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.

A black bear was found passed out at a campground in Washington state recently after guzzling down 36 cans of a beer.

link

I’m not making this up. This article is from Phuket Gazette:

High-speed bedmakers put to the test

Phuket, Thailand: Tuesday, July 27, 2004

PHUKET CITY: This year’s Hotelex Exhibition Food and Beverage Show, which will be held at the Royal Phuket City Hotel from August 12 to 15, will open with a thrilling “speedy bed-making” contest.

The novel competition, with 6,000 baht in prize money up for grabs, will get underway at 1 pm on August 12, marking the start of the four-day show…

What better city than Phuket? What better country than Thailand?

If you have Windows XP, you’ve probably heard about Service Pack 2 being released. They don’t make it easy to find the support page, but you’ll probably need it: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;EN-US;windowsxpsp2

Many software vendors are making updates to their programs to get them to work properly again, because the upgrade breaks a lot of stuff. MS’s page Using programs and hardware with Service Pack 2 (SP2) provides lists of programs that either “behave differently” or “stop working”. They’re long lists that includes their own products, the major anti-virus programs, and much more.

Make sure you have a lot of spare time, especially if you use dial up connection: The total download size may be as small as 70 megabytes (MB) or as large as 260 MB. With a 50k connection speed, that’s 41,600 seconds, or about 11½ hours. I read that the upgrade installation can take between 30 minutes and two hours. That’s after the download is complete.

SP2 also makes web pages behave differently; it: disallows ActiveX, disallows Java and prompts for script running. Lots of websites use scripting for their pages. If it’s really doing what it sounds like, disabling javascript, there’s going to be a lot of sites that need to be rewritten and will lose their dropdown menus. I would guess that upwards of 25% of pages, including most major commercial pages, would have to be updated. Many, although not completely based on script, still use it in a couple of places.

I can’t wait to get my upgrade and watch things break!

“Effective with this sentence, Wired News will no longer capitalize the ‘I’ in internet,” writes Tony Long, Wired News’ copy-editing chief. “At the same time, Web becomes web and Net becomes net. Why? The simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words. Actually, there never was.”

So what do we care? Wired produced the hardback book Wired Style in 1999. Although very out of date, it was the only guide of its time to cover a lot of the new terminology. This decision will (might?) influence a lot of writing.

In 2000 Wired magazine declared that the hyphen belongs in e-mail.

Personally, I never capitalized internet or web unless a spell check insisted for something being done at work. The move to email was recent, and Wired helped justify it: conventional wisdom [is] that “new terms often start as two words, then become hyphenated, and eventually end up as one word.” Almost everyone knows what email is, and it’s about time it just became its own word.

A similar spelling subject was recently discussed (actually emailed) with a friend: edress, e-dress, eddress or e-ddress. The issue is slightly different because the ‘a’ was being deleted from address, so it’s no longer just two words being merged. There were, and are, no standards to check What Is Right, but a few semi-useful references did surface:

• PseudoDictionary
• SlangSite
• RealDictionary
• Webster’s-online – not to be confused with Merriam-Webster

Atlantis, the legendary island-nation whose existence has been debated for thousands of years, was actually Ireland, according to a new theory by a Swedish scientist.

link

Look up events by year, or pick a specific day and look up events, birthdays and deaths. Good long lists no matter which way you do it. Brainy History says that on this day in history: France performs nuclear test, Howard Stern drops out of NY gubernatorial race, John & Yoko begin recording “Double Fantasy”, Elvis Presley releases “Hound Dog” and Sunday school teacher Lizzie Borden arrested in Fall River, Mass.

Oh yeah, and: US government collects its 1st income tax. Maybe not a great day to remember because of that one.

Retirement does strange things to some people. One guy has decided his hobby is to build a Stonehenge replica in his backyard using just rocks, wood and manpower. He’s currently moving and raising 10-ton blocks by himself with no ropes or pulleys. Put your mouse over any black pictures to start an animation.

Stop drooling, Terry.

Of course there’s a lot more to be found, but I stumbled across these and the first one listed got me to spend time on the rest.

The rules are simple:  Stare and the screen, then look at your hand. I saw this a few years back and had forgotten how well it works.

See over 100 posters by the late Rick Griffin. His work included a lot of album covers, probably most recognizable in his Grateful Dead covers, as well as Zap Comix.

Visual Overdose, Energisers and other Crazy Images from Eyvind Almquist of Virtual-Exp Psy.

Java-Fuxation and many other trippy voyages from Entropy8zuper, the people who brought us Venus Trap

There’s a lot more LSD inspired/related links at Best Psychedelics in the World, which is where these came from. Some have cool graphics, some are historical, some are just pro-acid articles. Go for the graphics.

Many a time I’ve said to someone: It’s on my blog, look there. The problem is, that only works if it’s on the main page or the post date is known. Neither one is very likely.

Enter the new Search This Site feature. Look over to the right near the top of the page and you’ll find it.

If you know a little music history, MusicPlasma is a lot of fun.  Enter the name of a recording artist and you’ll get a graphical display that shows similar or related artists.

It could be improved as far as performance and layout, but plan to spend some time following the links it shows.

Around a week ago my friend Andy send me a link to a great Flash parody of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land”. You can read about the creators being threatened with a copyright lawsuit, which happened before I could even get around to posting the song here. The very brief article has a link to the song along with Guthrie’s original copyright notice, which basically says to just use it.

Hey, it’s for your own good. link

Thanks, Terry.