Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Not the usual sorts of weirdness this week, but….

:: It’s weird in the sense that it doesn’t happen often: a baseball team wins (in this case, the LA Dodgers) despite having no hits in the game. Wow.

One oddity here is that official MLB rules indicate that for a game to qualify as an official no-hitter, the team pitching the no-no must pitch nine innings; since the Dodgers were the home team and thus carried a lead into the bottom of the ninth, they didn’t bat at all in the ninth, and therefore the Angels’ pitchers only three eight innings and thus this game is not an official no-hitter. I’ve found this rule silly ever since they imposed it. If the game goes nine innings, it should be a no-hitter. (Now, I’m on board with not considering rain-shortened six-inning games as no-hitters if it happens. But this, to me, is a no-hitter.)

:: I, for one, would love to have “WTF” on my license plate. Maybe I’ll get vanity plates that read “W TEE EFF”.

:: A Star Trek/Monty Python mash-up. What scares me is that I actually know which episodes nearly every one of those Trek clips comes from. I have got to get myself a life.

Boom de yada!

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Just a couple this week:

:: I don’t remember where I got this, but it’s a steampunk recumbent bicycle.

:: Aaron sent me this: a guy playing the Star Wars theme on bagpipes. Funny thing is, he’s a pretty good piper.

:: Now you can make your own Star Wars crawl. (Via.) Have I made a few already? Yes. Am I posting them here? No. So there. If any of you want to make one and disseminate it, feel free to drop the link into comments.

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Hmmmmm…I’m sure I left some weirdness here somewhere….

:: I’m Voting Republican! (Mileage may vary on whether this is funny or not. I, being a Democrat, found it hilarious. I’d credit my source, but I don’t remember where I got it. If it’s you, let me know and I’ll revise.)

:: The Interweb continues to astound with its fountain of information that you can use! For the latest example, if you’ve ever wanted an exhaustive list of all the events that triggered Bill Bixby to morph into a green Lou Ferigno on The Incredible Hulk, here you go (via)

:: Gummi lighthouses. But of course, it’s all a matter of perspective…. (via)

:: This isn’t actually “weird”, but pretty stunning. Back in the day I used to have an “Image of the Week” feature. I’ve let that go the wayside, but if it was still around, I’d have strong contenders from this group of cloud photos taken from space (via Lynn) or this group of volcano eruption photos (via SDB). On that latter set, the first three photos are impressive, but the fourth starts the eye-popping stuff. Note that both of those links come from the same site, Boston.com’s “The Big Picture”, a photo blog that seems to have lots of other amazing photographic goodness.

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Weirdness ahoy….

:: This isn’t “weird”, actually, but it’s pretty amazing: a chef with tongue cancer continues cooking. This reminds me of Beethoven and his deafness, although this chef seems to be regaining some of his sense of taste. (And yes, cooking is an art.)

:: Fifteen Republican rumors about Barack Obama.

:: If Sleepless in Seattle had been a stalker movie:

(This is via the “chick flicks” link I made the basis of a post the other day.)

Keep the weirdness coming!

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness (Monday Edition)

A day late, and not that much on display since I spent much of the last four days concocting in my mind Rube Goldberg devices for boring into my sinuses and forcibly draining the mucus therein….

:: But really, I wish I could think to do stuff like this. I love leaving little things like that for people to discover later, but I don’t know if I’d like to do it without the possibility of knowing if it ever came to pass.

:: Wow, do we need a Western NY version of this blog. This guy’s got my vote for Blog of the Year.

:: Worst. Teacher. EVER. This is just appalling. (The teacher has now been reassigned to an office job. Frankly, her behavior here to me screams out “Stern-faced Cafeteria Lady”.)

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Well, well, well….

:: We’ve had “Stuff White People Like”, and we’ve had “Stuff Nobody Likes”, so of course next up is pretty obvious, isn’t it? Stuff God Hates. The idea of a sarcastic blog written by God just strikes me as terribly funny.

:: I had this bookmarked for use a few weeks ago, but then I had to reinstall stuff and lost the link until I remembered it just now. I don’t remember where I first saw it, so I can’t properly credit anyone, but somebody’s blogging Things that are younger than John McCain.

You know, I really try not to be “ageist”, because I know plenty of people of advanced age who are amazingly bright and competent, but there’s just something about John McCain that makes me think that his Presidency would largely consist of him sitting on a rocking chair on the Truman Balcony, throwing empty cans at the kids who stop outside his fence to gawk at the fancy white house he lives in and talking about how his knee’s hurtin’ so there’s probably gonna be some weather. (And yes, I’d think the exact same thing about the Democratic nominee if we were running, oh, Robert Byrd for President. Maybe moreso. If McCain were a young and robust 40-something, running on the exact same set of ideas, I’d still be dead certain to not vote for him.)

:: Western New York’s most recent brush with national news attention came last year when an inmate at a local jail, a hood named Ralph Phillips who goes by the nickname “Bucky”, escaped from jail and then spent several months on the lam until he was finally caught. The whole thing was mildly entertaining for a while until he shot and killed a state trooper, and after that, the State Police wrapped things up pretty quickly. Now, Bucky Phillips is no longer in a local jail but in the one of New York’s maximum security prisons. Well, there’s a story in the Buffalo News this morning about his behavior since he’s been sent to the Clinton Correctional Facility (somewhere in the Adirondacks), and the lede contains an item that made me go, “Huh-whuh?!” Here’s that lede; let’s see if any of my readers spots the same thing that stunned me:

Ralph ���������Bucky��������� Phillips, who fatally shot one state trooper and seriously wounded two others during the biggest manhunt in state history, is a troublesome prisoner who has been sanctioned nine times for inmate misconduct, including one incident involving explosives, state officials say.

Anyone else react the way I did?

And by the way, I’m looking at the picture of Bucky Phillips in the News story, and I’m struck by the fact that he looks eerily similar to the fellow who plays Jesus in some of the videos they use at my church for the Gospel readings. You be the judge: Bucky, or Jesus?

(The actor as Jesus is a fellow named Bruce Marchiano; I grabbed this picture from here. He’s OK as Jesus, but I actually prefer the guy who plays him in the Gospel of John video they use in services where the reading comes from that particular book. That’s Henry Ian Cusick, who can now be seen brooding his way through the lush scenery of LOST, along with everyone else on ABC’s popular serial brood-fest. It’s an interesting contrast between the two performances; you have a long-haired guy with a British accent doing Jesus with a strong mystical bent, versus an American with thick but not-terribly-long hair doing Jesus-as-smiling-best-friend. I don’t have a problem with the latter, per se, but just for watching the thing, I prefer the former.)

More next week, as always.

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

I wasn’t online as much as usual this week, so I didn’t see quite as much Grade-A, US Prime weirdness out there on Teh Interweb. But here are a couple of items:

:: A Beavis and Butthead movie may be on the way. I’m fine with this; I loved that show and found the original movie pretty funny. But…they want to do it live action. Huh?!

:: Nazi UFO stuff. I guess it all didn’t start with Roswell, right? (via)

:: Note to self: when traveling in Japan, don’t take the subway unless you have to.

All for this week. Stay weird, folks!

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

:: I’m with Lynn: I wouldn’t try this, either.

:: Via Bella we see what you can do when you apparently have all of your ligaments removed from your body. Aieee!!! (There’s a brief commercial first; that’s not the actual video.)

:: I subscribe to Mental Floss, but I’d never much checked out the website, which turns out to be chock full of stuff you don’t find in the already-fun magazine. One example: a history of Bud Bowl.

More weirdness next week.

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

[Wow! I wrote this post on Saturday and published it using Blogger’s new “Scheduled Publishing” feature, and it works! Cool!]

Here we go!

:: Geez, what a way to go. The question is, does this fellow get added to the official roster of Civil War deaths?

:: I’m going to apologize in advance for this, but I read of the New Jersey Hall of Fame, and I immediately wondered if the museum’s corridors will be punctuated every forty feet by a tollbooth, at which one must pay seventy-five cents to continue with the tour.

(OK, joking aside, I don’t think there’s anything the least bit weird about a New Jersey Hall of Fame. It’s an old and populous state, so of course it’s contributed lots of notable American citizens, including two Presidents. I just can’t help making fun of the Jersey Turnpike. Because the New York State Thruway isn’t mockable at all. Heh….)

:: Back in my orchestral trumpet playing days, I used to wish we could do the Main Theme from Star Wars — until just a few minutes ago when I saw the first page of the score, and saw that as the principal trumpet player, I would have had to make a fortissimo entrance on a double-C. Talk about being exposed if you screw up!

:: I’m conflicted by this. See, I actually agree with what the guy’s singing. Which makes me the biggest geek of all! (Oh, and Billy Dee Williams is awesome for taking part in this.)

OK, that’s all. Be well out there, folks!

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Stuff of the weird sort:

:: Via SDB comes a great motivational poster.

:: Via Jason comes a great montage of old Saturday morning teevee characters. I can’t name them all, but I can sure look at a lot of them and say, “Hey, I watched that!” But Jason names them all, so check that out. (The montage is done by this guy.)

:: I try not to laugh at people who dress up for SF cons and whatnot, but geez…squash that guy with a Recognizer!

:: The Lord’s Prayer in leet-speak. Via.

All for this week.

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