August 5, 2004
Fahrenheit 200,000,000
Fahrenheit 200,000,000 [Flash.] Celebrating the 59th anniversary of Hiroshima by making fission fun again!
Lucky Number 666
The number 666 has been drawn by the Pennsylvania Lottery 12 times. Well, legally that is. On April 24, 1980, Pittsburgh personality Nick Perry, host of local TV shows and the live lottery drawing, fixed the lottery drawings. Perry has since passed away, but the story lived on in a (badly made) film adaptation. [more inside]
McWorld?......McDeath. McLife not served today.
Wade Davis, on "Death and life in the Ethnosphere - The Naked Geography Of Hope" : "In Haiti, a Vodoun priestess responds to the rhythm of drums and, taken by the spirit, handles burning embers with impunity. In the Amazon, a Waorani hunter detects the scent of animal urine at forty paces and identifies the species that deposited it....On an escarpment in the high Arctic, Inuit elders fuse myth with landscape, interpreting the past in the shadow of clouds cast upon ice.....Just to know that such cultures exist is to remember that the human imagination is vast, fluid, infinite in its capacity for social and spiritual invention." The death of the Ethnosphere was Margaret Meade's great concern up to her death, says Harvard ethnobotanist Wade Davis of Serpent and the Rainbow fame and student of Richard Evans Schultes, founder of Ethnobotany : "The surprising results obtained from treating psychoactive plants allowed their users to communicate more directly with the unseen world which they believed to exist." Davis coined the concept of the "Ethnosphere" and has worked for it's preservation through Cultural Survival
74 Years Old
"The application for stay of execution of sentence of death presented to Justice Kennedy and by him referred to the Court is denied." Hours later, James Hubbard is injected with lethal chemicals and dies in Atmore, Alabama. Hubbard, convicted of a 1977 murder, was 74 years old, demented, and retarded. File this one under "it's not cruel and unusual if you don't know what's happening to you."
Oh Rob!!
Oh Rob! What it was like to be in the studio audience of The Dick Van Dyke Show. Nice essay from Mark Evanier.
Do you have what it takes to be the King of Metal Knowledge?
We chased lady luck, 'til we finally struck Bonanza.
In 1967 the television program Bonanza enjoyed a
three-year run as the most-watched television show in the United
States. Bonanza had not started well; its first two seasons
returning disapointing
ratings but kept alive by the bequest of (then) NBC-parent RCA. RCA had a
vested interest in keeping the color series alive in order to push
sales of their color
technology.
That same year Bill and Joyce Anderson created The Ponderosa Ranch tourist attraction near Incline Village, Nevada on the site allegedly shown by the burning map in the opening credits. The property annually attracts nearly 350,000 tourists to Lake Tahoe's north shore to enjoy the surroundings of a period recreation including mock gunfights, cowboy rope tricks and an honest 1860's-style saloon. (more inside)
That same year Bill and Joyce Anderson created The Ponderosa Ranch tourist attraction near Incline Village, Nevada on the site allegedly shown by the burning map in the opening credits. The property annually attracts nearly 350,000 tourists to Lake Tahoe's north shore to enjoy the surroundings of a period recreation including mock gunfights, cowboy rope tricks and an honest 1860's-style saloon. (more inside)
Election
An OpEd piece by Bruce Springsteen, announcing the tour of Vote for Change, the umbrella of a new group including the Dave Matthews Band, Pearl Jam, R.E.M., the Dixie Chicks, Jurassic 5, James Taylor and Jackson Browne. (NYT)
The end of music
The worst CD in the world. Here's something to while away the office hours, compiling the worst CD in the world from tracks that you own.
"What's your least favourite track by your favourite band? It's a difficult question, because often we're reluctant to admit that our favourite bands have written bad songs. We program ourselves to take sides: we'll often convince ourselves that a good song by a band we don't generally like is worse than a bad song by a band we normally love.
I'm interested to know if there's any common stuff in people's most hated songs list, and conversely if something you own and hate happens to be someone else's favourite. And if there's something you really can't stand - why did you buy it? Why do you still have it?"
So it's fifteen tracks in your own record collection that you hate the most. And the site is something to do with some time mefi poster nylon, so all the more reason to join in the fun
I'm kicking off my CD with starship.
"What's your least favourite track by your favourite band? It's a difficult question, because often we're reluctant to admit that our favourite bands have written bad songs. We program ourselves to take sides: we'll often convince ourselves that a good song by a band we don't generally like is worse than a bad song by a band we normally love.
I'm interested to know if there's any common stuff in people's most hated songs list, and conversely if something you own and hate happens to be someone else's favourite. And if there's something you really can't stand - why did you buy it? Why do you still have it?"
So it's fifteen tracks in your own record collection that you hate the most. And the site is something to do with some time mefi poster nylon, so all the more reason to join in the fun
I'm kicking off my CD with starship.
...access to affected authors has been disabled.
The recent Australia/US free trade deal,among many other things, extended copyright from fifty years after an authors death to seventy years. As a result stuff like this happening. via Making Light
Photos of La La Land
West Sunset - Photos of Lost Angeles. [some of you may not like that it's a flash site]
John Kerry's Official Naval Records
John Kerry's Official Naval Records Time to put to rest the nonsense coming out of the hate groups. And when you hear about the Swift Boat group who have put out an ad and now a book denouncing Kerry, then turn to this URL to find out about that group of patriots
http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Swift_Boat_Veterans_for_Truth
Trust no-one: Banksy Strikes Again
A few months after his first (donated) statue, "Drinker", was kidnapped, London's guerrilla artist Banksy reveals a new statue, a £22,000 solid bronze prostitute with leather boots and a
thong, dedicated "to thugs, to thieves, to bullies, to liars, to the corrupt, the arrogant and the stupid."
Honour lost, indeed
Forbidden Love: The Romance That Masqueraded as a Bio In early 2003, a Jordanian woman named Norma Khouri published a book entitled Forbidden Love (or Honor Lost in North America). This book was a memoir about how Norma Khouri's best friend, Dalia, was killed by her own father after she fell in love with a Christian military officer, and Norma's subsequent escape from Jordan. Forbidden Love was a bio that read like a sensational romance, and it sold 250,000 copies around the world and made Norma Khouri a celebrity in her adoptive country of Australia. However, it turns out that the book really was just a romance. Dalia never existed. Norma Khouri left Jordan at the age of 3 and grew to adulthood living in Chicago. So, one very disturbed woman has exploited Western prejudices about Arab cultures, fooled the general public, plunged her publisher into an enormous legal and financial embarrassment, and impugned the very real and serious problem of honour killings. And she got away with it for a full year and a half.
Cuba classics
Cuba Classics: A Celebration of Vintage American Automobiles. An homage to Cuba's astonishing wealth of antique cars, revealing the time-worn splendor of classic American automobiles spanning eight decades.
Former King-Maker Under Fire
The real center of power in the War on Terror: Katherine Harris. Officials in Indiana and Washington, D.C., said they are dumbfounded by a statement U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris made about a terrorist plot to blow up a power grid in Indiana.
For those of you not familiar with Harris, she's certainly been no stranger to controversy over the years, and is not lacking for a significant fan base.
Be excited!
Well, it doesn't look like the Requiem for a Dream site ever got posted here. So, um, here it is.
Flash. You know, they were going to get Aronofsky to do Batman? Fell through when the executives woke up with a hangover, I assume.
Flash. You know, they were going to get Aronofsky to do Batman? Fell through when the executives woke up with a hangover, I assume.
Army dreamers
I got 500 2 gig drives and some tape!
Bored? Flame Wars got you down? Got extra Hardware?
This guy has an idea what you can do with some of those old hard drives. Or maybe you would fancy a 3 D Display? And these guys have my favorite summer project of all. (Props to Boing Boing)
Israeli soldiers get cannabis
CACODEMONS
Vroooom!
The Apple Product Cycle
Lather, rinse, repeat. "The forums are ablaze with vitriolic rage. Haters pan the device for being less powerful than a Cray X1 while zealots counter that it is both smaller and lighter than a Buick Regal. The virtual slap-fight goes on and on, until obscure technical nuances like,'Will it play multiplexed Ogg Vorbis streams?' become matters of life and death." Perhaps 1 Infinite Loop has an archetypical drama. [more q daily newsfilter]
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