Monday, June 26, 2006

Ah, college

This is an awesome video of a dude doing a live version of the first level of Super Mario Brothers at a college talent show.

http://www.buzzpatrol.com/news/bizarre/real-life-super-mario-004282.php

Saturday, June 24, 2006

Bjork from Ork

By the way, I might need to start another list of movies you should avoid at all costs. Based on the preview, "Drawing Restraint 9" appears to have something to do with whaling, but it also seems to contain an important subplot dealing with the fact that Bjork is from outer space.

Friday, June 23, 2006

An Inconvenient Truth

It's documentary week! Add this one to the top of the list.

http://www.climatecrisis.net/

I hope I get another chance to vote for Al Gore.

Required viewing

Now that it's out on video, I finally got around to seeing Why We Fight, a documentary on the American "military-industrial complex." I had been interested to see it since I first saw the previews, but it was in theaters so briefly that I missed my chance until now. More on that in a moment.

I was all fired up to blog about this film and all of the important points it makes about the real motivations behind US military actions, but then I watched another documentary that I've been meaning to see for some time, Control Room. Whereas Why We Fight prompts the viewer to question the motivations for war, Control Room reminds us to look for bias in media coverage of war.

Both of these films are extremely relevant and important right now. So instead of reading what I have to say, please just watch these films for yourself. I'm starting a list of documentaries that I feel should be required viewing for all Americans. I've also listed their tomatometer rating, box office gross and max screens. For comparison, Fahrenheit 9/11 grossed $119M (domestic) and was shown on 2,004 screens at its zenith.

Control Room200496%$2.6M74
Enron200597%$4.1M151
Why We Fight200680%$1.4M64

Even though I disagree with the policies of our leaders, I still love this country. One of the main reasons for this, perhaps the most important reason of all, is that we're allowed to disagree with and criticize our leaders. Unfortunately, based on the box office numbers for these recent films, it seems not too many Americans are getting the message. Which leads me to wonder if we are experiencing a form of censorship after all.

Monday, June 19, 2006

Thinning the herd

Geez, talk about survival of the fittest. Maybe we should give the terrorists some motorcycles.

HENNIKER, N.H. --A member of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang was killed in a crash on the final day of Motorcycle Week.

It was the tenth motorcycle death associated with the annual festival in Laconia....

He was riding west on Routes 202 and 9 late Sunday afternoon when he tried to pass a vehicle ahead of him and struck an eastbound car head-on, then side-swiped a westbound car, police said....

Authorities said six of the nine previous deaths also occurred when bikers crossed the center line into oncoming traffic....

Most of those who died were not wearing helmets.

Full story

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

That's using your--nevermind

Roethlisberger condition 'fair'
Roethlisberger suffered fractures to his upper and lower jaws, mild concussion, a broken nose, broken facial bones, multiple head lacerations, abrasions and contusions, two lost and several chipped teeth.
Everyone should stop picking on Ben. Wearing a helmet might not have made much difference, as he apparently landed directly on his face.

Friday, June 09, 2006

Nope, still not interested

World's Right; We're Wrong
What does this attitude toward the World Cup say about the U.S.? It illuminates many of our least flattering qualities as a nation, not least of which is a breathtaking incuriosity about the rest of the world....

Watch the clip of Johann Cruyff dekeing a Swedish defender out of his socks in the '74 World Cup, when the great Dutchman -- for the first time on a world stage -- feints right and backheels left in one bewildering motion. It's like witnessing the discovery of fire and is viewable by entering into any search engine the phrase Cruyff Turn, the name by which the tactic has been taught ever since.

Watch all these vignettes, and if you still don't like soccer, you don't like sports. You only think you do.

I looked up the Cruyff turn on video.google.com. If anything, I'm even less interested in soccer than I was before.

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Can't argue with that logic

America is a free society which limits the role of government in the lives of our citizens. In this country, people are free to choose how they live their lives.
- President Bush justifying the Marriage Protection Amendment

Friday, June 02, 2006

Read the fine print

Top Ten Signs of the Impending U.S. Police State
Touchscreen Voting Machines

Despite clear, copious evidence that these nefarious contraptions are built to be tampered with, they continue to spread and dominate the voting landscape, thanks to Bush’s “Help America Vote Act,” the exploitation of corrupt elections officials, and the general public’s enduring cluelessness.

In Utah, Emery County Elections Director Bruce Funk witnessed security testing by an outside firm on Diebold voting machines which showed them to be a security risk. But his warnings fell on deaf ears. Instead Diebold attorneys were flown to Emery County on the governor's airplane to squelch the story. Funk was fired. In Florida, Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho discovered an alarming security flaw in their Diebold system at the end of last year. Rather than fix the flaw, Diebold refused to fulfill its contract. Both of the other two touchscreen voting machine vendors, Sequoia and ES&S, now refuse to do business with Sancho, who is required by HAVA to implement a touchscreen system and will be sued by his own state if he doesn’t. Diebold is said to be pressuring for Sancho’s ouster before it will resume servicing the county.

Stories like these and much worse abound, and yet TV news outlets have done less coverage of the new era of elections fraud than even 9/11 conspiracy theories. This is possibly the most important story of this century, but nobody seems to give a damn. As long as this issue is ignored, real American democracy will remain an illusion. The midterm elections will be an interesting test of the public’s continuing gullibility about voting integrity, especially if the Democrats don’t win substantial gains, as they almost surely will if everything is kosher.

Bush just suggested that his brother Jeb would make a good president. We really need to fix this problem soon.
Nine more...

Related posts:

Power corrupts
The only thing we have to fear

Was blind but now I see

I will never buy another video game.

Okay, I will buy Halo 3, but that's it. At $50 a pop, I probably have about $1,000 worth of Xbox games that I rarely play sitting in a neat little 8"-square CD case. That's ridiculous. Video games depreciate faster than anything else I can think of. If I sold my games back the best I could hope for would be about 30% of the purchase price. And this is not a car with 100,000 miles on it but a piece of optical media in perfect condition. I feel utterly foolish for having spent as much money on games as I have. Given that the next generation of games are now going for $60 each, I believe it is inevitable that most other gamers will eventually arrive at the same conclusion.

The video game industry is headed for a seismic correction, and companies like gamefly.com will lead the way. The Netflix business model which has already proven wildly successful for movies makes 10 times more sense for video games. For $9.95 a month, you can play one game for as long as you want. When you eventually tire of it, just return it and get another. If the game sucks or you beat it easily, you can get another game right away. If you play through one game a month for a year, you end up spending $120, instead of $720 if you had purchased each game. Seriously, why would anyone ever buy another video game?

Except for Halo 3, of course.

Four (Million) Eyes



Put aside for the moment the question of why you would put spectacles on a housefly and consider how you would do it. First, of course, you'd have to make the specs. Micreon GmbH, of Hannover, Germany, used a pulsed titanium-sapphire laser to fashion the tiny eyewear, in a sleek style so fashionable at the moment. Günter Kamlage, a mechanical engineer and cofounder of Micreon, says the laser pulses, just femtoseconds long, cut the glasses out of a thin, tiny sheet of tungsten. They measure only 2 millimeters from temple to temple; note Micreon's logo etched on the nose bridge. The difficult part was placing them on the insect, which was quite dead. Basically, they used really small tweezers and a microscope, Kamlage says, and it took almost two weeks, because the glasses kept sliding off the fly's face. The publicity stunt was conceived a year ago by Kamlage's wife, Beatrix, to demonstrate the precision possible with femtosecond lasers.

Thursday, June 01, 2006

I knew it!


Sam Cassell Returns To Home Planet Following Clippers' Playoff Elimination