Leslie Pope and John Wagner were hauled away from the Lehigh Pub in handcuffs by the police in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania last week. Their "crime"? Refusing to pay a tip!If you're frustrated by poor service at a restaurant, think twice before you decide to not tip. You may be in for a bit more than just a dirty look from the waiter. "Nobody, nobody wants to be forced to pay a tip or be arrested for terrible service," Leslie Pope said when her happy...
Monday, November 23, 2009
GeekTyrant's retrospective of ALIEN
2009 marks thirty years since Ridley Scott's film Alien was released. Alien remains one of the most classic and influential science fiction movies ever produced... and it has not only held up against the test of time, it's one of the few films of the genre that actually seems to get better with each passing year.GeekTyrant has posted a fine retrospective of Alien, including...
Chad Austin makes THE NEW YORK TIMES!
A little over three years after my photo appeared in The New York Times, now it's life-long friend Chad Austin's turn! New York Times is running a story about the SAS Institute in Cary, where Chad works. The story is mostly about how the company is the biggest independent software company in the world and how its fast gaining attention in the corporate world, but there's...
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Ahead of his time: Michael Crichton on the global warming fraud
"F---ing pissed!" And that was one of the more polite e-mails that have come in since Friday afternoon when this blog and many others spread the news about the Climate Research Unit at University of East Anglia getting hacked. That 61-megabyte .zip archive has gone viral across the Intertubes and bunches of blood-boiling stuff is still being gleaned from the correspondence...
Chris Knight's somewhat typical Sunday
Right now: catching up on e-mail and news.Later: writing more of the novel that I've been working on for National Novel Writing Month, which as things stand now won't be finished by the end of November because of all the good stuff that I'm finding to add into it. But what will be done by then should still be enough to meet the 150-pages needed to qualify as "done" for the month. I'll just put the finishing touches on it later :-)Later still: painting...
Linguist spends first three years of son's life speaking only Klingon
An expert at linguistics used nothing but the fictional Klingon language from the Star Trek franchise when he spoke to his son for the first three years of the kid's life.Dr. d'Armond Speers wanted to observe whether baby Alec would pick up Klingon as naturally as most babies learn English or any other real language. Speers was especially giddy about the prospect of Alec's...
Boeing creates laser weapon that shoots down flying aircraft
The photo on the left is an unmanned aerial vehicle (like those drone aircraft that are being used by the military) being tracked and destroyed while in flight by a laser weapon developed by the Integrated Defense Systems unit of the Boeing Company. This isn't the first practical laser-based weapon to be developed, but the technology is certainly getting refined at a brisk...
It's an odd commentary on our culture...
...when all the literature on the front shelves of the bookstores is about either vampires, zombies, or Sarah Pal...
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Friday, November 20, 2009
CLIMATE RESEARCH UNIT HACKED! 61 megabytes reveal massaged data on global warming?! Did scientists conspire on climate scare?!
Ho-lee HELL!! This could turn into one of the biggest stories of the decade... scratch that, decades!Could it be that the whole "global warming" thing has been nothing but a colossal scam on damned near every man, woman, child and dumb animal on the planet?!The Intertubes are smoking hot this afternoon from the news about University of East Anglia's Hadley Climatic Research Unit getting hacked and a heapin' big pile of material being leaked online....
WWII IN HD: Best high-def programming I've seen yet!
My DVR just received a massive enema. Gone is stuff that I've recorded like P2 and Krull and Clash of the Titans and Stroker Ace (though how that got scheduled is beyond me, and I'm still trying to figure out how I wound up with Yentl). So now I've got plenty of disk space to record WWII in HD from the History Channel.HOW did I miss hearing about this until now? Well, no...
LOST Season 6: February 2nd, 2010
ABC's Lost, perhaps the most defining and innovative show of the decade, will begin its sixth and final season on February 2nd, 2010. That's a Tuesday night by the way, which is where Lost will be from here on out (apart from a break for the Winter Olympics). Eighteen hours spread out over sixteen episodes will begin with the two-hour season premiere, "LA X".
Can showrunners...
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Food Nazis strike again! Movie theater popcorn = 3 hamburgers?!?
The first time I heard about Center for Science in the Public Interest it was 1994. That was also the first time these ninnies went after movie theater popcorn. They declared it wasn't safe because of the coconut oil that most cinemas pop their corn in. The very next day EVERY movie theater listing in the News & Record posted declarations that their popcorn was free...
Box art for BIOSHOCK 2
Don't even think of bugging me about anything come February 9th 'cuz I've already cleared my calendar for that date and Lord willing I'll be spending all of it immersed in BioShock 2. And at last 2K Games has revealed the cover art for the hotly anticipated sequel to the 2007 original first-person shooter that blew minds and won awards all over the place.I'm really digging...
New wallpaper protects against bullets and bombs
Want to seriously protect yourself and your loved ones against flying debris, bullets and bombs? Consider covering your living room in X-Flex wallpaper. Developed by Berry Plastics in cooperation with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the X-Flex Blast Protection System is touted as wallpaper that will stop a wrecking ball and worse with a single sheet of the stuff. X-Flex...
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Finally watched last night's V and finale of AMC's THE PRISONER
AMC's much-promoted revamp of The Prisoner concluded last night. After watching both hours twice-over now I am going to say that that, acknowledging that while mine is going to be in the minority of opinions, that I very much enjoyed it and thought it was time well spent. And I will likely be getting the DVD of the series when it becomes available. But I will say that AMC way over-hyped The Prisoner. And so much so that I have to wonder how much...
International Space Station transits the Moon
Bernhard Christ, an amateur astronomer from Germany, put himself in just the right spot on the Earth's surface (a testament to his mad plottin' and plannin' skillz) and using a digital astronomical camera produced this sequence - made in less than 0.4 seconds - of the International Space Station transiting across the Moon...That's five shots of the ISS taken at equal intervals....
