:: Thursday, March 31, 2005 ::

When bad scenes happen to great movies and vice versa (onionavclub)
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Having done time in a surf band, I played freakin' "Apache" hundreds of times. That song is bored into my skull in a such a very uncomfortable way, I thought I'd never need to hear it again. Boy was I wrong. This is the best "Apache" I've ever seen. These groovy Hessian Hustle-rockists make B.O.C. look like a Barmitzvah band. (Don't thank me, thank Rivets)
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How to make Lava lamp liquid and ooze. way more complicated than I thought.
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A list of all known operating drive-in movie theatres in the U.S.
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57 Heaven Somebody's huge, warehoused collection of mint 1957 cars. Damn.
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Here's what it's like to listen to Abba's "Dancing Queen" nonstop for over 5 hours. (vid, from Coudal)
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Headmaster Ritual
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Spoiled, lying Laura K. Pahl, a Lewis University student, gets popped for Plagiarism. Nice to see this useless waste of some professor's time and energy get hit with a little payback. Don't feel too sorry for her- she'll do fine in politics some day.
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[more, more, more] Spring is here and you know what that means: the fast food joints want to fatten you up for next winter.
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If you thought analog unicycles were geeky, hold on to your propeller beanies...

Don't miss the utterly ridiculous movie. Holy crap.
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Hot Mouse hack for cold L337rZ.
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Urinals rising from the underground
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The Era of Exploitation (NYTimes)
Congress is in recess and the press has gone berserk over the Terri Schiavo case. So very little attention is being paid to pending budget proposals that are scandalously unfair, but that pretty accurately reflect the kind of country the U.S. has become.
President Bush believes in an "ownership" society, which means that except for the wealthy, you're on your own. The president's budget would cut funding for Medicaid, food stamps, education, transportation, health care for veterans, law enforcement, medical research and safety inspections for food and drugs. And, of course, it contains big new tax cuts for the wealthy.
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Is Microsoft Toast? (Financial Times)
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Plans to allow parents undergoing fertility treatment to choose the sex of their unborn baby have split an influential group of lawmakers and have reignited the debate over "designer babies". (reuters uk)
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Blast! Foiled again!
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Chili Con Finger
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Fool around, get $43 Million
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Pro chocolate eaters
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Elephants do impressions.
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Activist Museum infiltration Here's Banksy's site featuring his current exhibitions
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Iraq is a symptom, not a cause. It's a symptom of the passion we have for oil, which is a declining resource in the world. Alternatives can be found, but they will not be found as long as there's one drop of oil or natural gas to be extracted from other nations, preferably by force by the current junta in charge of our affairs. Iraq will end with our defeat.

Gore Vidal on The Undoing of America. Excellent reading.
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For sale: 90%-ass job!
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The God Racket (NYTimes)
Using old-time snake-oil 'lijjin to rally the rubes.

The president was not about to be outpreached by these saps. The same Mr. Bush who couldn't be bothered to interrupt his vacation during the darkening summer of 2001, not even when he received a briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," flew from his Crawford ranch to Washington to sign Congress's Schiavo bill into law. The bill could have been flown to him in Texas, but his ceremonial arrival and departure by helicopter on the White House lawn allowed him to showboat as if he had just landed on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Within hours he turned Ms. Schiavo into a slick applause line at a Social Security rally. "It is wise to always err on the side of life," he said, wisdom that apparently had not occurred to him in 1999, when he mocked the failed pleas for clemency of Karla Faye Tucker, the born-again Texas death-row inmate, in a magazine interview with Tucker Carlson.

Where are the Democrats in all of this? Why is it that every time these right-wing zealots launch a hijack discourse by launching cultural attack, they bury their heads in the sand?
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The press, the polls, and Terry Schiavo (Salon, AdWatch req'd)
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Cavern of Sorrows: Great acrylics by Camille Rose Garcia.
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Pledge to boycott any oil company that drills for oil in the Arctic Refuge. (TrueMajority)

I am writing to ask you to take a simple action for the sake of the planet. Please make a public pledge never to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This pristine wilderness should be protected, not exploited for oil we don't even need. If you refuse to make this pledge and do drill in the Arctic Refuge, you can count on losing my business. I will immediately boycott your gas stations, forever. And you can also be sure that I will tell every friend and family member I have not to patronize your gas stations, and I will beg that they tell all their friends, and so on, until you are forced to withdraw your drilling equipment from the Arctic Refuge.

Just click the link and send the above pledge to CEOs of 5 oil giants.
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Serious dance moves (vid)
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Free download of Bloc Party's newest single "Like Eating Glass" from Salon (watch a commercial for day pass, then scroll to bottom for download)
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Speaking of hacks, check out this awesome bicycle wheel POV. I'd even keep the default message.
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Ourmedia.org - store media for free forever (from Gizmodo, where I also found this $11 lcd photoframe hack)
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World's first fuel-cell motorcycle
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A very nice page dedicated to the British pre-war Brough Superior motorcycle.
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Tony Hawk's video gallery.
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Tell U.S. Customs you're a blogger; get stripsearched.
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Robert Blake and the Our Gang Curse
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Scientists busy
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Audio trick: endless octave ascending
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The Onion A.V. Club spoke to three men on the archival front lines, who work to bring the kind of movies that play big-city repertory houses into the Wal-Marts and Targets of Middle America. [1] [2] [3]
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Well, what can I say... The Bushies needed some more land to destroy, so they chose one of the few remaining pristine places left on the planet to hand over to their embedded industry cronies. The landscape will be fouled with hideous, dirty industrial equipment, and you and I won't see a shred of benefit. The huge, corrupt oil companies will make millions in deals that have already been quitely handed to them, and more land and water will get polluted in the name of profit. What an insanely filthy monster. You could argue that a lifetime of loafing, cronyism, coke-addled misdirection and having everything handed to you could breed a personality this vile and corrupt, but that doesn't begin to explain this character. How does somebody even get like this? Utterly sickening.

Add to this more pickup on the Whitehouse's fake news machine, and Tuesday's passing of mercury emissions standards that will actually allow industry to release *more* mercury, and allow them more time to comply with the weaker standards, while removing government mandated oversight and equipment, and removing current control rules for arsenic, cadmium and chromium emissions.

I'm amazed.
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There's gotta be an NRA pamphlet about what do do when shit like this happens. (vid link; awesome)
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The Lucky Ones (Time)
In World War II, 1 in 3 wounded soldiers died; in Vietnam, 1 in 4. In the Iraq war, the rate is 1 in 8. As of last week, just over 1,500 U.S. military personnel had died in Iraq and 11,285 had been wounded. The Pentagon does not keep counts of dead or wounded Iraqis. Human-rights groups and academics have tried to estimate the number of Iraqi deaths, speculating it could range from 15,000 to 100,000. No one has even tried to guess the number of Iraqis who have been wounded.
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"He hit the Man for $3 Million. Right where it hurts. And baby, that's cold."
The Blaxploitation movie poster gallery
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If this doesn't sound like a case for a superhero - any superhero - I don't know what does.
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Project C-90 is the ultimate blank cassette tape museum. Nice pictures of blank tapes from brands you knew well, and those you never heard of. I didn't remember tapes looking so cool. (from GMT+9)
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Three articles from PopMatters about the recording industry's increasing efforts to prevent ripping - often at the expense of privacy, convenience, and the intention of copyright law itself.
1. Living with Copyright Protection
2. Why record companies hate us all
3. So I get this disc...
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Iraq's Thin (and Blurred) Blue Line (mojones)
"Before the war, we had six months to do background checks on any police officer we hired," he said. "After the war, the Americans just began appointing officers."

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Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged News
To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all three. The report from Kansas City was made by the State Department. The "reporter" covering airport safety was actually a public relations professional working under a false name for the Transportation Security Administration. The farming segment was done by the Agriculture Department's office of communications.
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Skateboarding dog (link to .wmv)
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Lodi, New Jersey and the birth of Zombie Rock
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Wakeup call for U.S. tech industry and policymakers: U.S. Could Lose Tech Edge
The new report focuses on old issues: U.S. math, science and engineering education lagging behind other countries; attracting and retaining the world's best innovators; continued concern over America's lagging broadband deployment; cyber security, research and development investments; and the looming June deadline for corporations to expense stock options.
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There's been a couple of blips in the news about the falsification of Saddam's capture over the last two days, but finally major sources are picking it up. Utterly shameful, if true, given the number of people dead, dollars wasted, and lives disrupted to this end, but I wouldn't put anything past this cynical administration.

"I was among the 20-man unit, including eight of Arab descent, who searched for Saddam for three days in the area of Dour near Tikrit, and we found him in a modest home in a small village and not in a hole as announced," the UPI report quoted Abou Rabeh as saying.
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Here's what your Republican congress is up to: rewriting personal bankruptcy law by and for the credit card giants. (NYTimes). Some states (e.g. Delaware, where all credit card companies are legally based) already allow interest rate charges up to 22%. Now they're attacking you at the federal level. Thank you, congress, for such upstanding lawmaking!
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Finding God in a microscope (SFGate)
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What do you want the internet to be? (reprinted from Toronto Star)
Excellent article on how special interests are dedicated to using public policy law to transform the internet into a strictly-controlled, for-profit businessplace.

Notwithstanding the Internet’s remarkable potential, there are dark clouds on the horizon. There are some who see a very differing Internet. Theirs is an Internet with ubiquitous surveillance featuring real-time capabilities to monitor online activities. It is an Internet that views third party applications such as Vonage’s Voice-over-IP service as parasitic. It is an Internet in which virtually all content should come at a price, even when that content has been made freely available. It is an Internet that would seek to cut off subscriber access based on mere allegations of wrongdoing, without due process or oversight from a judge or jury.
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I'm currently rediscovering Chips Challenge (free d/l, abandonware), the most addictive puzzle game in computing history, as far as I'm concerned.

If you like it, there's a free editor out there to help you make your own levels, and read about the never-released Chips Challenge II.
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Coffee on paper
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Eat Fruit! Why? The internet told you so! (thx, pete)
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Afghanistan is now nearly a 'narcotics state'... At least its not a police state.
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RIP Martin Denny
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Sharp piece by NYT's Krugman on republican budget bait-and-switch (but I really got a kick out of his use of "conservative intellectuals")
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Ebay: A used breast implant: current bid ~$17K
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The New York Public Library digital image gallery is open to the public.
Check the ABC cigarette cards
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The concept of an honest politician is such an contradictory abomination of reason, that people immediately complain when they finally encounter one.
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Englishcut: An interesting blog by a Seville Row tailor (via memepool)
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How to make chocolate from the bean
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Xray: Sharp pain in head.
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Special interest greed trumps public policy every time. When Philadelphia announced plans for a low-cost city-wide wireless broadband network, the corporations went into overdrived and backed legislation that would illegalize ANY regional broadband network that would compete with a corporate offering - regardless of price, operational plans, or benefit to low-income households who would otherwise have no network access. The Philly deal was saved only by a last minute deal with Verizon (threatening them with a landslide of bad PR), but these networks still remain illegal elsewhere, and the big telecoms are free to price-gouge to their heart's content. Never mind that the US is now not even in the top-ten most connected countries (and sinking): corporate greed is killing access, innovation, and opportunity.

An interesting contrast can be found in the more humane UK with the very same issue (Guardian UK)
Chris Clark, chief executive for BT Wireless Broadband, said the UK's biggest broadband supplier would not be taking the same approach as Verizon. "The community wireless projects, which started in an environment of concern about rural service, are evolving into providing all sorts of innovative services," he says. "It would be a pity to see such innovation stifled. More recently, a number of metropolitan wireless projects have been in the pipeline. BT is fully supportive of these initiatives."
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A handfull of tracks from the Doves new album "Some Cities" (free, streaming)
The video for the single "Black and White Town" is here.
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A nice collection of mathematical animated gifs from Wolfram Research (with the math to back them up, if you're up for some proofreading)
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The Online Guide to Whistling Records
Bird enthusiast vinyl. Nice cover scans.
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Invisibility cloak!
Andrea Alù and Nader Engheta of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia say that a 'plasmonic cover' could render objects "nearly invisible to an observer".
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A Law Student finally passes a required course after 39 consecutive fails.
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Yahoo turns 10, and offers to buy everyone in the country an ice cream cone today.
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