Tag: Burst of Weirdness

Oddities and Awesome abound! This week, a trio of Russian stuff.

:: The first human to travel in space, Yuri Gagarin, died several years after his flight in a plane crash, the details of which have never really been made clear…until now. I continue to be amazed, this many years later and what with the news today, by humanity’s need for secrecy.

:: Today is the 50th anniversary of the first human female space flight. I’ve never understood why it took the United States more than two decades to get a woman into space. (Although, in more cynical moments, I think I do understand it, but I don’t like the implication.)

:: Finally, a more frivolous and non-space related item. New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft is mad at Vladimir Putin. I’ve never been able to figure Vladimir Putin out (I always get this vague sense that he’s the James Bond supervillain that Dick Cheney always wanted to be), but the fact that he has angered the Patriots makes me happy.

More next week!

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Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: This one’s a bit depressing, but it really trips my weird circuit, in the way priorities are so misplaced

The G-8 nations are meeting in Northern Ireland, near the town of Enniskillen, and David Cameron wants to make certain everything looks rosy for the world leaders coming to discuss economic matters. Trouble is, Ireland has been hit hard ever since the bottom fell out of the financial market a few years back. A lot of shops have been abandoned; they sit empty, signs pulled down, naked storefront windows showing bare shelves… Well, we can’t have world leaders confronted with visible signs of the disaster they continue to enable — they might become concerned or even shift to non-stupid policies. So Cameron’s government has decided to make Enniskillen prettier. Those storefront windows have been papered over with photos of stuff that would be on sale if only the store was still solvent.

I do hope I live long enough to see what historians end up having to say about the austerity-fetish that’s dominating economic policy across the world.

:: On a cheerier note, Cracked.com has a look at what they say is the greatest issue of Uncanny X-Men ever. Issue 137, you might think? The one that concludes the “Dark Phoenix” storyline? Or maybe #141, which starts the “Days of Future Past” tale? Nope! Their pick is…issue 183. In which Peter breaks up with Kitty and then gets dragged off by Wolverine for a stern lecture about heartbreaking.

What’s funny is that back when I became a big comics fan in the early 1980s, the very first issue of Uncanny X-Men I ever read was that same #183. As intros go, it was a pretty easy way in: the only characters who display their powers are Colossus, Nightcrawler, and Rogue (in a brief Danger Room exercise). I hadn’t read Secret Wars yet at that point, so I learned in the opening pages that there was this big thing that went on and it changed people on the way back. And it had all the soap opera stuff that was always the best thing about The X-Men — I still remember one commentator back then referring to the book as “Dallas with capes”. Anyway, it’s pretty cool seeing something like this remembered almost thirty years later.

More next week!

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Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Moving large numbers of cars around at once: Here’s how they used to do it.

:: I’m stealing these re-made Disney DVD covers from Tumblr, because…well….

:: The lost, submerged Egyptian city of Heracleion. This is amazing stuff. Who knows what secrets our planet still holds from us!

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Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: The video may be funny, but believe me, kids — there’s nothing funny about Bitchy Resting Face. I am a sufferer of the male equivalent, “Angry Resting Face”, in that my facial features seem to default to an expression that society has decided is equivalent to SMOLDERING RAGE. I wish I had a nickel for every time somebody walked by when I was just standing there and said, “Wow, you look like you’re ready to rip someone’s head off!”, when what I’m actually thinking is, “Do I want turkey or roast beef on my sub today?”

There’s a very odd societal thing we have going on right now where any facial expression that’s not a grin is interpreted to indicate a negative emotional state. It would be mildly annoying, but that gonzo assumption can have some unfortunate effects in the professional world.

:: I always wonder just what we’ll do in Buffalo if we ever get the waterfront developed, because that will eliminate one of the three major topics of discussion around here, leaving us stuck with the Bills (ugh) and the Sabres (double-ugh). But, over the last couple years, things are really starting to happen down there, which is nice. And in addition to the actual development that’s underway, we have also seen a very welcome reduction in the amount of gonzo ideas being tossed about for the waterfront. I, for one, am thrilled to see the Era Of Goofy Buffalo Waterfront Proposals come to an end!

Only…not everybody got that memo, because someone cooked up a really detailed idea for cable cars on the waterfront. And not San Francisco-style cable cars, either — we’re talking about the little ones that hang from an overhead cable. Like this:

What’s more, this isn’t envisioned as a tourist attraction or ‘something to do on the waterfront’. This person actually wants this cable car system to be part of Buffalo’s commuter infrastructure. People who work downtown would drive to the cable car station and ride the cable car to their downtown job, or to a Metro Rail station so they might then get to their job. Cable car systems of this type — or ‘aerial trams’ — aren’t the fastest moving of transportation systems, so how they’d be embraced by commuters is hard to imagine.

The article concludes with this: “Even our long-held hopes of rapid transit to Niagara Falls and the Airport might one day be possible for far less money than expanding MetroRail!” Did I read that right? An aerial tram from Buffalo to Niagara Falls, which is 25 miles away? Aerial trams don’t tend to go much over 30 mph, so are we really expecting people to sit in an aerial tram for an hour to get to a place they could drive to in less than half that?

Now, I like cable cars/aerial trams. I like riding the ones at amusement parks. And I’m sure I’ll have a thrilling time riding one if I ever vacation in Switzerland. But as a major part of a city’s transportation infrastructure? A flat city like Buffalo that already has tons of roads, surface parking never more than a block away downtown, and declining population?

Oy.

Oh well. More next week!

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Oddities and Awesome abound…but I wasn’t online much this week, so I only have one thing: this article about the fellow who invented Sriracha Sauce, which is the newest food craze. Yes, I have a bottle on hand. I like it, although I tend to forget that it is significantly hotter than my usual Frank’s Red Hot.

Early on, one of Tran’s packaging suppliers told him, “Your product is too spicy. How can you sell it?” Add a tomato base, some friends counseled. Sweeten the flavor to pair it better with chicken, others said. But Tran stood firm.

“Hot sauce must be hot. If you don’t like it hot, use less,” he said. “We don’t make mayonnaise here.”

I especially like the part toward the end, when the article discusses what Tran did when underforecasting led to the company literally running out of product for three months. Their choices were to change the formula so they could keep bottles on the shelves, or…well, check it out.

More next week!

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Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: This is kind of creepy: the library of dust.

“In 1913, the Oregon State Insane Asylum began to cremate the remains of unclaimed patients and their ashes were stored in copper canisters.

After decades in storage the canisters have undergone chemical reactions resulting in explosions of vivid blue-green corrosion. Maisel was granted access to the room in which the canisters were stored to document them for his book.”

The full image of the room, with the cannisters all nicely arranged on the shelves like items in someone’s pantry, is particularly troubling to behold.

Well…that’s about it, I guess. This week really sucked, folks. We’ll get better, though!

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Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Want to buy an Uruk-Hai scimitar but you can’t think of why you might need such a thing? This woman has you covered. This may be the best thing I see all year. (Lots of other folks thought so…apparently this has shot through the Tumblrsphere like fire on a dry prairie.)

:: Those of us who grew up seeing lots of movies first via their teevee-edited versions will find this article (link fixed) a trip down funny-memory lane. Creative edits for swearing in movies! The very first one on the list tickles me especially, as I literally thought that was the actual line in the movie until just three or four years ago when we watched that particular movie on DVD as a family!

:: 30 Indispensable Writing Tips From Famous Authors. Oddly, I don’t see “Keep a list of the names of everyone who rejected you so can glory in their failure once you hit it big” anywhere on the list. Maybe I should delete that list….

(No, I am not keeping such a list! Sheesh!)

More next week!

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Oddities and Awesome abound! Even if I almost forget to do the post. Sorry….

:: This one is…well, I’m not really sure if it’s awesome or not. It’s a video of a tarantula crawling along the ground someplace. Trust me, nothing creepy, just a tarantula in its natural habitat. (Unless you find that inherently creepy, that is.) But they claim that this particular spider can reach sizes of eight inches in diameter, making it “as big as your face”. Well, I have no way of substantiating that, because when I click on a link that says “A spider the size of your face!”, I expect to see said beastie making his way across someone’s face. No such luck, here. For all I know, that’s a really nice close-up of a spider the size of a quarter. Until I see something to give this guy some scale, I officially call Shenanigans on this. Cool looking spider, though.

:: This is one of my favorite Flickr streams. This lady, Shelby, is really, really skilled at composition, and she always manages to come up with really interesting and new ways to look at things. Check her out!

:: Here’s a product that, while apparently popular in the 1970s, found itself with some serious branding issues in the 1980s. See if you can figure out why:

Via Retrospace, another one of my favorite Flickr streams. Also see the companion blog.

More next week!

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