Stray Hawkeye

In case you happen to be up late some weeknight and are looking for something to watch, might I suggest Craig Ferguson.  If you like the humor around here, he’s like that, only about eight thousand times better.

He’s on after Letterman.

The really great part of the show is that unlike all the other late night shows where they just read off of cue cards, Craig just has an outline of topics and makes stuff up as he goes.  And it shows.  It’s basically just him rambling by himself (no band, no side kick (okay, he does have a robotic skeleton sidekick, but I don’t know that it really counts) ), and he’s actually funny enough to make it work.  Obviously, it’s hit or miss depending on the night since he’s making it up as he goes, but on the whole it’s one of the only things on television that consistently makes me laugh out loud pretty much every time I watch it.

It’s also kind of nice that being on late, it starts off with the best part and slowly tappers from there.  He does a little 2-3 minute skit to lead of the show, which is usually pretty good and occasionally involves singing hand puppets (that sort of gives you an idea of the tone of the show).  Then there’s the monologue which is hit or miss but also usually pretty good.  We then go to the desk for email/twitters/random guest.  If it’s email or twitter it’s usually good, if it’s random guest, go to bed.  Then we have interview with some kind of sort of celebrity, which is rarely worth staying up for, but occasionally decent.

I not only love his delivery and overall style, as well as making it up as he goes, but I also love that he jumps back and forth between being a show based nearly entirely on poop and fart jokes to making obscure reference to Dali or Kierkegaard.  Seriously.

And really, let’s take a quick run through the list of what else is on for late night talk shows:

• There is (or in this case, was) Conan.  Vaguely entertaining, but doesn’t really make me laugh, and I have a sort of deep rooted hatred for him stemming from a college roommate I had who watched him every night, loudly, even when I had early classes the next day.
• There’s Letterman.  Umm, “Is this anything?” and “Will it float?” are entertaining, but only happen once in a blue moon.  Aside from that it was vaguely funny while Conan and Leno were fighting it out, but on the whole it’s mostly just sound to have on, and Paul Shaffer being a continuous public service announcement for why you shouldn’t spend decades doing drugs.  (Okay, so Craig apparently did lots of drug for a couple decades too, but has since cleaned up.)
• There’s Jimmy Fallon.  And that’s just painful.  Have you ever watched it?  Did you too think that it must have just been an off night, and tried watching part of it again another night, only to find that it was still terrible?  It’s not the it’s offensive, or anything, in fact it would woefully fail the “Is this anything?” test, it’s just that it’s not funny.  At all.  Except to Jimmy Fallon, who laughs at length after every joke.  Unlike the audience.  Seriously, it’s like they wanted to do an experiment where a guy just goes out and bombs, every night.  I actually watch full episode of it once, hoping, praying that there was some great skit that he always saves for the end.  There wasn’t.  I went to bed basically feeling bad for the guy that he does that on national TV every night.
• And there’s Leno.  Sort of okay in small doses, but I get sick of him in a hurry.  It seems like 50% of his comedy is making fun of how dumb other people are, and the other 50% consists of the most hackneyed, formulaic, lowest common denominator humor you can come up with.  This is probably wildly off base, but in a really tangential way, it makes me think a proposed reasoning I heard for why many non-slave owning white southern poor resisted the abolition of slavery so strongly in the first half of the 1800′s.  It’s wasn’t so much because it was economically beneficial to them, but because it gave a social structure where they were officially better than some one.  Admittedly really tangential, but that’s what Leno makes me think of – stupid humor making fun of others for being stupid.  For example, the “Headlines” segment – count how many times he calls the people who write them stupid or idiots.  The entire “Jay Walking” segment in all of it’s edited down to only the most comically wrong answers glory.  Even the monologue, where on a given night he’ll usually preface at least one joke by saying how stupid people are.  It’s one of those things I didn’t really notice for a long time, but once I did, I just couldn’t watch him anymore.
• There’s a smattering of others across other networks, but I don’t have cable.  So, they could be great, or not, I don’t really know.

So, anyway, Craig Ferguson, telling low brow poop jokes in a way that’s funny and not particularly insulting to others, using running gags while still being fairly random, genuinely opinionated, and pulling about an hour of comedy totally out of his ass, weeknights after Dave.

Robot Skeleton Army, march on.

How have I not posted this before?

Pretty cool effect that’s something like a flip book animation married to ghosting effects of a bad tv showing quick action in sports.

Booksthatmakeyoudumb by Virgil Griffith is a nice info-graphic that uses the books that people list as their favorites on Facebook, tied to the school they go to, tied to the school’s average SAT score to determine what books are the leading cause of stupidity/genius.  Amusement ensues.  Apparently smart people like solitude, at least when they’re not sleeping with underage girls, while dumb people prefer to ponder a purpose driven life and Oprah movies while reading the Bible.  My favorite on the list is a book I’ve yet to come across- “I Don’t Read”.

If you’ve ever been in downtown Minneapolis, you’ve probably walked around in the Skyways.  And if you’ve walked around in the Skyways, you’ve probably gotten lost in the Skyways.  Each building built their own, with no central planning that I can discern.  If you look at a map of the Skyways, it basically looks like a two year old scribbled on a map of downtown with a crayon.  And the signs and maps in the Skyways are few and far between, and not all that helpful if you don’t know the official names of each building.  Aside from that, I would say more than half of the businesses and restaurants downtown are on the second level instead of the ground level.  So, I would like to see an app for phones that would help navigate the Skyways.  I was all gung-ho on making this myself a while ago, but as I’ve yet to get around to even starting it, I’m passing it on.  Some potential features:

• At the most basic, it would have a map of the Skyways, and a “You are here” dot showing where you are in them based on the gps in your phone.
• Ideally, it would have some sort of description of each Skyway and building’s interior, so if your phone doesn’t have gps you could figure out where you are based on what it looks like (super ideally, you could take a picture of the Skyway in front of you and it would show you where you are).
• Be able to find routes between places.  Include the times that each Skyway is open and find the shortest / fasted route between two points in the Skyway.  Be able to have some parameters like how far you’re willing to walk outside (maybe 5 blocks if it’s nice, 2 if it’s okay, none at all if it’s really cold – maybe even tie this to a weather service so it can decide this automatically).  If you’re going outside, it should show you pictures of where on which building you need to go back in to get to where you’re going.
• Tell you how long it will take to walk from here to there (in case you have a meeting in 10 minutes and need to grab lunch quick).
• Have the locations and, super ideally, menus, prices, specials, and hours of restaurants in the Skyways.  Do this with bars too.
• Have locations of businesses, both retail and corporate.
• Have things around getting to and from downtown.  Have location of parking ramps, their rates, average time they fill up, specials, etc.  Integrate it with the app they have for city buses.  Show bike racks.
• List upcoming events downtown at the Target Center, First Ave, Orchestra Hall, movies, etc.

Not sure how to describe this one, it’s sort of like an anti-mime – actually manipulating a real object that seems fake instead of the other way around, so it gives a sort of cool wonder instead of a general mime-level hatred.

That’s got to take a lot of practice.

Via Ovablastic

Because:

1. I’m that much of a dork
2. It’s sort of fun to see how much you actually remember from geography class (see point 1)

Globetrotter XL has you try to pin point the location of cities around the world.  For each level you have to be a little more accurate to keep going.

Statetris is like Tetris, but instead of colored blocks, you drop states (up arrow to rotate).

Both are good reminders that I have no idea where anything is in Africa, and that Eastern Europe is pretty fuzzy in my mind.

• Martha Steward with a 15 foot long hot dog.
• And, via Make, proof that Martha Steward eats babies.  I mean seriously, the one that’s a pie comes with a knife?!?!  The Caesar salad kid knows what’s up.
  

You may think that many of the traditions and celebrations that are now part of the Easter holiday have absolutely nothing to do with religion.  That they’re actually mostly left overs from pagan holidays celebrating the equinox and the start of spring, and that Easter was meant to ease conversion by occurring at nearly the same time and taking many of the same themes.  That perhaps candy and bunnies and dyed eggs shouldn’t be such a big part of the celebration.  That there are no more than five puns you could make around the Easter Bunny and religion.  Turns out, you’d be wrong.  Dead and resurrected wrong:

Any one else notice what the lizard guards are wearing on their heads at 1:23 in that clip?  Remind you of anything?

Via Friendly Atheist

Several ideas this week, all around efficiency and energy:

• Make an electric powered motorcycle.  Batteries / electric engines can give a lot of torque immediately, which bikers seem to like.  Motorcycles don’t have to carry all the extra weight that cars do for safety mechanisms.  And they generally already tend to be a secondary vehicle for short trips, which seems like it would be an ideal niche to start getting consumers to try electric on a large scale.  Batteries also tend to suffer in cold climates and really cold weather – again, not a problem for motorcycles.
• Use the heat absorbed by roads during the day to generate electricity.  If you can absorb it to use it for energy and keep the roads at a more steady temperature, you’ll have less plowing/scraping wearing on the road, and less buckling and overall less stress on the material.  Use the heat they retain into the evening and the cool they retain into the morning as a sort of geothermal pump or Stirling engine, or something.  This would also help to reduce the heat island effect that city centers have.
• Use the snow on the side of a mountain to reflect the sun onto a specific point as a solar concentrater.  You could potentially put a giant mylar type sheet over the whole area too to reflect more light.  Use a Stirling engine to take advantage of the difference in heat between the heat from the concentrated sun and the cold of the surrounding air.
• Put heat insulators below the burners on stoves so you don’t just heat the air around the coil – force all of the heat up to the surface of the pan, so all of it has to transfer away that way.  Be able to adjust the size of the surface that is being heated so you get full contact with the whole pan, no more no less, and, that way you don’t need several different sized burners / parts.  Make the are area of the surface that is being heated light up so people know right where to put the pan.  Or even better yet, have a sensor that can tell where the pan is and how big it is, and just heat that area.