Crash here for the tale of Daniel East, his sister Tevyn, and how they inadvertently brought Tricky through a harrowing eight-hour scenic tour of the desert wasteland of Utah and Nevada.
Tricky not only lived, but he suffered just a few minor scrapes on his paws.
(And methinks Tricky should sign an endorsement deal with ACME while that iron is still hot.)
The Electronic Frontier Foundation - which many of y'all will remember came to the aid of Yours Truly two years ago during that very bizarre situation with Viacom - is now setting out to document "the worst of the worst" of bogus copyright complaints. Hit here for the Takedown Hall of Shame, featuring outrageous acts of DMCA abuse by Warner Brothers, the Nation Organization for Marriage and many more!
(By the way, in my opinion there are few finer organizations out there than the Electronic Frontier Foundation: those guys really go all-out to defend the rights of content creators. If you're feeling so led, ya might wanna consider making a contribution to 'em 'cuz they definitely more than earn it :-)
And you'll still have plenty of time for trick-or-treating, too!
And it looks like things have gotten even worse in the ten years since the events of BioShock...
BioShock 2 beckons us back under the sea on February 9, 2010.
Originally buried in Mt. Sterling in North Carolina, Popcorn's widow Pam Sutton cited "problems with vandalism" as the reason for moving and re-interring Popcorn's casket at Resthaven Memorial Gardens in Dandridge, Tennessee: not far from Popcorn's home in Parrotsville.
The move was scheduled for this past Saturday. A public memorial service was also held, attended by hundreds of people including country music legend Hank Williams Jr.
An old-fashioned horse-drawn hearse then brought Popcorn Sutton to his final resting place.
WBIR has more about the service for Popcorn Sutton, including a rather intriguing comment from Hank Williams Jr.
And here are three videos of the service, courtesy of aliciajose on YouTube (thanks aliciajose!)...
And if y'all wanna know why so many of your friends and neighbors have found Popcorn Sutton and his craft so endearing and enchanting, I cannot possibly recommend enough Neal Hutcheson's award-winning documentary The Last One. This has become the most-watched DVD of my collection in the past year (mostly 'cuz of all the people who keep asking to borrow it! :-)
The Nazi lizards from outer space invade again for the first time next week, November 3rd at 8 p.m. ET/PT on ABC.
Per the reckoning of a group of scientists being reported in a Dutch journal (link goes to English translation) the popularly-held belief that the Maya calendar predicts the destruction of the world in 2012 is a miscalculation and doesn't even have anything to do with the end times whatsoever. The real end of the Maya cycle of time, according to what these researchers have found, is around 2220... and then the calendar just goes back to the beginning, even as ours ends on December 31st and goes into January 1st.
So like Lt. Commander Susan Ivanova of Babylon 5 once said: "No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There is always boom tomorrow."
(But if this kind of thing floats your boat, we've still got Sir Isaac Newton's prediction of a 2060 apocalypse looming before us :-)
I can't remember the last time that I went to a GeoCities-hosted page. But once upon the time they glittered across cyberspace like sand on the seashore, mostly for "personal home pages". Those are dying out now, being supplanted by blogs like this one.
It can't be said enough though, that a lot of us today took our first steps into that larger world with GeoCities. Mark Milian writes a fine send-off for the service at the Los Angeles Times site and if you want a tribute to just about every GeoCities page that ever got created, click here.
And I have to report to all two of this blog's faithful readers that much to my surprise, I enjoyed Twilight more than I had anticipated. So far as vampire fiction goes I'm still going to consider Dracula to be the high bar, along with Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles (the first several books anyway). But in Twilight I found a satisfying fulfillment of something I hadn't realized there had been a dearth of: a thoroughly modern-day American vampire mythos.
And that's the thing that makes me want to read the other books in the Twilight series: Meyer does establish quite a deep and empathetic lore in her tale of Bella, Edward and the Cullen clan of vampires. Yeah, they're vampires. I can finally buy into that. Up 'til now, what little I'd known of the vampires in the Twilight books had caused me to muster up a "meh". I mean, "vampires" who aren't afraid of sunlight, aren't repelled by garlic or crucifixes, etc.? Those aren't vampires, those are people with severe eating disorders at most. But having the read the book I kinda like this updated take on the vampire physiology, just as I thought Anne Rice had a brilliant and even sensible basis for vampires in her literature.
In other aspects, Twilight reads much like any romantic novel aimed at adolescents and young adults... and that's fine too. Vampire fiction cuts across a huge swath of genre. In this case it didn't detract from my personal appreciation of the novel at all, and I don't foresee it being a hindrance in my reading the other installments of the Twilight series either.
So if, like me, you've been wandering the bookstore aisles and inwardly debating whether Twilight is a book worth sinking your teeth into (or at least sinking into your wallet and plunking down money for), I'll have to give it a good recommendation.
And maybe sometime I'll even draw up the courage to watch the movie...
What sort of funny are we talking here? Captain America was just on the phone while wearing a Confederate outfit, discussing the re-enactment he's on his way to: "Hey it's the Civil War, what's the worst that could happen?"
Looks like I've found something new to DVR (in addition to those reruns of Are You Being Served? on PBS :-)
That's the grim scenario envisioned by Cracked.com, which asked its readers to send in their Photoshop-ped submissions depicting an Internet-addicted society suddenly having to make do without things like Twitter, Nigerian scam e-mails and online porno. At the link you'll find the top twenty entries, each hysterically funny... and clever!
That's a helluva over-reaction to something that otherwise hasn't been inordinately differently from the typical garden-variety influenza. But to hear it from some people, it's already akin to the 1918 pandemic that killed millions in a very short period of time.
ComingSoon.net has just posted this pic (click to significantly embiggen) of Bradley Cooper as Lt. Templeton "Faceman" Peck, Quinton "Rampage" Jackson as Sgt. "B.A." Baracus, Sharlto Copley as Capt. "Howling Mad" Murdock, and Liam Neeson as John "Hannibal" Smith - along with the team's signature van - from the upcoming film adaptation of the beloved Eighties television series. The movie is out this coming June.
Maybe if we're good boys and girls we'll get a teaser trailer by Christmas :-)
In layman's terms that's about 20 high-definition DVDs or 250 million pages of text.
The engineers made their breakthrough using the process of selective doping, in which an impurity is added to a material whose properties consequently change.Click here for the official press release from Dr. Jagdish "Jay" Narayan and his team at N.C. State., including how the processes they've discovered can also be applied to fuel economy, reduction of heat in semiconductors and engine design.Working at the nanoscale, the engineers added metal nickel to magnesium oxide, a ceramic. The resulting material contained clusters of nickel atoms no bigger than 10 square nanometers -- a pinhead has a diameter of 1 million nanometers. The discovery represents a 90% size reduction compared with today's techniques, and an advancement that could boost computer storage capacity.
I'm already giddy about the thought of one of those chips in an iPod...
And with that fateful decision, the world would never be the same again...
Along with millions of his fans throughout the world, The Knight Shift blog and its proprietor wishes a very HAPPY BIRTHDAY today to "Weird Al" Yankovic!
God bless you and yours Al. Can't wait to see what the next fifty years bring from ya :-)
(And while we're on the subject, why not celebrate Al's birthday by giving him some hard-earned royalties? Mash down here to order The Essential "Weird Al" Yankovic 2-disc CD set, due out this coming Tuesday!)
Anderson has now plead guilty to a DWI charge. The judge has sentenced him to two years of probation.
(That is definitely a new one for the "Hold muh beer and watch this..." file!)
