The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
If you ever wondered what real life might look like if it played out like a cartoon, check out this FARK thread. (Tons of pics; if you’re using dial-up, expect a lllooonnnggg load. I actually hit “stop” and then right-clicked each picture to individually load them.)
Link via Oliver Willis.
How does Warren Ellis find this stuff, anyway?
Those easily offended probably shouldn’t investigate this, but the subversive in me wants to make postcards of the painting in question and send them, en masse, to Attorney General John Ashcroft….
The deployment of the Galileo space probe by the space shuttle Atlantis in 1989.
Galileo has spent almost eight years in the Jovian system, gathering immense amounts of information about the Solar System’s largest planet and its moons. Now, with the ship’s power nearly gone, NASA has put it into a course that will carry it down into the Jovian clouds this coming Sunday. For all the troubles NASA has had with Martian probes in recent years, it’s worth remembering that a successful probe can yield astonishing results, vastly increasing our knowledge of our celestial neighborhood.
Godspeed, Galileo.
(For an explanation of this particular bit of madness, read this post.)
:: KEVIN DRUM
MORE RECALL MADNESS….In a press conference yesterday, a reporter asked Arnold for his thoughts on why chickens cross roads so often in California. His answer? Because Gray Davis allows it. But of course, when it comes time for Arnold to provide an answer as to what he’ll do to stop the tide of chickens crossing our roads, he simply says that he’ll ask for a statewide audit of chicken-crossing procedures in California. And McClintock says that he’ll authorize people to use their concealed handguns to shoot the chickens.
So, we have one candidate saying we’ll audit the chickens, and another encouraging trigger-happy people to fill that California air with bullets in an effort to stop the chickens. And the one candidate who has the most realistic plan for stemming the tide of chickens is Gray Davis, and he’s getting recalled! California politics are nuttier than our chickens, by far.
THANKS, RED STATES….A recent federal report suggests that chickens are constantly being enticed to cross the borders from us hard-working blue states to the chicken-starved red-states. So not only do the red-states hate us blue-states because we want the government to work harder at making sure everyone has a chicken, then they steal our chickens!
FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING….Isn’t Inkblot (left) cute as she tears the heart out of that live chicken who dared to cross the road in front of our house? But Jasmine (right) prefers tuna. Go figure.
The town in which I live, Orchard Park, has recently been expending a lot of effort to make its village center a lot more attractive. (Orchard Park is a fairly affluent suburb of Buffalo. It happens to be the town where Ralph Wilson Stadium is located, and thus, a lot of Buffalo Bills players end up living here.) They’ve built new sidewalks, planted flower beds and commissioned sculptures along the main streets, given pretty much every building a fresh coat of paint, and in one case even demolished a crappy 1960s era building that had been on the town’s main streetcorner and replaced it with an attractive building of red brick that actually blends in with the older style buildings around it, including the 1910-era red brick building across the street. I don’t know if they’ve read David Sucher‘s book City Comforts, but they seem to be putting a lot of his ideas into practice: building to the sidewalk, putting parking behind the buildings, putting a lot of benches about for people to sit, et cetera.
There have been a couple of mis-steps, though.
First, there are these really pretty new streetlights, the ones that look like old gaslights but aren’t. Problem is, the bulbs they’re using in these lights are those same horribly bright, amber/orange color you’ll see in the streetlights along I-90 in Cleveland, for example, or on a thousand other big highways. The light from these is horribly garish, and doesn’t enhance the town’s attempts at the picturesque (which, during the day, are very effective indeed).
Second, it seems that the town might have gone wrong in its selection of contractors for certain aspects of the work. During the early summer, all of the crosswalks in the town center (basically those reflective strips on the pavement) were replaced with red-brick crosswalks that were really nice-looking when they were done. But as the summer wore on, the concrete or whatever is underneath those crosswalks turned out to be too soft, and many of those brand-spanking new brick crosswalks became somewhat buckled from all the automobile traffic crossing over them. So, guess what: today I drove through the town center, and observed men at work pulling up the “old” new crosswalks for replacement. Not six months after they were laid down.
I don’t know if the original contractors did a bad job, or if they didn’t figure on the wet summer we’ve had, or what. But it reminds me of that line in Armageddon when one of the guys says, just as they’re about to lift off for space, something like: “Did it occur to you that we’re all strapped into a machine built by the lowest bidder?”
(EDIT: Broken link rendered unbroken.)
Lynn Sislo on band names. She opines that my “Lynn Sislo and the 2 Blowhards” sounds, to her, like a southern rock band. I was thinking a folk-rock type group, complete with penny-whistles and whatnot. And if you do nothing else today, at least take the “Christian Band or Star Trek Episode?” quiz. I got eight out of twelve, but one wasn’t entirely fair because one of their Christian bands uses a phrase that is part of a Star Trek episode title.
His Swankness points to a joke that I really should have thought of myself. Ach, it makes me mad!
Survivor starts its new season tonight. As with all previous incarnations of Survivor, I shall celebrate its return by watching Friends.
I’d probably be interested in Survivor if they did something like, oh, tell them they’re taking them to some tropical island, so they pack accordingly…but really drop them off in the Northern Yukon. Or, give them parachutes and push them out of an airplane…over Kashmir. Yeah, that would be fun. Yee-haw!
I’ve been paying attention to a discussion, involving several blogs and their comment threads, of the ongoing death-spasms of the recording industry, the feasibility of micropayments, and verious peripheral issues. Read here first, and then Daniel Davies’s follow-up post (one of the commenters in that thread) here. In Davies’s words:
“The issue of ‘whither the music industry in a world of reduced intellectual property’ is bound to bring out a lot of interesting opinions; I think this is because a) we don’t know what the heck will happen b) we’d all like to believe that the answer will involve us all owning loads and loads of fantastic music for next to no cost but c) we all suspect that it probably won’t.”
I think that’s exactly right. I’ve long since given up being enthusiastic about the soon-to-arrive dawn of the Incredibly Cheap Music Era, because it seems to me what most people are really trying to get at is some modified version of the “Information wants to be free” spiel, which I find utterly unconvincing to begin with. They say that death and taxes are the only two certainties in life, but I think there’s a third: that given X that someone or some group wants, some other person will figure out a way to make money on it. There will never be a time when music is free, and the sooner we realize this, the better off we’re all going to be.
The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer