Fear not! The aliens aren't coming (yet anyway) but this luminous halo over western Moscow a few days ago has sparked worldwide curiosity. Many are saying it looks a lot like the arrival of the giant ships from the movie Independence Day. But meteorologists on the scene are reporting that it's merely a very peculiar effect of sunlight shining through the clouds during a convergence of an Arctic air front over the city.
Putting it into perspective, Nate Anderson has composed a very good piece over at Ars Technica titled "100 years of Big Content fearing technology-in its own words". In it Anderson documents a century of hysteria on the part of copyright holders that in retrospect is absolutely laughable: everything from fears of the photocopier after World War II and how some dreaded the coming of the VCR, on back to John Philip Sousa's screed against player pianos and gramophones (pictured). It's only too interesting to note that in spite of all of the "warnings", that there has been no evidence at all that technology has stifled creativity... or that the copyright industry has done anything to encourage creativity, for that matter. Quite a rollickin' good read no matter where you're coming from.
But I've no doubt what it was that I saw here in Rockingham County, North Carolina a short while ago. At a national conference for the Boy Scouts of America's Order of the Arrow in Colorado years ago I got to see a Bald Eagle way up close: those birds are positivalutely HUGE!
I spotted the Bald Eagle from my car at about 3 p.m. this afternoon, just off U.S. 158. Soaring at not too great a height over a field off to my right. I've never seen a beak that brilliantly yellow in these parts and that's what caught my eye. That and the wingspan. It soon glided off west into the woods and I lost sight of it. But I'm not gonna soon forget seeing it :-)
I don't think I've ever been jazzed about an upcoming Pixar movie as I am finding myself to be about Toy Story 3.
And this first trailer is making me even more stoked about it.
No YouTube for this one folks. It's the rare trailer which demands that you behold it in full vivid Quicktime.
Definitely worth seeing during its first run, folks. Zombieland is one amusement park that will definitely have you screaming with thrills!
In Fourteen Hundred and Ninety-Two,
Columbus sailed the ocean blue.In Two-Thousand freakin' Nine,
we all fear a flu called 'swine'.-- Brett Williams
I put the clip of The Jay Leno Show featuring my commercial (along with a few others from around the country) during this past Thursday night's broadcast on YouTube. Click here to behold Yours Truly's visual effects and Melody Hallman Daniel's awesome voice-over entertaining the entire country in prime-time!
However I don't know how long it'll be up on YouTube, 'cuz as soon as I posted it the system told me that NBC Universal had already flagged it for possible infringement... which I'm thinking is just an automated response to the keywords I attached to the video. But even so, after EVERYTHING that I've gone through in the past few years pertaining to copyright law (yeah I'm looking at you Sumner Redstone) there's no way I would have put this on YouTube had it not met the criteria of Fair Use. So hopefully, this is just something minor that will be resolved quickly. And hey, I'm giving free advertising for Jay Leno's show :-)
EDIT 8:24 p.m. EST: The infamous NBC lawyers must have let up, or something. Here's the embedded video!
We'll see how long it lasts though :-P
The problem, according to paleontologists Mark Goodwin and Jack Horner, is that many of the dinosaurs marked as unique species were actually pre-pubescent juveniles of other species! In one example cited, a variant of tyrannosaur that was previously considered to be a relative of Tyrannosaurus Rex was probably nothing but a young T-Rex before his "hormones kicked in".
It's funny: I'm old enough to remember when dinosaurs were regarded as slow-moving cold-blooded beasts that dragged their tails on the ground. Which as we know, isn't anything like how the latest research and pop culture currently depicts them as. And now maybe one-third of known dinosaurs never existed at all.
'Course, all of this is entirely within the realm of speculation since nobody has reported observing a real dinosaur before... right? :-)
America is fast and furiously becoming a nation built around a service economy, as opposed to being the manufacturing powerhouse that we once were not so long ago.
And sooner than later, that service economy is going to become all tapped out, with nothing to replenish it.
As angry as a lot of people will be at Whirlpool for this, they should be even more filled with wrath at the politicians in the United States who have driven away domestic industry with high corporate and individual taxation. Slash taxes across the board, impose new but fair tariffs on imports, and this country's economy will zoom through the roof.
Too bad we are sorely lacking visionary elected officials who would even conceive of doing such a thing, though...
THAT's gonna leave a mental scar! :-P
I'm going to always think of myself as one lucky son of a gun for having the extremely rare opportunity of enjoying Michael Dougherty's Trick 'R Treat the way it was meant to be seen: on a big screen with a huge crowd of fellow film fans (it was at Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9 two years ago). And we were told then that Trick 'R Treat was supposed to have been released last year in time for Halloween... but for whatever reason the suits at Warners quashed what would have been a fall box-office bonanza.
But at last, however it came to be, Trick 'R Treat can be enjoyed by the wide audience it deserves.
Slash here for the link to Amazon.com where you can purchase the DVD of Trick 'R Treat. I'm not earning any coin from this pitch. All I'm getting is satisfaction of knowing that I'm doing my part to spread the word about an amazing lil' horror film, one that those of us who saw it in 2007 knew was the stuff of modern classic. Check it out, however you can!
Suffice it to say, I'm very interested in watching this to see how it played out :-)
Thanks to everyone who's been sending in the nice e-mails about it. And if you're just now finding this blog because of Jay Leno running my ad: welcome! Hope you'll like what you find here :-)
EDIT: Last night's The Jay Leno Show is now up on Hulu! Hit the link and go to about 36 minutes into the show.
The entire segment is hilarious! :-)
Behold our government's latest performance of Security Theatre:
This is more than ridiculous. The people of Colorado and all Americans should feel insulted by their own government, that it would even suggest that we are as cowed and paranoid as this video suggests. What the #&@$ was Elway thinking when he agreed to help make this crap?
