The Google Goats

In an effort to encourage "a more carbon-friendly, less polluting alternative to lawn mowers", Google has turned to employing goats to chew down the excessive vegetation on its sprawling California campus.

Here are the Google Goats hard at work...

The idea isn't entirely without precedent. During the World War I years First Lady Edith Wilson kept the White House lawn "mowed" by letting her family's sheep graze freely on the grounds. Maybe Obama could follow Google and the Wilsons' example and demonstrate some real environmentalism at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? :-)

Well anyway, I think it's a pretty neat story. Having grown up on a farm with a number of goats I can attest that they can eat anything, and will faithfully keep the grass and weeds at bay. Who knows: maybe with some good PR, goats and sheep can become the next "cool" pets to own.

(And as an added bonus, they can provide goats milk and lambchops!)

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THE HUNT FOR GOLLUM: The most beautiful fan film I have EVER seen!

Ever since I began my own forays into filmmaking, it's become one of my personal missions in life to encourage others to make their own movies too. And you wanna know why?

Because the time has finally arrived when every person can make a movie that stands on par with anything that the major studios can produce.

Seriously. Think about it: high-def consumer camcorders are now inexpensive and with some equally affordable editing software and a lil' bit of know-how, the finished footage can look extremely cinematic. Can't compose a note of music? Ask around on the 'net for talented folks to help you out (hey, it's what I'm doing with a project now :-)

Thanks to the web and broadband, practically the entire world becomes a fully-equipped studio and post-production facility right at your fingertips. There's no longer any reason not to make the movie you have always dreamed of.

And as of today, a group of dedicated fans of J.R.R. Tolkien have proven that premise in spectacularly gorgeous fashion.

The Hunt for Gollum is a 40-minute long movie that had its online premiere earlier this afternoon. It's directed, co-written and executive produced by Chris Bouchard, who coordinated a worldwide effort involving 160 people to make the film a reality.

Adapted from Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, The Hunt for Gollum expands upon Gandalf's recounting to Frodo earlier in the novel the tale of how Gollum eventually went looking for the One Ring, before the vile creature was tracked down in the wilderness and captured by Aragorn.

That's all you need to know before you start watching The Hunt for Gollum, because the film is so utterly amazing and tremendous an achievement, that I don't dare spoil anything else for you. Well, I can tell you that the cinematography is a feast for the eyes, and it's obviously styled after the look that Peter Jackson came up with for his The Lord of the Rings film trilogy.

Okay, I'll tease ya with this: yeah, you see Gollum. Chris Bouchard and his friends didn't "cheat" either. Maybe someone should make a fan film about The Hunt for Gollum crew breaking and entering into WETA so that they can CGI-render Gollum on the sly :-)

So... want to see it for yourself? Click here to watch The Hunt for Gollum in high-def or standard quality. And prepare to be amazed, friends and neighbors.

And to Chris Bouchard and his staff: very well done!! Y'all deserve nothing but the highest of praise for what you have done :-)

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MAKE MINE FREEDOM: Amazing insight from a 1958 cartoon

Just over fifty years ago, Harding College produced a series of films "to create a deeper understanding" of American culture. This one, Make Mine Freedom, has been "re-discovered" in recent days and is making the rounds quite a bit across the Internet. Personally, I found it to be uncannily prophetic about the country we are living in today. Perhaps we should begin considering the wisdom of the past.

Here is Make Mine Freedom...

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My first-ever text message from a mobile device

Yesterday (Saturday) afternoon I finally broke down and got a new cell phone. At the risk of sounding like a Luddite, I had only the vaguest sense of what mobile technology is capable of doing these days, like "Bluetooth" and such.

And then there is text messaging. Something that I have never done before in my entire life. Not even once.

Until tonight.

I got the X-tc from Virgin Mobile (and I might treat myself to an iPhone if... something happens in the near future), which has a very nice slide-out QWERTY keyboard. It's a feature I was particularly looking for since I'm such a fast typist, and I didn't want to "re-learn" how to do texting like most folks seem adept at doing.

Anyhoo, I tied my Twitter account into my new mobile phone, and a short while ago sent my first-ever text message from a mobile gadget.

Want to see it? Here it is.

"What hath God wrought" were the words in the very first telegraph message, sent on May 24th, 1844 by its inventor Samuel F.B. Morse from a line in Washington, D.C. to Baltimore. The quote is from Numbers 23:23 in the Bible, and was suggested by the daughter of a friend.

The first time I got on the Internet, those were the words that I sent in my all-time first e-mail. So I figured this was an appropriate time to use the phrase again :-)

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Jack Kemp has passed away

Jack Kemp was one of the best people in modern American politics who never became President.

I'll be even more blunt: when the 1996 elections came around, Kemp was the only reason why I not only voted for Bob Dole, but put up a huge campaign sign for "Dole-Kemp" in our front apartment window (yeah my roomie was rootin' for 'em too).

And I can't help but wonder: if he had been vice-president under Reagan (I've heard plenty over the years that he was highly considered for the job by Reagan himself, but the party bigwigs wanted George Bush as his running mate instead) then this might have been a far different... and far better... country today. Kemp was a man of real ideas, particularly in regards to economic growth.

Jack Kemp - former NFL football player, member of the United States House of Representatives, and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development - passed away today at the age of 73 following a long battle with cancer.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to his family tonight.

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Swine flu has FINALLY infected swine!

It's taken more than a week, but tonight the first confirmed case of the swine flu infecting REAL swine has been reported.

The plague-laden pigs were found in Alberta, Canada: a loooong way from what's thought to be the initial hot zone down South of the Border.

Meanwhile, news agencies all over have been struggling with what to call the epidemic, since it's apparently "not nice" to refer to it as "swine flu". In the past few days there's been a dramatic shift on the part of journalists toward calling it simply the "H1N1 virus".

Can't say that really rolls off one's tongue, aye? So I noted to one reporter that it adapts well in "leet-speek"...

...so maybe we should start calling it the "Hiney-virus" :-P

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Framed websites creeping back into popularity

Remember "frames"? That website design technique which a lot of us discovered during idle hours in a campus computer lab back when the Internet was still so new? Depending on how they were used frames could make a page look spiffy-kewl... or they could make it look like a fractured abomination.

(To this day I'm still stunned at that one homepage that my filmmaking partner "Weird" Ed came up with. Just how many frames did you cram into that, Ed? Did you even know?!)

Anyways, The Wall Street Journal is reporting on the comeback of frames and how a lot of people aren't too happy about it. Digg attempted to resurrect it last month but was promptly booed-down by many of its users.

Personally, I never found any reason to outright dislike frames, and it mystifies me that there's this much raw hatred toward them.

What do y'all think?

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He can have a strong influence on the weak-minded

Found this political cartoon and couldn't resist posting it here...

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PATRIOT Act denied son Constitutional rights, says North Carolina mom

This early on in the reporting of the story, I'll admit to wondering if there's more to this. But knowing what I do about how damned abusive and corrupt our own government has become, I'm also inclined to take this family at their word.

Sixteen-year-old Ashton Lundeby, of Oxford in Granville County, North Carolina (not far from Raleigh) was the subject of a raid by federal agents who handcuffed him and took a LOT of his personal possessions. The feds claim that Lundeby made a bomb threat, but the family denies the charge, saying that someone hacked into their IP address and made crank calls through the Internet.

And now...

Ashton now sits in a juvenile facility in South Bend, Ind. His mother has had little access to him since his arrest. She has gone to her state representatives as well as attorneys, seeking assistance, but, she said, there is nothing she can do.

Lundeby said the USA Patriot Act stripped her son of his due process rights.

"We have no rights under the Patriot Act to even defend them, because the Patriot Act basically supersedes the Constitution," she said. "It wasn't intended to drag your barely 16-year-old, 120-pound son out in the middle of the night on a charge that we can't even defend."

Passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S., the Patriot Act allows federal agents to investigate suspected cases of terrorism swiftly to better protect the country. In part, it gives the federal government more latitude to search telephone records, e-mails and other records.

"They're saying that 'We feel this individual is a terrorist or an enemy combatant against the United States, and we're going to suspend all of those due process rights because this person is an enemy of the United States," said Dan Boyce, a defense attorney and former U.S. attorney not connected to the Lundeby case.

Critics of the statute say it threatens the most basic of liberties.

"There's nothing a matter of public record," Boyce said "All those normal rights are just suspended in the air."

According to the story, Ashton Lundeby sounds like a pretty good kid. He's got American flags all around his room (he's probably more patriotic than the assholes who passed the PATRIOT Act) and he was away at church when the raid went down.

If the Lundebys' story is true, I will once again be led to yield to the lesser angels of my nature, go against all sense of polity and Christ-like bearing that I do strive to uphold, and repeat with great exuberance what I posted here a little less than a month and a half ago on another story about law enforcement abuse...

"F*CK THE GOVERNMENT!"

(I won't post the exact word until we know more about the situation. But you get the gist of it.)

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Third TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN trailer is online!

Officially, it's being hosted at Yahoo! Movies. Un-officially however, you can find it pretty much anywhere on the 'nets tonight. I snagged it in high-definition from YouTube.

However it is that you see it, make sure to catch the third trailer for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen...

That's Constructicon combined gestalt bad-'bot Devastator scarfing down a wazoo-load of Saharan sand, trying to suck in and chop Optimus Prime to slivers. By the way, Devastator is now said to be the most complex digital construct that Industrial Light and Magic has ever done in its entire thirty-some years of existence!

I also feel led to comment that based on this trailer alone, it looks like the second Transformers movie is going to be much more intense in the way of plot than the first film... along with a hella lot more action (and presumably more actual screen time for the Transformers themselves, supposedly being around 60 of 'em this time).

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen lands on June 24th.

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Steve Jablonsky's score helps GEARS OF WAR 2 win Best Sound at ELAN Awards!

Our friend Greg at Music4Games.net passed along the terrific news that Gears of War 2 has won "Best Sound in a Video Game Production" at the Third Annual ELAN Awards. ELAN is the Canadian Awards for the Electronic and the Animated Arts.

At the ceremony, hosted by SpongeBob Squarepants' Bob Kenny, Gears of War 2 was honored for its audio engineering, which included a full-length score composed by Steve Jablonsky (who has also composed Transformers and its upcoming sequel, Desperate Housewives and many other films, games and television projects).

Congrats to audio director Mike Larson, composer Steve Jablonsky, sound designers Jamey Scott and Joey Kuras, and everyone at Epic Games on your win!

And for a complete list of winners at this year's ELAN Awards, mash down here.

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Twitter loses 60% of new users after one month (BUT...)

If you use Twitter, the latest craze on the Intertubes, then it's quite likely that you are going to abandon the service after your first month. That's the finding of a Neilsen report which found that 60% of new Twitterers get tired of it after just one month.

However, I have to wonder how many of these Twitter expatriates eventually come back. Robert Strohmeyer elucidates on that further over at the ABC News website. Strohmeyer's point is that many folks first come to Twitter under the assumption that it's supposed to just chronicle the minutia of daily life, like "I'm cold" or "Going to the bathroom now"... when that's not what Twitter is about at all. And that when they realize how Twitter is actually quite useful as a serious micro-blogging utility, then they have the tendency to drift back.

I can vouch for that. When Twitter first hit the scene, I created an account and then... promptly got bored with it. But as more people began using it, I started taking a serious look at how Twitter could be used to complement my regular blogging.

So I've been back on Twitter for about a month now, and as things stand I'm finding it hard to envision that I'll be making a second exodus from it. Last night it was put to especially hilarious use when I vented my rage at President Obama nearly pre-empting Lost. And lately with the swine flu scare some have taken to using Twitter for comedic effect. Gotta love ingenuity like that :-)

So if you've tried Twitter before and quickly tired of recording the tedium of your waking hours, reconsider how it is that you should be using it, and give it another shot. You might find that it's a lot harder to quit after a second helping.

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Reaction to tonight's LOST: "The Variable"

I ain't saying nothing. And you know why?

Because I am completely tapped-out of any possible hyperbole that I could use to describe how I feel about Lost, after tonight's episode "The Variable".

If we are lucky, storytelling like this may happen twice in our lifetime. It's taking place, now, with Lost. Lord only knows when anything coming anywhere close to being just as comparable will ever come again.

This show is like sculpture being chiseled out before our eyes. And tonight, what we thought was the work being brought to life... just got smashed to smithereens.

Okay, I gotta say this: Eloise Hawking is a real b*tch! I didn't know what to quite make of her, until tonight's show. The whole thing about stopping Daniel and his piano playing: and you thought some parents went overboard when it comes to their kids playing sports. Sheesh!

Think I'm gonna have to watch this at least twice again tomorrow after I get it from iTunes. Just... wow.

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World's fastest camera: 6 million photos in 1 second

A team of physicists at UCLA have developed a new photographic technique called Serial Time-Encoded Amplified Microscopy, or STEAM for short. Using common fiber-optics components, the new system is capable of recording photographic images at a staggering rate of once every 163 nanoseconds.

That's more than six million photos in one second, folks.

It's an innovation owing to quantum physics and laser light, not standard CCD chips like how most digital images are captured. And the resolution right now is quite small: only about 2,500 pixels, or a thousand times smaller than most cellphone cameras. But with refinement there is the possibility that STEAM will eventually be able to video record real-time activity within living cells.

Give 'em ten years: that'll make for a helluva IMAX nature film!

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Don't be cheap: Buy MAD MAGAZINE #500!

It didn't hit me until a few months ago how much MAD Magazine has influenced my life. You can see it on this blog even: my propensity toward emboldening words a lot? That's definitely something I picked up from MAD's style... along with a jillion other traits, large and small that have crept into my work.

I've been been of the school of thought that MAD has suffered a decline in quality ever since the mag made the decision ten years ago to not just run real advertisements but worse: to shift from black/white to color. MAD never needed color. It was like when The Andy Griffith Show dropped grayscale: darn few of the color episodes were anywhere as funny as the first few seasons. No, MAD's allure was always the quality of its content, not its chroma.

But even so, MAD Magazine is now celebrating it's FIVE-HUNDREDTH ISSUE! It's on newsstands now and if you're anything at all of a MAD-man (or MAD-woman) you owe it to yourself to pick this up... and pays the money 'course. In the issue Sergio Aragones publishes a gallery of the 500 favorite "marginal" cartoons that he's done in his nearly 50 years with MAD. There are also no real-world advertisements in the issue past the first few pages (apart from officially sanctioned MAD schlock). This issue is a huge throwback to the MAD that many of us fondly grew up with. Unfortunately #500 will be the last issue before MAD goes to quarterly publication: a consequence of the current economy that is hilariously lampooned (along with a rather vicious treatment of Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi) in Frank Jacobs' song parody "The Bailout Hymn of the Republic".

Maybe we can help. Go buy MAD Magazine #500. And if you've got the money buy six or seven more copies :-)

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LOST celebrates 100 episodes tonight with "The Variable"

Didn't get to comment on Lost during the past month ('cuz I was busy with... other projects) but if you're a faithful viewer, you already know that the past few episodes have been everything from intense, to heartbreaking, to hilarious. I'm still giggling at Hurley's attempt to "improve" The Empire Strikes Back and get it to George Lucas in time to keep the Ewoks from ever happening.

And tonight's episode, "The Variable", portends to be a doozy. It's the one hundredth episode of Lost, so maybe it's time to start answering some long-standing questions? At the end of last week's installment Daniel Faraday (Jeremy Davies, right) returned after an absence of a few episodes and possibly three years - bear in mind that most of the characters are now stuck in 1977 - and word is that tonight he finally "comes clean" about what he knows about the Island. There's also rumor that "The Variable" will be something of a companion piece/flip-side story to last season's amazing "The Constant", thought by many to be one of the best of the entire series to date.

In case you need a "brush-up" of everything that's happened that's brought this story to its one hundredth episode, TVOvermind has a great compilation of what it considers to be the 100 best Lost moments of the past five season.

And I'm looking forward to getting back to posting reactions tonight after the episode airs :-)

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Swedish robot attempts homicide

A Swedish company won't be prosecuted but must pay $3000 in fines after one of its factory robots nearly killed a man. From the story...

A worker was about to fix a broken rock-lifting robot. He'd shut the power off, but the machine suddenly woke up and grabbed the man by the head.

"The man was very lucky. He broke four ribs and came close to losing his life," prosecutor Leif Johansson told the TT news agency.

Perhaps a review of Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics is in order:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

This kind of story is becoming all too common. We've already heard about military robots opening fire on their comrades. Now it looks like those employed by the private sector are beginning to revolt.

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