Geek alert: The greatest photograph in the history of, well, photographs can be seen here. We might all as well just toss our cameras in the trash.
Thank God for Geckos!
According to this article, scientists think that the feet of geckos may provide the key to developing adhesives that don’t leave junky residue behind. Since my least favorite tasks at The Store frequently involve removal of tape residue (due to the fact that I inevitably have to resort to using a chemical called “Goof Off”, the fumes of which literally make me stoned), I find this immensely heartening. Yay geckos!
Of course, the applications of this research are likely years away from showing up as tape adhesive, so if I’m still doing what I’m doing now when that stuff becomes available, I’ll be dealing with different issues….
(link via MeFi)
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Awkward Conversations
SETTING: The dinner table. We’re having spaghetti. The Daughter has just twirled a big bunch of spaghetti onto her fork.
THE DAUGHTER: Look! My fork is a mummy!
ME: Wow, you know what mummies are?
THE DAUGHTER: There’s a mummy in one of my books, but I don’t know what they are. They’re people that are wrapped in toilet paper or something.
ME: Oh! Well, then. Mummies are the way the people in Ancient Egypt, a long time ago, used to store their dead people. They wrapped them in bandages.
THE DAUGHTER: Ewwww! But when my great-grandma was buried, why didn’t they wrap her in bandages?
It was all downhill from there.
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Taxpeyer’s Prerogative (or, Stealing the Government’s Bandwidth)
I haven’t shamelessly filched bandwidth from the auspices of Our Government lately, so here’s my favorite recent APOD:
That’s an artist’s rendition of the Huygens probe descending toward the surface of the Saturnine moon Titan. I’m really looking forward to the results of this particular venture.
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Oh, THAT Kevin McClatchy!
A constant in the nearly three years (!) that I’ve been writing Byzantium’s Shores is hits from search engines by people looking for the answer to the burning question, “Is Kevin McClatchy gay?” I always assumed that these people were inquiring about the owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, and this baffled me, since I can’t imagine caring if a sports owner was gay or not. But now I’ve done a little more investigating, and apparently there’s an actor named Kevin McClatchy too. This explains some of the interest, I think.
Although I still don’t know the answer to the question, and neither do I care.
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Reminder: the novel’s online!
Chapter One, anyway. (I know, regular readers here already read Chapter One a while back, but maybe they didn’t, and still, I’m serializing the entire book!)
Go here. Tell all of your friends. Put burning paper bags filled with dog poop on their doorsteps if they fail to check it out.
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IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Yeah, I wasn’t going to do one of these until next week either, but AICN linked this collection of photos from Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, and they immediately set me to massive bouts of salivation. There are potential spoilers in the images, so beware. (That’s why I’m not posting one directly here. That, and I couldn’t decide which one I liked the most.)
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Burst of Weirdness
I know, the Burst wasn’t supposed to return until next week, but here it is, thanks to Teresa Neilsen Hayden. Witness the ultimate evidence that men are just plain dumb.
When the women of Earth finally decide that they’ve had enough, take over the planet, and relegate men to “worker drone” status, I for one shall welcome our new female overlords.
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Die nasty….
Before I shut the TV off for the night, it was briefly tuned to the beginning of some dramatization TV-movie that’s apparently about the making of the 80s primetime soap opera Dynasty. Now, that show was a staple in my household when it was on, mainly because my mother and sister loved it. I, of course, never liked it all that much, being into much more cerebral matters. (OK, I was a Dallas fan. Happy now?)
Anyhoo, even though Dynasty was pure 80s drivel (and its spinoff, The Colbys, was even worse — there’s a show that for a season-ending cliffhanger had one of its characters abducted by aliens, and this was well before The X-Files came along), there was something goofily endearing about the show — Joan Collins’s relentless overacting; John Forsythe’s never-totally-successful attempts to erase the “God, I can’t believe I’m doing this show” expression from his face; that odd smile that never left the visage of Linda Evans (not even when she ended up dating Yanni for a while, after the show ended). And on Dynasty, the ultimate thing was that whenever one character seriously pissed off another, the aggrieved party would solemnly vow, “I’ll destroy you!” This became an in-joke in my family, like this:
MOM: Please change the cat litters today.
ME: What happens if I don’t?
MOM: (eyes narrowing) Then I’ll destroy you.
Not sure why I’m bothering to bring this up; it just seemed kind of funny. I hadn’t thought about that show in ages.
(And tonight’s TV-movie opened with the Dynasty theme tune, which I have to admit was an awfully good theme tune. So I headed over to this site to see if I could find the theme — and they don’t have it. What a betrayal. I’ll destroy them!)
UPDATE: Jostein the Evil Socialist Norwegian forwards me a link to the Dynasty theme tune, thus prolonging his own life, the little scamp. Oh, the theme is here. It really is one of the best TV themes ever, in my opinion.
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A Very Public Service Request.
When something really, really bad happens that kills lots of people and puts vast numbers more into seriously dire straits for things like food, water, housing, and the avoidance of disease — like, say, a huge tidal wave striking heavily populated areas along the Indian Ocean coastlines — can we stop kvetching over the lessons we need to learn from it and just help the folks affected?
(And as long as I’m on the subject, here’s another item for my “Why I’m Not a Libertarian” file. The mindset that holds such beliefs could not be more alien to me if it hailed from a planet orbitting Proxima Centauri.)