With the news of Meat Loaf’s endorsement of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, it may be worth taking a moment to remember his finest performance. While Meat Loaf has undoubtedly had a distinguished career, it was his duet with Chef for 1998’s Chef Aid album that stands above all the rest, including his consumption of an animated taco on a two-dimensional stage.
To the Beemobile!
– Bees in northeastern France have been producing honey in odd shades of blue and green lately. This stumped the beeologists at first (auto-correct really wanted to change that made-up word to “biologists,” but I showed it who’s boss!!!)
On the hunt for answers (which is what scientists do, and it’s awesome), they discovered a biogas plant about two-and-a-half miles upstream that processes waste from a plant operated by the candy company Mars about 62 miles away. Among the products made at the Mars plant are M&Ms, including the blue and green varieties. Coincidence? Mars isn’t commenting, so I’m going to speculate that it is not coincidence, but rather conspiracy!!! Of course, I can’t back that up with anything.
“I wore a five pound beard of bees for that woman.”
– From Australia, we have the Babes & Boars calendar, which contains, not surprisingly, pictures of babes with the boars they presumably just bagged. This is part of a publication by Sporting Shooter magazine known as Bacon Busters. I’m still trying to confirm if this is satire or not.
If you like pictures of babes and are indifferent to the presence of dead boars, this may be a good publication for you. If you like pictures of dead boars, please reevaluate the course of your life so far.
– Doctors saved a toddler’s life by performing a Fecal Microbiota Transplantation with the child’s mother as the donor. It’s a very touching story, if you can get past the fact that Mom donated poo to her son.
– Sometimes an awesome Halloween costume crosses paths with a profoundly mistaken individual, and tragedy results. A man in western Pennsylvania who, police say, was not drunk somehow, decided to shoot at a skunk with a shotgun. Upon hitting the stinky passerby, he learned that it was not actually a skunk, but a nine year-old girl in a skunk costume. Also, the two are related somehow. The girl was flown to a Pittsburgh hospital and was reportedly doing well. Police aren’t sure what to do with the guy. Until that gets sorted out, I guess kudos are due to whomever made the costume, because it was obviously good enough to fool a totally-not-drunk guy. Seriously, though, I hope the kid is okay.
Photo credits: “To the Beemobile!” via evergreenterrace.com.au; “I wore a five pound beard of bees for that woman,” via mmmsimpsons.tumblr.com.
Ian Boudreau seems to have captured the idealistically ethereal nature of libertarian ideas in today’s political discourse:
Libertarian candidates can say wonderful-sounding things because they never are faced with the prospect of implementing their ideas.
— Ian B. (@iboudreau) October 25, 2012
Discuss.
You might find this surprising, but I’m kind of a geek.
I mean this on several levels. On certain issues of pop culture or history, I have a peculiarly encyclopedic knowledge, while finding myself cripplingly hamstrung in other arenas. I also have a tendency towards pompous certainty when it comes to my particular areas of knowledge, although I have tried to reign it in during the past few years. History will decide if I succeeded or not.
It therefore came as an embarrassing shock to me to learn, via Justin Griffith at FreeThought Blogs, that a beloved ’80s anthem contained a glaring error. Specifically, the Dead Milkmen’s “Punk Rock Girl” name-checked the wrong band:
We went to the Phillie Pizza Company
And ordered some hot tea
The waitress said “Well no
We only have it iced”
So we jumped up on the table
And shouted “anarchy”
And someone played a Beach Boys song
On the jukebox
It was “California Dreamin'”
So we started screamin’
“On such a winter’s day”
(Emphasis added)
See the problem? “California Dreamin'” is not a Beach Boys song. It was the Mamas and the Papas (although to be fair, the Beach Boys did record a cover in 1986. It just wasn’t nearly as good.) The Dead Milkmen released “Punk Rock Girl” in 1988, i.e. twenty-four years ago, and I never noticed the discrepancy until just now.
I have failed you, Gods of Geekdom. I offer myself in atonement.
BONUS FEATURE: I also want to acknowledge two of my favorite rhymes in all of songwriting history, courtesy of “Punk Rock Girl”:
She took me to her parents
For a Sunday meal
Her father took one look at me
And he began to squeal
And
We got into a car
Away we started rollin’
I said “How much you pay for this?”
She said “Nothing man, it’s stolen”
Honorable mention goes to “If you don’t got Mojo Nixon then your store could use some fixin.'”
Today is the eighth annual Wombat Day, an international celebration of all things wombat. If you know little to nothing about wombats, then you and I have a lot in common.
Here’s the pièce de résistance of the wombat phenomenon (in my opinion, anyway), via Dogwork.com:
I Love My Wombat, he is my best friend – Wombats should not be taken in as pets as they are an endangered species and illegal to own one. The wombat you see here was orphaned and grew up with humans and could not be returned to the wild. If you would like to learn more about wombats visit this website here
A video by Ajakwerth
Trust me, you want to wait around for the belly-scratching scene.
This is from more than a year ago, but it is worth it just for the headline:
Couple Busted for Sex in Aquatic Park
Witnesses ‘Disturbed,’ Pool Water Recycled
Need I say more?
Photo credit: “Sundlaug Stykkishólms water slide top” By BiT (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
Meet the larva of the Megalopyge, a family of moths that sound highly unpleasant.
Not all that is fluffy is cuddly…
The moth Megalopyge opercularis has numerous common names, including southern flannel moth, pussy moth,puss caterpillar, tree asp, and, asp caterpillar. It is visually striking in both larval and adult forms. The inch-long larva is generously coated in long, luxuriant hair-like setae, making it resemble a tiny Persian cat, the characteristic that presumably gave it the name “puss.” It is variable in color, from downy grayish-white to golden-brown to dark charcoal gray. It often has a streak of bright orange running longitudinally. The ‘fur’ on early-stage larvae is sometimes extremely curly, giving the larva a cottony, puffed-up look.
Well, that sounds positively dandy! What could be wrong with that?
The ‘fur’ of the larva contains venomous spines that cause extremely painful reactions in human skin upon contact. The reactions are sometimes localized to the affected area but are often very severe, radiating up a limb and causing burning, swelling, nausea, headache, abdominal distress, rashes, blisters, and sometimes chest pain, numbness, or difficulty breathing (Eagleman 2008). Additionally, it is not unusual to find sweating from the welts or hives at the site of the sting. Ironically, the resemblance of the larvae to soft, colorful cotton balls encourages people to pick them up and pet them.
Okay, so there’s that. We have these guys in Texas, except the caterpillars are usually black. Don’t touch them, seriously.
If you’re feeling bold, here’s a video about their life cycle:
A local TV spot has received a nomination for a state-level Emmy award. The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Lone Star Chapter announced its 2012 Lone Star Emmy Nominations, and “Maddie’s Day Out” is nominated in the “Commercial – Single Spot/Campaign” category.
The city’s Channel 6 produced the ad for Austin Animal Center, chronicling the adventures of a yellow lab named Maddie as she hits many of Austin’s iconic destinations while her human searches for her. As cute as it is, it has an important message about tagging and microchipping your pets. Dogs go missing all the time, unfortunately, and they’re not all as resourceful as Maddie. Of course, you should also make sure your backyard is secure so your dog can’t get out, and also make sure the tagging and microchipping are up to date.
The competition is rather diverse: “Celebration: ‘Outliving Your Ovaries’ Product Spot”from KDTN in Denton; “Dallas Mavericks Basketball Is Back – Time Lapse Mural;” and “Sea World San Antonio/Momentum ‘Howl-O-Scream.'” I think Maddie’s got this one.
I’ll just take this opportunity to post this AT&T commercial from a few years ago, which still makes me cry, dangit:
Blackberry 7800, via mrgadget.com.au
I purchased my first Blackberry, a 7800 model, in 2005. Even with a contract, it cost about $350. The phone could barely connect to the internet on a good day, and I can’t remember if it had wifi connectivity or not. I owned four different models of Blackberry after that first one, all with increasingly bad-ass names: the Pearl (not very bad-ass), the Curve (am I being graded on my choice of phone?), the Bold (now we’re talking…), and the Torch (oops, there go my pants!)
There was only one problem: beginning in about 2007, the cultural influence and general bad-assery of my phone steadily declined against that snotty upstart, the iPhone. I, like most Blackberry loyalists, didn’t see the allure. Why would I need an app to order pizza? I can do that with the part of my phone that sends my voice through the air to a cell tower, then across fiber optic lines and into someone else’s ear. I also appreciated the fact that the Blackberry still allowed you to type on actual (albeit tiny) keys, rather than ethereal spots on a touchscreen. During my lawyering years, the Blackberry seemed like the tried and true, wise choice for a professional. All of this changed one clumsy summer day.
BlackBerry Torch 9810, via Wikimedia Commons
In July 2012, I caved and bought an iPhone 4S. (I don’t care that I could’ve gotten an iPhone 5 if I’d just waited a bit. In the tech world, you can always get something newer and cooler if you’d just wait.) I got an iPad last year (an iPad 2, if you must know, a few months before “The New iPad” came out.) In August, I bought a Macbook. My journey to the Apple side is complete, although I still maintain that I can get by without 90+% of the apps.
The Blackberry holdouts have now come to resemble the dogged Apple loyalists of a decade ago. Except that Blackberry shows no signs of a miracle resurgence. You were good to me, Blackberry, but I guess I’ve moved on.
Photo credits: Blackberry 7800, via mrgadget.com.au; “BlackBerry Torch 9810” by TonyTheTiger (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
The group United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) has, by all appearances, a worthwhile goal, which is to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. To accomplish this, it often puts pressure on private companies to divest from Iran, both directly and through any subsidiaries or affiliated business that might do business there. By and large, this is clearly the free exercise of economic power to try to bring about social change, something I generally support. I could say a few things about the long-term wisdom of tarring an entire nation of people with a history and culture spanning millennia based on the oft-psychotic behavior of a 33-year-old regime, but let’s focus on UANI’s latest campaign instead.
According to a UANI press release dated September 18, 2012:
On Tuesday, United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) launched its World Wide Web campaign, and called on both the Internet Corporate for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE) to disconnect the Internet access of sanction-designated Iranian entities such as its Central Bank and its military’s engineering arm.
ICANN is the nonprofit corporation that has the authority to designate and assign domain names on the World Wide Web. RIPE performs a similar service in Europe. UANI sent letters to both agencies on September 7, demanding that they cease providing services to “sanction-designated Iranian entities.” This may work as a public relations move, but it has multiple problems, not least of which is the fact that ICANN and RIPE can’t just turn off a spigot and cut Iran off. UANI seems to be suggesting cutting off specific Iranian entities included on the sanctions list, but it could never work that way. John Levine, a writer for the internet technology journal CircleID, calls the idea that ICANN or RIPE could just cut Iran off “ridiculous”: Continue reading
