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.
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!
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.
The merger between satellite radio services XM and Sirius finalized a couple of months ago, and initially there were no programming changes, but apparently this week that all changed…and without any advance notice. It seems that most of the programming that was eliminated or moved around came from the XM side of the street, which has left quite a few subscribers who came along from XM pretty steamed. This poster at the Motley Fool website says he gets the need to eliminate the overlap of programming, but all they’ve done with this unannounced change is piss people off, including him, at a time when they can scarcely afford to start dropping subscribers. Technoblogger Dave Zatz is similarly unhappy and is quitting the service for the SECOND time, having ditched XM last year because of programming changes. I’m sure some people will get over it, but alienating your already-miniscule audience isn’t how I’d go about “synergizing” anything.
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.
But this is no ordinary terlet…it’s a hi-tech environmentally friendly toilet that will recycle all of the urine it collects and turn it into drinking water for the astronauts on board the station.
I don’t know about you, but I think the paint job on the new version of the U.S.S. Enterprise is a dead giveaway.
I’m also a little concerned about Spock’s science station on the bridge:
Seems a bit too retro to fit the rest of the reboot.
On the other hand, at least they didn’t stray too far from the original version of the ship…unlike the Enterprise-D from “Star Trek: The Next Generation”
Plus, you have to give J.J. Abrams credit for not going with the stunt casting people were suggesting:
You might, for example, enjoy this 1999 interview with the late Studs Terkel as he talks about his own involvement in the early days of Chicago television. The local stations in Chicago were a hotbed of programming innovation in the 1950s, launching the careers of people like Dave Garroway and Burr Tillstrom, and Terkel was part of the Chicago broadcasting scene for decades.
Charlotte had the day off from school yesterday in honor of Veterans’ Day, so we got to have one of our Daddy-Daughter Days. One of my favorite things about living in the Boston area is that there are so many places to go and things to see and do with kids, but the downside is that it’s difficult not to be overexposed to them. When I was growing up in Maine, a trip to Boston to go to the New England Aquarium or the Museum of Science was something you might only get to do twice in your entire childhood, but we are regular visitors to those places and most of the other popular destinations. I think Bridget and I do a good job of coming up with hidden gems and lesser-known attractions to visit, but inevitably we also have gotten very familiar with the major ones.
