The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Oddities and Awesome abound! Just one item today, but it’s a doozy. I can’t decide where it falls on the continuum that exists with Weird on one end and Awesome on the other, but I suspect that it’s right in the middle.
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: This is probably one of those things that everybody’s seen but me already, but as it is in fact new to me, here’s the Tarantula Song.
(Stolen from Tumblr)
:: Want to know how to make the Star Wars blaster sound effect? Sure you do!
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: It always amazes me to learn of cultural things that are apparently really big, and yet, somehow I don’t learn about them until quite a ways into their fifteen minutes of fame. Case in point: Dorito tacos. How on Earth did I not know about these? Is this what happens when you turn away, in large part, from watching teevee shows actually on teevee, during their broadcast timeslots, with commercials?
:: Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth, available for free audio download. Wow. I shall have these before the day is out, oh yes!
:: This fellow canoed the Mississippi River. I haven’t dug through his posts yet, but I certainly mean to. I love stories like this. Years ago my parents had a subscription to Canoe Magazine, and one month there was a big feature article about an epic canoe journey that took two guys all the way around North America, or something like that. I read the hell out of that article, over and over again. Good travel writing thrills me!
More next week!
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: Oh Japan, never, ever change!
As LiveDoor News pointed out this week, a new trend is spreading among Japanese schoolgirls. It’s called “cream puff face” (“ganmen shuukuriimu” or 顔面シュークリーム). And, you guessed it, it involves smushing a cream puff in someone’s face.
This isn’t exactly a new trend, as it’s possible to find examples of cream puff faces as early as 2007 and 2008. And, yes, this is a spin on the old fashioned pie in the face gag. But in Japan, the trend really started to take off with schoolgirls in 2011. The Japanese mainstream is just catching on now.
Huh….
(Well, stop the whaling. Other than that, never change!)
:: Check out these detailed floor plans of teevee households. I never realized that the Simpsons have two living rooms!
:: Want to make your own ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ posters? Of course you do!
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: If you don’t like insects (or art), don’t watch this video.
:: Leonard Bernstein rewrites Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. If you’ve read Bernstein’s brilliant and indispensable The Joy of Music, you’ve already read the transcript of this old teevee program, but to see it is amazing.
:: Like puzzles? As in, physical, mechanical puzzles? Puzzle World is for you. (Ignore the comic sans, if you can. Lord, I detest that font!)
More next week!
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: What happened when a guy forgot to send his girlfriend a Valentine’s Day gift. Oh my Goodness Gracious!
:: Being in maintenance for a living, I get to hear a lot of jokes about duct tape, which has a reputation of being useful for everything. I find that amusing, because it turns out that I almost never use duct tape for anything! But anyway, here’s an artist for whom duct tape is a medium, as well as other mundane objects. Wow.
:: Here’s the type of thing I wish I would think of first: The Record Books, or, if classic albums had been books instead. Here’s how he sums up a Celine Dion album-turned-book:
Further reading from the same author: Let’s Talk About Love, A New Day Has Come, One Heart, Miracle, Taking Chances, and Water and a Flame, dealing with the oral orgasm (oralgasm), ‘real-birth’, soul-mate divination through exsanguination, post-menopause childbirth, mid-life crisis continuity management and, finally, recipes for ‘mental-healthy’ eating.
More next week!
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: What Single Girls Do on Valentine’s Day. As you might expect, I love the ending here….
(seen on Tumblr)
:: In the “Science rules!” department, the other night, a friend commented on Facebook how bright and clear the stars were that night, and I responded with my observation that I like the winter sky in the northern hemisphere a lot more than I like the summer one, because it always seems so much brighter and clearer and it has my favorite constellation in it (Orion the Hunter). He asked if this was because it’s just generally less hazy and humid in winter, and I have figured for years that this was the case, but then I decided to actually look it up. And you know what? The actual reason why the winter sky is clearer than the summer sky turns out, as is so often the case with science, to be even more interesting than the original supposition!
As seen during Northern Hemisphere winter (or Southern Hemisphere summer), the stars seem brighter. Why? It’s partly because – on December, January and February evenings – the part of Earth you’re standing on is facing into the spiral arm of the galaxy to which our sun belongs.
Consider the sky at the opposite time of year. In June, July and August, the evening sky seen from the entire Earth is facing toward the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The galaxy is about 100,000 light-years across, and its center is some 25,000 to 28,000 light-years away. We don’t see into the exact center of the Milky Way, because it’s obscured by galactic dust. But during those Northern Hemisphere summer months (Southern Hemisphere winter months), as we peer edgewise into the galaxy’s disk, we’re gazing across some 75,000 light-years of star-packed space (the distance between us and the center, plus the distance beyond the center to the other side of the galaxy).
Read the whole thing. Amazing! I love science.
More next week!
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: One of the greatest interactive maps, ever: Vaguely Rude Placenames. Hover over the little flags to see the names. Great stuff! Apparently there’s a place in Iran called “Shit”.
:: Back when I used to watch the Oscars semi-seriously, I would dutifully sit through the Obituary Tribute thing and say to myself, “Hey, they left out _____!” Turns out there’s cinematic politics involved in the selection of the honored dead. Wow.
:: Here in Buffalo, we often deflect the derision heaped upon our winter weather by pointing out that our summers have never hit 100 degrees (although with global warming, I expect that this claim will not be available to us much longer), we don’t have to worry about tornadoes, wildfires, hurricanes, volcanoes, earthquakes, and so on. Add to that list…raining spiders!
If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go lie down and shiver a bit. More next week!
Oddities and Awesome abound! They never stop. Nosiree Bob, never at all.
:: John Scalzi has come up with a creative response to a bizarre nitwit who has developed an even more bizarre fixation upon him. I find the whole thing really funny (and will likely kick a few shekels in myself at some point).
:: Is your cat really a dog? I can relate to a few of these!
:: OK, a little set-up for this. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, there was a cable teevee channel in Upstate New York called the Empire Sports Network. This channel was devoted to, well, sports stuff pertaining to Upstate teams and interests, such as Buffalo Sabres games, Syracuse University sports, and the like. They also did a lot of locally-produced teevee shows featuring commentary on the Buffalo Bills, often featuring players and coaches themselves (this was when the Bills were actually good). One such figure was head coach Marv Levy, who actually had his own show on the network.
Well, one week, apparently Coach Levy promised his squad that if they beat the Miami Dolphins, he would write — and sing — a fight song for the Bills on his teevee show. They did just that, and…well, if you were a Bills fan in the 90s, you remember this. Maybe fondly. More likely…not so much.
More next week!
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: Jason Bennion posted this pic on Facebook. It’s the TV Guide cover from when Battlestar Galactica was set to premier, back in fall of 1978. Pretty cool stuff, although…well, I’ll give the geeks out there in the audience a chance to notice it.
Yup, look at that for a little bit. A hint: one of the details is really wrong.
See it yet?
The ship on the cover: that’s not the Galactica. That’s the back end of Discovery from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Oops!
What likely happened is that this issue had to go to press before ABC was willing to release certain details, like what the titular starship of the show looked like. (And also, judging by Richard Hatch’s and Dirk Benedict’s heads being placed atop weird gray blobs, certain details of costume design as well.) Understandable, but pretty amusing nonetheless! That’d be a funny mashup, anyway — just as the Cylons attack, they’d have to contend with Hal refusing to open the pod bay door….
:: A couple of folks go Scuba diving in Hawaii. Just a normal dive, down to the bottom…when one of the guys looks up, and Whoa! Admiral, there be whales here!
:: I’m not embedding this video here because it’s really kinda icky, but…sneezing in slow motion. There are things that should be seen in slow motion. This is not one of them.
More next week!
