Frank Zappa did cover versions of Sunshine of Your Love and Stairway to Heaven. This surprising news is from The Covers Project, where you can look up songs or groups and see what they did that other people did.

Like lots of music reference sites, this is neither complete or correct, but it’s a good start.

Another useful site is AdTunes.com, where I found what is, and who did, the Mitsubishi ad that goes “yeah yeah yeah yeah yehyehyehyehyehyehyeh YEAH!”?. The answer (which I should have know) is it’s “Uncontrollable Urge” by Devo.

Need a measuring tape but one’s not around? Whip out any U.S. bill and use it for a rough measurement. It is about 6-1/8inch long.

Lots of other good tidbits at HandymanWire

A recent news article reminded me that I still hadn’t bothered to get my free credit reports, so I finally got around to it at www.AnnualCreditReport.com. The good news is that it works. The bad news is that all it does is link you to the other sites and saves you from having to fill in your name and address on each one.

Each of the three agencies had different ways of verifying that you are who you say you are. TransUnion was a pain, asking for multiple account numbers before giving me access. I wonder what would have happened if their info was wrong in this area?

They all had my basic credit info and it seemed to be correct. None of them had my correct birthday, which I always thought was a major part of determining who is who. The dates varied by eight years. They said I’ve lived in places I’ve never lived. My last employer was from a job that ended in 1990. One place had an alternate spelling for my name, along with the correct one. There are lots of accounts that I can’t figure out, but none were opened recently and all are paid on time and/or have a 0 balance.

Now I understand why my credit is so good. There are multiple listings of the same information, giving me a history of having Really Big Loans and paying them off.

I’m sure glad nobody expects this information to be accurate.

HandPrint/watercolor is about watercolor paint. It may have questionable oil paint relevance about specific colors but I suspect that most of the information still applies. More importantly, it’s got charts, it’s got research, and it’s got an explanation of color theory that fits all the pieces together. There’s more info on color at this site than all the art books and website I’ve seen.

British researchers have found chemicals produced by the human body that repel mosquitos, which could lead to a natural, odourless bug spray.

more

A group of former pupils at a London comprehensive school are poised to win thousands of pounds in unpaid royalties for singing on Pink Floyd’s classic Another Brick In The Wall 25 years ago.

full story

Having just received one of those reminders of how the Pilgrims shared with the Indians, which started the tradition of Thanksgiving, I was inspired to find a little more of the true history. Here are a few likes that tell the real story.

• The Fourth World Documentation Project’s Thanksgiving Information has lots of historical details. You can get most of the info by reading An introduction for teachers. It reminds us that the celebration was more of a treaty negotiation, and was intended to last until more Puritans arrived to help exterminate the heathens. This item has the most details and historical references, but is also the longest.
• The Thanksgiving Story gives an only partially-sanitized version. Short and sweet.
• One person’s account of what they found on the internet in a similar search to mine. A good mix between lots of info and relatively short.
• History of Thanksgiving is short.
• The History Channel has a page on Mayflower Myths and another on Other Feast Facts. Both are short but don’t provide a lot of the unspoken history mentioned in the first item here.

Enjoy your food, but remember it’s not all about what they taught you in grade school.

It sounds too incredible to be true, but this is not a hoax. A species of tiny human has been discovered, which lived on the remote Indonesian island of Flores just 18,000 years ago.

Researchers have so far unearthed remains from eight individuals who were just one metre tall, with grapefruit-sized skulls. These astonishing little people, nicknamed ‘hobbits’, made tools, hunted tiny elephants and lived at the same time as modern humans who were colonizing the area.

News@nature.com tells the story of a find that changes the world of palaeoanthropology, and challenges our perception of what it means to be human.

link

It was sure hard to find a page that had a list of holidays, commendations, and that type of stuff. What I really wanted was a list of just those things that congress wastes its time on, like declaring the fourth week in November National Bible Week.

The best list so far is this one at ButlerWebs.com

Wash Up! Wasabi! What is up? A Matrix version of Whassup?

See way too many of them — but you need a high bandwidth connection.

The “Induce Act” is a crazy bill to begin with, and it looks like it is gone, at least for a while. This description from Reuters, quoted below, gives a good example of why bills should be limited to one subject.

Though the committee declined to take action against file-trading networks, it did approve a measure that would direct the U.S. government to devote more effort to chasing down individual file traders.

Peer-to-peer users who share more than 1,000 songs or other copyrighted works would face up to three years in prison under the bill. U.S. copyright investigators would be able to file civil suits, which require a lower standard of proof than criminal cases, echoing tactics already used by the recording industry.

Those who secretly videotape movies when they are shown in theaters or distribute movies before their release date would face up to 10 years in prison.

The bill also designates the oak as the national tree.

I have no idea how the idea of “one bill, one subject” could become law, although it should. The problem is that it would be very difficult to define what “one subject” is — for instance a finance bill could cover a lot of different areas, but still be considered one subject because it’s all finance.

The Lone Star Iconoclast, which distributes 425 weekly newspapers, has endorsed John Kerry for president. Why does such a small newspaper endorsement warrant comment? Because it’s the newspaper for Crawford, Texas, George Bush’s hometown.

Not even the editors of his hometown newspaper will stand with Bush this election season, saying that after they endorsed him in 2000, “we were duped into following yet another privileged agenda.”

And there’s more:

Four items trouble us the most about the Bush administration: his initiatives to disable the Social Security system, the deteriorating state of the American economy, a dangerous shift away from the basic freedoms established by our founding fathers, and his continuous mistakes regarding Iraq.

Oddly enough, Reuters reports this in one of their Oddly Enough articles.

I’m feeling really lazy today, so a little humor is all that there’s going to be:

“Yesterday President Bush gave a major speech about Iraq. Today John Kerry gave a major speech about Iraq. You know what this means? The war in Vietnam may finally be over ladies and gentleman.” –Jay Leno

“We begin tonight with a simple, indisputable fact: as a young man, President George W. Bush benefited from family connections to get a place in the Texas Air National Guard, thus avoiding service in Vietnam. As you would guess, this has led to calls for the resignation of Dan Rather.” –Jon Stewart

“Bush and Kerry have agreed to three debates. The first debate will cover the 1960s and the second debate the early ’70s and in the third debate if there’s time, some topical issues.” –Jay Leno

“Over in Russia, Russian President Vladimir Putin is using terrorism to increase his power and erode his people’s civil liberties. It’s nice to see the American way of life catching up around the world.” –Jay Leno

“There’s a lot of controversy surrounding the authenticity of this memos shown on ’60 Minutes’ concerning President Bush and his service in the National Guard. If there’s one thing you don’t want to see, it’s a president who didn’t really win the election being brought down by phony documents.” –Jay Leno

What do Gillian Anderson, Tori Amos, Christina Aguilera, Paula Abdul, Honore de Balzac (French writer), Rachael Leigh Cook (star of “She’s All That”), Sally Field, Buckminster Fuller (inventor of geodesic dome), Laura San Giacomo (star of tv’s “Just Shoot Me”), Gerry Halliwell (ex Spice Girl “Ginger Spice”), Avril Lavigne, Shakira, Dudley Moore, Elisabeth Shue, Paul Simon (of Simon and Garfunkel), Reese Whitherspoon, and Paul Williams (songwriter, actor) have in common?

They’re all one inch shorter than Sammy Davis Jr., Bo Derek, Judy Garland, Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Ghandi, Melissa Joan Hart (of tv’s “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch”), King Hussein (of Jordan), Nikita Khrushchev, Vivien Leigh, Natalie Portman, Mickey Rooney, and Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet, French writer)

Wow, Bo looks so much taller than Dudley. Learn more at FamousHeights.com

Chordbook.com has an interactive Flash guitar chord builder and finder. It doesn’t have all the inversions, but it’s a good start.

Another cool feature is you can build your own chord and it will look up what its name is.

I recently received the following in an email, forwarded from the organization HCA. You don’t need to read all of it, but it gives an explanation of what his five-minute animation is about and who its target is. I preferred to just read to text version at Single Payer?. I’m a big proponent of this, but have had a difficult time explaining why it would work and countering the arguments against it. Graham does a good job of doing it in a short space.

Graham Walker’s animated message on single payer

Single payer advocates sometimes have difficulty understanding why there isn’t a groundswell of support for the single payer model of reform since its superiority as a method of funding health care is so clear (to us). But actually the model is fairly complex and not well understood by the majority of citizens. A brief explanation tends to be dismissed with the meme by which we have been thoroughly indoctrinated that “the government can’t do anything right.”

Graham Walker is a medical student at Stanford University and a former staff member of Physicians for a National Health Program. To no surprise, he found that it was difficult to deliver a simple message on single payer that would stimulate an inquisitive mind to investigate the model further. He then went to work on creating a message that would be directed to a broad spectrum of relatively uninformed individuals. He was especially interested in creating rhetoric that would connect with young adults who have been saturated with the message that Social Security and Medicare will not be there when you need it (essentially the same message that is being presented this week by President Bush when he discusses the “ownership society”). Graham uses the analogy of funding “Prom Night” as an example that might resonate with a younger audience.

Graham has created an animated explanation of single payer targeted to the larger audience that does not have a sophisticated understanding of health policy. You should view this five minute animation since you will probably find it very useful in your advocacy work. It is particularly suited to distribution over the Internet through an e-mail link that Graham has provided.

For the animation: http://www.grahamazon.com/sp/whatissinglepayer.php

For a written explanation of single payer (The animation can be accessed on this page by clicking “”animated version” near the top.): http://www.grahamazon.com/sp/

If you don’t have five minutes now, retain this message so that you can view the animation during a break. I suspect that you’ll agree that we should share this with as many people as possible (but avoid spamming those who wouldn’t be interested).

But this won’t get it done. I just got an email similar to this:

Governor Schwarzenegger has a phone poll for the electorate.

Call (916) 445-2841
1. On the phone tree, Press #5 for “Hot Issues.”
2. Press #1 for Same Sex Marriage
3. Press #1 or #2 to vote on “gay” marriage in California.

It really is a state-run poll, but as a way of gauging public opinion it’s a waste of time. You can vote as many times as you would like, making the results meaningless as a scientific poll. The poll’s phone number isn’t listed on the State’s website. You have to know that an issue is being polled or you’re not likely to know that you can vote on it.

The only thing the results may be good for is as a way for Ahnold to justify a stance, in something like: “calls to my poll indicated that a majority of people favored…”. Other opportunities for pretending your voice is heard (at the same phone number) include voting on “Drivers License (for Undocumented)” and legalizing ferrets already in the California.

To see the current cost, click here. It was $130,502,023,708 as of this posting. The site also shows what else could have been done with the money. Code is available there to add a counter to a website, but Blogger won’t allow a javascript tag in any posts so I couldn’t include it here.

Thanks, Becky

From a 8/25/04 press release:

DualDisc was officially launched today by a consortium of record labels including EMI Music, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and 5.1 Entertainment Group/Silverline Records.

DualDisc is a two-sided disc made up of a CD on one side and a DVD on the other. In addition to a full album on the CD side, the DVD side provides the full album in enhanced sound (such as surround sound and/or DVD-Audio or LPCM stereo), and also includes a wide range of special features such as music videos, interviews, photo galleries, web links, concert footage and lyrics.

Although DualDisc creates a new music experience, it does not require new equipment. DualDisc is compatible with nearly any device that can currently play a CD or a DVD-whether a home stereo system, portable disc player, car stereo, game console or PC.

More info is available at High Fidelity Review’s DualDisc – The Hybrid CD/DVD Disc Part 1 and Part 2, including the patent war that may be looming. I don’t understand how they can say that DualDisc requires no new equipment, but it may have DVD-Audio content; many DVD players don’t include the technology required to play DVD-A.

A while back I was trying to find the name of one of the songs used in a Mitsubishi commercial. (It was Start the Commotion (video) by The Wiseguys.) Lots of fun sites were discovered:

AdTunes has a lot of good links to commercial advertising sites. Three of the better ones listing popular songs used in commercials are related: Inthe70s Music, InThe80s Music and Inthe90s Music. The site also has other trivia for each decade.

About.com 80s Music details 1980s era music used in television commercials, but it’s links to other music trivia is what really eats up the time. Songtitle.info features a list of music used North American TV commercials from 1996 and keeps adding to keep it current.