| Jenny McCarthy: Still Pretty Hot, Dangerously Stupid |
[Oct. 1st, 2008|03:46 pm] |
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/health/2008/10/01/intv.mccarthy.cnn
She is campaigning against vaccinations, saying that they cause autism. I don't believe that there is a causal linkage, but truth of the core argument aside, her perspective on it is idiotic and she's a pretty bad spokeswoman.
Interviewer: [Doctors say] that there preventable diseases that children are dying from because they're not getting vaccinated.
McCarthy: People are also dying from vaccinations. Evan, my son, died in front of me, for two minutes.
Um... what? |
|
|
| Spokesman |
[Sep. 30th, 2008|10:14 am] |
|
I just love the idea of a pirate spokesman. |
|
|
| Cecilia Ann: A Chiptune (Kind of) |
[Sep. 23rd, 2008|11:31 am] |
Remember a while back, when I said I thought the Pixies' "Cecilia Ann" would be the best chiptune ever? Well, thanks to a little cheating with musagi and some guitar tabs, I now have a brief proof of concept using the opening notes of the song (warning, pretty loud):
For reference, here's the original.
|
|
|
| Destructible Environments |
[Sep. 11th, 2008|08:53 pm] |
So I was at game night at a local game company tonight. They were playing this Xbox 360 game, Earth Defense Force 2017, where you are defending a city from a giant ant invasion. The buildings are destructible -- one of the guys commented on this, and then someone said, "Dude, take down the skyscraper!" So they shoot their missiles at the skyscraper, and everyone's like "WOOOOOOoooooo.... uhhhh... hmmm. Huh. Um." Skyscraper comes crashing down, everyone's silent for a moment.
|
|
|
| Eat 'Em |
[Aug. 27th, 2008|10:00 pm] |
Courtesy Clatyon Cubitt (NSFW), we see a Republican lobbyist at home, wrapping gifts for her guests in actual money. As Mr. Cubitt says: Eat. The. Rich.
|
|
|
| Coincidences |
[Aug. 27th, 2008|09:23 pm] |
So I heard this song on satellite radio, called "An Imagined Affair" by Elbow. It is decent enough, although entirely a Coldplay ripoff (which is dubious in and of itself). But what caught my attention is that there's a guitar lick in the chorus that is straight out of Everyday Shooter. The first embedded mp3 has the chorus.
The second embedded mp3 is the bit from Everyday Shooter, which triggers when you kill the spread shooting enemy in the first level, "Robot."
They're exactly the same, down to the rhythm -- the only difference is the Elbow song is missing an extra note that "Robot" has. Am I saying this is plagiarism? No. Just a musical coincidence that was bugging me today.
(Sorry about the embedding, LJ defaults to an iframe of 475x405 for some reason...) (Never mind, it just looked that way in Preview mode.) |
|
|
| Some Good Food Rhymes |
[Aug. 27th, 2008|05:45 pm] |
"The Hood Diet", by Loer Velocity featuring Donnan Linkz
From Vegans of Color
Monday, Wednesday, Friday night takeout
The neighborhood McDonalds is the poor man's steakhouse
Chicken Fried Crown just a few doors down
give your small intestine new lining a frown
I've been there before and I'll probably go again
'cause it's right here in the hood, choices are few and slim
..
Between Entenmann's berries (?) and Little Debbies
I'm only eatin' veggies in my Chinese food
And there's one on every corner so I'm fillin' my quota
MSG, fried food, and grape soda
I'm killin' me with this shit, and what's worse I buy it
Livin' off this high blood pressure diet
|
|
|
| More Weird Things I Do |
[Aug. 25th, 2008|11:16 pm] |
When I was in high school, I read an edition of PKD's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? that had a foreword where the author (I forget who) mentioned that he couldn't read the book's title without singing it in his head to the tune of "Greensleeves."
In a similar vein, I always sing Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination (originally known as Tiger! Tiger!) to the tune of the Pixies' "Wave of Mutilation."
Oh the stars my destination,
Stars my destination,
Stars my destination,
Staaaaa-a-aaaaa-a-aaaaars.
Staaaaa-a-aaaaa-a-aaaaars.
Um, does anybody else put the titles of science fiction novels to the tune of random songs? |
|
|
| |
[Aug. 25th, 2008|08:21 pm] |
Dear Internet,
You see this? This is BACON MAYO -- emulsified bacon fat. This, on French fries, is my dinner. Fuck. Yes.
I win.
Wuv,
Darius
(Okay, it's actually fat rendered off the smoked pulled pork I made the other month. Still. WIN.) |
|
|
| Codes |
[Aug. 20th, 2008|05:02 pm] |
Does anybody else do the following?
Often, I'll be entering a password or a PIN, and in my head I will vocalize letters or numbers that do not correspond to my actual code. You know, in case there are psychics nearby scanning my brain.
Psychics that can only read what I'm thinking out loud. |
|
|
| Had to be Done |
[Aug. 11th, 2008|04:30 pm] |
|
I give you: SavonaLOLa.
|
|
|
| Weird? |
[Aug. 11th, 2008|04:24 pm] |
Hey, art history folks: is it weird that this painting of Savonarola's execution has angels holding a blank scroll at the top?
I guess what I'm asking is: does the blankness have intentional significance (he was famous for burning books, after all), or do you think it's just an unfinished painting? (Or a photoshop?)
|
|
|
| Stoking Old Fires |
[Aug. 10th, 2008|10:27 pm] |
More on boom de yadda, courtesy of my favorite LJ'er, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) springheel_jack.
(Also, new icon! From Scott Pilgrim. Holy crap do I love that book. It manages to reference video games in a way that doesn't make me feel slimy and debased. Gotta love any book where the following exchange can occur:
Scott: I wish I could turn into a morphing ball and roll to the bathroom from here, instead of having to get up.
Ramona: I used to know a guy who could do that. He said it wasn't that great.
Scott: You're ruining all my illusions!
And the author doesn't feel obligated to say, "Hai im referencin' METROID!!!!") |
|
|
| I've Got a New Icon |
[Jul. 21st, 2008|06:26 pm] |
|
For bike-related stuff. You know you love it. |
|
|
| On de Quincey |
[Jul. 20th, 2008|09:23 pm] |
Doing a little reading on Thomas de Quincey. Borges references him a ton and so I figured I'd look into him. Lo and behold he wrote "Confessions of an English Opium Eater," a work I've actually heard of.
Anyway, I just wanted to share this quote from Wikipedia. When describing a young prodigious de Quincey, his schoolmaster said:
That boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one.
Isn't that the best compliment ever? |
|
|
| Thomas M. Disch |
[Jul. 8th, 2008|01:59 pm] |
Yesterday I read that Thomas M. Disch committed suicide. I had never heard of him, but read a few things about him and his life. What I didn't realize until just now, and must have skipped over when reading, was that he wrote the children's book The Brave Little Toaster, which is what the movie of the same name was based on.
I loved that movie. Profoundly affected me as a kid. (Incidentally, Wikipedia says that a lot of future Pixar employees worked on the film. Not surprising.) |
|
|
| How to Start Your Grill, or, Idiots With Lighter Fluid |
[Jul. 5th, 2008|11:59 am] |
So this was written in a fit of frustration today inspired by a cookout I attended yesterday (not entrope 's, I mean the one I went to afterwards).
|
|
|
| On Aesthetics |
[Jul. 1st, 2008|08:58 am] |
Oh, and another thing. Was just reading Wittgenstein's "Lectures on Aesthetics" for the first time since high school. It's probably his most accessible work, although that's probably because it wasn't written by him: it's lecture notes from his grad students at Cambridge University. It's especially meaningful to me as it showed me that aesthetics is a valid branch of philosophy and not "a science telling us what's beautiful--almost too ridiculous for words." One passage in particular has stuck with me close to verbatim since I last read it (when I was 15):
If you ask: "What is the peculiar effect of these words?", in a sense you make a mistake. What if they had no effect at all? Aren't they peculiar words?
"Then why do we admire this and not that?" "I don't know."
Suppose I give you a pill
(1) which makes you draw a picture--perhaps 'The Creation of Adam';
(2) which gives you feelings in the stomach.
Which would you call the more peculiar effect? Certainly--that you draw just this picture. The feelings are pretty simple.
"Look at a face--what is important is its expression--not its colour, size, etc."
"Well give us the expression without the face."
The expression is not an effect of the face--on me or on anyone. You could not say that if anything else had this effect, it would have the expression on this face.
I want to make you sad. I show you a picture, and you are sad. This is the effect of the face.
The stuff in quotes is back-and-forth between students and professor. This particular passage was transcribed by Rush Rhees, so I'm not even certain how much of it is Wittgenstein and how much is Rhees. That one bit, "Well give us the expression without the face," is what convinced me that abstract expressionism has value, dawg. |
|
|
| Wall-E |
[Jun. 29th, 2008|04:25 pm] |
I saw Wall-E yesterday with philiptan and a bunch of the GAMBIT crew. I gotta say that while I liked the movie, I think the first part of the movie, on Earth, is like 300x better than the second part. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed the second part, but it seemed kind of bogged down in animated kids movie conventions, whereas the first part was almost transcendently great.
Although I gotta say, I love any movie where the characters, by design, cannot feature any snappy one-liners.
Oh my god, I just had the most amazing thought. What if Pixar did an animated adaptation of We3? It could never happen because they're all about the original IP, but still... that would blow me the hell away. |
|
|
| Boom de -- oh, Fuck You |
[Jun. 28th, 2008|10:32 am] |
I found myself puzzled and then absolutely repulsed yesterday. First I saw the XKCD strip and I had no idea what it was referring to until I read the title and went, "Oh, Discovery Channel. Okay." Then I saw the television advertisement it is based off of and instead of smiling, I got sick to my stomach. And I was thinking the rest of the day, "Wait, why am I reacting this way?"
This morning I remembered why: a few minutes before viewing the ad, I got to see the following (at that link there is an extremely disturbing image of a man set on fire because people who never met him didn't like him):
South African policemen attend to Mozambican immigrant Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave who was set on fire in Reiger Park during xenophobic clashes that shook the whole of Johannesburg on May 18, 2008. Nhamuave, a 35-year-old father of three, later died of his injuries, his body returned to Mozambique to be buried. (STRINGER/AFP/Getty Images)
And police officers just looking on like, "Yup, there's another guy on fire. Who's on that one?"
I love how a corporate entity can pen a song about how everything is fucking fine and then the smartest people I know are humming it all day long. I think I may actually go puke now. (EDIT: apparently they didn't write the song, they just changed the lyrics to fit with their television programming.)
I'm all for optimism. I am maybe stupidly optimistic. But about the future, not about the present. Write me a catchy song about we can make the world a better place and I'll be humming it all day, too.
(I think I may be turning into dirkcjelli.) |
|
|
| Dr. Who Question |
[Jun. 23rd, 2008|05:01 pm] |
|
So, these new episodes of Dr. Who people were raving about a week ago (the new Moffat ones... Silence in the Library and something else). I'm assuming that those are new-new, as in newly aired in the UK and I'd have to torrent them to watch? 'Cause basically I ain't watching them until my DVR catches them on BBC America. |
|
|
| Garkov |
[Jun. 13th, 2008|11:01 am] |
So you've seen Garfield Minus Garfield, but now there's Garkov. Some guy (edit: Josh Millard, apparently a WPI '01 alumnus!) applied a Markov chain to Garfield and created a random strip generator. Some of the results are pretty damn funny.
Register a Pulse
You Die
Most of the time it's just sort of dadaist, but it's usually pretty amusing anyway. Here are some that I generated:
We Make Sandwich
Decide!
I Wonder
I'm a Professional |
|
|
| Whee |
[Jun. 3rd, 2008|05:16 pm] |
Just purchased a 1993 Trek 720 Multitrack (hybrid) off Craigslist for $140. It looks like this bike, although in worse cosmetic condition. The guy I bought it from didn't know the year, but the nice thing about the Trek bikes post-1982 is that you can tell the year from the color combination.
It rides like a dream, though, and it's a steel frame which I vastly prefer to aluminum. I get some really bad creaking on my Larkspur.
Hmm. It occurs to me that I'm on the path to being one of those guys who owns like 8 different bikes. Somehow, I like the sound of that. |
|
|
| Sigh. |
[Jun. 3rd, 2008|12:04 pm] |
I've had my bike, a Marin Larkspur hybrid, for three years now. I think it's time to get a new one. I spent $400 on it new, and in the last two months I've spent about $400 in repairs on it. Nothing too big all at once, just nickel-and-diming to the point where today I was faced with a $120 repair bill and just said, "Screw that."
I'm looking on Craigslist, but does anyone out there have another source for a good used bike? I can't really afford to spend more than $200 right now on a bike, and I'd need something in the 21"-23" frame range. |
|
|
| Eating |
[May. 28th, 2008|03:07 pm] |
So I've decided to make a change to my diet: I'm eating vegetarian (lacto-ovo), unless it's meat I've cooked myself or a special circumstance like I'm eating at one of Chris Schlesinger's restaurants. In practice, this means I'll be eating meat once, possibly twice a week.
Also, it means that when I do eat meat, I'm going to make sure it's a fucking amazing experience. I'll be paying a visit to arguably the best butcher in the country. I'll be selecting a recipe that is anything from simple-with-quality-ingredients to something relentlessly outdated to a timeless classic. And I'll be cooking it my own damn self, because that's the only way to really take pleasure in a meal.
I think this is what is known these days as "flexitarian."
Anyway, much like kadath and dirkcjelli did, I'll be doing a one month trial to see how it goes. I started yesterday. |
|
|
| Useful Service |
[May. 10th, 2008|12:56 pm] |
Let's say you are only $1.67 away from getting Super Saver Shipping at Amazon. You can use this website to search for items that cost that much (or a little more) in various categories to fill out your order.
http://www.filleritem.com/ |
|
|
| Tracy Morgan... Funnier Than I Thought |
[Apr. 18th, 2008|01:55 pm] |
So I always suspected that Tracy Morgan was basically just playing himself as Tracy Jordan on 30 Rock. This clip from a Chicago morning news show pretty much confirms it.
Either that, or he's being waaay Andy Kaufman meta about the whole thing. But from cast interviews I've seen where people ask if TM is anything like TJ, and the nervous, uh I don't think I want to answer that question responses they give, it's probably the real deal. |
|
|
| Back Pages: How You Can Help |
[Apr. 14th, 2008|01:58 pm] |
So Alex from Back Pages sent out a letter explaining how you can help out with the store. It's basically a membership rewards program.
|
|
|
| Back Pages Books is in Trouble |
[Apr. 11th, 2008|10:57 am] |
Last night Alex Green, who runs Back Pages Books in Waltham, sent out an email plea for help to his customers. Apparently the store is in financial trouble (in large part due to losing three months of business to permit nonsense back when they moved). This is my favorite independent bookstore: Alex is friendly, really loves books, is there practically all the time, and busts his ass to bring in Poet Laureates and local authors alike.
( (Check behind the cut for the full letter.) )
It's kind of a strange letter, in that he says they need money and support, but doesn't really give a course of action for how you can donate or whatnot. But I guess if you know anyone willing to invest $25k in a local bookstore... drop me or him a line? |
|
|
| Puppy and Robot: Together at Last |
[Apr. 7th, 2008|05:27 pm] |
This is mostly for grannyglasseye :
|
|
|
| Cool Thing of the Week |
[Apr. 1st, 2008|10:58 am] |
So I was browsing through del.icio.us' help files and discovered that they have system tags for file extensions. Meaning that you can go here and listen to (and stream with a click!) any mp3s that people have been bookmarking.
http://del.icio.us/tag/system:filetype:mp3
Some fucking addictive sonic exploration right there. |
|
|
| Outlands: Free Tabletop Sci-fi RPG From 1995 |
[Mar. 20th, 2008|11:05 am] |
For those of you interested in sci-fi tabletop RPGs (and I'm sure that's a lot of you), my friend Chris Bateman notes that his second ever published RPG is now available online for free. Originally published in 1995, Outlands "take[s] a variety of different classic science fiction sources - including Aliens, Angel Station, Blade Runner, Dune, Outland, Wetware and Blake's 7 - and merge[s] them into a melange that would present a coherent science fiction setting."
Certainly worth checking out... I mean, it's free for cryin' out loud. You can get the PDF here. |
|
|
| Google Sky |
[Mar. 14th, 2008|01:44 pm] |
In case you haven't seen this, check out Google Sky. It's Google Maps, but for... the night sky. You can even do a quick search for celestial bodies. |
|
|
| Destroyer |
[Mar. 10th, 2008|04:24 pm] |
I love Dan Bejar, and his band Destroyer. Here's a track from their new album, Trouble in Dreams, called "Dark Leaves Form a Thread".
He has a knack for moments that knock me on my ass. Around 1:38, after a bunch of na na nas: "Nah, it's cool, you go, I'll stay, perfectly at home with this dread--DARK LEAVES FORM A THREAD!!" It reminds me of the "her father, the fucking maniac" moment right before the giant guitar squeals in "European Oils." Man this guy is good. |
|
|
