Stray Hawkeye

This picture/exhibit by Mark Jenkins made me laugh:

Also like this one:

Not really a big fan of the rest, but I really like those two.

A segment from ESPN’s E:60 about the Aplington-Parkersburg’s football team after the tornado there this spring:

I’ll admit I got a little teary eyed watching that.  That doesn’t happen often.

The kinds of people in the video are why I still like to refer to myself as an Iowan, even though I’ve lived in Minnesota for over 3 years now.  I think this is why I still find myself referring to Iowa as “home”.

I think someone should make a site called YouTuber, dedicated solely to hosting videos of potatoes.

Let’s see Google pay $1.65 billion for that.  Unfortunately, it looks like the domain name is already taken by a bland search engine.

Very good, if slightly aged, clip of Bill Moyers interviewing John Stewart, talking about the American people’s relationship to the war in Iraq.  Right around from 2:00-3:00 is so, so good.

It’s part 2 of 3 parts to the interview.  Part 1.  Part 3.

This is probably only funny to people who work in IT all day, everyday.  If you don’t work in IT, it may still be vaguely amusing, but probably mostly just IT people (NSFW):

Michael Kontopoulos makes machines with obvious flaws, such as this one:

Machine that Tries to Draw Circles from Michael Kontopoulos on Vimeo.

If you have ever wondered what it’s like to attempt to program computers using a Microsoft product, just watch the above video, and while it’s playing, scream something to the effect of “You’re supposed to go at the same time.  No, no, together.  To-ge-ther!  Why do you keep stoping like that?!?!  I already fixed that yesterday!!!  WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?!?!?!  JUST DRAW A !@#()!)$#!@ CIRCLE!!!!!!!!  HOW CAN SOMETHING SO EASY BE SO HARD?!?!?!?!?!?”

Hotness:

I watched this video about 3 times before I noticed the heart necklace tying in with the lyrics.  What can I say?  I’m slow, or distracted.

This is also the same girl who was singing in the Ben Folds song I posted a little while ago.  Such a great voice.

A few entertaining links to help lighten the mood as we slip and slide towards total government control of the economy everything:

• Hank Paulson’s bailout package, presented in a much more fitting manner- as Nigerian banking spam email.
• One of the clearest explanations of the Sub-Prime issues I’ve seen, plus, it has stick figures and explicatives to ease the pain.
• Want a Bailout of your own?  Log on to Buy MY Shit Pile and give the government your best offer.

All this can be yours for the low, low price of $3,000 for every man, woman, child, infant, new born, and senior citizen in America.

Don’t worry though, come November, you’ll get to pick between McCain, who will support whatever bailout plan they all agree on at the White House tomorrow, and Obama, who will support whatever bailout plan they all agree on at the White House tomorrow, but I’m sure they’ll disagree on minor points, and you can pick between those!  Ain’t democracy great?  And people laugh when I say I’m voting 3rd party.

As a bit of an “I told you so”, Ron Paul predicted absolutely exactly this – the failure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the bursting of a housing bubble that The Fed has propped up, and an ensuing tax payer bail out of the industry – 5 years ago.  Here is a speech he gave on Sept 10, 2003.  He’s had many other speeches in the same vein.  It’s the same kind of thing he’s been talking about since his 1st term in Congress in 1978, all the way through his campaign this Spring, and now his Campaign for Liberty.

It seems like he’s been interviewed by nearly every media outlet over this last week, and even had an op-ed piece on the front page of CNN’s website yesterday.  It’s been interesting to watch all of this and see both how much exposure he’s getting these last couple weeks (especially compared to the total lack of attention the media gave his Presidential run), and how much everyone just nods their heads, and then keeps doing exactly what they were doing before.

So, I was reading some of the accounts of the RNC protests over at the Minnesota Independent, and one of their articles had this:

Best sing-along: “We all live in a fascist police state” to the tune of “Yellow Submarine,” sung on the John Ireland Bridge as cops arrested hundreds of people.

I tend to be of the opinion that the best protests/messages are the ones that make you both laugh and think.  They stick around longer that way.  This one seemed especially good for the juxtaposition of the original and the parody- the upbeat tone while singing about the general destruction of our democracy.  The hippies of the 60’s vs now.

I was briefly feeling ambitious and was going to make a YouTube video with a full version of “We all live in an fascist police state” to the tune of “Yellow Submarine”, overlayed with images of the various beatings, unlawful arrests, and such that happened at both the RNC and DNC.

However, that would involve me finding a karaoke version of the song, learning to sing, recording it, remixing my voice in, along with appropriate beating sound effects, finding a bunch of video clips, and mixing all of this together into a nice finished product.  Unfortunately I have neither the time, nor (probably more importantly) pretty much any multimedia editing skills that aren’t rustier than my first car.

But, I was ambitious enough to rewrite the lyrics.  I think they’d fit pretty well.

Feel free to sing along, and mentally replace the images of the cartoon versions of the Beatles with images like these.

If anyone actually has the equipment to record audio and remix clips, or even knows where to start, let me know.  It would be fun to make the actual video, even if we did have to use my singing.

Fascist Police State:

In the town where I was born,
Police are wearing black uniforms,
To protect the government,
In the land of police state.

So we protest in the streets,
Till they sprayed us all with mace,
And collapsed in fits of pain,
In our fascist police state.

We all live in a fascist police state,
fascist police state, fascist police state,
We all live in a fascist police state,
fascist police state, fascist police state.

And our friends are now in jail,
And they raided the house next door,
Preemptive strikes just like the war.
(air raid sirens, in a somewhat trumpet like manner)

We all live in a fascist police state,
fascist police state, fascist police state,
We all live a fascist police state,
fascist police state, fascist police state.

(Tighten up that line men!
Round up the journalist over here sir!
Battle stations! Battle stations!
Aye, aye, sir, fire!)

And they shred the bill of right,
Every freedom taken away,
The Patriot Act and FISA rule,
Over our fascist police state (Ha ha!)

We all live in a fascist police state,
fascist police state, fascist police state,
We all live in a fascist police state,
fascist police state, fascist police state.

(fading)

We all live in a fascist police state,
fascist police state, fascist police state,
We all live in a fascist police state,
fascist police state, fascist police state.

So in watching bits of the RNC, it occurred to me that there’s the perfect opportunity for some really good ads by anyone opposing the Republicans/Bush (and I can’t imagine people of that temperament are in short supply these days).  It struck me that the overall set up, with the giant screen behind the podium, especially with Bush’s speech projected on it:

could have some cultural resonance.  Specifically to this ad, from Apple:

It actually already got spoofed by the Obama people against Hillary:

And given the giant screen / mindless crowd set up already in place at the RNC, half of your editing work is already done for you.  They’ve even posted videos of all of the speeches here.  Plus, it could make it really easy to repurpose the images from the RNC in everyone’s minds for their parallels to this.

If you’re doubting my claims of the “mindless crowd” at the RNC, I was talking to one of my friends who was a delegate (one of the Ron Paul people we got elected), and apparently aside from all of the made for TV-ness that was apparent, there was even more you might not have noticed.  Many of those home made looking signs were actually made by the McCain campaign and handed out on the floor.  They also handed out cards with numbered chants, a la- Chant 1 – “Country First, Country First”, Chant 2 – “Drill, Baby, Drill”, Chant 3 – “U.S.A.”, more on that last one here.

(A side note – Fans at WWE Professional Wrestling events often also chant “U.S.A.” when one of the “bad guy” characters billed as being from another country, such as Russia or India, is in the ring and receiving more attention than they like.  The RNC and WWE probably have more in common than most people care to realize.  And yet people think it’s odd Minnesota elected a former pro wrestler Governor. )

At any rate, apparently “Live Free or Die”, “Make love, not war”, and “FREEDOM!!!” were not in the cards at the RNC.

Here’s an interesting video on quantum physics, presented in a fairly lay person approachable manner:

Where this makes me a little paranoid is the fact that one of the central claims of safety for the LHC is that the types of collisions they’re going to create happen all the time in the atmosphere, and at higher energies, and the Earth hasn’t been destroyed yet, so it must be safe.  The only problem is that we’re not observing the collisions in the atmosphere.  The whole point of the LHC is to put an observer into the equation.  Which, if what we know about quantum physics is any guide, totally changes the situation, and may effect what is actually happening in the collision.

A side thought, the plan is to get one stream going 99.99….% the speed of light in one direction, and another going the same speed in the other direction.  So, if you used one as the frame of reference for the other, or even if you just measured one against a frame of reference like the galactic center, which we’re moving quite fast relative to, wouldn’t you have a fair shot at having something moving faster than the speed of light?  Or is this where relativity makes things all weird with time actually slowing down around the the particles as they increase in speed?  And if so, with the rapid deceleration once they hit, is it possible to create something like a time shock wave?  I need to read up on my advanced physics at some point.  The “how does stuff work” mixed with the mind bending thought experiment factor makes it too interesting to not think about.

Also, for the “this happens in nature all the time” argument – I can see how one particle traveling at that speed could hit another one that is relatively fixed (like in the atmosphere), but having two, and even more so, two whole groups of them, traveling in exactly opposite directions at nearly the speed of light and colliding exactly head on doesn’t seem like something that would happen that often.  With the size of the universe, I’m sure it probably has happened, but I have a hard time thinking it does that so frequently that “the earth is still here” argument is all that waterproof.

Either way, I still get a laugh every day when I get my rss update from
http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com

Though really, they’re just getting things going in one direction right now.  No real colliding yet.

My computer is back up and running.  Let the blogging resume.

Hi All,

An administrative note.  My home computer is having some issues, so I’ll be taking a slight hiatus from blogging in order to get it fixed up.  Posting will be a bit sporadic, and less frequent than my current usual of one per day.  No worries, I still have lots more to share.  Hopefully I should get things straightened out with that within a week or so, and then get back to my usual schedule,

Kearn

Some old, awesome pictures from the sets of Godzilla movies:

link: http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/er/2008/05/godzilla-may-19.html

link: http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/er/2008/04/new-category-go.html

More here, here, and (*ahem*) here.

Also, and ongoing list of Godzilla related posts on that blog here.

So today I was having a Caribou Iced Coffee that I got at a race.  Basically it’s coffee, which is cold, and comes in an aluminum can.  I was curious what was in it, so I read the list of ingredients:

Coffee, reduced fat milk, sugar, sodium bicarbonate, natural flavors, carrageenan

Those all sounded pretty familiar, except carrageenan.  I was curious what it was, and even more so, how to pronounce it.  It strikes me a fun sounding word, though I’m still not sure if I’ve got it right.  That’s one of the major downsides of the internet- you can read about something all you like and become an expert on it, but as soon as you go to talk about it, you’ll sound like an idiot for saying it wrong.  Either way, it’s kind of fun to try to say. Carrageenan.

So anyway, I looked up what it is on Wikipedia.  Apparently, it’s an extract from a type of red seaweed that grows off of the coast of Ireland.  Aside from iced coffee, it’s also used in processed meat, fire fighting foam, shampoo, and shoe polish.  Oh yeah, and it might also be useful as a sexual lubricant and microbicide.

Amazing the things you can learn reading an ingredient list while highly caffeinated.

What will they do with red Irish seaweed next?