Stray Hawkeye

This is old, but still amusing.

That was actually basically the first thing I ever saw that Sarah Silverman did, and I thought it was hilarious. So I looked up some other videos of her stand up and some other comedy bits she’s done, and realized that her entire comedic range consists of looking vaguely innocent and then cursing and saying things that are in bad taste and totally improper to the situation.  Which is funny (at least for me), for all of about one video before it gets really old and I wish the comedian had enough of a  brain to have some range and variety.  So if that is the only clip of Sarah Silverman you’ve ever seen, stop now, while it’s still funny.

To take a little shine off of that new Christmas toy, especially the electronic ones, here’s a look at where “away” is when you throw the old one away.  Fair warning, it’s really depressing.

Here’s an added bonus.  I found that video via Boing Boing Gadgets.  On the same day, they posted about a Target gift card, with a low resolution digital camera built in.  They described it as:

It’s easy to get all sniffy about the specs of Target’s new digicam gift cards — 1.2 megapixels? 8MBs of onboard memory? The eyeroll of disdain underlined with a wipe of a mucousy nose with the back of the sleeve — but they’re still awesome. A gift card is an inherently tacky and thoughtless gift, but the ability to load photographs of yourself or loved ones before shoving one into a Christmas stocking is a great, humanizing touch.

That’s right, on the same day as posting where all this thrown away toxic trash goes, they post a piece of absolute throw away toxic trash, and deem it “awesome”, with “a great, humanizing touch”.  Bleeding heart environmentalism at its best/worst.

In case the irony there wasn’t thick enough, they also linked to both of of these articles in their daily round up, deeming one “oddly humanizing”, and the other “super disturbing”.  I’ll let you decide which is which.

• Flying
• Beneath the Bridge No. 1/3
• Lightening at Sunset

Too cute to not post.

So Pepsi recently redesigned their logo:

(image grabbed from Pepsi’s website)

My first thought was – wow, that looks like the logo for a South Korean airline.  Anyone else?

How about now?  (New Year’s resolution – get better at photo shop so lame sight gags like that don’t take an hour to make.)

So, I actually looked up what a real Korean Airline logo looks like, and, really, not that far off:

A little different, but really, I think think the Pepsi logo would fit Korean Airlines better than their current logo.  Make it a little more modern and sleek.

We’re getting close to the Inauguration, so I figure it’s about time to post some things about the election.  (Yep, I’m that far behind on the things I’d like to blog about.)  Still trying to keep the political stuff to an occasional blast of links/bullets.

• Now that Obama has been elected, and the shine is starting to wear off as everyone, slowly, one by one, realizes he won’t please everyone or fix everything instantly, The Onion puts things pretty well in perspective here.
• Apparently the people dancing in the streets in my neighborhood after Obama’s election was nothing compared to across town.
• 
  Via: Pundit Kitchen
• Have I mentioned how glow in the dark Chernobyl blue the city of Minneapolis votes?  The Deets has a good example.  Only three precincts in the whole city of Minneapolis voted for the Democrat in the Senate race by less than a 20% margin (all were still over a 10% margin), IN A THREE WAY RACE.  The race is still up in the air though, as they’re recounting all the ballots, and it’s hard to get enough people from the campaigns to take off their mittens and boots to count that high when it’s this cold out.
• I shall laugh heartily if Norm Coleman gets beat by Al Franken, not because I really like Franken (I voted for Dean Barkley, as the least terrible option), but because it would mean that not only has Coleman been beaten by pro wrestler, Jessie “The Body” Ventura:
  But also by Stuart Smally:
  
• So how much did all those votes cost in the Senate race?  Well, it was the most expensive Senate race in Minnesota history.  I’ve seen estimates ranging from $27 million to $33 million, and they’re still spending with the recount.  So, let’s look at total number of votes for each candidate, vs how much they spent on TV ads in the Twin Cities, just as an extremely rough estimate of how much each vote cost.  (Yes, I know there’s more to Minnesota than the Twin Cities, and they spent money a lot of other ways, and there’s also political committees and special interests, and so on, but hang with me here, you’ll see why that doesn’t matter for my point in a moment.)  According to MPR, Coleman spent about $6.6 million on TV ads in the Twin Cities, and got 42% of the vote, with 1.2 million votes.  That’s about $5.50 per vote.  Franken spent $5.5 million on TV ads in the Twin Cities, and got 42% of the vote, with 1.2 million votes as well.  That’s about $4.58 per vote.  Dean Barkley got 15.2% of the vote, 437,404 votes to be exact.  And how much did he spend on TV ads in the Twin Cities?  Nothing.  Not a dime.  He didn’t run any ads at all, and still got 15% of the vote.  Kind of tells you something about the race and the candidates.
• A couple of good sites where you can look at the challenged ballots and see both how creatively people can screw up thier ballots, and how frivolous some of the challenges are.
• Excessively loaded down with ads, but pretty entertaining – Super Obama World.  Yep, it’s an Obama/election themed take on Super Mario Bros.  All the ads make it just about unplayable, but entertaining for a moment none the less.  Really pretty challenging too.
• I really can’t tell for sure if this is serious, or really tongue in cheek, but a blogger has declared November 22, 2008 Victory in Iraq Day, and a wide array of other blogs have joined in.  I’ve looked it over and over, and I keep going back and forth or if it’s extremely well done satire on the American need to “win” every war, or if it’s serious and embodying what would be satirized.  Either way, I say, yay, we won, does that mean you’ll stop holding signs saying “let our troops win” and let us come home from this horrible, terrible mistake now?  Wait, I mean, let us come home from this “triumphant victory” now?  If that’s what it takes to end this thing, I’ll march in the street celebrating VI day.
• Ironic Sans (via Kottke) has collected Google street view images of all of the 1600 Pennsylvania Ave’s around the country.  It’s actually an amazingly diverse and representative cross section of America.

Remember, the early worm catches the bird.

(click for  bigger)

• Brickworks High Angle
• Venetian
• Sand Castle, Fishermen and Rainbow Remnant

Another group I like that they play on The Current – Tegan and Sara.

Yes, they are twins.  And both have beautiful voices.  Bonus points for dorky cuteness.  Thier website is here.

• Chasing the ISS
• Ocean Dream
• Sailfish (series)

A potential multiple choice question for becoming a Minneapolis Police Officer:

It’s 3 degrees out and snowing.  It has been brutally cold for several days.  While driving along a narrow residential side street in your squad car, you come across a small SUV double parked in the street.  It has signs on it that say “Auto Rescue: Tires Changed, Jump Starts, Lock Services”.  It is parked next to a small legally parked car with it’s hood open.  There are two people standing in front of the car, one holding jumper cables.  You should:

A) Park in the open spot 3 car lengths back, get out, and see if you can help jump start the car.

B) Pull up behind the SUV and put your lights on so no one hits them.  Help to direct traffic around the SUV while the one lane is blocked to keep traffic flowing.

C) Park your squad car in the middle of the street, so it will block traffic coming from both directions instead of just one.  Stay in the warm car.  Announce over your car’s speakers that the SUV driver needs to move their vehicle because they are blocking traffic.  If the stranded motorist yells back that the SUV driver is giving her a jump start, repeat over the speaker that they need to move their vehicle because they are blocking traffic.  Note that no cars have pulled up behind you, in the lane that was already blocked by the SUV, though there are 3 cars now backed up in the oncoming lane, which only you are blocking.

D) A and B.

30 seconds.  Think it over.  As I saw tonight, the answer is apparently C.  Yes, that’s right C.  And they’re lucky you didn’t give them a ticket for being double parked.  Actually, he may have, I had walked further on by that point.

While we’re ripping on the Minneapolis police, on a more serious note, we’ve had a string of at least 10 violent, armed robberies on a main bicycle/running/walking thoroughfare recently.  And the police didn’t make any statement about this until there were 10 of them.  No warnings, no reaction at all.  People I know who work at a local running store, and bike on the route in question all the time hadn’t even heard about it.  (The following bit largely echos the sentiment of this post on The Deets.)  Then the police did finally issue a warning.  And it’s every bit as absurd as one might expect.  Do they give a description of the attackers?  Not really.  Three young males, that’s about it.  What is their first bit of advice?  Tell people to avoid going out after dark.  This trail is a main route for bicycle commuters.  Dark in Minnesota in the winter comes at about 4:30pm.  The work day ends at 5:00pm.  Anyone else see an issue here?

Another bit of advice from the police: “Pay attention to your surroundings. If you see people ahead of you, that make you nervous or uncomfortable, exit the Greenway at the nearest ramp.”  Apparently the police have never been on the Greenway (which would explain a lot).  There are very, very few entry/exit points.  It’s down in a hole that used to be a rail line, with bridges over it every block.  The sides are pretty much shear brick walls at several points.  There are several places where there’s no entry/exit for a least a quarter mile, and one I can think of off the top of my head that’s closer to a half mile.  (I hate running on the Greenway for just this reason, and avoid it even when there isn’t crime for this reason.  There’s also no water stops, but that’s another rant.)

Well, at least they tell the exact location of the attacks so people know where to watch out, right?  Nope.  “…on the Midtown Greenway. They’ve occurred in both the 3rd and 5th Precincts at different locations along the trail.”  All of the Midtown Greenway that is in the city of Minneapolis is in the 3rd and 5th Precincts.  It’s 5 miles long and spans the entire city, from one side to the other:

(base map from, that’s right, the police department)

And what do people do when the police aren’t protecting them?  They organize themselves:

(video via MN Stories)

Not that a big group of bikers all biking together one time really does much.  I would think something like a “riding buddy” program would do more, so people don’t have to ride alone.

Or have a regular police patrol or something.  There’s a good 10-15 cops standing in the intersections down town “directing traffic” every night during rush hour.  And by “directing traffic”, I mean standing in the middle of busy intersections waving their arms and blowing their whistles, telling drivers to do exactly what the traffic signals are already telling them.  Absolutely, 100%, exactly what the stop lights are already doing.  Except making people more nervous because there’s a cop waving his arms and blowing a whistle that you have to drive around in addition to the usual traffic and pedestrians.  Why not put a couple of them on bikes and run them up and down the Greenway in a loop.  They might not stop anything in progress, but being there, and on bikes, would at least show a good faith effort, and allow them to respond faster so there would be a better chance of catching the people doing this.

Generally when people lose faith in the police and try to police themselves, it doesn’t end well.

Dear Batman, are you there?  It’s me.  Kearn.

As you may have heard, there are a variety of legal suits at the moment trying to block Obama from being sworn in as President on the claim that he isn’t a natural born citizen.  They claim anything from “he was born in Kenya, secretly snuck back in to the US, and then given a birth certificate, without anyone noticing until now”, to, “his dad wasn’t American, so he’s not”, because apparently nationality is carried on the Y chromosome.

Though I like to indulge a good conspiracy theory from time to time, if nothing else as the “what if” type thought experiment (ie, if Obama wasn’t legally able to become President, who gets it then?  Biden? McCain? Re-Vote?  Supreme Court decides because they seem to like deciding elections?), but this one’s a little ridiculous to me.  Before the Democrats let Obama become a visible candidate, I’m pretty sure they verified his “natural-born citizen” status about eight thousand ways to Tuesday, or (to throw the conspiracy theorists a bone) forged it all so well you would need a nuclear powered Delorean to have any chance of getting evidence to the contrary.  Either way there’s too much riding on any party’s Presidential nominee to not check these things out excessively well before the media even hears the candidate’s name, much less gets elected.

But, when I close a door I open a window.  Or at least a mail slot.  Yep, this witch hunt is as good as dead (not that it really ever had much life).  But, what about a real witch hunt?  I’m pretty sure this one will have as much appeal to the GOP base as the current one, if not more.  Because after all, who does the GOP hate more than foreigners?

Non-believers.  That’s who.  (And really, they probably mostly hate foreigners for being non-believers.)  So why not take all the lipstick off the current witch hunt and cut right to the guts of it?  I propose the GOP finally launch a real, honest to goodness witch hunt.  And better yet, this time I have a simple way to find verifiable proof that the target is a witch.

Here is the logic I propose.  (Tongue in cheek so far I can nearly lick my own ear.)

As we all know, Obama’s whole campaign was based around one central theme, which he embraced.  Hope.

I would say that in many ways, it would be fair to say that in his campaign, Obama embodied hope.

And, as we all know from the 1998 movie of the same name, Hope Floats.

I’ll leave it to the GOP base to provide you with the rest of the logic:

So, logically, if Obama weighs the same as a duck, he’s A WITCH! The GOP could finally be absolutely justified in one of their witch hunts, if only we could find some larger scales.

As a side note, I’d also like to point out the length of the silence between, “She turned me in to a newt. – A Newt?” and, “I got better.”  Almost everyone who quotes this makes that pause significantly too short.  It bugs me.

• Siena Perspective
• Eternity
• Jordan.01

Usually when I post a musician on here, it’s one I’ve been listening to a lot lately and really like.  Someone I heard of a while ago, and their music hasn’t faded, gotten old, gotten annoying, or been massively overplayed since then.  Pretty often they’re also local musicians.  However, I’ll make an exception for this one, this is the first time I’ve ever seen this girl, and just saw it a couple days ago, but I’m impressed.

If you can open a song, on a live broadcast by singing a capella three part harmonies with yourself, and go from there, there’s a place on my blog for you:

I’d love to be able to compose/perform like that.  Just think of managing all those tracks in your head, while singing another one over it.  Most musicians take months in the studio to come up with something like that.  Wow.

On third or fourth listening, also really cool for the layering the past over the present, especially with the overall lyrics of the song about getting out of a trapping surroundings, and getting by just for the moment.

Via: Ovablastic