Stray Hawkeye

Do they have these at the State Fair yet?  How about now?  Now?

Via Craftzine

I don’t know what to say, other than I’m jealous I didn’t think of it first:

Anyone know where I can get the sheet music for that? And the flame thrower-esque sousaphone attachment?

As a side note, the cover of Britney Spears’ “Ooops I Did It Again” playing in the background is by Max Raabe.  He has his own orchestra (the Palast Orchester), and does lots of 1920′s German dance music style covers of pop songs (among his other work). Other favorites are his cover of Angel (by Shaggy), Super Trouper, Tainted Love, and We Will Rock You. I didn’t have much luck finding YouTube clips of these, but these two Amazon pages for the albums have little clips of them to at least give the flavor of it.

The Minnesota State Fair started today.  I don’t claim to be an expert on the fair by any means.  I went for the first time last year, and I will say the various fried whatever on a stick was wonderful.  I’m pretty sure I spent as much on an afternoon / evening of food there as I would have at a fancy restaurant, and I would totally do it again.  The deep fat fried pickles were way better than I expected, and the deep fat fried candy bar on a stick is much better if you let it cool just a little to a more gooey state if you get it fresh right out of the fryer.  Everything else is just sort of a blur of fried wonderfulness.

The other great part of the State Fair is, of course, the people watching.  Last year some co-workers and I took an afternoon off to go, and one of them forwarded us people watching fair bingo cards (pdf).  I have no idea where it came from originally, so I unfortunately can’t credit whoever it was that originally came up with it, just got it as an email forward.  It’s great, terrible, but great.  Not having been to the State Fair before, I mostly thought it was a joke.  Not so.  We forgot to print off cards before we left, but by the end we were pretty sure we were playing for a black out card instead of a simple line, and I think we all would have won pretty easily.

I’d like to meet someone who can type in such a way that the tapping noises the keys make are timed so that they convey the same message that the person is typing, but at about a third of the speed and in Morse Code.

- …. .- -   .– — ..- .-.. -..   -… .   -.-. — — .-.. .-.-.-

Via I can has cheezburger

Via I can has cheezburger

Via I can has cheezburger

I especially love that last one.

Cuddling chimps

This film on protein synthesis, created in 1971, is proof that the first few years of the 70′s got a contact high from the 60′s.  Wait untill about three and a half minutes in for the drugs to take effect.

Bet you never thought of the basic building block of life as tripping, dancing hippies with balloons taped to their heads before, did you?

1. NASA is apparently in the practice of dropping rubber duckies with Inuit tattoos into bottomless holes in the Artic.  It makes me laugh a lot that our national space agency, which sends people into outer space, uses rubber duckies to research glaciers.  (via Herd)
2. There is apparently also a bottomless hole at the end of half of a waterfall called the Devil’s Kettle, right here in Minnesota.  As much as I love scientific discovery, I also like the wonder from the fact that there are some really simple things like this that we don’t know.

Have I mentioned I’m quickly falling out of love with Google?

From Noise to Signal, found via Read Write Web

I have no idea if these things are any good at what they are, but I heard both the names lately and thought they were great names:

• The First Ammendment Art Gallery, an art gallery in north east Minneapolis (found via this article)
• Times New Viking, some band with a cool name that played in Loring Park recently