Tag: Burst of Weirdness

“Weird” probably isn’t the right word for this; it’s actually really cool in that MC Escher-ish way. Go look.

Link via He-Who-Eschews-Permalinks.

(Steven also notes, in the post above the one I’d link above if he had permalinks, something about Internet Explorer 7:

And now for something good: middle-clicking a link opens it in a new tab. That was something I really came to like in FireFox. (And middle-clicking while not on a link opens up scrolling, which I like, and which FireFox does not do.)

Is he referring to clicking the scroll-wheel? In the latest version of FireFox (I’m running 2.0.0.3), clicking the scroll wheel does the same things he describes here.)

(And actually, I now see that Steven thinks the pictures are more reminiscent of Magritte than Escher. I had to remind myself who Magritte was, and I think I lean in his direction, kinda-sorta. Maybe even a blend of the two.)

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Possibly more snark than weirdness, but hey, I’m feeling snarky today.

:: The Right Wing has begun its latest project: taking Gandhi down a peg or two. Gandhi. Oy.

Oddly, the people who hold Gandhi as “the most overrated man of the 20th century” (I’d pick Reagan, personally) are probably people who claim that the teachings of Jesus should be universally followed. But not the Jesus stuff about loving your neighbors, forgiveness, charity to the poor, and all that. Rather, the Jesus stuff about shunning gays and Spreading Love Through Widespread Use of Incendiary Devices. You know, “Action Figure” Jesus. The one who conveniently fits into the cockpit of their toy bombers (sold separately, of course) with the crosses painted on the fuselage.

:: Apparently there are a number of words which, when encrypted using Rot-13, turn into other words. That’s pretty cool. I especially like that the Rot-13 of tang is gnat, or tang spelled backwards!

:: OK, I’m going to assume that the Garrison Keillor article that occasioned this vehement response is an example of a satiric joke that was so poorly executed that it wasn’t recognized as a joke at all. I’m not the world’s biggest Keillor fan, but I have to think he’s more enlightened than that. Hoo-boy.

:: A three-way tie on Jeopardy!. That’s interesting. Which brings to mind that I always find it kind of funny when an episode of The Price is Right ends in a double overbid at the showcases, in which case nobody wins anything. Whenever that happens, you can just feel the show deflate on the air.

:: OK, everybody’s probably already seen this, but I just saw it the first time the other day: ROFLCAT. We had a good time with this one in our household (skipping past the non-PG ones).

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:: Here’s something I never knew. John Jacob Astor IV was a science fiction writer! You can read his work A Journey in Other Worlds online. A taste:

Jupiter–the magnificent planet with a diameter of 86,500 miles, having 119 times the surface and 1,300 times the volume of the earth–lay beneath them.

They had often seen it in the terrestrial sky, emitting its strong, steady ray, and had thought of that far-away planet, about which till recently so little had been known, and a burning desire had possessed them to go to it and explore its mysteries.
Now, thanks to APERGY, the force whose existence the ancients suspected, but of which they knew so little, all things were possible.

Ayrault manipulated the silk-covered glass handles, and the Callisto moved on slowly in comparison with its recent speed, and all remained glued to their telescopes as they peered through the rushing clouds, now forming and now dissolving before their
eyes. What transports of delight, what ecstatic bliss, was theirs! Men had discovered and mastered the secret of apergy, and now, “little lower than the angels,” they could soar through space, leaving even planets and comets behind.

Interesting. Of course, Astor was best known not for his SF writing but for dying aboard the RMS Titanic, although he didn’t actually “go down with the ship”. His body was actually found floating at sea a week after the wreck; from the damage to his body and the amount of soot covering his body (he was actually identified by the fact that his initials were stitched into his lapels), it was surmised that he was crushed by one of the falling smokestacks of the great ship.

:: Via Warren Ellis: fun for kids of all ages! Color such Biblical scenes as when Jesus rode the Velociraptor on his way to…somewhere!

Always weird stuff out there in Internet land…and with DSL, the weirdness is faster!

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I like to think I’m a geek in good standing, but I must bow to this fellow. That is the greatest room in the history of rooms.

UPDATE: I should warn those of you with dial-up connections that this post has a lot of photos. It’s worth it, though.

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Here we go:

:: Almost two years ago I finally filled a giant hole in my small geek-toy collection when, through the services of eBay, I bought a die-cast Millennium Falcon. Finally I could play out the asteroid-field chase from The Empire Strikes Back in my head! And the final battle from Return of the Jedi! Hooray!

(Actually, I now own two die-cast Millennium Falcons; the months following the release of Revenge of the Sith saw a whole bunch of new Star Wars toys on the market, among them new ships from MicroMachines. My second toy Falcon, viewable in this photo (although not very well), is a “battle-scarred” one. That apparently means they dabbed more gray paint on it to simulate carbon scoring from laser blasts and whatnot. So basically I seem to now have a model of the Falcon from both before and after Han Solo got his hands on it.)

Why am I bringing this up? Because now you can get a Lego set to make your own Millennium Falcon. It checks in at almost three feet in length, and it costs five hundred dollars.

I don’t think I’ll be buying any of these anytime soon. Not just the money, but who the hell has the patience to assemble it?!

(via)

:: The stuff people do these days. Ye Gods. (Kind of a creepy image involving tattooing. Not graphic, but creepy.)

:: Superman versus the KKK. Seriously. This is fascinating.

(via)

:: I saw this mentioned on a blog somewhere over the last few days, but now I can’t remember which blog. I’ll update if I find it again, but for now, here’s a bit of Presidential lore I didn’t know: sixteen years after he left the Presidency, John Tyler, our tenth President, was elected to the Confederate House of Representatives.

Now, Tyler died before he could assume that office, but I’m wondering: if he’d lived to serve in the Confederate Congress, would that have constituted an act of treason against the United States? Committed by a former President? Man, history’s fascinating, but you never hear about this stuff in high school. It’s like, they give you all the boring outline stuff, but the year ends and you graduate before you can start learning all the good stuff.

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Hoo-boy….

:: How to draw Dick Cheney.

First Step: Draw Dick Cheney. Yah, I know that’s a bit of a leap, I remember my old “how to draw superheroes” books where the first step would be a box, and the second step would be Captain America.

Of course, my visual arts mojo is such that drawing the box would trip me up.

:: Move over Pauline Kael! An AICN persona reviews the new movie 300:

I can’t spoil the plot because THANK GOD THERE ISN’T ONE. Just ass kicking that kicks ass that, while said ass is getting kicked, is kicking yet more ass that’s hitting someone’s balls with a hammer made of ice but the ice is frozen whiskey.

Ummm…OK then.

:: A dead whale carcass washes up on a beach in South Africa; South African police tow the carcass out to the waters off a place called Seal Island. I don’t know anything about Seal Island, but I can only assume that it’s called Seal Island by virtue of being home to lots of seals. And we all know what beasties love to munch on seals, right? Yup, sharks. Lots of sharks. Lots of Great White sharks. Who now have a nice big rotting whale carcass to nibble at. And by “nibble”, I mean, “take big honking bites out of”.

Here’s the nearly seven-minute video of the feeding frenzy. It’s pretty grisly stuff, as you might surmise, so keep that in mind, all ye queasy creatures out there. But it’s worth watching in that “Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom” way that always fascinated when the lion ran down the wounded gazelle…and that’s all before the guy in scuba gear goes into the water to get a better look.

And what do you suppose happens when a bunch of boy sharks and girl sharks get together and fill their bellies? Well, their thoughts may well turn to thoughts of, well, doin’ the underwater grind. A scientist hypothesizes that dead whale carcasses may well be essential to the continuation of the Great White species, by providing the opportunity for full-stomached shark orgies.

This is officially the greatest thing ever posted to YouTube, and quite possibly the entire Interweb. Icky dead things being fed upon by ravenous sharks, followed by scuba diving bravado, followed by the making of little sharks? I honestly can’t think of a way for this to get any better, unless it would be for one of the scientists to get up the next morning, when the carcass has been reduced to just chunks of internal organs held together mostly by gristle, and climb onto the carcass in an attempt to get even closer footage of sharks feeding….

Seriously, greatest thing on teh Internets EVER.

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This isn’t all that weird, but I figure that with the history involved between all parties, it’s bound to get weird at some point or other, so we’ll just call this a Sunday Burst of Proactive Weirdness: David Lee Roth is back with Van Halen.

That is, of course, almost certain to end well!

(I am, of course, that rarest of animals: one who refuses to fall squarely in the camps of either DLR or Sammy Hagar where Van Halen is concerned.)

:: And via Warren Ellis, here’s an idea that’s certain to sweep the nation: a gas station that only uses terror-free oil!

:: Like many a soul, I love a good steaming bowl of General Tso’s Chicken. Now, I always suspected that it wasn’t actually an authentic Chinese dish, in that you won’t find people making this in their kitchens at home in China, and it now turns out I’m right: General Tso’s Chicken was invented in New York City. It was invented by a Chinese chef, to be sure, and the food writer here claims that the dish still exists in the fine tradition of Hunan cuisine. But it’s not Hunan.

And you know what? I don’t care. Now I want some General Tso’s Chicken. Maybe next week sometime….

(via)

:: Here’s a cautionary tale for the twenty-first century: a substitute teacher faces up to 40 years in prison because the computer she used in a classroom subjected her students to a whole bunch of pornographic pop-ups. The computer was running Windows 98 and the school district had allowed the subscription to its filtering software the lapse, so anybody who knows the first damn thing about the Interweb knows that this computer was a malware disaster waiting to happen. And as the whole tale unfolds, there is unmatched stupidity on all sides — the police, the prosecutors, the legal system, everyone.

Welcome to 21st century America. Won’t someone please think of the children!

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It’s been a good week for weirdness out there!

:: Not actually weird, but really pretty cool: Lynn linked a post on another blog about a minimalist composer named Rhys Chatham who recently contrived a work that is scored for electric guitars. Plural. And not just two or three, but four hundred electric guitars. It’s nothing “heavy metal” like at all; all those guitars combine to form a fascinating soundscape. There’s nothing about unusually-massive musical forces that require a resulting work to be trashy; Hector Berlioz was a master of huge orchestras, and he postulated that the effect should be “powerful” rather than tasteless. I’d like to hear this entire piece. An MP3 download of the first movement (quite a large file) can be found here.

:: As usual, good weirdness at MeFi, in particular this thread devoted to a possibly spoof “dating site” for “beautiful people”. As usual, the key attraction to MeFi threads like this is the snarky commentary:

Fantastic website. All the most nightmarishly shallow, ignorant, irrelevant people you truly need to avoid, in one convenient location…with pictures, so that you know who they are without a doubt.

Mmmmm.. I’m feelin kinda Ayn Randy I am.

it’s survival of the fittest … if it was survival of the cutest, kittens would have ruled the earth long ago

The majority of the most thoroughly screwed-up, personally repugnant (aka batshitinsane) people I’ve ever met have been very visually attractive.

You know what makes me laugh? When two really pretty and vain people get together and create really goofy looking kids. That makes me laugh. And only a little bit because I have beautiful kids. Mostly because I like it when vain people get a little reality smackdown.

My parents are both more beautiful than me. Can I sue Darwin?

But then the thread gets all serious and stuff. Do we have to always derail good snark with serious discussions of sociology?

:: CNN ran this article the other day about the season debut of the long-running (second only to The Simpsons) FOX animated show King of the Hill. It’s a pretty good article, actually; what’s weird about it is the goofy list of “bullet points” at the top of the article, in a box labeled “Story Highlights”. Have we become so poor readers that we need a helpful list of bullet-points, summarizing an article before we even read it???

:: And this week’s winner, via Shamus. The brain nearly shuts down, trying to list all the ways that this is just plain wrong.

I await the fuzzy-kitten version of King Lear….

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