July 2008 - Posts
The Montauk Monster appears to be the lastest Web sensation breaking into mainstream news so here's a quick summary to catch you up:
As best as I can tell, The Monster's first Web appearance was
on this blog a week ago . Creepy in itself, the added detail of the proximity of the carcass to the Plum Island Animal Research Facilities.
New York Magazine was able to locate
a witness to the monster , thus dispelling Photoshopping possibilities, though not eliminating some kind of model or sculpture. The best detail of the report is at the very end when it is relayed that the body was carted away by an "old guy." It's probably safe to assume they mean "old guy" in the "Dr. Moreau" sense so the creature probably either escaped from his lab or else he's been hosting a nest of them on his estate. There is no direct refutation of the possibility that this creature is in fact a specialty food to provide sustenance to whatever this eccentric old scientist might be keeping in his personal menagerie.
Local media coverage has used the kind of
loose science reporting I love in stories like this:
"Four government biologists contacted by Plum were unable to identify the species of the animal from its photo and came to the conclusion that "no such creature exists..." So science has no answer for this animal and therefore it is surely either alien or science-gone-bad with the additional possibility of being an ancient sea creature or some combination of all of these.
Gawker has been providing
avid coverage . Speculation has ranged from dead raccoon to dead dog to
marketing stunt but the
mystery persists .
And if it wasn't a marketing campaign to begin with it hasn't taken marketers long to catch up.
Venom energy drink has placed a bounty on the creature. So what's mostly likely to happen is that big game hunters will flock to Long Island, eventually capturing a sibling of the monster which will enrage its significantly larger more dangerous mother and possibly herd or tribe and we'll need some Will Smith-like character to save us all from otherwise certain slaughter.
The actress Keira Knightley caused headlines on one of my favorite subjects:
Keira Knightley says no to airbrushing her boobs . No, I don't mean boobs, I mean digitally altering real humans to make them look "better" by making them look less like humans. (If you really can't stand to wait for the Salon.com ads, the main visual aids are
here and
here in the Daily Mail.)
Keira Knightley is a curious case because she has the kind of physique
that is typically criticized for creating unhealthy body images and serving as a poor role model for impressionable young people. In short, she has the kind of body other people are usually photoshopped to resemble more closely. Which brings me to a new-to-me term in the field of digital celebrity body morphing: "
reverse airbrushing ." Reverse airbrushing is a phrase someone already thought up to describe the counter intuitive practice of using digital photo manipulation to actually make someone fatter.
As you may have heard, the
bountiful booty trend championed by J-Lo has passed (in spite of evidence provided by
this schlocky, mostly-ridiculous-but-still-sort-of-makes-an-important-point survey NOTE: Nudity ), leaving in its wake a bony booty trend.
Thus, for the good of us all and the products they sell, thin women are having to be made more perfect, if less recognizable, with a few helpful mouse clicks.
Thighs thickened, arms smoothed , and in cases like Keira's boobs biggened - unless, like Keira, they take a stand.
ADDING: Coincidentally, I happened upon this one this morning:
Researchers Find Thin Models Make Viewers Like Brands More, but Themselves Less (and eat less).
Speaking of lady parts, while it's never good to laugh about natural disasters, since yesterday's earthquake seems to have gone off with relatively little tragedy we can highlight a lighter moment. Those of us who checked Twitter for earthquake references found
this gal to have the
day's winning line in reporting her experience of being in the middle of a gynecological exam when the earthquake struck.
Moving on...
Crocodile Cage of Death - You can never lose when you use the phrase "of death" in the title of anything.
Spherical multi-touch display screen. The Tron 2 (Tr2n) trailer was shown at Comicon but as far as I know hasn't been released online yet. Someone pointed a camera at the screen while it was playing and got
a pretty weak bootleg but it looks awesome nonetheless. Someone else edited the bootleg to make it
bigger and correct the angle .
Speaking of trailers everyone is watching online but that don't seem to have an official release for better quality viewing, here's that trailer for
the new W. movie from Oliver Stone .
"The Orwell Prize, Britain’s pre-eminent prize for political writing, is
publishing George Orwell’s diaries as a blog ." (Not yet, soon.)
I didn't see Wall-E but apparently
Presto is the short film they play before the feature movie.
If you paid 36 grand for
a pair of jeans from the 1890's would you try them on or quickly put them in a glass display case?
Awesome: What happens when you pour
a bowl of liquid nitrogen into a swimming pool . (Just a lot of fog but still cool.)
I made a note to read the New York Times article on the
new personal jet pack but then I saw Alan's coverage. Holy moly the guy wrote
the definitive work on jet packs . Someone might as well just copy/paste it into Wikipedia under "jet pack."
Speaking of futuristic transportation, check out
Jack Nicholson's car of the future! If only there was technology like this 30 years ago, by now we'd have completely dumped the oil economy. Oh....
Speaking of the future and corrupt energy economies,
The Solar Billionaires: Who’s Made Mad Money off of Solar Power? (Just kidding. I don't begrudge these guys their success -yet.)
Top 10 Most Pirated TV Shows on BitTorrent - Foolishly I thought this list would reflect what's actually popular on TV, maybe CSI or The Office or something. Instead it's all the cable shows I watch on DVR after my wife goes to bed. Weeds is the only one I've considered downloading on Bit Torrent because I haven't found an easy, free online collection of them and I haven't had Showtime since Mike Tyson got his butt kicked by Lennox Lewis - though to be honest I haven't looked very hard and now I'm busy trying to catch up on last season's Mad Men while it's still free On Demand.
Could this possibly be real or is this another one of those unauthorized Gatorade ads? And P.S. what the heck is a blob jump launch? That's really a thing?
How to carry groceries with a square of cloth - This is the coolest Japanese folding video since the
one-move t-shirt fold .
Al Gore Places Infant Son In Rocket To Escape Dying Planet - Hilarious illustration, and I never realized the similarity of the name Jor El to Gore, Al.
That Ludacris Obama song that Obama ended up having to apologize for is on
the Ludacris MySpace page as Politics as Usual.
NOTE: Pretty clear curses out loud. Fans should stick with
will.i.am . (Even the one with the
weird chanting is better.)
When I saw the headline the other day about the latest high profile terrorist-I-never-heard-of
killed by U.S. forces in the war on terror my reaction was a cynical snort because the news came on the same day as another big headline, "
Bush Leaving Next President Record Federal Budget Deficit ." Funny, that. Such is the sorry state of my faith in our ruling powers but even I wasn't cynical enough to think this could be
a recycled terrorist-I-never-heard-of . I guess Abu Khabab al-Masri is a common name or else we're fighting zombie terrorists, in which case things are much worse than I realized.
Moviefone has
high definition versions of the new Harry Potter trailer so you don't have to squint at the crappy YouTube version.
This video and
the way the story is shaping up is so outrageous it's beginning to make national news.
Here in New York City there's
another police video that has a lot of folks upset. While there's no denying the violence of it is pretty shocking, it appears as though the guy was resisting being cuffed, which I've never seen end well in any city.
It's been fun to see all the new ideas and technologies roll out to the trumpeting of tech heralds but a theme of making it easier to express oneself online has created a moment of reflection in some parts of the blogging community. If maintaining a blog is too much trouble for you, you can try a Tumblr blog (tumblelog) which is just like blogging but easier. Still too much? Just use Twitter, it's only 140 characters at a time. Can't be bothered to Tweet a sentence? Friendfeed will collect the feeds from your various social accounts and put them all in one place for you so all you have to do is play with some bookmarklets to generate a presence on the Web. But who wants to bother with a presence on the Web? A lot of discussion lately has focused on leaving remarks on other people's sites and the amount of notoriety one can generate as a nearly anonymous commenter. Of course, you could always just tinker with your Facebook status and play online Scrabble.
While none of these developments could be described as blog killers they've definitely taken some of the enthusiasm out of the idea of blogging revolutionizing media and taking over the world.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the blogging stage, reading blogs and other online output has also become easier. Instead of reading blogs directly you can follow their RSS feeds in your aggregator. Or follow the feeds of blog searches in your aggregator - why be bound to specific blogs? Or don't bother setting up your own aggregator; sites like Memeorandum will do the aggregating for you so you just get the good stuff. Better yet, a social aggregator site like Digg will give you the good stuff - or at least the popular stuff, which is sometimes good if you shovel through enough of it.
It would be wrong to say that the value and significance of online citizen media has decreased but clearly its character has changed.
Further contributing to the pallor of disquiet is the recent departure of Jason Calcanis from the blogging scene. Obviously just one blogger quitting is not a big deal no matter who he is, but his reasons did serve as fodder for discussion. Calcanis is part of a generation of bloggers who are reaching a point of success and fame at which some of the properties and principles of (inherently small-media) blogging begin to give way to those of big media.
I'd planned to pepper this item with links, but as Clicked is more of a link-list blog, I think it's more fitting to share some of what shaped my conclusions above as a reading list. Let me know if you see something else in these tea leaves:
The song from
that Reebok ad with all the football players walking through their respective cities is
"Train Song" Vashti Bunyan . Not really as cool as it sounds in the commercial.
Speaking of ads, that Snickers commercial that has folks up in arms plays on the opening of the "
Get some nuts " site. The
site also has a little game where you drive around shooting Snickers at
people. If you haven't seen it already the soccer player one is in the
site's video tab.
In case you aren't surrounded by enough nerds to get your fill of post-Dark Knight discussion, I recommend the
Kevin Smith chat on /Filmcast .
It's full of spoilers and curses and as such does a good job of being a satisfying "what was so great about that movie" conversation.
Speaking of Batman, since these comic book movies so often take on the gray areas in the definition of justice and good and evil, in my mind they always make good metaphors for the War on Terror. So I walked out of the theater last weekend drawing parallels between Osama bin Laden and the Joker and even Harvey Dent and Barack Obama in terms of their image of squeaky cleanness (and of course the obvious FISA wiretapping parallel). But is there a Batman parallel? Is it George W. Bush? For all the conspiracy theories about the Bush administration is the room for one that would have him playing the role of vigilante outcast? It's a tenuous argument and more of a mental exercise than a serious position but I was excited to be tipped off to
an essay on Salon.com touching on that very theme and by way of links leading me to an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal called,
What Bush and Batman Have in Common .
Speaking of Bush and Batman,
Bush or Batman ?
And by the way, if you saw Batman you saw the Watchmen trailer and if you didn't you need to
watch it right now here . "Eagerly anticipated" does not begin to describe the atmosphere online for this film.
Speaking of trailers that inspire head-popping excitement,
The new Caprica (Battlestar Galactica prequel series) trailer is out . It looks about a close to a Bladerunner TV series as we're likely to get.
Speaking of building publicity online for upcoming shows, did you see
the vampire dating site meant to tease that new HBO show?
Speaking of trying to keep up with new HBO shows, I stayed up late this week to get caught up on Generation Kill. Here's
what Generation Kill gets right about the invasion of Iraq .
Seemingly every other week there's a story about some powerhouse company with plans to pay a ridiculous amount of money to buy Digg.com. The new one that folks seem to be taking seriously is a rumored offer from Google supposedly in the $200 million range. I read this item because of its headline:
Why doesn’t Google build its own Digg like Yahoo and AOL did ?
Be the missile - Harder than actually playing this game is playing it without bobbing and ducking your head.
Johnny Depp's Island to be Solar and Hydrogen Powered - Follow
that Ecorazzi link for some video.
Credit to reader Phil for spotting
a more ridiculous version of the other day's "cancer cured" headline.
What would compel a famous astronaut to make up
stories about aliens ? That is to say, if he's not telling the truth, what would his motivation be? Is he making fun of UFO believers? Has he lost his mind? Has someone played an elaborate joke on him? If you don't think he's joking or the victim of a prank and you don't think he's lost his mind, then...
There's nothing like reading
someone else getting yelled at to remind one to pay better attention.
Baby's first internet -
NOTE: Not for babies.
Groverfield - See also the link to
the mysterious new Muppets videos .
Cake Wrecks , the ugly cake blog.
Lastly, I have to mention
the political campaign of Sean Tevis . The idea of an "Internet candidate" is tossed around loosely by the mainstream media, generally applied to anyone who manages to raise money online. A better demonstration is the
Netroots activism of sites like Atrios who pinpoint local elections , find like-minded candidates that need help and rally the strength of a national audience through the principle of micro-payments. But what we see with Sean Tevis is the kind of Internet candidate that makes futurists giddy. On his own he told his story, described his platform and presented himself to his online peers. Those peers responded with enough financial support to secure his candidacy, if not his victory.
I haven't had time to poke through the local Kansas media to see what the folks there think of having their politics influenced by outsiders. Tevis is a local guy, so it's not like some carpetbagger is sweeping in on them but part of the story (and part of the point of Netroots) is to bring support to someone who doesn't necessarily have it from the local political scene.
(As a tangential but not insignificant point, when you view the source code of the Tevis site he has included special messages for programmer nerds in the comment tags.)
You may have heard that wanted war criminal
Radovan Karadzic had been hiding in plain site all these years. What's more is that
he even had a Web site . It's not in English but still pretty bold of him.
That video of President Bush explaining that "Wall Street got drunk" is now hidden behind a privacy wall on YouTube but not before copies were made everywhere. Most of the credit for making the video public seems to be going to
this local news blog (where you can see a copy of the video).
Details on the story of John McCain getting the history of the surge wrong and CBS News handily editing the error from its broadcast is covered in
Countdown's News Hole blog (to which I've recently been assigned to contribute research) but I think
the Huffington Post has the latest updates.
Here's the MySpace page of the missing 2-year-old gir l whose
mother is under suspicion in her disappearance.
A 4WD pedal cart
- I've been wondering when we'd start seeing more stuff like this. I
remember once seeing a cart a guy had built that could build up some
serious speed just by having the driver bounce on some springs. With
the right kind of gear box and maybe a little battery assist I bet you
could do some serious driving without getting too sweaty. I bet more people would be interested in getting to work under their own power if they didn't have to straddle a skinny frame of pipes and wobble alongside traffic. Sealing the thing to the elements might make the air inside a little thick, but with a good stereo and some rockin' music you'd be at work in no time.
Speaking of rockin' music,
StumbleUpon has a new audio channel (Ah the hazards of assuming...),
StumbleAudio . I've only just started playing with it but it looks like you pick your genre of choice and just listen, giving songs thumbs up and down as you go. Kind of like Pandora, it's supposed to learn from your thumbs up and down and make recommendations accordingly. The interesting bit from their "about" page: "And, yes, artists do get paid when their songs are played on StumbleAudio."
Some of the gals here are using
this new site to check the criminal histories of ex-boyfriends. I couldn't think of any criminals I know personally so I tried a search for Mike Tyson. It worked.
ADDING: Helen has written
her column this week about this site.
Cancer cured headline of the day:
Drug for deadly prostate cancer - Actually, this is a pretty responsible article, not the kind I usually make fun of with this feature. Oh wait, here's a ridiculous one:
Tobacco 'could help treat cancer.' Not only does it put "could help treat cancer" in quotes but it also puts "grow" in quotes and includes the tell-tale sentence:
UK specialists said while "potentially exciting", more research would be needed to test how well the vaccine actually worked. They even put "potentially exciting" in quotes!
How to be interesting . True for more than just blogging.
Please please please
let these costumes be popular this Halloween. I would love to see a herd of these in this year's parade.
I'm still trying to piece together the McCain/NYTimes rejection story from online links. The key pieces appear to be
this Drudge item that includes the McCain essay and
this item from the Times that includes the rejection letter to McCain's people.
Speaking of getting worked up about the New York Times,
this bit of poll cherry picking has the left crying foul and is a great demonstration of how vulnerable poll data is to interpretation and why it's best to look at the source data yourself.
Was I never paying attention before or
are the Olympic facilities in China especially surreal ?
I keep seeing people linking to
this perspective of the Great Sphinx . I guess we shouldn't be surprised that it's not in the middle of the desert but faces a tour bus parking lot and what looks like an urban environment.
I was interested to see the
comments in this thread about seeing Batman a second time . A lot of people who saw it first on IMAX want to see it a second time because IMAX was too big. I saw a pretty low res screening of it so I'm actually wanting to check out the IMAX version just to see the details I missed.
"What if there were no stop signs... and
a major corporation was charged with inventing one ?"
"
365 days of free games - Every kind of gaming for every day of the year - and it won't cost you a penny." I don't generally like to download games to my machine, even if they are free, but this also includes videos of the downloadable games so at least you get a sense of what you're getting. Look for "play it now" links to games that don't require downloads.
There's a note on the
Mygazines site saying they're having technical difficulties but I didn't suffer any in testing out the site. I don't know how it's legal but they've basically scanned in tons of popular magazines so you can flip through them.
I'm racing between meetings and chores but I wanted to share a few quick links, and especially point out that the first Dr. Horrible episode came out yesterday.
The periodic table of videos - The kind of fun and interesting chemistry lessons you wish you had in high school.
The first episode of
Dr. Horrible's sing-along blog was released yesterday but the site was crashed all day. I watched it this morning. Not surprisingly, it's really well done. I wonder if this could work on TV.
Chinese restaurant called TRANSLATE SERVER ERROR Ugly Overload Giving ugly animals their day in the sun. In case you don't get the joke in the title, it's based on
Cute Overload .
Because it's in the news and I like to dig up these kinds of things, here's
the Myspace blog entry by Christopher (Peter Brady) Knight in distress over comments by his former fake TV mom, Florence Henderson, about his new reality TV model wife.
The story of
the B-2 bomber crash reminds me that I think it'd be a winning feature for some publication to focus on mistakes and the lessons learned from them. I often wish the motorcycle magazines I read would include first person stories of crashes and how they happened. I don't fly B2 bombers but even in this story I feel like I've benefited from some vicarious lesson.
Folks who've spend any amount of time on a basketball court understand a brick to be a non-scoring shot that thuds awkwardly into the rim. I think I've heard "brick" used to describe particularly and unfortunately unintentionally dense bread. And "brick" or "bricked" is becoming an increasingly common term for gadgets that for one reason or other don't work. Previously I'd heard the word using mostly in connection with tampered-with gadgets. People would try to tinker with the software on a phone or camera and end up bricking it either because they did something wrong or because of company safeguards. But since the iPhone 3G debacle at the end of last week I'm seeing
"brick" as the word of choice for the shiny, heavy rectangular box that hundreds of thousands of people waited hours to buy only to have it do nothing more than be a shiny heavy rectangular box.
NOTE: Contains one pretty distinct F-bomb.
How to beat the claw game - I don't find this in Snopes so it might actually be real. Y'know how every once in a while there's a news segment that shows a little kid trapped in one of those claw games? This video shows how that happens.
Photojojo has instructions on
mounting a regular pocket camera on your bicycle handlebars . I'm not sure you really need instructions for this but there ya go. The problem I've had in trying to do this sort of thing is getting the camera to see what I see. That said, "jittery handlebar cam" video does have its charm. And what a good excuse to re-watch
this exhilarating NYC bike messenger race video from a few years go. (And hey look there's such a thing as
The Bicycle Film Festival .)
I've never been able to put AllTop to good use because it's a little too broad for my purposes at Clicked. Their new
Frienderati feature is worth a look though. They took the Friendfeeds of big names in tech blogging a put their 5 most recent items all on one page. It's still not a "top links" aggregator but you can spot trends as you scroll through it.
It doesn't do any good for one word to have
a really specific meaning if the word has so many syllables that it might as well be a sentence-worth of words.
I spent a bit of time last week playing with
Flowgram . I didn't try to make one, I just watched a couple of the
already built ones in the list but it's a really neat idea. It's sort of like an audio slide show but the slides are clickable Web pages. Actually, it reminds me of the "buddy surfing" idea I remember some of the instant messengers offering that let two people share a live browser window. In this case a Flowgram can allow you to give someone else a guided tour of Web sites while still giving them the freedom to click on their own. Can you imagine a Clicked like this?
Feist counts to 4 on Sesame Street . The two top favorites in my house right now are
Norah Jones and the
Goo Goo Dolls .
This is obviously wicked dangerous and if I catch you doing it you're grounded but what a great fun idea it is to
drive along side your RC plane and pilot it through a tunnel . I wonder how well it handles the turbulence created by other cars.
A big story I didn't get to mention last week is the judge's order for YouTube to
give its user traffic data to Viacom as part of Viacom's lawsuit against Google. The stand-out line for me: "Viacom wants the data to prove that infringing material is more popular than user-created videos, which could be used to increase Google's liability if it is found guilty of contributory infringement." I'm
less convinced than Helen that copyrighted bootleg material isn't the main appeal of YouTube. I think a lot of YouTube's success comes from the fact that traditional content producers were so slow or otherwise clueless about making an online video service as useful as YouTube. Separate from Viacom's lawsuit, what I'm wondering is whether traditional content producers will starve YouTube to death now that they're coming up with video solutions of their own. And if they (with sites like
Hulu ) can add a user generated/social element to their legal video libraries, does that spell the end of YouTube?
Hey look! It's a recommendation from Ralph!
Battle of the Bands: Rock Band Build your rock band and compete for the record contract. But be careful to hit your notes at the right time, or the audience will boo you off the stage! Will closes the browser in shame: Wow, I never play those guitar hero games and I seriously suck at this one.
As soon as I saw
that story of the Iranian missile Photoshop job the first thought that popped into my mind was "Photoshop contest." Unfortunately my skills aren't so sharp that I was able to get my sample contributions out very quickly. While I noodled with layers and opacity,
this guy followed a similar idea to one I had about increasing the number of missiles to the point of absurdity and did it better and funnier (but he didn't add a Santa!). Nearly a hundred thousand views of his image as I write this.
Speaking of better and funnier,
this Wired item did a nice job of surfacing some gems from around the Web.
Speaking of round-ups, The Chicago Tribune did a nice round-up of
other famous fakes .
We've never had a Photoshop contest here at Clicked and I'm not sure
how it would work since I don't have a voting system built into this
software. Let's just call this one an open invitation just to see how
much interest there is. If someone blows us all away I'll hit up
marketing for a prize to give.
Post your link in the comments
and I'll try to round them up periodically. Before any comments are
approved I'll check the link first so you won't have to worry about
surprises when you click them.
I did three of them:
this ,
this and
this .
I saw a link on a few political blogs to
a statement by Rene Marie . Clueless, I thought to myself, "Gee, there's a jazz singer named Rene Marie too." Actually, that's the same one. Rene Marie is the lady who caused all the fuss when she decided to
sing the black national anthem instead of the actual national anthem to introduce the Denver mayor's State of the City address.
Realizing who she is and being
somewhat familiar with her music brings a little more clarity to the story. The first time I heard Rene Marie was through her medley of Strange Fruit and Dixie. After searching all over the place I finally found
a full free version of it on Rhapsody . It's the tenth one down on
this list or, if we're lucky,
this link will pop it up in their player .
Seriously, set aside what you think the anthem story and give it a listen. Totally worth it.
I'm away from Clicked this week but I hate to let it sit idle and obviously I'm still going to poke around the Web so hopefully I can do a few light updates this week.
I lost some time this morning to
Star Fighter . It's interesting how it doesn't need an instruction mode because the control keys are labeled in the screen readouts. The one bit of advice I didn't realize until my second game is that you want to shoot like crazy with the space bar, not selectively.
Portable Autonomous Sentry demonstration - Tell Sarah Connor to trick-or-treat at a different house.
I feel like there's something I'm missing about
this rental car rally . You pay 150 bucks and rent a car and drive to Montreal. And there will be parties.
"
100 Unbelievably Useful Reference Sites You’ve Never Heard Of "
Watching this commercial I have to wonder how well Sylvania light bulbs are selling in Bangkok.
Solar saves the deay headline of the day:
How a Giant Solar Tower Could Power the Future - The idea is that the temperature different between the top and bottom of a huge tower causes a natural updraft that turbines can then turn into energy. As the commenters note: dubious.
Pharrell's tattoo removal :
"It's basically like getting a skin graft, but you're not taking skin from your ass or your legs. These guys actually grow the skin for you," he explains. "First you have to give them a sample of your skin, which they then replicate. Once that's been done, they sew it on - and it's seamless."
New pictures from the
next Harry Potter movie .
The title of this is "
Stripper Fail " but it's more like a belly dancer. There's no explicit nudity and even the front of her top is blurred out but it is a wiggling dancing lady so be aware at work. Anyway, you'll see the disaster coming from a mile away.
A train that uses less energy by never stopping
is one of those ideas that's a little beyond my imaginative grasp. I
get what they're saying, stopping and starting is a huge energy waster,
and yes, the animation makes it look like it works, but my mental model
has the passengers suffering whiplash and the car flung across the
countryside.
Speaking of straining the mental model, here's
the latest on the Uno monocycle
- which turns out to actually have two wheels side by side. The thing
tops out at 15 mph right now and the maker hopes to get that up to 40.
Imagining a gyroscope in a size that would fit this vehicle that can
maintain its axis while braking from 40 mph is where my brain shuts
down.
Speaking of crazy monocycles,
the BuzzBall
seems like it could hold some promise with the addition of a gyroscope.
The fact that it doesn't have one is why it's being compared to a
personal roller coaster: "Once the BuzzBall is in motion and the pilot
decides to turn, their seat inside the ball will rotate against the
direction of travel resulting in spins, somersaults, corkscrews, barrel
rolls and other nausea inducing motions."
This game is supposed to guess how old you are by how well you score. It's not in English so you don't really get the benefit of instructions. The first time I played it guessed correctly. The second time I played I came out nine years younger. So it's a good game in my book. (Oh, the instructions are that it shows you a bunch of numbers and then replaces them with empty circles. Click the circles in the order of the numbers they represent, lowest to highest.)
Commuter Click:
Why are the media obsessed with supposedly 'out of control' women? "Out of control women" should not be confused with "Girls Gone Wild." I had always seen the focus on Lindsay Lohan/Britney Spears train wreck stories as being a mix of "at least I'm not screwing up as bad as that guy" and a general public mothering. I'll be interested to read how this person argues that it's part of a feminist backlash.
The Website is Down literally made me laugh out loud. It reminded me a little of
You Suck At Photoshop and made me wonder if there's a name for the genre of movie that is a voiceover while you watch someone's actions on a computer screen.
Shepherd huts - These make me want to go ice fishing or something. (Do I need to have a hole in the floor for ice fishing or can I just park my hut next to the hole?)
With liberal bloggers (and commentators in other media) spinning themselves in circles trying to figure out if they should bash Obama for his stance on the FISA bill or maintain a facade of unwavering support, I thought this was an interesting point of note:
Reminder: Obama Told Us To Judge Him, and Pressure Him Wiring up all your furniture with LED rope lights didn't really grab me as a good idea until I saw the bed. I'm not necessarily a fan of those pimped-out cars with the glowing undercarriage but if anyone in your family has monsters-under-the-bed issues, I can't think of a better solution.
50 Must-Read Up and Coming Blogs by Teachers 7 People From Around the World With Real Mutant Superpowers - I'm not sure how I feel about this piece. On the one hand it's great that people physical challenges and anomalies can be successful at finding new ways to deal with the world. On the other hand it feels wrong to cheer for birth defects and crippling injuries. (And P.S. yes, on some of these the facts are a little thin.)
Speaking of super humans, "Some people have a mutation that makes them amazingly resistant to HIV -- and now, scientists may have
found a way to give that immunity to anyone ."
The popular Boing Boing blog has purged its archives of any mention of a popular sex blogger named Violet Blue. No one knows why for sure and frankly the whole thing is the kind of drama I avoid but the waves the matter is making across the Web are undeniable (whether for the drama or principles like censorship and transparency) so I'm giving it this one mention and this,
the most detailed account of the whole thing I've seen .
NOTE: In case you glossed over it, Violet Blue is a sex blogger, which isn't a porn blogger per se but links to that site are almost guaranteed to contain nudity. The link I've place here is fine.
Barroom Debate:
Is Having Sex with a Robot Hooker Cheating? An interesting remark from my colleague sitting nearby: "If you have to ask, it is." That's a fair point, but I also wonder at what point a non-cheating inanimate sex toy crosses the line to cheating sex robot. When it has a face? When it's life-sized?
Alternative energy saves the day headline of the day:
Wind on the verge of being a power player - It's interesting to see a wind-power business story - as opposed to a tech story or some kind of human interest story about the wind-powered rock concerts or something.
I'm inclined to agree that the addition of Robin to Batman changes the dynamic and
decreases the overall coolness of Batman drastically . Then again, Christopher Nolan has done such a great job amplifying the coolness of Batman I'd be really interested to see what he could do with Robin.
