layers that can be controlled by an artificial intelligence. They have a weather station outside and several dozen sensors in the house. The AI will use the data from all these points to determine when to open and close the curtains, windows, insulated screens, and adjust the internal lighting. These can be overridden by controls on your iPhone.

They've done to their whole ceiling what I want to do to my kitchen eventually. It's a tightly pulled, translucent white sheet with lighting on the other side so the whole ceiling glows. [link]

The kitchen window is shielded from the low sun when the insulating screens are open. When the sun is high or the screens are closed you flip a switch and the glass slowly turns a dark blue.

The kitchen and living room are at one end, the bathroom is right in the middle with hallways on either side, and the bedroom is at the other end. The bedroom wall that's shared with the bathroom consists of two sliding bookcases. They slide out to act as doors/privacy screens. When pushed aside you can see the TV embedded in the wall behind them.

The kitchen counter comes out revealing the sink and stove underneath. The counter can be pushed aside for use, can go over the kitchen table or over the sofa, or be wheeled out on the deck.

The solar panels move, but only need to once a month.

I can't properly describe the lighting around the bed. Check out the video down below around 6:22.

They have taken a risk in that they're not storing their energy in battery or hydrogen form. In fact they're not storing it at all. Even during the competition they'll be feeding their power into the grid and then feeding off the grid at night.

The students can't sleep in the house when it's on the National Mall next month, but there's no such restriction at it's current location. In fact, the Building Museum people encourage that so that it won't be at risk from thieves and vandals. They don't even have to lock up. They close the screens and there ain't nobody getting in.

There were several people from Siemens there when I came by. They were clearly amazed at what these people had done with their technology.

Go check out the video on their site to see mockups of what I saw. http://www.solar.arch.vt.edu/

You can see more about their theory and design in this video.Joseph Wheeler was the guy who showed me around.

The Solar Decathlon is October 9-18 on the National Mall in Washington, DC.

Jury duty

It's kinda like a game show. A computer draws names at random. These people show up at a selected destination and wait in a big room. From the people in this room a group are selected to sit in another room with less comfortable seats. These people are interviewed one at a time over the course of several hours.

Then comes the big moment. Everyone gathers at the uncomfortable chairs at a set time. They sit for another hour and watch as groups of people in expensive suits huddle around tables and deliberate over how everyone answered their questions. The tension slowly builds as the time passes. From time to time the groups of suits stand and address the host. Everyone looks up and scoots forward. Then the suits sit back down and everyone relaxes.

Finally, the host steps up to the microphone. One by one he calls out numbers. If your number matches you step out of the crowd and get a comfy swivel chair with arms. The sad part is that the people who get the comfy chair are the losers of this game. They've been selected for JURY DUTY!!!

I lost at jury duty yesterday. I lost big. It's a malpractice case. The judge expects it to take fifteen days. This means at least three weeks, probably four, possibly five.

Airport - A Bruce story

Three years back I had the back of my house replaced. This is not a story about that.

For the first week that I was cast out of my house I took a vacation to visit my parents in Kansas. This is not a story about that.

For the remainder of the time that I was without house I was going to live in my office. This is a related story.

Bruce had agreed that he would pick me up at the airport and help me smuggle my luggage onto base. Yeah, that's as in Army Base. I mean, what guard is gonna let some guy with a suitcase through the gate?

I'd also left my key with him so that he could get my bird into my office and feed it while I was gone. I will freely admit that I gave him the wrong key. That's my bad. So Gandolf's cage was set up in the main office instead of mine. So, props to Bruce for smuggling the cage onto base. Annoyance for him losing fully half the bolts.

Bruce didn't show up to meet me at the airport as promised. Instead we had a conversation like this:
ME: Bruce! It's Ibid. You at the airport?
HE: Yeah!
ME: I'm down at luggage claim, where are you?
HE: I'm on the highway.
ME: Oh. So not actually at the airport.
HE: I'm going to see a movie.
ME: Did you say you're going to see a movie?
HE: Yeah.
ME: You said you were gonna pick me up at the airport.
HE: I'm going to see a movie.

So I took the subway from the airport to the nearest Metro stop. I dragged my suitcase to the front gate at about 10:30 at night. The story I told the guard was that some coworker was supposed to pick me up at the airport but decided to go see a movie instead and had left my house keys in the office. He let me in. It was another half mile to my office building.

I checked the building over until I found a door that was locked but hadn't latched. I navigated a maze of stairs, elevators, and locked and unlocked doors to get to my office. Since I still had the key to my specific office I got in.

I called him the next day (Saturday) and asked him to bring me my keys. He says they're sitting on the bird's cage. That would be the bird cage two rooms over. The room I want the keys to get in to. He said he'll be in Monday.

I had 7 cookies left, 3 packages of instant oatmeal (microwave is inaccessable), and the better part of a box of Mt Dew. I already ate a package of Skittles, three packages of Twix, and several cookies. Bruce says he left the bird with lots of food, but his definition of lots is in question. I didn't dare leave the building to go get more food because the doors may well lock behind me so I'd be without shelter. The tap water is barely potable so we keep bottled water in the fridge. I couldn't get there, either.

Monday:
HE: You should be grateful!
ME: Grateful? Grateful that I almost got to know what it's like to sleep in a gutter!?
HE: Fine! No more favors!
ME: That's for sure! If you call failing to be where you said you would and forcing someone to choose between food and shelter a favor the please don't do anyone any favors!

Hypothetically...

Pretend for a moment that you find out that all the global warming stuff is not just true and the 100 year predictions are closer to 5 year predictions but there's nothing you can do. Anything that could have been done needed to be done before Reagan took office and we've just been coasting along all this time with all our actions having zero impact on what is going to happen. How do you live your life differently?

Friday links: Sept. 11

First, yesterday was the one year anniversary of when Yummy and I met.

Now, what you came here for.

Build a Faraday generator to replace the batteries on your remote control. [link]

Neil Gaiman's bookshelves. [link]

Al Franken talks health care reform to both sides of the debate. This is what you get when you don't have disruptive GOP plants. You have to listen carefully to hear over background noise.

Al Franken, comedian, Senator, cartographer.


Why the intelligent designer makes such crap designs.

New orbital photos show how close the Apollo 14 astronauts got to Cone Crater before being forced to turn back. 30 meters. Click on the orbital image to blow it up and look close. You can see a dark, wiggling line that shows their footsteps. [link]

A closeup of a letter in an old "Leave it to Beaver" episode. [link]

I love/am horrified by this idea. [link]

If this steel Velcro stuff can support so much weight how do you take it apart? [link]

Technology of THE FUTURE! No. Come on. Say it right. "THE FUTURE!" [link]

Music for monkeys. [link]

The artistry of corridors in science fiction TV and movies. [link]

Just for the weirdness of it.

Now you know who to blame. Blame Drew's Cancer. [link]

A report about profits made from the bailout of the banks. [link]

Obama's diplomacy and war having a greater effect on terrorists than Bush's "fuck you" and more war. [link]

How to drill a square hole. [link]

Game: Equanimity - Tetris with balance. [link]

The future of our star system. [link]

Shaping pears into Buddha. [link]

Purebred dogs being bred to death. [link]

Lots and lots of steampunk adaptations of movie. [link]

Nature videos with narration. [link]

A 92 year old who was in Hitler's suicide bunker talks about what he saw. [link]

The story of a blind phone hacker. THE blind phone hacker. [link]

Modern children review The Beatles. [link]

Game: The Wizard's Notebook - 11 levels long. Type words that become what's needed to solve the puzzle. [link]

Exerpts from old conversations - part 1

While cleaning out my inbox I found lots of old conversations with bits worth keeping. Here's the first batch of several.


From a friend checking Match.com after moving to the deep south.
"Southern Bells? Only describes their shape, I think."


Her lawyers say no no, but her eyes say yes yes!


Their printers are good, the scanners are iffy, the scanner/printers were smashed together and the drivers written by 100 monkeys given a week to work.


JC: I saw the Pixies for the first time at Camden's infamous punk club City Gardens. I was 13 (so 1988), and I'd just started my regular habit of telling my parents I was going to play D&D over at a friend's house, then grabbing a bus to a rock show with friends -

ME wrote -
10 years from now:
JC: Hi, honey. How was game night?
LC: Ok. My Paladin made level 23 and I got the +3 Sword of Holding from the Caverns of Cannibal Lilliputians.
JC: Paladins can't use Swords of Holding. Where were you really?
LC: No, we were using 5th Gen rules.
JC: No self respecting Dungeon Master would ever use 5th Gen rules. You were out with that boy with the piercings weren't you?
LC: Daaaaad. That's not a piercing, that's his cellphone.
JC: That's a cellphone? It's huge.

JC: I would expect nothing less.


RM: [I'm] stewing about the idiot co-worker who thought wrapping a Rubik’s cube in duct tape wouldn’t ruin it...
*sigh* What the hell am I supposed to do with 17 white squares?
JC: Osmond Family Reunion?


For the humbler origins section of my campaign for President:
I was born a poor black woman in a log cabin that I helped my father build. Alas, my father died in childbirth. The next morning, when the immigration agents came for my mother I slipped out the window and hid in the woods until they were gone. I was adopted by a flock of baby harp seals who raised me in the Arizona rain forest. I learned to read by studying the hieroglyphics in the old neanderthal cliff dwellings
where we lived. My family took turns clubbing each other and selling off each others skin to pay my way through college.


All over Army and Air Force bases you see signs telling soldiers not to shake a baby. This came from telling non-military employees about the posters.
JC: Shaken... Baby... Syndrome? It's a syndrome? No it's not - it's assholes who assault an infant. Or, are they calling neck strains and such from unsupported heads SBS? That's just weird.
ME: It's the brain and neck damage caused by shaking a baby who wakes up every half hour all night long screaming it's lungs out for no good reason other than it feels like it and I really don't need this shit right now because I just spent the last 2 years dodging bullets and explosives come to think of it you're probably not even my kid that cheating bitch and for the love a god would you just shut up you screeching howling little monster WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU...
oops.


What do I look for in a woman? A chest that disturbs the Earth's orbit and a mind that can calculate by how much.


In a meeting:
Boss: I just got off the phone with the World Health Organization.
ME: Wait. The who?
Boss: The World Health... shut-up, [Ibid].


Response to a rumor that a Harry Potter game for the Wii would have the player shout the names of spells while waving a "wand".
"Assio Firebolt!"
" Shutting down."
"NO! Fuck! Cancel!"
"Launching Photoshop!"
"You're a Wii! Where did you get Photoshop?"
"Mailing kiddie porn to Mom."

Calendar: A Bruce Story

So Bruce calls me over because he's having trouble printing his calendar. The boss wanted him to make her a calendar.

First he's trying to print the calendar using the techniques he used to print the brochure on the old (and now scrapped) printer. No. That doesn't work now and your old setup failed on every other printer except for our POS.

I try it the correct way but the printer flashes a few times and then denies you ever tried to print. We used to get that if there was a Postscript failure, but I haven't seen that trick in years. Still, I'm having to assume there's a flaw in the file.

A calendar is a simple thing. Boxes, numbers, a bit of text. Not hard. He could have developed it in InDesign (layout software). Instead he developed it in Photoshop (photo editing software). Illustrator (drawing software) I could understand. Photoshop is probably the hardest environment to develop something like a calendar in.

And instead of developing 12 months on 12 files he put them on 6 files each with two months. Then he puts it in InDesign in a 2 page spread and puts the picture across both pages. That was wrong and met with disaster even when he was doing it with the brochure. He had to put each file in twice and crop off what he didn't want. But he doesn't remember the many, many complete and total failure each time he tries.

I'm telling him that he has to start over and rebuild in InDesign. I'm making sketches so he can just built one and modify it a few times. Then our resident bureaucratic savant comes over and tells me that what Bruce is doing isn't what the boss wants anyway. Bruce is trying to build a book style calendar that folds in the middle and shows two months at a time. What the boss specifically asked for is something that can fit this three month display with hooks that everyone in the office has. It's designed to show three separate pages in a column. Bruce's calendar wouldn't work at all. And, yes, she had spelled it out for him

So in the end Bruce can just print what he has and take a paper cutter and hole punch to it.

I really hate working with him.

Camping

Over Labor Day weekend Yummy and her friends (and their friends) took me camping with them in Catoctin Mountain Park. It's about half way across Maryland and just south of the Pennsylvania border. This would be the same park that houses Camp David. Obama is said to have been spending the weekend there, but I didn't see half of the President related air traffic that I see around DC.

Their definition of camping and mine differed a bit. I've grown accustomed to digging a latrine, chopping and lashing together a toilet, sterilizing water, etc. I feel I was able to adapt well to their pro-bathroom and well water philosophy.

I introduced a few things to their camping repertoire, too.

Yummy planned chili for our first night. It was her recipe, her ingredients, and my stew pot. Luckily it's easy to get guys to take over the cooking so long as there's that danger element involved (i.e. fire). It turned out really well. I would take it over the stuff from Ben's Chili Bowl any day. What was even better was that it could have doubled as sloppy joe filling.

We brought along two pie irons [link]. They're two concave metal squares with long handles coming off of them. You butter the concave side, put in bread, add pie filling (or whatever), close it up and jam it in the fire until it's charred and you have to do another one. After 4 or 5 you should figure out how long to leave it in.

One of the other camper supplemented my pie irons with a doodad from Pampered Chef that allowed us to do much the same thing, but the slices of bread were crimped together and the crusts removed before it was put in the pie iron. That, combined with practice over the fire, did a great job making pies.

We brought along a cast iron griddle, too. It was flat on one side and grooved on the other. So we could make pancakes, eggs, bacon, etc. on one side, and flip it over to make steak.

Yes, I seasoned it before we left. Just slathered it in Crisco and left it in the oven at 300°F for an hour. Keep away from soap, clean by wiping it down.

We also brought along a camp percolator. It says it makes 9 cups, but in reality it was 5 half cups. The first use involved everyone sitting around the fire wondering if we needed to lower the grill, build the fire, sacrifice that screaming child a few sites over, or just wait. We built up the fire (when guys are involved that's always the answer) until it started boiling over. It worked great, but we should have gotten a larger pot.

I introduced them to hobo dinners, too. This is where you lay out some aluminum foil, make a hamburger patty and put it on the foil, add carrots, potatoes, onions, whatever you want around the patty, close the foil so ash can't get in and juice can't get out, then toss it in the hot coals of your fire. Burying it coals is optional. After 15-20 minutes you dig it out with a shovel, open it up, and eat. I've hear about similar tricks used to cook on a car engine during road trips.

Alas, not everything we tried was a success. I tried to make ice cream in coffee cans. You put the ingredients in a small coffee can, put on the lid, duct tape it down, put it in the larger can, fill the gap with ice and salt, duct tape that lid on, and roll it around for 30 minutes. I got frost to form on the outside of the can, but inside we only got sweet, frothy milk. I'll have to work on this and try it again next year.

Oh, and the birdies got to come, too. Gandolf was willing, if not eager, to share Bixby's cage for the car ride and stay in there at night. Like a fool, I left the carefully packed bird food at home. Bixby is willing to eat everything and anything. She felt obliged to notch every piece of bread for grilled cheese. Gandolf is more picky. We had to go shopping to get her crackers, Skittles, a seed log, egg noodles, and a bag of bird food. She ate the crackers, the Skittles, the egg noodles, and any chips that were offered to her. She was hungry enough that she tried to steal a bagel from the camp 3 year old on the last morning. Two and a half crackers fixed that.

Yummy came with a new two person tent and an air mattress that fills the tent perfectly. The mattress has an electric pump that had it up and useful in no time. I definitely prefer it to blowing up the mattress myself, but it does seem like a bit of a cheat.

Friday Links: Sept 4

Sci-fi author Frederick Pohl finally gets his high school diploma at the age of 89. [link]

Weird Al and Danny Osmond doing an early version of the "White and Nerdy" video.

The latest text from Richard Dawkins. He talks about the torture of teaching high school science class when even the most basic facts are constantly challenged. [link]

Make a camera lens from an old DVD lens. [link]

New Jersey attempting to take an adopted girl from her family because they're atheists. [link]

Lots of free targets. [link]

Just to piss off the Catholics among you.

The one and only Twitter feed I bother with. [link]

Tossable Army droids. [link]

Air Force needs video game players. [link]

The complete H.P. Lovecraft. [link]

The head of the GOP spreading lies on Fox. Specifically, that the VA is encouraging vets to just die already. [link]

Sculptures on the head of a pin. [begin]
Hulk SMASH puny pin! [link]
Alice, maybe you should lay off the drink. [link]

I saw this in the Hirshhorn Museum some time back. It's the Khaaaan! clip from "Wrath of Khan" with tiny bits played back and forth so the whole thing lasts 15 minutes and you can study every twitch of Shatner's face as he says it. [link]

Yankees suck.

The Legos must flow. [link]

The ISS as seen from Earth. [link]

Aluminum + rust + fire = data security

Disney bought Marvel. A few years back I'd be happy because it meant they had a big movie maker helping them like DC has Warner Brothers. But Marvel has been setting up something that promises to be great. Disney can't even do cartoons without some outside company (Pixar) taking over. Please don't screw up Marvel more than it already is.
In the meantime, check out these visions of projects to come. [link]

Another Star Wars deleted scene - Luke's first try with his lightsaber.

For 12 years this guy has been working on an ASCII version of Star Wars. I check in from time to time. He's up to "Aren't you a little short for a Stormtrooper?" [link]

Game: Fig. 8 - ride an architectural drawing of a bike around an architectural city without hitting anything. [link]

Odd new musical instrument.

Cars made from beer cans. [link]

Picture taken of a molecule using an atomic force microscope. [link]

So, Disney bought Marvel. How will this affect the movies? [link]

A couple of you should get jazzed that someone is remaking the game M.U.L.E. [link]

Game: Canabalt - jump over stuff. Run as far as you can. [link]

A conversation at work

This was a few years back.

I got called over to B's space to help him figure out how to make an "é" (that's an e with an accent in case this doesn't translate). So we switched to Word so he wouldn't screw up what he was working on in InDesign (layout software). We did that. Then he started in on the special characters menu.

"Ok, B, you need to go into InDesign."
I don't even know what he started doing.
"...you need to go into InDesign."
"Uhhhh."
"...In. Design..."
He goes to the Finder.
"...you need to go into InDesign...you need to go into InDesign..."
He goes into Word.
"...you need to go into InDesign...you need to go into InDesign...you need to go into InDesign...you need to go into InDesign..."
He goes into Photoshop.
"...you need to go into InDesign...you need to go into InDesign...you need to go into InDesign...you need to go into InDesign..."
"I went into InDesign".
"No, Bruce, I've been watching. You went into Photoshop. You need to go into InDesign."
He goes into Word again.
"...you need to go into InDesign...you need to go into InDesign...you need to go into InDesign...you need to go into InDesign..."
The woman who he's been working with starts laughing.
He finally makes it into InDesign.
"Ok. Now you need to go into the "Type" menu."
He starts studying the "Edit" menu intently. I finally start getting annoyed.
"B! The type menu! Right there!"

I'm sure I'm the asshole here.

I don't get subjugation

I don't get Muslims. Granted, I don't get most religions but this one is extra odd. They subjugate the women but make them cover themselves from head to toe. Who's idiotic idea was this?¹ Dammit, if I was gonna do some subjugating I'd be giving the women something more revealing. The local grocery store would look like Daytona Beach during Spring Break or a rave instead of a photo negative of a Klan rally. Bikini's and/or washcloths and dental floss would be the order of the day. If you've got it, flaunt it.² And if you don't got it then go be a Muslim. At least with my plan you won't need to buy all new berkas if you put on 30 lbs.

¹Most Christian religions have similar restrictive clothing selections. I just picked the most restrictive I could find.

²The author wishes to note that he does not, in fact, got it.

Visits with Gandolf

I'm going through my Gmail and weeding out old messages. Along the way I find things worth saving. Like these old lines from Gandolf (my parrot).

Written 15 September 2005 -

Last night Gandolf started using a new word. "RADIO!"
I was getting ready to go upstairs and put out my hand for Gandolf to climb on so she could come with me. She refused and clearly wanted to stay in her cage. As I was leaving the room she yelled "RADIO!" So I turned on the radio.

This morning before I left she reminded me "Food", "Water", and "RADIO!"


Written 6 March 2007 -

I got season two of Justice League on DVD.
In the previous episode Green Lantern and Hawkgirl finally admitted they had feelings for each other. In this episode a fleet of ships from Hawkgirl's home planet of Thanagar showed up announcing that she's a spy sent to see if our defenses could stand up to the mortal enemies of the Thanagarians.

GL: So you've been a spy all this time? Why didn't you tell me?
HG: I was on a military mission. I'd sworn an oath. You're a military man. I thought you'd understand.
GL: What else aren't you telling me?
HG: Well...
The leader of the Thanagarian fleet flies in and kisses her.

Gandolf: Ooooh. That's hard.


Written 4 August 2007 -

Monday morning I was getting ready for work and NPR was playing on the radio. They played a clip of this really high strung guy. He was speaking in a rather high pitch, barely controlled rage, monotone. His every syllable was slightly separated and enunciated.

"Con-gress needs to re-qui-re pow-er com-pan-ies to use fif-teen per-cent re-knew-a-ble en-er-gy by ..."

Gandolf jumps in with

"EX-TER-MIN-ATE! EX-TER-MIN-ATE!"

It took me a minute to catch my breath I was laughing so hard.