The art of Matt vanLieshout

Friend of The Knight Shift Matt vanLieshout (shown in self-portrait) is an up-and-coming artist blessed with an abundance of talent. And after you check out his blog Liquid Electricity, I've no doubt that you will agree. Some of Matt's charcoal renderings are especially eye-arresting: they look like photographs instead of work of the hand! Check out his stuff now, so you...

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Sand-based battery lasts THOUSANDS of hours

You can't recharge it - yet anyway - but a new battery designed at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel could revolutionize everything from cellphones to electric cars. Prof. Yair Ein-Eli (pictured) worked for almost three years with partners in the United States and Japan to develop the battery which gets its power from, of all things, silicon from plain...

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Here's a song dedication going out to Falcon Heene

Yeah, the kid from Colorado who was thought to have taken a ride in that balloon yesterday and then cryptically said on national television "We did this for a show".Here is "Up, Up and Away" by The Fifth Dimension...Now, let us never speak of this aga...

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Japanese TV show fakes sniper attack (and it's pretty funny)

Ahhh, Japan. A country of good-natured people who seem to take everything to the extreme! Where else in the world can you find $150 plates of potentially lethal fish so readily available?I've already shared with y'all some Japanese prank videos. But this next one is definitely over-the-edge darkly hilarious: a Japanese hidden camera "reality" television show fakes a sniper attack on an unsuspecting contestant. Panic Face King is kinda like Candid...

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Is the LHC's own future sabotaging itself?

See if you can wrap your noggin around this one: the Large Hadron Collider - that super-powered high-energy thingamabob at CERN in Switzerland that previously had been predicted would destroy the world - is now theorized to be the first observed occurrence of the "grandfather paradox" of time travel!According to two physicists, the LHC's mission to produce the hypothesized...

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DEATH TROOPERS: Gory good horror in the Star Wars galaxy!

Star Wars: Death Troopers is the craziest detour I've ever taken as a life-long fan of the saga. When word of this book came awhile back, the notion of a Star Wars horror novel... aroused considerable curiosity, concern and consternation. Yeah, Star Wars had (kinda) attempted scary literature before but let's get real: the Galaxy of Fear "young adult" books only came about...

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Boy Scouts under assault from insane zero-tolerance policies

Matthew Whalen is an Eagle Scout from upstate New York. He got suspended for a month from school for having a pocketknife in his car while it was parked on his school's campus.Zachary Christie is a six-year old Cub Scout from Delaware who was sentenced to 45 days in reform school. His "crime"? Bringing a spork (combination spoon and fork) to school so that he could use it to eat his pudding.Fortunately however, the ensuing public uproar embarrassed...

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Baptist church will burn Bibles on Halloween

Marc Grizzard (pictured at right), pastor of Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Canton, North Carolina and its fourteen members, has announced that his church will hold a book-burning this coming Halloween. Among the tomes to be incinerated are every version of the Bible other than the King James Version, various works of Billy Graham, Mother Teresa, and Rick Warren. Also set...

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Neato meteorological special effect: Halo over Moscow

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...

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Celebrating a century of copyright paranoia

For all the frustration that independent content producers such as myself are running into with multi-billion dollar media companies regarding YouTube and other self-publishing outlets, it's comforting to know that we are not the first... and no doubt won't be the last either.Putting it into perspective, Nate Anderson has composed a very good piece over at Ars Technica titled...

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Spotted: Bald Eagle in Rockingham County!

Of all the times that I didn't have my camera with me, it had to be on the way back from a bookstore in Greensboro today... sigh.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...

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The first trailer for TOY STORY 3

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 Quickti...

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I'm a Fireman!

Well, I get to be one in Theatre Guild of Rockingham County's production of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, anyway ...

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Finally saw ZOMBIELAND today!

This afternoon I hooked up with good friend/fellow blogger Steven Glaspie and we caught Zombieland. This is hands-down the funniest movie that I've seen all year! Much better than I had expected going in. It's like National Lampoon's Vacation meets 28 Days Later! Woody Harrelson's character Tallahassee is definitely one of the most outrageously original characters in recent...

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Something clever...

Composed by a friend this evening...In Fourteen Hundred and Ninety-Two,Columbus sailed the ocean blue.In Two-Thousand freakin' Nine, we all fear a flu called 'swine'.-- Brett Willi...

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Wanna see my appearance on THE JAY LENO SHOW?

Well, it was just "that Star Wars school board campaign commercial"... but at least I can now honestly brag about having made Jay Leno and a studio audience laugh on national television! :-)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...

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1/3rd of dinosaur species... may have never existed to begin with

Call it "genus-cide".  Over a thousand species of Dinosauria have been identified since Sir Richard Owen first came up with the term in 1842.  And now perhaps a third of the dinosaurs known to date stand to get wiped out of the taxonomy, according to National Geographic News.The problem, according to paleontologists Mark Goodwin and Jack Horner, is that many of...

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