Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Man will not stop messing with the simple pizza until it's an inedible pile of preservative-laced preformed saturated fat. This hideous vending machine is the latest, making even monstrosities like Pizza Hut look wholesome in comparison (who eats Pizza Hut? Is there one person who even eats this stuff?! Why the need for stunt-food? Cheesy Lava Pizza? Who the hell are you people?!)
On the Perils of Powerpoint (Wash. Post)

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

C'mon party people! Give me a good vote on threadless.com! Click 'I'd buy it'! It's cool! How many other shirts do you see with broken down hillbillies grousing over spilled moonshine?

My Threadless.com Submission

Followup: YEEE HAH! Thanks, and keep it coming!
Another NYTimes must-read on the Bush Administration vs. National Parks

Consistently, this scam involves secret backroom deals, partisan scheming, a link to Dick Cheney, embedded cronyism, and private profiteering from preserved public property.

Recently, a secret draft revision of the national park system's basic management policy document has been circulating within the Interior Department. It was prepared, without consultation within the National Park Service, by Paul Hoffman, a deputy assistant secretary at Interior who once ran the Chamber of Commerce in Cody, Wyo., was a Congressional aide to Dick Cheney and has no park service experience.

Within national park circles, this rewrite of park rules has been met with profound dismay, for it essentially undermines the protected status of the national parks. The document makes it perfectly clear that this rewrite was not prompted by a compelling change in the park system's circumstances. It was prompted by a change in political circumstances - the opportunity to craft a vision of the national parks that suits the Bush administration.

Read the LA Times piece on the same.

Meanwhile, these black-hats also proposed fuel economy standards that would actually incent light truck manufacturers to make their trucks more heavy and less fuel efficient by bumping them into higher categories (newly created, of course, so as not to put any pressure on the industry to create more efficient vehicles)
[check her out] A Swedish library, realizing that books are not the only things being judged by their covers, will give visitors a different opportunity this weekend—to borrow a Muslim, a lesbian, or a Dane.

Borrowing a person will be free, and the library will also provide coffee at its cafe where the “living books” will answer questions about their lives, beliefs, or jobs. “It’s supposed to be relaxed and human-to-human,” Noren said.
StencilRevolution: Good site for street stencil galleries, howto, etc.
Also see Cooper Union's Ambush in the Streets site, which has a few artist profiles and historical info, as well as this gallery tracking the work of London's Banksy
[apes pondering, flying skulls, angry robots] The Daily Jive has a bunch of prospective tshirt designs going up soon on threadless. I'm counting on you guys to give me some good votes in hope that at least one of them gets printed. More when they get approved.
New fish riddle at Coudal Design - School of Government

Monday, August 29, 2005

How to screen print a poster: start to finish
The Daily Jive loves silkscreened art. Do what the page says and make a print. Send me one when you're done.
Vandals burned swastikas into the lawn of a Jewish family in Georgia. Officials aren't sure whether to call it a hate crime.
Trees don't suck Carbon Dioxide (Nature)
"Some scientists and politicians cling to the idea that a carbon-dioxide-rich future might favour the greening of planet Earth. It's time to disillusion them," says Christian Körner, a plant ecologist at the University of Basel who led the study. "What remains is the greenhouse gas effect," he adds.
The Mercury-bound MESSENGER spacecraft captured several stunning images of Earth during a gravity assist swingby of its home planet on Aug. 2, 2005. Several hundred images, taken with the wide-angle camera in MESSENGER’s Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS), were sequenced into a movie documenting the view from MESSENGER as it departed Earth.
Don't mess with the profiteers. If you step between Haliburton and their cozy insider, no-complete guaranteed deals with the Army, you get squashed. (NYTimes)

Ms. Greenhouse fought the demotion through official channels, and publicly described her clashes with Corps of Engineers leaders over a five-year, $7 billion oil-repair contract awarded to Kellogg Brown & Root. She had argued that if urgency required a no-bid contract, its duration should be brief.
Univ. of California sued over Creationism (Salon, free day pass req'd)
The Fundamentalist ignorance machine goes into assault mode.

Friday, August 26, 2005

A nice new Shag show: LA by Day/LA by Night

Thursday, August 25, 2005

"There are liberals under my bed!" More toxic vitriol about how everyone isn't a free-market spouting, big industry coddling Republican. You know... like Jesus.
This time, though, they're doing it for the kids. Tremble as Hillary "Clunkton" assaults kids at a lemonade stand (with her "stubby little finger", no less!). Why not just cut to the chase and have Clunkton blow up the kids? You know, like the civ-casualty kids in Iraq? Except they don't have lemons and sugar. Or ice. Or clean water.
Anticlimactic Twilight Zone Episodes (McSweeneys)
Evian Water Bra
Amazing Amanda (NYTimes) has definitely taken up residence in the Uncanny Valley
War of the Future: How Oil Drives Genocide in Darfur (mojones)
"When countries with few other resources of national wealth exploit their petroleum reserves, the ruling elites typically monopolize the distribution of oil revenues, enriching themselves and their cronies while leaving the rest of the population mired in poverty -- and the well-equipped and often privileged security forces of these 'petro-states' can be counted on to support them."
Compound these antidemocratic tendencies with the ravenous thirst of the rapidly growing Chinese and Indian economies, and you have a recipe for destabilization in Africa. China's oil imports climbed by 33% in 2004, India's by 11%. The International Energy Agency expects them to use 11.3 million barrels a day by 2010, which will be more than one-fifth of global demand.
The Struggle over Science (BBC)

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Pentagon begins program of propaganda sloganeering on dead GI's graves. Does anyone not laugh anymore when they hear nonsense like 'Operation Iraqi Freedom'?
8 bit Atari gaming music remixes.
0.000000000004% of internet users have requested that the Jive cease its campaign to cause permanent sight loss. We've enlarged the post font size and fired the guy that was pushing for a full-site transition to Atom Narrow on all printed and online communications.
Sushi making machine. Where does it spit out the fish heads?
Google Talk is Live
Horny? (SFW)

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

"Dearrrr Goddddd... Bless these snipers and the holy rounds they are about to deliver unto the vital organs of their heathen targets... Amen."
Hey, what's Christianity without a little rabid, right-wing extremist call for political assasination?

This, of course, follows Robertson's threat to "nuke" State Department headquarters in '03. This terrorist lunatic needs a long stay in Gitmo.

In October 2003, Robertson, criticizing the State Department during an interview on "The 700 Club," said "maybe we need a very small nuke thrown off on Foggy Bottom to shake things up," referring to the nickname for the department's headquarters in Washington.

So, what stokes the furnace of such intense Christian hatred against a country like Venezuala to the point that such Republican thought leaders as Pat Robertson threaten publically to slaughter its leaders and cast it into anarchy? What could possibly motivate such insane, terroristic rants against a poor country that couldn't defend itself against such Republican hit-squad black-ops? What else?

The production of synthetic crude has lead Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez to argue that the country’s estimated 78 billion barrels in conventional reserves should be coupled with an estimated 238 billion barrels of extra-heavy crude in the nation’s Orinoco Oil Belt, resulting 55 billion barrels more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia’s, making Venezuela the oil-richest nation on the planet.

If you're wondering, like we at the Daily Jive are, what type of weaponry Jesus would prefer when he does his work among men, please join the Daily Jive's letter writing campaign and ask Pat. A typical letter might be "Dear Pat, what type of stopping power would Jesus prefer in hand weaponry?" or "What might Jesus look for in ammo that leaves an exit wound the size of a grapefruit?", "or possibly, "Pat, how might political murder be accomplished in a most holy and economically incentivized fashion such that the righteous killer be rewarded with the fruits of his blessed assasination mission?"

If Pat writes back, or televizes his answer on the 700 club, please share with the Jive!

Monday, August 22, 2005

Police ruin giant beer party in South Africa
“It was a lot of trouble from one train crash,” Van Zyl said. “They were firing rubber bullets into the crowd. The issue was the beer.”
Thought the old 3x3x3 Rubik's cube was hard? Try this. Here's some video of the behemoth in action, from its maker, the aptly titled Olympicube.
Oil: The End is Near. NYTimes Magazine piece, The Breaking Point, on the coming supply-side collapse. Administration officials don't want to sound the alarm when the building is already in flames, and voice codewords ('common sense solutions', 'hydrogen') to their embedded cronies as a signal that they won't stop fighting for them, but the reality is on the signs above the pumps.

The consequences of an actual shortfall of supply would be immense. If consumption begins to exceed production by even a small amount, the price of a barrel of oil could soar to triple-digit levels. This, in turn, could bring on a global recession, a result of exorbitant prices for transport fuels and for products that rely on petrochemicals -- which is to say, almost every product on the market. The impact on the American way of life would be profound: cars cannot be propelled by roof-borne windmills. The suburban and exurban lifestyles, hinged to two-car families and constant trips to work, school and Wal-Mart, might become unaffordable or, if gas rationing is imposed, impossible. Carpools would be the least imposing of many inconveniences; the cost of home heating would soar -- assuming, of course, that climate-controlled habitats do not become just a fond memory.

Friday, August 19, 2005

Family Guy vs. Take On Me
This weekend, find a swimming hole. A site started by Thomas Hillegass profiled in today's NYTimes.
Swimming holes have few rules and no lifeguards. Some are on private property; others are in state or local parks. At some, bathing suits are de rigueur. At others, arriving in one is considered poor taste.
"And there is good naked and bad naked," said Ms.deBear, who has grown to share her husband's passion for off-piste swimming. "Good naked" she defines as people with a touch of discretion in the form of, perhaps, a well-crossed leg. Bad naked? "This guy we saw recently was standing right up there on a rock with his big belly, just enjoying the scenery," she said with a shudder.
Nice DIY Backyard Rollercoaster. This one features a more modern steel structure (and rolls in off the top of a barn)

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Pee Battery
One Happy Big-Box Wasteland (SFgate) A rant, but an honest, poetic rant.

Do you want to know what depresses the American spirit? Do you want to know why it feels like the center cannot hold and the tyranny of mediocrity has been loosed upon our world? Do you want to know what instills more thoughts of suicide and creates a desperate, low-level rage the source of which we cannot quite identify but which we know is right under our noses and which we now inhale Prozac and Xanax and Paxil by the truckload to attempt to mollify?
I have your answer. Here it is. Look. It is the appalling spread of big-box strip malls, tract homes like a cancer, metadevelopments paving over the American landscape, all creating a bizarre sense of copious loss, empty excess, heartless glut, forcing us to ask, once again, the Great All-American Question: How can we have so damned much but still feel like we have almost nothing at all?


Amen, brother.
These oil prices [aren't] [hurting] [others] as much as they're hurting you. Being on Cheney's speed-dial list has its distinct advantages.

In fact, with [profit] [pinned] in the hundreds of percentage points, the big insider oil companies can afford to ask you cut a lot more corners. After all, it's not like you'll do anything about it.
"So who are we honoring here?" -- George W. Bush
Video from outside of the Bush "ranch" with Cindy Sheehan about the War of Lies that the administration continues to perpetuate. Articulate, deeply moving common sense that everyone should see. (quicktime .mov)

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Daily Jive faves X perform "Hot House" and "Breathless" on David Letterman (1983, Quicktime .mov, 50mb, well worth the big d/l)

Monday, August 15, 2005

Hacking hybrid cars for even better fuel economy.
Instead, Frank said, automakers promise hydrogen-powered vehicles hailed by President Bush and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, even though hydrogen's backers acknowledge the cars won't be widely available for years and would require a vast infrastructure of new fueling stations.
"They'd rather work on something that won't be in their lifetime, and that's this hydrogen economy stuff," Frank said. "They pick this kind of target to get the public off their back, essentially."
Scientists untangle Inca number strings (Nature)
Printball from recyclism
Uses an inkjet driver to fire a paintball gun. Dot matrix, but the dots are exploded paintballs, and the page is a wall.
UFO Evidence... we got your UFO Evidence
Asshole
Indeed.
More Cereal Box fetishism
Shredded Ralston? Liz Taylor? Wha? Also, is it just me, or does somebody need to give Booberry a ride to the nearest methodone clinic, stat? (Tons of great stuff to check out on Tick Tock Toys, from Bubble Gum machine insert cards to 50's ad art. Worth the visit to see the packaging fonts alone)

Sunday, August 14, 2005

From Bad-Boys: Insane Quarters Skills (link to vid)
The World's Best Drunk Bastard Bars. (from a site called drunk bastards, so you'd figure they know what they're talking about)

Four Amendments & a Funeral

An excellent Rolling Stone article that explores how the Republican Party will spare no effort to sabotage citizen's interests in pursuit of their greed-driven motives. Absolutely sickening.

Bush's summer bills were extraordinary pieces of legislation, broad in scope, transparently brazen and audaciously indulgent. They gave an energy industry drowning in the most obscene profits in its history billions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks, including $2.9 billion for the coal industry. The highway bill set new standards for monstrous and indefensibly wasteful spending, with Congress allocating $100,000 for a single traffic light in Canoga Park, California, and $223 million for the construction of a bridge linking the mainland an Alaskan island with a population of just fifty.
It was a veritable bonfire of public money, and it raged with all the brilliance of an Alabama book-burning. And what fueled it all were the little details you never heard about. The energy bill alone was 1,724 pages long. By the time the newspapers reduced this Tolstoyan monster to the size of a single headline announcing its passage, only a very few Americans understood that it was an ambitious giveaway to energy interests. But the drama of the legislative process is never in the broad strokes but in the bloody skirmishes and power plays that happen behind the scenes.

Saturday, August 13, 2005

A collection of 70's NYC club photos.

Friday, August 12, 2005

[The Jive is here to teach]
Cheap-Ass Cereal Hall-of-Fame, because if a site has 'hall-of-fame' in its name, I'm there with freakin' bells on. Who wants non-fame in their halls? Idiots, that's who. And I know that a good simple majority of you out there aren't idiots. This is for you. Via Bifurcated Rivets.

I learned many, many things at this site, not the least of which was that Amazon.com was downplaying their books presence, apparently so they could focus on the lucrative shrink-wrapped bologna sector. From there, I learned that customers who bought this, also went on to buy a 16 frogs legs dinner. Did I blink and Amazon got taken over by mental patients or something? What the hell is going on?

From there I learned: "Just don't believe that old rumour that frogs taste like chickens. I've always thought they tasted more like parrots" which 5 out of 6 people found helpful.

With all of this knowlege gained, I'm confident that I'll make a better and more interesting dinner guest.
Praying mantis eats hummingbird
The Jesus Pierogi is up to $1000 on ebay. From KingNutter
Or you could learn the musicpole, like this cool guy. This is a marketing disaster on every point. It's name alone is enough to keep people from playing it in public ("and on the pole we have so-and-so. He sure smokes on that pole!")
The Banjo-Tam is exactly what it sounds like. (although Banjorine sounds nicer)

The Jerk-o-meter

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are developing software for cell phones that would analyze speech patterns and voice tones to rate people — on a scale of 0 to 100 percent — on how engaged they are in a conversation.
Anmol Madan, who led the project while he pursued a master's degree at MIT, sees the Jerk-O-Meter as a tool for improving relationships, not ending them. Or it might assist telephone sales and marketing efforts.

Ever looked at used vehicles on ebay and wondered why the mileage was so low? Do only sunday drivers sell their cars on ebay? This is more likely the reason.

Thursday, August 11, 2005

A japanese drawing robot. Apparently, it's programmable by coloring cels on a paper disc that sits atop the thing. The same site has Edison cylinder phonographs that sub a plastic cup for the resin cylinder.
Unhappiness with Microsoft's draconian licensing terms drives the flight to Linux.
Google Inc open source programs manager Chris DiBona said the search giant has stuck with Linux throughout the company's life, in part, because it was unhappy with the terms of another software company.

New York City has asked all restaurants to voluntarily remove all trans fats from menu items. (NYTimes)
A survey by the department's food inspectors found that from 30 to 60 percent of the city's 20,000 restaurants use partially hydrogenated oil in food preparation, meaning that thousands of cooks and chefs might need to change their cooking and purchasing habits to meet the request.

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Sophie Olmsted spent 5 years photographing the Richards, a family of Southern California Gypsies (MakingRoom)
Interview with cartoonist Daniel Clowes on his upcoming film, Art School Confidential
To date, much of the drug-use data gathered has centered on the consumption side. The Italians checked the outflow side of the black box by sampling sewage water, and found that many of their citizens were nursing W-sized Texas-sized cocaine habits.

This approach revealed that the 5 million people living around the Po, Italy's largest river, consume four kilograms of cocaine each day. This translates into at least 40,000 daily doses of this drug, or about 200,000 lines of cocaine, the team reports in Environmental Health1."It's higher than what we were expecting," says Zuccato.
[Hannitation Engineers]
Liberality for All is an "action-packed, patriotic knee in the groin to the embodiment of the ultra-left". Check the ACC comic site for a preview!
Apparently in 2021, we all worship the U.N., speak with French accents, and Sean Hannity has a robotic arm. But why dream of a dystopic fantasy future, when Republicans are making a real one today? (Wash. Post)

On June 7 the three Republican appointees on the five-member board that regulates employer-employee relations in the United States handed down a remarkable ruling that expands the rights of employers to muck around in their workers' lives when they're off the job. They upheld the legality of a regulation for uniformed employees at Guardsmark, a security guard company, that reads, "[Y]ou must NOT . . . fraternize on duty or off duty, date or become overly friendly with the client's employees or with co-employees."

Softball night might get pretty frosty with all of those cameras, recorders, and spies around making sure you're not 'friendly' with co-workers.

Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Gee your snapshots sure are round! The Lomo Fisheye Camera. Make sure you're centered in frame, and its easy to make it look like the world really does revolve around you.
Widespread environmental devastation seen from space
Think you're paying a lot at the pump? Republicans know how to get you in other ways, too.
You're paying far, far more than that. Bush signed a corporate welfare bill that benefits big energy by repealing the Public Utility Holding Company Act and allows for massive, unregulated consolidation and enormous tax breaks to the already handout-heavy industry.

To add insult to injury, the bill also tacks on this bonus:

A provision meant to curtail U.S. oil demand by one million barrels a year by 2025 was struck down, as well as provisions for opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil drilling and protecting companies from lawsuits pertaining to gasoline additive MTBE and its contamination of drinking water supplies in less than 40 states.

The oil and gas industries get $2.7 billion in tax breaks and $500 million over the next 10 years for research into drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

This is special interest pandering at its most (literally) sickening and dangerous. Thanks again, Ohio. There's a press-blackout on this from the major outlets. Some add'l coverage here.

The section of the 2005 Energy Policy Act repealing PUHCA is a tiny, almost invisible portion of the massive document. But as a result of the simple line ("The Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 (15 U.S.C. 79 et seq.) is repealed."), there are now no restrictions on who can buy public utilities. Holding companies will no longer be required to divest non-utility businesses; geographic limitations or restrictions on number of holdings are similarly gone. Even the SEC has been taken out of the process, replaced by a much-scaled-down review by the Federal Energy Regulations Commission (FERC).
In short, the repeal of PUHCA means that public utility companies are now fair game for buyouts and consolidation. One likely scenario is that we see a process of merger and acquisition in the energy utility market akin to that in the telecommunications arena. Moreover, as major global energy companies such as ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco have been at the forefront of efforts to get PUHCA repealed, it's highly likely that they -- along with other energy majors -- will look to spend some of their recent windfall profits on utility acquisition, buying not just the power supply businesses, but the customer information. But it need not be an oil firm buying up utilities; billionaire investors and non-energy industry companies could just as easily buy up local utilities.

Monday, August 08, 2005

Gandalf: "Precious? Its been called that before, but not by you."

Frodo: By whom then, Gandalf?

Gandalf: By the evil GE, who markets this walk-in wine vault to the sophisticated collector!

Insulated panels with an R-33 insulation factor and an airtight door seal help keep the temperature and humidity constant. The door can be locked to keep consumers precious wine inventory secure. Motion detection lighting ensures that the lights turn off, if the consumer leaves the Wine Vault and forgets to extinguish them.

The Twilight Era of Petroleum: The world is about to see the end of easy oil -- and the beginning of the resource wars. (Mother Jones)

In setting the stage for its simulated crisis, Oil Shockwave identified a set of conditions that provide a vivid preview of what we can expect during the Twilight Era of Petroleum:

*Global oil prices exceeding $150 per barrel
*Gasoline prices of $5.00 or more per gallon
*A spike in the consumer price index of more than 12%
*A protracted recession
*A decline of over 25% in the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index
*A crisis with China over Taiwan*Increased friction with Saudi Arabia over U.S. policy toward Israel

Whether or not we experience these precise conditions cannot be foreseen at this time, it is incontestable that a slowdown in the global production of petroleum will produce increasingly severe developments of this sort and, in a far tenser, more desperate world, almost certainly threaten resource wars of all sorts; nor will this be a temporary situation from which we can hope to recover quickly. It will be a semi-permanent state of affairs.


Prices hit an all time high of $64 today. (NYTimes)
Great. Now even our rice is lethal.
"When we're all paranoid about what's in our food, the question to ask is, 'Would you like your rice to be grown on arsenic contaminated soil?'," he says.Low doses of arsenic such as these do not cause acute illness. "It's more about long term intake that can elevate levels of cancer,"
Meanwhile, NY state songbirds are showing high mercury levels. If results come back as bad as researchers fear, it could spell disaster for the watershed that supplies the 9 million people in the New York metro area.
Robot catches 186mph fastballs. (NewScientist)
Last year Congress ordered the Bush Administration to create a civil liberties panel to oversee rights issues as they relate to the so-called 'war on terrorism'. They've never met.

Lanny Davis, the only prominent liberal among the five people Bush nominated after a six-month delay, said he had not received a call from anyone related to the board since it was formally announced in June. Davis said he could not comment on specifics because the members had not yet met.
All four other panel members declined to comment.
The inactivity comes at a time when Congress is nearing reauthorization of several provisions of the Patriot Act, a controversial law that gave the government new powers to go after suspected terrorists.
Asked why it was taking so long to set the board up, Connecticut Republican Rep. Christopher Shays charged, "It's not a priority for the administration."
Drivers are getting off the expensive stuff
Whatever the trigger, drivers pulling up to the pump in vehicles that ostensibly require high-grade gas are wondering if they really need the more expensive fuel or whether it's okay just to fill it up with regular.

Friday, August 05, 2005

P.E.A.R.T: Yet another auto-drummer, this one with triggered sticks on a real drumset.
Michael Lynn found and published details of how Cisco's security vulnerabilities. Cisco responded with all of the typical threats, attacks of the guy's employer, and legal sabre rattling that you'd expect of any modern corporate giant. In a paranoid hissyfit worthy of Salieri, they've topped it all off by resorting to old fashioned thuggish censorship.
Sombody shot some damning video of Cisco sheep/employees literally ripping out the text of his presentation from the BlackHat conference books.

Here's a Wired interview with Lynn to give you his perspective on the Fatal Cisco Flaw.

WN: Then what happened?
Lynn: So on January 27th, ISS comes out with their response to this vulnerability -- the advice to their customers based on my analysis.... I stayed up all night basically (to research it).
I realized in looking at this (that the program) is actually way worse than Cisco said.... So (our guy) calls up ... Cisco and says, "OK, we aren't 100 percent sure that we found the same bug that you're talking about, but it's important we find out because the one we found has much, much greater impact. You said there's (the possibility) of a denial-of-service attack. But the one we found is fully exploitable."
Cisco said, "You guys are lying. It is impossible to execute shell code on Cisco IOS."


Note to Cisco: Never call a security researcher a liar, unless you're damned sure of it.

Thursday, August 04, 2005

Revenge!
Your land is their land. A look in to the utterly unbelievable happenings with private property siezure via imminent domain. Article [Part 1] [Part 2]

Woody Guthrie wrote, "This land is your land, this land is my land, from California to the New York Island. From the redwood forest, to the Gulf Stream waters, this land was made for you and me."
As far as the U.S. Supreme Court and Oakland are concerned, alas, those lyrics are all wet. To the true believers in eminent domain, your land is their land, and all land was made to produce optimal tax revenue.
[Kickin' Mad Scient] "Galactic Tyrant Xenu banishes pure energy beings called Thetans to Earth!"
This isn't an old Ed Wood sci-fi byline, it's a fundamental tenet of a major religion: Scientology! Skewered on Jon Stewart's Daily Show here (reg., link to vid.)
Build your own triggered electronic drum set for about $250 out of practice pads and fairly cheap electronics.
Elevator Hack: Get to your floor in a hurry. No key required.
Speaking of rubes, somebody tried to ebay a $2.7 Million FM antenna. The pics are gone (which is a shame. I'm dying to see what 2.7M of personal wooden audio antenna looks like) but the spoofy description is pretty entertaining.
If you're going to sell snake-oil to the rubes, you've gotta have a catchy name (NYTimes)
Mr. Bush used the phrase "war on terror" no less than five times. Not once did he refer to the "global struggle against violent extremism," the wording consciously adopted by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other officials in recent weeks after internal deliberations about the best way to communicate how the United States views the challenge it is facing.
HousingMaps - Using google maps to find targeted real estate property and rentals.
Found on O'Reilly Radar (get it?) Tim O'Reilly's new alpha-geek blog on the latest technology happenings.

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

[Flat Earthers advance on public schools] As further evidence that the intellectual backwater is evolving into the mainstream, Bush today said that Intelligent Design should be taught in schools. Look forward to a generation of hillbilly imbeciles assaulting the scientific community with assertions on how God made chameleons change color because He thought it was pretty.
Apple has a surface-touch sensitive mouse, which eliminates mechanical buttons in favor of virtual buttons: Mighty Mouse
The Zippo people were tired of hearing about how their customers had their lighters taken away from them by paranoid airport security staff, so they solved their problem the old fashioned way: They lobbied congress and had TSA laws changed.

“Zippo was overwhelmed by the response from consumers concerned with this ban,” Booth stated. “We appreciate the thousands of calls, letters and emails we received -- particularly those from Zippo lighter collectors and Zippo retailers. Their support is gratifying and it is certainly good news that new Zippo lighters can now be packed in checked luggage,” he concluded.
The long list of everyone who has gone over Niagra Falls, whether by barrel or otherwise (tightroping ruled until 1886), and whether they survived or not.

Monday, August 01, 2005

Parking Meters Get Smarter
In Pacific Grove, Calif., parking meters know when a car pulls out ofthe spot and quickly reset to zero -- eliminating drivers' little joyof parking for free on someone else's quarters.
In Montreal, when cars stay past their time limit, meters sendreal-time alerts to an enforcement officer's hand-held device,reducing the number of people needed to monitor parking spaces -- notto mention drivers' chances of getting away with violations.
What the hell is going on with the Democratic Party? It seems like their only agenda is kowtowing to the utter nonsense that the GOP is ladling out, and whenever anybody steps up to question it, they quickly slap him down? Who needs a Karl Rove or a Scott McLelland when the Dems are so damned good at self-censorship? Sissies.

He closed by encouraging the College Democrats to "fight for what you believe in ... We don't need two Republican parties," Dean said.