I’m SURE I’ve eaten here.

See Also

• July 28, 2010 -- Unclear On The Concept, #45294
• July 21, 2010 -- It’s Not A Bug, It’s A Feature!
• July 13, 2010 -- Dirty Secrets Of The Tech World
• July 8, 2010 -- Unclear On The Concept, #7593
• July 6, 2010 -- Sorry For The Inconvenius

But that ain’t nuthin’. By now you’ve probably had a chance to see the latest trailer for the new “rebooted” Star Trek movie coming out next May that begins with a teenaged James Tiberius Kirk getting in trouble with some Trekkian version of RoboCop and ends with our favorite salsa-eating Vulcan making like a rabbi. It’s just more fodder for my increasing fear that this new movie is going to suck donkey dick, but somebody else looks VERY UNHAPPY:

Don’t worry, Bill. You’ll always be Denny Crane to a whole generation of people, not to mention T.J. Hooker to another generation.

See Also

• October 19, 2007 -- To Boldly Go Where Nine Movies Have Gone Before
• May 11, 2009 -- This One Goes Out To My Homeboy Mig
• May 11, 2009 -- Another $0.02 Opinion About “Star Trek” From A Middle-Aged Geek
• May 5, 2009 -- Please Don’t Suck, Please Don’t Suck, Please Don’t Suck…
• March 5, 2009 -- The Scent That Drives Alien Babes Mad

The Imaging Research Center at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County has been working on a project to create a digital reconstruction of the District of Columbia as it existed at the time of the construction of the U.S. Capitol in 1814. The video at that link explains a bit about the challenges of having to derive topographical data from inexact sources such as contemporary paintings and incomplete maps. Though Pierre L’Enfant’s master plan for the city of Washington was finalized in 1791, very little of the city as we now know it had been built more than 20 years later, and most of the city was still farms and open land. Complicating matters further, the British burned what buildings there were in place that same year, including the White House and the Capitol, setting construction back even further and causing the destruction of many official documents that would have been of invaulable use to the IRC’s project. The Capitol would require four additional years to be reconstructed after the fires, and was not completely finished until 1868.

See Also

• July 20, 2009 -- Mooning
• May 5, 2009 -- Mr. Kane Goes To Washington

• The Milwaukee Airport realizes what an annoying hassle it is to have to remove shoes and belts, empty pockets, submit to pat-downs, and whatever other useless security theater tactics the Gestapo feel like putting you through, and so they offer a “Recombobulation Area” where you can undo the various indignities and be on your way to far-flung destinations looking kempt and heveled once again.

• Speaking of which, this shoulder-holster rig for your electronic gadgets will undoubtedly make you feel fucking cool, but it will probably also keep you off of most major air carriers in the United States for the forseeable future. Plus it will immediately brand you as a total douchebag if you actually wear it. You can, however, pack hand grenades in your check-in bags without any trouble, or even any additional baggage handling fee.
• Mental Floss has a post today that tries to explain the origins of various nicknames people have for their localities. For example: “Nutmeggers” for people from Connecticut, the “Nutmeg State” or “Sooners” for people from Oklahoma because so many Oklahoma settlers jumped the gun on the state’s homesteading law. Conspicuously missing from the list: Massholes and Maine-iacs.

• Fans of Big Band Era music will know the Glenn Miller standard “PEnnsylvania 6-5000″. Futility Closet passes along the trivia factoid that the number was and still is the main telephone number for the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City. The hotel has been using that phone number since it first opened in 1919, and is the phone number in longest-continual service in New York, if not the world.

See Also

• July 22, 2010 -- Invasion Of The Body Scanners
• November 17, 2009 -- A Bulletin From The TSA
• January 5, 2009 -- To The Dustbin Of History, All Of You!
• August 5, 2008 -- The Unfriendly Skies
• June 25, 2008 -- Things You Probably Don’t Want To Know…

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day here in the United States. Most Thanksgiving dinners feature a roast turkey as the main course, and all told Americans will consume approximately 675 million pounds of turkey tomorrow. Resultingly, approximately 900 million hours of tryptophan-induced post-dinner naps will occur sometime in between the conclusion of the meal and halftime of the Dallas Cowboys v. Seattle Seahawks game, waking up just in time to indulge in 479 million hours of insulin-induced diabetic comas from eating 366 million pumpkin pies.

Earlier today, George W. Bush got in a little practice before letting himself and his band of war criminals off the hook by pardoning not one, but TWO turkeys. Luckily the turkeys were named “Pumpkin” and “Pecan”, not “Dubya” and “Dick”, but I suspect he’ll get around to freeing those turkeys before January 20, too.

Poultry processing is a filthy, dangerous, cruel, and relentless thing, just perfect for the backdrop for an interview with Sarah Palin, or an episode of “Dirty Jobs”. If people really knew much about how that mutant hyper-breasted fowl got from the farm to their plate, they would probably never eat a drumstick or slice of breast meat again.

The animal protection group Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, NY has been running a program called Adopt-A-Turkey since 1986 that lets you “sponsor” your very own rescued turkey living at the program’s farms in New York and California. The rescued turkeys live a life free from the harsh conditions of commercial poultry farming, and even get their own special vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner every year. You can even really “adopt” a turkey to take home and care for yourself…just don’t mention cranberry sauce around the bird when you get him home.

See Also

• April 15, 2010 -- Unclear On The Concept, Teabagger Edition
• November 25, 2009 -- The BKO Guide To Thanksgiving
• November 24, 2009 -- Run For Your LIVES!!!!!
• November 7, 2008 -- Pile-On Palin
• November 5, 2008 -- Goodwill Hunting

(thanks for the link, Hanan)

See Also

• October 16, 2008 -- Edie Adams
• July 22, 2010 -- Stupid Human Trick Of The Day
• July 19, 2010 -- Moo
• July 2, 2010 -- A Whole Lotta Funny
• June 29, 2010 -- Popcorn Kittehs!

Most people are familiar with the Myers-Briggs Personality Type matrix at this point, so I won’t take any time explaining that to you. My regular readers also probably know that I am a dyed-in-the-wool INTJ. INTJ stands for Introverted Intuitive Thinking Judgmental and is the least common of the 16 different personality types outlined by the MBTI. INTJs thrive on solitude, are rational and critical to a fault, project self-confidence but inwardly are deeply doubtful, and tend to by systematical and analytical. I knew I was an INTJ for sure the very first time I ever read about the MBTI when the example they gave of an INTJ was Captain Horatio Hornblower, my most favorite literary character.

So imagine my suprise when I plugged my blog URL into this writing analyzer and discovered that my blog is the polar opposite of my “real” personality. According to this site, my blog is an ESFP: Extroverted Sensing Feeling Perceptive. Each one of those traits is the exact flip side of the traits that have defined me as a person for my entire life. Extroverts derive their energy and enthusiasm from the company of others, Sensers are “gut instinct” people, Feelers are more concerned with how things impact others than what is “right”, and Perceivers “go with the flow”. That could be no more like me if it tried.

No wonder I’m so fucked up! I have a split personality! Maybe I’m like that supa-hot chick on “Heroes” who has an evil twin lurking inside her just waiting to pop out and haul out some serious whoop-ass!

Except, you know, the short, fat middle-aged guy version…or maybe my other personality IS a smoking hot blonde chick! That would be totally awesome!

See Also

• December 9, 2008 -- I’ll Be Sure To Do This First Thing Tomorrow
• December 18, 2007 -- The 44-Year-Old Virgo

I think you know by now that I am strenuously opposed to all of the bailouts that the federal government has been throwing at the various flailing tentacles of the dying capitalist monster. While I can see some rationalization for injecting cash into the financial sector to revive liquidity, I see absolutely no good reason for the government to literaly flush money down the toilet by giving it to the “Big Three” car makers. The “too big to fail” argument only underscores how over-dependent our country is on automobiles and auto manufacturing and just how badly we need to let that industry die so that other forms of transportation can find their way to the market.

In his weekly strip for Salon, cartoonist Keith Knight points his sharp black marker at a much better idea than a government bailout: Let the oil companies, with their massive windfall profits, bail out the car manufacturers. After all, that’s a symbiotic relationship in the first place. Then, take all that money that would have gone into Detroit’s ripped pockets and invest in rail services, public transportation systems that decrease suburban dependence on automobiles, and anything else that helps to bring down the curtain once and for all on the Automotive Era.

“Jonco” from “Bits & Pieces” offers this alternative to having the government pay for all the bailouts:

1 . At Wal-Mart, Americans spend $36,000,000 every hour of every day.

2 . This works out to $20,928 profit. Every minute!

3. Wal-Mart will sell more from January 1 to St. Patrick’s Day (March 17th) than Target sells all year.

4. Wal-Mart is bigger than Home Depot + Kroger + Target + Sears + Costco + K-Mart combined.

5. Wal-Mart employs 1.6 million people and is the largest private employer. And most can’t speak English

6. Wal-Mart is the largest company in the history of the world.

7. Wal-Mart now sells more food than Kroger & Safeway combined, and keep in mind they did this in only 15 years.

8. During this same period, 31 supermarket chains sought bankruptcy (including Winn-Dixie).

9. Wal-Mart now sells more food than any other store in the world.

10. Wal-Mart has approx 3,900 stores in the USA of which 1,906 are SuperCenters; This is 1,000 more than it had 5 years ago.

11. This year, 7.2 billion different purchasing experiences will occur at a Wal-Mart store.
(Earth’s population is approximately 6.5 billion.)

12. 90% of all Americans live within 15 miles of a Wal-Mart.

13. Let Wal Mart bail out Wall Street

Just to put the various bailouts into historical perspective, this blog has run the numbers and says that the total cost of all the bailouts, loans, and other federal interventions to date (including the proposed bailout for Citibank) comes to $4.6 trillion dollars. That is more money than we spent on the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Apollo Program, the Marshall Plan, the New Deal, the Louisiana Purchase, the Iraq Invasion, the Savings-and-Loan Bailout, AND the budget for NASA for the last 50 years COMBINED. Even the entire cost of the Second World War (in adjusted dollars) was “only” $3.6 trillion.

See Also

• November 11, 2008 -- Capitalism Destroys Everything, Chapter #3549
• July 14, 2010 -- Aux Armes, Citroyens!
• March 9, 2010 -- Unclear On The Concept, #596015
• February 5, 2009 -- Buddy, Can You Spare $18 Billion?
• November 18, 2008 -- We’re Not Even Number Two

Meanwhile, here’s a picture of a kitty:

If I find something good to post about, you’ll be the first to know, I promise.

See Also

• July 30, 2010 -- Saddest Kitty Picture Ever
• July 14, 2010 -- Lighten Up, Pal
• June 29, 2010 -- Popcorn Kittehs!
• June 23, 2010 -- Please Feel Free To Visit The Snackbar During This Brief Intermission
• May 17, 2010 -- Animal

…don’t you immediately wonder what happened to make somebody put it there?

See Also

• July 28, 2010 -- Unclear On The Concept, #45294
• July 21, 2010 -- It’s Not A Bug, It’s A Feature!
• July 13, 2010 -- Dirty Secrets Of The Tech World
• July 8, 2010 -- Unclear On The Concept, #7593
• July 6, 2010 -- Sorry For The Inconvenius

Even though our tanking economy seems to be taking the whole world along with it, I think it’s pretty safe to say that the American Era, such as it is, has ended. There aren’t many categories left where we can boast about being Number One, and the ones where we are Number One probably aren’t the sort of thing we should be boasting about.

Barack Obama’s made it pretty clear that the overarching goal of his administration is going to be restoring America’s moral standing in the world. It’s going to take a lot more than one guy in the White House to do that, I’m afraid. I’d settle for “not such a bunch of douchebags anymore” on this go-round.

See Also

• November 11, 2008 -- Capitalism Destroys Everything, Chapter #3549
• July 14, 2010 -- Aux Armes, Citroyens!
• March 9, 2010 -- Unclear On The Concept, #596015
• February 9, 2009 -- Let Them Eat Cake!
• February 5, 2009 -- Buddy, Can You Spare $18 Billion?

Is there anything more sadistically entertaining than spending a summer evening sitting on the deck watching assorted flying insects meet their final reward in the glowing fluorescent light of a bug zapper? Especially the big ones like the wasp in this video, who sometimes even burst into flames. Now THAT’s some entertainment, kids!

Since it’s winter where I live, and all the bugs are pretty much gone for the season, I guess I’ll just have to content myself with this Virtual Bug Zapper until next spring. (You can even install it as a screensaver, if you need your fix more than once in a while)

Or maybe you’re more amused by pet toys. I mean, c’mon, admit it, everybody plays with pet toys now and then, right? You’re home alone, kinda bored, looking for something to pass the time, and out of the corner of your eye you spot your dog’s favorite squeaky bone, or your kitty’s squeaky mouse. It’s HOURS of entertainment!

Okay, you don’t have a pet…or, you do have a pet, but Fido isn’t too keen about sharing his toys with you…or, there’s just too much kitty slobber on the catnip doll to even consider picking it up in your teeth. So for you there is this Virtal Squeaky Toy.

Oh, all right, you’re a little too highbrow for frying insects and squeaky toys. You would rather have your mind tickled and treated to something with a more sophisticated aesthetic. Then how about a Virtual Kaleidoscope you can design yourself? Just drag the colored bits into the thing that looks like a radar screen and watch the kaleidoscopic patterns in the circle next to it. There’s a newer version, too, but it gets confused if your Flash plug-in is later than Version 6 (the latest is V.10), so stick to that first link unless you are sure you’re only using V.6.

This Tonight Show clip from 1983 (via Mark Evanier, of course) features Albert Brooks doing one of the funniest bits I ever saw him do on that show. He whips out a Speak-And-Spell toy and proceeds to do a ventriloquist act with it that sends Johnny Carson into hysterics. I remember watching this particular program and howling with laughter at this routine. Hey, it was 1983, we had to make do with what comedy we could get back then.

Even though you probably won’t have much of an act if you visit this link, you can go and play with this Virtual Speak-And-Spell that works just like the original 1980s toy. Heck, if you were an ’80s kid, maybe you even still HAVE a Speak-And-Spell tucked away in your parents’ attic, in which case showbiz fame and fortune await!

See Also

• January 13, 2010 -- Most Days Are Just Like This
• November 24, 2009 -- Talking Kitty
• November 3, 2009 -- Give Me A Sandwich And A Douchebag And There Is Nothing I Cannot Do
• October 27, 2009 -- Another Darwin Award Nominee
• May 20, 2009 -- Don’t Let ‘Em See This Up In Maine!

So here’s my take on this whole “Hillary For Secretary Of State” thing: it’s a ploy.

Obama took a lot of flak for not making Hillary his running mate. The campaign made a very cursory effort at making it look like they were at least putting her on the short list, but nobody except the Hillary-Hating Republican crowd thought it was anything except the illusion it turned out to be.

They are doing the very same thing now, but doing a slightly better job of making it look realistic. The stories right after the election about John Kerry wanting the job were more of a traditional “trial balloon”, and they got shot down pretty fast by a very unhappy party. Hillary Clinton seems to be getting far more serious consideration as an actual possibility, but over the last 48 hours there have been all these stories about how Bill Clinton’s assorted post-presidential activities might create conflicts of interests and how he hasn’t been all that cooperative about turning over his lists of donors and contributors. And it’s my belief that the Obama people completely and utterly anticipated that and are ready to use it as a way to shuffle her out the door without looking like the bad guys.

I also believe that Hillary’s people knew all of this, too, and needed to play along for the sake of rehabilitating her public image after the “sore loser” end-game of her primary campaign. She sucked it up and played nice in the fall campaign, but did not get as much credit for it as she probably deserved. So this gives her a more favorable opportunity AND lets Bill look like the bad guy all over again. Moreover, I think HRC herself is 100% aware that her destiny is now in the United States Senate as the likeliest successor to Ted Kennedy as the ideological leadership of the Senate Democrats, and recognizes that there is absolutely no upside for her in actually becoming Secretary of State.

And for Bill, he takes the short-term hit on his reputation in the U.S., which isn’t all that great to begin with, but he doesn’t have to curtail his present-day activities for Hillary’s behalf. WIN-WIN-WIN.

Personally, I think Obama’s stealth candidate for State is Chuck Hagel — openly critical of Bush and the GOP, but with enough cred to fit the “bipartisan” approach Obama seems to be taking, has sufficient foreign policy experience, AND because State doesn’t have any domestic policy role to speak of, it helps to neutralize the elements of Hagel that are more objectionable to us pinko commie liberal bastards, namely his conservative and religious positions on domestic issues.

See Also

• February 21, 2008 -- Another Link Dump: Political News
• November 23, 2009 -- Three Must-Read Articles
• November 6, 2008 -- Larry The Money Guy
• July 30, 2008 -- I Bet He Takes Viagra, Too
• May 8, 2008 -- The Three Stooges

• This is an awesome idea for the iPhone/iTouch: American Airlines is making it possible for fliers to use their iPhones, Blackberries, etc. as their boarding passes, using those 2-D graphic image barcodes. (via Engadget) For the moment, the service is only being tested at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, Los Angeles International, and at John Wayne Airport in Orange County, CA. When you order your ticket, you can opt to have American e-mail you the boarding pass, then all you do is save the attachment on your mobile device and bring it with you to the security checkpoint. Show the image to the Gestapo goon BEFORE you try to go through the shampoo detector, and you’re IN!
• While I’m on the subject of iPhone/iTouch stuff, I have a thumbs-up and a thumbs-down to share. First, on the thumbs-up side, there’s the Pandora app. Pandora has been around for eight years, so you may very well have encountered it long before this. Like a couple of other music sites from the dot-com era, the idea was to be able to offer tailored musical selections to suit a user’s identified tastes. The so-called “Music Genome Project” uses a set of 400 different musical characteristics to identify songs a listener might like based upon the choice of a single artist or song. The listener then gets a “radio station” programmed around that choice and can fine tune the offerings by giving a thumbs-up-down vote. You don’t NEED a mobile device for this service, but it’s PERFECT for a device like the iPhone/iTouch. I already have a traditional iPod I keep in my car with my whole music collection on it, so I don’t bother putting music on my iTouch, but there are times when it’s kind of nice to be able to listen to music anyway and having a tailored music stream available is pretty great.

  Meanwhile, my thumbs-down goes to the appalling amount of difficulty I have had trying to get non-YouTube, non-iTunes video to play on my device. I spent most of my day Wednesday frigging around with two or three different Cydia apps, trying to find one that would let me copy some videos to the iTouch and then play them back. So far I have tried vlc4iphone and mplayer and pwnplayer and could not get a video that I had in both .avi AND H.264 formats to play. What makes it more frustrating is that I have no problem getting the H.264 video to play on my regular iPod or my wife’s Nano. As with the music I just mentioned, I would love the ability to occasionally watch something I’ve downloaded without having to be Apple’s bitch. I’ll also throw in some snarls and grimaces at the nearly infinite number of total shite websites that purportedly tell you how to do this sort of thing — they’re either written in incomprehensible English by non-English speakers, or they’re SEO honeypots trying to get you to view more page ads. Ooh, I hate that.

• One of the big news stories in the technology/media world in the last month has been the recent decision by the FCC to free up what is called “whitespace” — the unused spectrum between analog television channels — for broadband, mobile data services, and other wireless technologies. FCC testing of whitespace technologies began last year, but the final decision to allow development of the spectrum was held off for a while. Now, with the final cutover of analog television broadcasting set for February, 2009, the FCC has lit the green light. This MIT Technology Review article explains a bit about the huge potential for whitespace services to revolutionize wireless data services. Imagine, for example, using a whitespace wireless device to beam content from any source in your home to any viewing device — not unlike the Slingbox concept, but done wirelessly at very high throughput speeds that would accomodate high-definition video. Commercial devices like that are probably at least five years out, but you’ll see other devices (like iPhones, GPS devices, etc.) taking advantage of the spectrum space much faster.
  

  See Also

  • December 18, 2007 -- So Why Bother With The Radio At All?
  • September 9, 2008 -- Linkapalooza – Tech
  • August 28, 2009 -- You Say You’re A Big Fat Loser? There’s An App For That.
  • March 2, 2009 -- I Phone, You Phone, We All Phone For iPhone
  • February 18, 2009 -- Linkapalooza – Media News
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