The Blurbs shows how the advertising copy for a movie can be completely misleading. Well, I think most of us figured that out. Still, seeing the extremes they take it to is a bit more than expected.

They did a bunch on Fantastic Four. Here’s one of the shorter ones:

Here’s another on The Beat That My Heart Skipped:

Fun!

No, I didn’t do it yet, but verified it’s not a hoax.

I’ve always liked wordplay, and liked the sound of backronym. The rest of this is stolen from Wiwipedia.

Noticed this at BoingBoing, it eventually led to these great mammatus cloud pictures. I’ve never seen anything like them.

State Senate Bill 840, the California Health Insurance Reliability Act (CHIRA) passed in the State Senate by a vote of 24 to 14.

The bill would insure every Californian with comprehensive health benefits while preserving each consumer’s right to choose his or her own doctor.

Even if you’re covered now at work (think that will go on forever?) consider this: Half of the personal bankruptcies in this country are the result of medical expenses, and the majority of the people bankrupted for that reason had insurance at the time they became sick or injured.

Press release should soon be posted at Health Care for All — California website.

Always using sunscreen may actually contribute to far more cancer deaths than it prevents. In the last three months alone, four separate studies found vitamin D helped protect against lymphoma and cancers of the prostate, lung and, ironically, the skin. The strongest evidence is for colon cancer.

link

I wonder why we aren’t hearing anything about this one? Since it involves kids I would think this would be all over the news.

Story: Then They Came for the Children

One of the “stars” in a early 60’s film promoting growth and funding for Florida’s college system is a pre-Doors Jim Morrison. The archived clip mercifully shows mostly the Morrison part, saving us from having to view the entire film to find him.

http://www.floridamemory.com/photographiccollection/videofilm2/

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.