You are currently browsing the monthly archive for August 2009.
Apparently Delta now has WiFi.
Updating the website from 33,000 feet. Somewhere over Pennsylvania.
- Palestinian Prime Minister Fayyad drafts document that pushes statehood, infastructure for Palestine.
- Some aboreal treelines advancing as planet warms, study says.
- Wikipedia to launch controls on editing certain pages.
- CIA used mock executions, electric drills, firearms and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques on terrorist subjects investigation reports.
- Iran puts hundreds of opposition leaders on mass trail under the pretext of destabilizing the government and trying to start a coup.
- North and South Korea to hold talks to re-unite families separated by the Korean War.
- One dies, two rescued after being swept into the sea while hundreds crowded Thunder Hole in Acadia Park to watch huge waves from Hurricane Bill.
Martin Scorsese does a horror picture and it looks pretty good. No gangsters, but we still get a deep dish serving of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Boston accent and a creepy Sir Ben Kingsley. The trailer looks promising. The whole thing is based on a novel written by Dennis Lehane (Mystic River) and should be pretty good. (This is the point where I drop the fact that I’ve met the author.)
Also: a preview for The Burden is up and once we get word from the 48 Hour Film Project we’ll put the whole thing up. I’m excited about this, the entire project was like making a haunted house. There’s something very satisfying in playing with things we fear and trying to illicit a response from the audience. Hopefully we did well.
Watch the preview below in the H’est of D’s.
A Megaptera novaeangliae requests Marco Queral give him five.
This dude is perhaps one of the luckiest guys in the world right now. (Read this article.) I didn’t even know that I had a secret wish to chill with a humpback until reading this.
I now wish to get quite chill with a lady humpback, maybe ask her “‘sup?”
This summer has been a strange one for health care in America. Back in July Walmart announced it was backing Obama’s health care plan and supported a universal single-payer care program. Just recently Whole Foods’ CEO wrote against “ObamaCare” (in the form of a national health care program) in the Wall Street Journal saying: “A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That’s because there isn’t any. This “right” has never existed in America.” Everyone it seems is taking a side and making enemies.
Now on the Walmart front, aside from the speculation that “the mean old giant has met the baby Jesus and now loves the people of America”* it seems most likely that this is a huge business ploy. Walmart is the largest private employer and so will have a huge part in negotiating what the employer health care mandates are and can set the bar higher for it’s competition. Also, the need for employers to supply health care to their workers will make the market a lot harder to enter. I am not a buisiness major, I picked a lot of that info up here.
And Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods whose statement has stuck in the craw of hundreds of upper-middle class yippies does have some good sugguestions, like making medical costs transparent and honest so that a positive form of “doctor shopping” can take place where a patient can know what he’s getting in for and what he is actually paying for up front. As he puts it: ”What other goods or services do we buy without knowing how much they will cost us?”
America has the most expensive health care system in the world. The second is Norway, however Norway does not have 15% of its population uncovered by health insurance, nor does it have a privately run health insurance industry a trait we share with a large number of third world nations and only a very few developed nations. Now there have certainly been health care reforms that have gone bad, and though America is not going to close all rural hospitals and tell sick people to go to Washington DC for treatment. we certainly could stand some positive changes.
- Civilians waiving white flags of surrender killed by Israeli troops, a Human Rights watchgroup says.
- US Mayor gets teeth knocked out while defending gandmother and child.
- Worlds oldest pupil dies at age 90.
- Brad Pitt might become mayor of New Orleans.
- Swiss bank agrees to spill over 4,000 names of potential US tax-evaders.
- The Portland, Maine chapter of the 48 Hour Film Project is finished! MINT Films submits their short: ”The Burden” on time. Screeming on Tuesday at 9:30pm at the Westbrook Cinemagic with the rest of the festival’s films.
- New Zealand man robs record store after giving owner his contact information.
- Jones vs. Harris Associates may be first Supreme Court case to address the issues of ”excessive” bonuses paid out to executives of failing publicly traded firms.
- Obama may opt for non-profit insurace co-operatives in health care reform plan following pressure from opponents.
- Japan leaves recession but experts not sure for how long.
- 600 Chinese villagers storm lead plant after children poisoned.
- Egyptian President agrees to recognize Israel if comprehensive peace plan is achieved and building on the West Bank is stopped.
- 20 dead in Russian suicide bombing.
- Stanford engineer decodes his genome for just five easy installments of $10,000.
ACT ONE
SCENE ONE
(The stage is dark. One spotlight comes on, illuminating a MAN standing centerstage.)
MAN (wincing)
Ah! Jesus, that’s bright! Turn it off.
(The spotlight goes out, the stage is completely dark again.)
MAN (relieved)
Ah. Jesus. Now this is dark.
(The MAN leaps off of the stage into the house.)
MAN
Thank you, Jesus.
(The MAN walks up an aisle and sits in an open seat.)
(The curtain falls.)
FIN.
When I left home for college, I began experimenting with many different and exciting things, including drugs, alcoholic beverages, and — perhaps most dangerously — high-speed internet. I moved from the dark ages of 56k dial-up and Internet Explorer to the golden cities on the hills of cable internet and Mozilla Firefox. The hours I’ve lost to the world wide web are being catalogued in some gigantic computer somewhere, just waiting to be used against me when I’m standing at the pearly gates or when SkyNet takes over the world.
I don’t have to tell even the most casual internaut that the web is filled with crap. I’m not just talking about comments on YouTube (“these waterfalls are gay! obama wasn’t even born in america!”) or poorly-designed geocities pages; I’m talking about the random worldly detritus that has been, against better judgement, digitized for the remainder of time. When I lived in the same dormitory as the venerable THSeamonsters, he turned me on to this device for wading through and around the excreta called StumbleUpon.
StumbleUpon is a small browser add-on that, according to their website, “helps you discover and share great websites.” It basically adds three little buttons below your address bar: “Stumble,” “like,” and “dislike.” When you hit stumble, it takes you to a site that people similar to you have “liked.” The more you use the button, the more it figures out what kind of things you want to read, which is how my browser now knows I’ll enjoy looking at a series of pictures of ants carrying a potato chip or reading about ten all-time great hoaxes. This kind of personal interest and care makes me feel somewhat better about sitting naked in front of a laptop at three in the morning.
I recently discovered, though, that the real gem of StumbleUpon is the “StumbleThru” option. StumbleThru allows you to see all the pages you’d like from a certain domain — and in my case, this domain is always Wikipedia.
Allow me to present you with five random stumbled Wikipedia pages. We all just might learn something. (or learn something, learn something, laugh at something, learn something, and be disgusted by something, respectively)
Ancient astronaut theories or paleocontact are various proposals that intelligent extraterrestrial beings (called ancient astronauts or ancient aliens) have visited Earth and that this contact is linked to the origins or development of human cultures, technologies, and/or religions.
The Colossal Squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, from Greek mesos (middle), onyx (claw), and teuthis (squid)), sometimes called the Antarctic or Giant Cranch Squid, is believed to be the largest squid species. It is the only known member of the genus Mesonychoteuthis. Though it is known from only a few specimens, current estimates put its maximum size at 12–14 metres (39–46 feet) long, based on analysis of smaller and immature specimens, making it the largest known invertebrate.
The Yale “We Suck” prank was a practical joke accomplished November 20, 2004, at the annual Yale-Harvard football game, Yale University students used a card stunt to trick more than 1,800 Harvard University fans into holding up placecards that spelled “WE SUCK”.
Portal is a single-player first-person action/puzzle video game developed by Valve Corporation. [...] The game consists primarily of a series of puzzles that must be solved by teleporting the player’s character and other simple objects using the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device (“ASHPD”, also dubbed the “Portal Gun”), a unit that can create an inter-spatial portal between flat planes. The player character is challenged by an AI named “GLaDOS” to complete each puzzle in the “Aperture Science Computer-Aided Enrichment Center” using the Portal Gun with the promise of receiving cake when all the puzzles are completed.
The Shark episode or Mudshark incident was an alleged event which took place at the Edgewater Inn in Seattle, Washington, on 28 July 1969, involving Richard Cole, a road manager for English rock band Led Zeppelin, and members of the American psychedelic rock band Vanilla Fudge. [...] The Shark episode is alleged to have involved some type of sexual act with a fish. However, there are many variations on the story, all involving one or some of the band members, as well as variations of the type of fish (often claimed to be a shark), and the nature of the acts performed.
fornication: voluntary sexual intercourse between two unmarried persons or two persons not married to each other.
versus:
formication: a tactile hallucination involving the belief that something is crawling on the body or under the skin.
