I am … unhindered by talent

Our friend Jenny Nellis had a really nasty fall recently, and Jess Larson suggested we send her a happy photo or two. I thought a few shots of WeatherGirl and Jess when we were at the Tate Modern might help :-).

The photo above is the two of them being silly and fun with their hard sweets. The one below is WeatherGirl (on the right) photographing her bare foot with Shibboleth by Doris Salcedo, while Jess is photographing WeatherGirl. We had way too much fun with Shibboleth, which is a wonderfully experiential piece of sculpture, and took a gazillion photos. As you can see, WeatherGirl even took her shoes off in the name of art :-).

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Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

Damn :-)

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I don’t have time to come up with a clever April Fool’s joke, but I will take a moment to point everyone at the classic 1957 BBC program on the spring spaghetti harvest in Switzerland.

Really wonderful stuff, and very cool that the wonders of the intarweb (and the sensibleness of those nerds at the BBC) allow us to see it all over again!

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Somehow (and I’m not sure where now), I ran across a pointer to a YouTube video entitled “Jesus shaves” by David Sedaris. I wasn’t in a position to watch it at the time, so there it sat as a lonely, forgotten Firefox tab while life pulled me in other directions for several weeks.

Today, however, I returned to this tab as part of my post-Naples electronic housekeeping. This was mostly dominated by really exciting activities, such as the disposal of hundreds of e-mails promoting conferences and workshops in areas I know almost nothing about; telling me of events back at UMM that I can happily ignore; advertising baby cribs, pick-ups, and houses for sale; and promising to make me an irresistible sexual dynamo that can finally, truly satisfy the woman in my life. (I forwarded the latter to WeatherGirl for review.)

After all that fun, I finally got to the Sedaris tab, and I laughed so hard I nearly wet myself. Then, because my to-do list hasn’t quite gone into triple digits, I wandered around YouTube listening to other “videos” of him reading is stories. (Few of these are actually videos in the sense of “moving pictures”; they’re mostly just audio recordings with a still plopped on top so YouTube will swallow it.) The better part of an hour was spent giggling my way through random stories, and now my stomache muscles are slightly sore, so I thought I’d type for a bit as a form of rest.

There appears to be quite a lot of Sedaris material on YouTube, and everything I listened to was enormously fun. I love his deadpan voice, and suspect the experience of listening to him is actually funnier than reading him on the printed page. I would love to have him on my iPod when going to work, but suspect it would be hard to avoid embarrassing myself by laughing out loud in response to things that the people around me can’t hear.

Some of the bits that I enjoyed in my little distract-o-fest included

• Jesus shaves
• The squirrel and the chipmunk
• Bend over and say “Ah”
• Sedaris on Letterman reading his essay on the Stadium Pal

All definitely recommended.

But don’t blame me if that important project falls behind…

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Much chops to Bad Science for pointing out Phun, a simulation environment/game/construction engine thingie that (judging from the videos) is just super fun (ho, ho, ho) to fiddle with. It seems a wonderfully open-ended platform for making stuff, which is of course the great strength of a pad and paper, or a bucket of Legos. This demo video gives a sense of the range of possibilities:

There’s a YouTube group devoted to this thing, and the number and variety of little clips there also speaks well to the Phun’s flexibility. We even have one person building a binary adder, and another a working pinball machine. Very, very cool.

The sad, sniffle, miserable bit is that Phun doesn’t run on Macs at the moment. It supports for Linux and Windows, though, and there are people working on a Mac port, so my fingers are crossed. It just seems like it would be too damn much fun to play with.

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Most of you have probably already seen this, but it’s just so fun that I felt that I had to give it a plug. Also, posting this proves that I’m alive without actually requiring much mental function.

And remember…

Don’t talk back to Darth Vader - he’ll getcha!

Actually, I love the this as an example of how kids see the world. Great stuff.

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After a long day of being cultural and scientific in London with Kildegaards a few weeks ago, we got on the Tube back to Liverpool Street and the train back to Colchester. Looking across into the next car on the Underground, I was surprised to learn that a volcano was expected to erupt in Rome!

Turns out it’s a reference to a rugby player in an international match. And here I thought it was gonna be Pompeii all over again, but with more automobiles.

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Sorry for two xkcd comics in three posts, but I can’t tell you how many times things in my life haven’t been attended to because someone was a dufus on-line.

Hey - look! There’s a windmill right over there! Tilting! Tilting! Tilting!

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A tale of mismanagement, overly enthusiastic love of buzz words and the Next Big Thing, and hiring good people and making them do stupid things.

The pig go. Go is to the fountain. The pig put foot. Grunt. Foot in what? ketchup. The dove fly. Fly is in sky. The dove drop something. The something on the pig. The pig disgusting. The pig rattle. Rattle with dove. The dove angry. The pig leave. The dove produce. Produce is chicken wing. With wing bark. No Quack.

Thanks to MJ for the pointer. As he said “makes one weep for our kind”.

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I ran across this great dismantling on Whatever of Sony BMG’s truly ludicrous new semi-kinda-sorta-DRM free music system last night and just about wet myself giggling.

Kid #2: So to recap, what you’ve got here is a system that makes people leave their house in order to download music at their house, and makes them go to a store to get music that they could get at the store, somewhere else.

Sony BMG dude: Er.

Come on - you know you don’t really have anything important to do. Go treat yourself (to the post, not one of their stupid cards).

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