My friend Erin recently started a blog, but her posting has been pretty sporadic and today she’s reached that dark midnight of the blogger’s soul, the blogistential crisis if you will, that all of us online dabblers eventually come to:
Apr142008
Archives
Apr142008
A Few Important Facts
This will probably surprise no one:
Created by OnePlusYou
Yeah, nothing unexpected there. The next one, however, surprised me very much, because I’m willing to bet the incidence of profanity in my spoken usage is much, much higher:
Created by OnePlusYou
And finally something that’s good to know, just in case it ever comes up:
Created by OnePlusYou
Apr142008
The Best and Brightest
I’ve pretty much stopped paying attention to the seemingly endless back-and-forth between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — at this point, I figure I’ve already decided who I prefer and I’ve frankly lost interest in following the campaign any further until a candidate is officially chosen at the Democratic National Convention in August — which means that I only learned of “Bittergate” this morning when I saw that the blogosphere had been chattering about it all weekend. Basically, I guess Obama made a remark about small-town folks relying on guns, God, and anti-immigrant feelings to deal with their frustrated ambitions, and Hillary and McCain are feigning offense on behalf of those people he was talking about, branding Obama an “elitist.” (In case you also missed this one, details are here.)
Now, I’ve read Obama’s remarks and I personally don’t think he said anything all that offensive (although I grant I may feel differently if I were one of those small-town people). While you never know what’s going to piss people off, this whole thing strikes me as a tempest in a teapot that’ll likely be forgotten by next week. However, the accusation of elitism has been reliably effective in bringing down politicians who display too much schooling in their speechifying, so, again, you never know what’ll happen here. It’s a phenomenon I’ve never fully understood, myself. I find our cultural distrust of intellect both mystifying and deplorable.
So does writer Peter David; he made some particularly cogent remarks on the subject today:
We have a situation wherein this country’s anti-intellectualism has become so pervasive, so suffocating, that we have multi-millionaire Ivy league graduates trying to pretend they’re just plain folks when clearly they’re not. And people know they’re not. This country was founded by men who knew they were the best and brightest, and the citizenry took pride and comfort in that. But television has put politicians into peoples’ homes, and now we just want someone we’re comfortable with. We don’t want men and women who come across like professors; we want the guy who sat in the back of the class and goofs off, as if life was a sitcom. To put it in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” terms, we should want to elect Mr. Hand; instead we opt for Jeff Spicoli.
Couldn’t have said it better myself…
Apr102008
Russian Space Shuttles and Wandering Moonbases
Do you remember Buran, the space shuttle the Russians built back in the ’80s that looked so much like ours? Ever wonder what happened to it after the collapse of the USSR? Well, I have, and today I finally satisfied my curiosity.
Apr102008
Today’s Best Descriptions
As I fancy myself something of a clever wordsmith, at least on good days, I always admire a good turn of phrase, a line that perfectly describes the subject at hand or even — bonus! — makes me smile or laugh out loud.
I’ve encountered two such items in today’s web surfing, which I’d like to share with you now.
The first comes from Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, who, in talking about yesterday’s news that scientists have successfully tested an immensely powerful petawatt laser, explains that:
…one petawatt is 1000 terawatts; peta is a prefix people will get to know in a year or two once terabyte drives prove too small to store very many illegally downloaded BluRay movies.
That’s a pretty good one, but the comparison that really earned a chuckle came from Boing Boing Gadgets:
[Item X] should cost more per ounce than heroin filtered through the limbic system of Tom Cruise.
Heroin filtered through Tom Cruise’s limbic system? How absurd! How perfect! What kind of twisted, beautiful mind comes up with something like that? I can only doff my hat in wonder and respect…
Apr092008
Waiting for the Bus
I love this photo:
Why? Well, why not? It’s in groovy black-and-white and has the slightly flattened, zoomed-in perspective that I often shoot with myself. There’s some awesome mid-century googie architecture in the background, and it looks like that’s probably the famous Randy’s Donuts to the right. Oh, and there’s frickin’ Dr. Zaius sitting on a bus-bench in modern-day (well, 1968, anyway) Los Angeles. How could you not love this?
I found it here, via Boing Boing, of course. I recommend checking out all of the photos in that set. There’s a lot of beautiful, nostalgic, and somewhat weird stuff. Be warned, though — there is some hippie-style nudity. If that sort of thing bothers you.
Apr092008
It Is What It Is
This morning as I was driving over to the train station, I heard the song “Jessie’s Girl” by my main man Rick Springfield… on KODJ. That’s the local oldies station, if you don’t know.
Then, coming home on the train tonight, I was serenaded by a couple of sweaty, pubescent twelve-year-old boys with dumb haircuts who were wearing baggy jeans and way-oversized hoodies covered in skulls. They were singing “I’m Turning Japanese.”
I honestly don’t know which of these two events made me feel more over the hill.
At least the kids weren’t being mocking or ironic — they were, in fact, behaving like this moldy chestnut was a really cool and funny song. Which it is. And at least Rick’s back on the radio somewhere.
I’m rationalizing, aren’t I?
Sigh. I’m going to go put on a sweater and lay in a supply of rocks for chasing the damn kids off my lawn…
Apr082008
Deal or No Deal? How About If I Throw in a Bevy of Slave Leias?
Oh, boy… what a conundrum…
You see, I loathe the “competitive reality show” phenomenon that has overtaken primetime television in recent years. Survivor and its highly contrived ilk long ago wore out their welcome for me and the American Idol-style talent shows alternately bore and irritate me. However, I reserve a particularly strong flame of hatred for the mind-numbingly stupid modern-day variants of the traditional quiz-show format. I think it’s the way they all try to generate artificial suspense by having the contestants deliberate for ridiculously long periods of time (usually not very believably — I mean, come on, how hard is it to answer the lowest difficulty level of these softball questions? Is the sky is blue or green? You honestly don’t know that one? Well, then just pick one!) while ominous “the clock is ticking and which wire is Jack Bauer going to clip” music plays in the background. This technique was developed for Regis Philbin’s thankfully deceased Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, but it endures in the even-more-annoying Deal or No Deal, in which contestants essentially play three-card monte by choosing from a range of metal attache cases in hopes that one of them will contain a cool million bucks. (The difference, of course, is that the contestants aren’t betting their own money and so have nothing, really, to lose by just picking one, a scenario that makes the delayed-response thing even more obnoxious. It’s not like Howie Mandel is pulling cash out of their wallets for every wrong choice they make!)
Needless to say, I don’t watch Deal if I can possibly avoid it — which is sometimes tricky, because my parents love the damn thing, so I have to be careful about when I choose to visit them — but now an item on the Official Star Wars blog has piqued my curiosity… not to mention my prurient interests.
If you’ve never seen the show, part of Deal‘s schtick is that the attache cases that may or may not contain the million-dollar winnings (well, the cases actually contain cards with a dollar amount written on them) are held by 26 lovely female models, all wearing identical dresses (I believe they’re usually red). But according to the Star Wars blog, an upcoming episode will have the Deal models dressed in the classic Princess Leia slave-girl outfit from Return of the Jedi, a.k.a., the “metal bikini.” Can any loyal fanboy whose puberty was haunted by sail-barge fantasies resist that diabolical kind of lure? Especially when Vader, Chewie, R2-D2, and Carrie Fisher herself are also supposed to be on hand? I guess we’ll find out…
(As an aside, I will admit that the idea of a Star Wars-themed episode did make me smile, even if I dislike the show, because it brings back a lot of fond memories of How Things Used to Be. Back in the late ’70s, every variety show on the air, from The Muppet Show to Donny and Marie did an SW episode. It seems like strange timing to do one now, though; I’ve been thinking lately that SW in general, and the original trilogy in particular, is fading from the pop-cultural radar now that the prequels are complete. Perhaps Deal or No Deal skews heavily among people in my demographic?)
Apr072008
Night Photo of Sandy TRAX Station
I had a little surprise waiting in my e-mail inbox this morning and thought I’d share it with my three loyal readers. The gorgeous photo above was taken by my friend, Mike Gillilan; it’s a panorama consisting of several overlapping images that have been digitally stitched together, then tweaked in the computer to produce a “high dynamic range image.” I’ll confess, I don’t fully understand the HDR stuff — hell, I don’t even own a digital camera — but as you can see, it produces some really striking results. Don’t forget to click the image for the larger version…
Incidentally, in case you don’t recognize this location, it’s the Sandy TRAX station, a.k.a., the “end of the line, as far as we go,” the southernmost terminus of the Salt Lake Valley’s light-rail system. This is the station where Gillilan and I both begin our daily commutes. For the record, it looks much cooler in this photo than in the real world…
Apr042008
It’s Not Cooper’s ‘Chute
Following up on the possibility that a new clue to the fate of hijacker D.B. Cooper had been found, Earl Cossey, the man who packed the four parachutes given to Cooper on that night in 1971, says the ‘chute discovered by some children in Washington state is definitely not one of Cooper’s. Cooper’s parachutes were made of nylon, and the mystery ‘chute is silk. (I’m guessing that would make it much older than Cooper’s, possibly even World War II-vintage.)
For the record, Cossey sounds like something of a dick. He apparently told some reporters that the ‘chute really was Cooper’s, just to yank their chains. I’m sure it must be tiresome being the go-to man whenever anyone turns up a rag that they think might be Cooper-related, but still… playing games like that strikes me as very uncool, especially when it might get somebody fired.
And for the other record, I still think Cooper survived his jump, made off with the bulk of the cash, and spent the rest of his days drinking margaritas in the sun… it makes for a better story that way.