World War II began 70 years ago today

Early on the morning of September 1st, 1939, a squadron of Nazi German Luftwaffe attacked the Polish town of Wieluń. More than twelve hundred people were killed. Minutes later a German battleship opened fire on the military depot at Danzig. In the hours that followed dozens of motorized German divisions stormed into Poland along three fronts.

World War II had begun.

Nothing more to say here, other than to remember history... and a prayer that we may be mindful of lessons that are all too often only paid for at the highest of cost.

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Disney to buy Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion

Click on over to ComingSoon.net for the story that I thought had to have been a joke when I first heard about it this morning.

But it's true: Disney is purchasing Marvel Entertainment and everything that comes with it - comics, characters, movies, the whole shebang - for $4 billion in cash and stock transaction.

All that I can think of at the moment is that this will probably become the entertainment industry's equivalent to Ted Turner's Time Warner purchasing of America Online.

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V declares Vendetta for Johnny Robertson!

Look folks: honestly, that isn't MY blog at all! And I have no idea whatsoever who it might be who created it. Heck, lately I haven't had much time to devote to this one, much less start and maintain a new one. Especially one as slick and polished and inspired as what I'm about to show you.

But that doesn't mean that I'm not flat-out stunned at whoever it is out there who has assumed the guise of V and decided to take on Johnny Robertson...

Vendetta For Johnny Robertson popped up out of nowhere this morning and a reader passed it along to me. Yes folks, V - the masked protagonist from V for Vendetta - has arrived on the streets of Martinsville, Danville and Reidsville to take on the cult leader/convicted felon who has been trying to "defeat destroy" in the name of God everyone he hates...

Johnny Roberston a "pastor" residing and terrifying the WGSR viewing area. His supposed Church of Christ in Martinsville Va., the only ones not damned to hell.

Spewing vitriol at his enemies and any and all who disagree; in this vast sea of hate is where we find dear lost Johnny.

Here and now is the victory. A vying of his virtues, our dear lost Johnny.

Judgment shall ran down upon he, and a judgment ruled impartially.

The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it's my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V.

By the way, whoever this "V" is, he/she/it went to the expense of registering a top-level domain name for the site: head on over to vendettaforjr.com to see more of Vendetta For Johnny Robertson.

"People should not be afraid of Johnny Robertson." Darn right! :-)

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Ancient musical instruments getting resurrected

Scientific Blogging has an intriguing story up about how one group of scientists is working to reproduce musical instruments that had previously been lost to antiquity... along with the the unique sounds that they produced. One such instrument is the barbiton (right), an early type of bass guitar.

Do you long to hear the dulcet sounds of the salpinx, barbiton, aulos or the syrinx? Of course not, because no one has heard them in centuries. Most people have never even heard of them.

But you will soon have the chance to experience musical instruments familiar to ancient civilizations but long since forgotten.

Ancient instruments probably got lost because they were too difficult to build or too difficult to play. The ASTRA (Ancient instruments Sound/Timbre Reconstruction Application) team is tasked with bringing them back to life and already have successfully reconstructed the sound of an earlier instrument called the 'epigonion'.

The team has been so successful at reconstructing these instruments that they plan to have a concert with their own "Lost Sounds Orchestra" later this summer.

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Another hilarious DILBERT strip

Methinks that Scott Adams is veering perilously close to real life in today's Dilbert cartoon...

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A shot across the bow

To a certain few reading this blog...

"For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms."

-- Ephesians 6:12

I don't have to win. I only have to fight.

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Meet "The Dude Who Took Down Viacom" at SPARKcon in Raleigh!

That commercial is going to haunt me for the rest of my life, isn't it? :-P

SPARKcon is a grassroots-organized four-day festival in Raleigh celebrating individual creativity around the Triangle area and throughout North Carolina. This will be the fourth annual event and this year SPARKcon will be held September 17-20. And I've been invited to speak that Friday night about the very crazy situation that happened between Yours Truly and Viacom two years ago.

Look! Event announcement!

The Dude Who Took Down Viacom: One Filmmaker's StoryEVENT LOCATION
Artspace

EVENT DESCRIPTION
Meet North Carolina filmmaker Chris Knight, a.k.a. "The Dude Who Took Down Viacom". In 2006, Knight made a campaign advertisement to help promote his running for a seat on Rockingham County's Board of Education. Knight did not win a seat on the board, but he did win some internet and media fame as his commercial was featured in The New York Times, on the Fox News Channel, every major newspaper in the state, on National Public Radio, the Canadian Broadcasting Company, by the Heritage Foundation, VH1's show "Web Junk 2.0", and E! Entertainment Television's show "The Soup". The major attraction of Knight's commercial was his creative use of Star Wars as an allegory for his strong commitment to reforming education practice. Life was good for Knight, until he loaded a few clips of his infamous commercial's featurette on "Web Junk 2.0" onto Youtube and was slammed with a copyright infringement claim. Come here the details of Knight's battle tonight as the filmmaker recounts his battle with Youtube and VH1's parent company Viacom firsthand.

SPONSOR
Artspace

And look again! There's even a Facebook page for "The Dude Who Took Down Viacom"!

I'm really exciting about doing this, and I'm very much thankful to Nene Kalu, Kathy Justice and the rest of the good folks organizing the filmSPARK track for inviting me to take part in SPARKcon. Check out the SPARKcon website for more information and hey, if you're gonna be around that evening I'd love to meet ya! :-)

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Trailer for THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS

A film starring George Clooney, Ewan McGregor and Kevin Spacey based on the real-life experiments that the United States military conducted in psychic warfare. I didn't know anything about this one but judging by the trailer, The Men Who Stare At Goats looks rather promising...

It's due to open in theaters this November 6th.

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This has been the craziest day that I've had in awhile...

...and it's not even 6 a.m. yet.

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Bev Perdue giving lottery money back to North Carolina schools

Bev Perdue - who for as long as she is Governor of North Carolina will be referred to on this blog as "WORST GOVERNOR EVER!" - is returning $38 million to the school construction proceeds from the North Carolina Education Lottery, which she raided back in February

(However there's still $50 million from the lottery's reserve funds that Perdue isn't paying back yet).

Does Bev Perdue have any clue at all about the mess she has caused for this state's public schools? Probably not. Here in Rockingham County plans to build four much-needed new schools were thrown into turmoil because the construction funds earmarked from the lottery were swiped by Perdue so that she could play games with the state's budget problems. Many other school systems across North Carolina were also hit by Perdue's monetary mayhem.

I would imagine that in the greater scheme of things, Perdue's unwise fiscal planning has cost the state more than whatever financial pain North Carolina may have eluded in the short term. And it will likely as not fall to the local governments and school systems to deal with the ramifications of the fault of state officials in Raleigh.

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Damon Lindelof Twitter-ed me about LOST!

We're about four and a half months away from the return of Lost. What many have called the best scripted television drama ever is heading into its sixth and final season, with plenty of mysteries still abounding. Like, f'rinstance, the statue of the Egyptian goddess Taweret that we saw in last season's finale.

Well, this might or might not mean anything but hey, it's my own lil' claim to having what might be a viable theory of Lost, so... why not share it with everyone? :-)

Damon Lindelof, one of the Lost showrunners, asked this via his Twitter account on August 13th...

"QUESTION: What is the significance of the statue of Taweret? (Creativity + ingenuity will win over ridiculous humor or familiar theories.)"

I'm sure that Lindelof got hit with a slew of responses. So I figured I'd posit my own rumination on the subject. Here's my tweet to Lindelof...

"@DamonLindelof Re: Tawaret statue: because giant alligator-headed women are a honkin' lot scarier than a "Beware of Dog" sign?"

And then like a lot of things on Twitter I completely forgot about it. Until a week later when Lindelof Twitter-ed my answer for all the world to see...

"@theknightshift Because giant alligator-headed women are much scarier than a "Beware Of Dog" sign?"

Whoa! Did I inadvertently stumble on something here? That was the only response that Lindelof conveyed via his own Twitter. Could it be that this really is the purpose of the Tawaret statue (which is estimated to be as tall as a 30-story office building)? Kinda would make sense, given that it looks out toward the sea. In times of yore that would certainly be quite a visual deterrent against approaching the Island.

Guess we'll just have to find out together in a few months' time!

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Been playing BATMAN: ARKHAM ASYLUM

It came out this past Tuesday and I bought it then from the nearby Gamestop. I'll post a full review when I finish the game.

But until then, believe the hype: Batman: Arkham Asylum is very, very, VERY good. I'll even say that without completing it yet, it's already my personal choice for best video game of 2009.

Don't even think about whether you want this game. Because you do. You really do. The inmates are running the asylum... and you're trapped with them. And when said inmates include the Joker, Riddler and Killer Croc among many others, there can be no doubt that you are in for a hella scary (and thrilling fun) stay.

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Obama to control the Internet? Not likely...

The Intertubes are burning out today with reaction to news of a bill introduced into the United States Senate by Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia that would give the President the power "to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency."

In other words: Obama would take over the Internet. That's the chatter about it anyway.

Is such a thing even possible? Plausible? I'll suggest that it's more than okay to raise hell about the civil liberties aspect of such a notion, but in terms of technical capability I don't see how we should be anything more than cautiously alarmed about this. For one thing, the Internet was designed from the getgo to take a lickin' and keep on tickin' in the event of a catastrophic systemwide loss of communication (namely, nuclear war). It's too decentralized, far too distributed a network. I'm not saying that there wouldn't be a loss of some data traffic in the event that the occupant of the White House (whoever that might be) goes mad with power, but more likely than not, to paraphrase Princess Leia "the more they tighten their grip, the more systems will slip through their fingers."

Then there is what we have just seen happen in Iran: one of the most tightly-controlled regimes in the world. Even when that country's government tried to shut down all Internet traffic, people on the outside were busy setting up proxy servers and the like to keep the news, e-mails, photos and Twitter tweets of the post-election violence coming out to the rest of us. I'm apt to think that those of us in the United States would enjoy similar assistance should our own government try to put up the twenty-first century's version of the Berlin Wall.

Might anyone dare to purposefully halt the United States' Internet traffic and somehow manage to pull it off, they would subsequently be bringing down a huge chunk of the world's commercial economy in one fell swoop. Which I'm all too aware that some will claim that this would be one of the primary motives of such an act anyway...

But the biggest reason why I doubt Obama or any other President would seize overwhelming and absolute control of the Internet: it would most likely be the one thing that stirs the vast majority of Americans to storm Washington D.C. with torches, pitchforks, ropes and blistering-hot tar and proceed to break bad on damn near every elected official and bureaucrat in town. Threaten to take away people's Facebook and YouTube and Twitter and blogging and iTunes and online video gaming (the Gears of War players alone would raze D.C. into the ground) and porn and pirated music and movies and sports coverage and news and porn and political discussion and porn and everything else...

Who doesn't think that this would be the most politically suicidal act of modern American history?

If you wanna call your Congress-critter and tell him/her/it "hell no!" on this, then definitely do it. In fact, a call or written letter would be much better than an overly-convenient e-mail (trust me on this). Barrage the Capitol switchboard with angry but polite phone calls.

But in the meantime, be of good cheer: the Internet shouldn't be going away anytime soon :-)

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YouTube video: Police officer says "It ain't (America) no more"

From August 25th, 2009 at a public meeting between Rep. Jim Moran and his constituents at South Lakes High School in Reston, Virginia. As is happening a lot lately, the meeting was to discuss President Obama's health care "reform".

And outside the school, this exchange was taking place between a private citizen and polie officer Wesley Cheeks, Jr. During which Officer Cheeks is told that this is America and replies "It ain't no more"...

The only comment I'll make is that I've seen this sort of thing happening for a long time already. It certainly didn't start with Barack Obama (I saw much of the same happening on George W. Bush's watch). And I like to think that now that the shoe's on the other foot, that some Americans who had been too dense before will start paying attention.

I like to think that, anyway.

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It's a pentacene molecule

Pentacene, chemical formula C₂₂H₁₄ and the above image is such a big deal because it's the first time ever that photographs of actual molecules have been obtained.

Mash here for the story on how IBM's scientists conquered a decades-long technical challenge.

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Elon dorms plagued by bats!

I just had to post about this 'cuz I'm an Elon alum and have friends from there who read this blog: Virginia, West and Sloan dormitories at Elon University have been invaded by bats.

Fourteen students already moved in but had to evacuate for two days while the bats (mostly in Virginia) were removed. Elon's fine maintenance crew (you know, the ones who have to paint the grass green whenever the school's honchos come to visit) installed a gadget that emitted sonic frequencies which drove the chiropterae to flee the premises. Then various holes in the dorms were patched up with caulking so that the bats couldn't get back in.

If Virginia has problems with bats, then Lord only knows what is lurking inside Smith...

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Yes Johnny Robertson, by all means let's talk about "honesty"

Say what one might about Bob Lawson, to the very best of my knowledge there was only one person in that "debate" on WGSR this past Tuesday night who has lied boldly and publicly when he accused not one but two churches, with no evidence whatsoever, of what can only be called child pornography.

And Bob Lawson wasn't that person.

More than a few people have told me that Johnny Robertson is "scum", "a dirty-minded individual", "a sick man", "a complete bastard", and numerous other epithets that I won't share here for sake of polity, for making those unfounded accusations against First Christian Church in Kernersville and Osborne Baptist Church in Danville. Interestingly, Robertson hasn't dared bring those accusations up any more since they have been chronicled by this and other bloggers in the area.

Based on the footage I have seen from Tuesday night's "debate" and now tonight, Robertson is certainly becoming increasingly unhinged from reality. Already tonight he has said that he has "loathing" for Baptists, that a full-blown war is going to be needed to get rid of "denominationalism", has called Bob Lawson a "whoremonger" because Lawson is divorced, has claimed that he is the only defender and upholder of "the truth in this area", has declared himself superior to everyone else in this area, and that the First Amendment somehow gives him the right to harass whoever he wants to.

(Robertson must have missed civics during what was likely his two or three trips through ninth grade: the First Amendment of the Constitution only guarantees that the government cannot stifle free speech. It says nothing about churches exercising their right to protect themselves against disrupters like Johnny Robertson and his cult.)

There's way more that I could comment about the extraordinary nuttiness that Robertson is descending into, but for now I'll just note that tonight I took a look for the first time at WGSR's streaming video feed. There's been one for the Reidsville station and from what I understand the one for the Martinsville station went live Tuesday night (just for the "debate" apparently). Bear in mind then that the Reidsville one has been established the longer of the two.

So how big an Internet audience does Johnny Robertson and his so-called "Church of Christ" cult have?

Eleven viewers. Only ELEVEN! So that's me, and at least three other friends of mine who are watching Robertson and his cult from across the country just to laugh at him.

How many "serious" viewers does Robertson have then?

I'll wager an RC Cola and a Moon Pie that this blog gets many more regular readers than Robertson does.

And I don't think any less of you, Dear Readers, either. Hell, I know that y'all - well most of you anyway - are smart enough to think for yourselves. And I will be the first to admit that I don't understand enough about God than to harass people with it.

I sure as frak won't ever accuse a church of pornography like Johnny Robertson has done.

(And Charles Roark raised eyebrows in some places with his comment that said church is filled with "perverts", but that's all I'll say about that.)

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