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 can tell your kids later on that you saw Matt here first before he rocketed to fame and fortune :-)

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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 ol' sand. The new battery is said to provide constant power for thousands of hours, is extremely efficient, and is already drawing considerable commercial interest. It is also very safe on the environment.

Sounds like a winner to me. We could soon see the day when these things are powering our cars... and we can then tell OPEC, literally, to go pound sand :-P

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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 again.

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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 Camera meets Scare Tactics.

Watch the mayhem! And this is the sort of thing that, for once, you don't need to worry about a translation :-)

The 24 countdown timer sound effect is a particularly nice touch :-P

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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 and long-sought Higgs boson is damned to failure by its own future. The reason? Because the Higgs boson "might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather". And according to Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, this "predestination" from the Higgs particle goes far beyond screwing up a laboratory experiment: the failure of the United States government to finish building the Superconducting Supercollider is cited as possible evidence that the Higgs boson is wrecking havoc across spacetime from the future.

Here's that link again, if you still dare to look further into the abyss.

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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 'cuz of a desire to tag along with the then-wildly successful Goosebumps series.

Death Troopers however, is the first-ever stab at blood-curdling horror in that galaxy far, far away.

So... did author Joe Schreiber pull it off?

Death Troopers is the kind of Star Wars story that I've been wanting to enjoy for a long time but didn't realize until I'd finished reading it: a good, solid stand-alone tale rife with action and without the baggage of moral dilemma or political metaphor. As a horror novel, however...

I've no doubt it's probably just personal taste. The perfect kind of horror in literature, in my mind, is the kind evoked by writers like H.P. Lovecraft, or Richard Matheson. The sort of gnawing uncertainty about being cast alone and adrift with no idea what the hell is making that god-awful sound behind the walls.

On that note, Death Troopers almost satisfies completely as a horror story in its own right. Not quite all the way though.... but enough that I have to note that I am very much looking forward to Schreiber's next Star Wars horror novel (which he is already writing). Death Troopers is certainly the most visceral Star Wars story in a great many moon. Some of the stuff that Schreiber came up with is maximum gross-out: nightmarish in our "real" world but put it in the Star Wars universe and the effect is particularly disconcerting. I liked that!

Death Troopers isn't that totally perfect horror entry for the saga, and it doesn't have to be either. This was the first time anything like this has been tried... and with Death Troopers Schreiber has definitely proven that there is a very rich potential of horror genre for Star Wars that has until now not been tapped into.

For a Star Wars novel, I enjoyed Death Troopers immensely and would recommend it to all of my fellow saga geeks out there. And I'm not gonna let this review go without saying that I for one would love to see LucasArts consider a Star Wars horror video game inspired by Death Troopers! There's a real BioShock/Dead Space kinda vibe that Schreiber evokes in this book, and it would translate brilliantly into a first-person shooter :-)

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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 administrators enough to bring Christie back to his regular school. And Whalen has been assured by West Point Military Academy that his situation will not be a mark against him when he applies for admission (something he has dreamed of since first grade).

It's "zero tolerance" craziness like this that has contributed a lot to a loss of faith in America's public education system. What the hell is going on when we as a people are getting indoctrinated from an early age to fear things like plastic knives?!

But at least Matthew Whalen has nothing to be worried about. Before too long, he'll be strutting proudly across campus... carrying a machine gun!

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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 for consignment to fire are country music, oldies and jazz tunes.

Here's Grizzard's press release...

Halloween Book Burning
Burning Perversions of God’s Word
October 31, 2009

7:00 PM – Till

Great Preaching and Singing

Come to our Halloween book burning. We are burning Satan’s bibles like the NIV, RSV, NKJV, TLB, NASB, NEV, NRSV, ASV, NWT, Good News for Modern Man, The Evidence Bible, The Message Bible, The Green Bible, ect. These are perversions of God’s Word the King James Bible.

We will also be burning Satan’s music such as country , rap , rock , pop, heavy metal, western, soft and easy, southern gospel , contempory Christian , jazz, soul, oldies but goldies, etc.

We will also be burning Satan’s popular books written by heretics like Westcott & Hort , Bruce Metzger, Billy Graham , Rick Warren , Bill Hybels , John McArthur, James Dobson, Charles Swindoll , John Piper, Chuck Colson, Tony Evans, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swagart, Mark Driskol, Franklin Graham , Bill Bright, Tim Lahaye, Paula White, T.D. Jakes, Benny Hinn , Joyce Myers, Brian McLaren, Robert Schuller, Mother Teresa , The Pope , Rob Bell, Erwin McManus, Donald Miller, Shane Claiborne, Brennan Manning, William Young, etc.

We are not burning Bibles written in other languages that are based on the TR. We are not burning the Wycliffe, Tyndale, Geneva or other translations that are based on the TR.

We will be serving Bar-b-Que Chicken, fried chicken, and all the sides.

If you have any books or music to donate, please call us for pick-up. If you like you can drop them off at our church door anytime. Thanks.

Well, at least they'll also be serving fried chicken...

Seriously though folks, I thought there was something way familiar with Grizzard's litany of hate. So I went looking and sure enough: Marc Grizzard's church comes highly recommended by David Cloud. Anyone with even passing knowledge of "King James Only-ism" will be familiar with that name. David Cloud, through his Way of Life Literature website, has been a longtime worshiper of the King James Bible. Yeah, I said "worshiper" because these people have put their interpretation of the Bible in a place above that of Christ Himself. And King James-onlyists adore David Cloud: they have itching ears for whatever vile vitriol he cranks out against... well, everything that's not "Bible-believing Baptist".

Grizzard, Cloud and their kind have literally made an idol out of the King James Bible.

Ironically, as much as they claim to follow the King James Bible, they seem awfully ignorant of the words of the 1611 Authorized Edition's own translators in their preface to the book...

"Now to the latter we answer, that we do not deny, nay, we affirm and avow, that the very meanest translation of the Bible in English, set forth by men of our profession, (for we have seen none of theirs of the whole Bible as yet) containeth the Word of God, nay, is the Word of God."

Grizzard should be rejoicing that the Bible is so available to everyone. As it is, Grizzard and people like him trust in their own feeble understanding more than they trust God to draw people unto Him.

And in the end, what Grizzard is doing will only repel people from Christ, unfortunately.

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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 convergence of an Arctic air front over the city.

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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 "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.

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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 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 :-)

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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 Quicktime.

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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 film history. Steven and I both thought that Zombieland should be turned into a video game: there's definitely a Doom 3-ish vibe going on here (with a bit of old school Duke Nukem). And this movie has one of the most hilarious cameos - featuring a well-known actor - that I've seen lately.

Definitely worth seeing during its first run, folks. Zombieland is one amusement park that will definitely have you screaming with thrills!

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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 Williams

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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 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

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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 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? :-)

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