(Click to embiggen...)
(Click to embiggen...)
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Happy Halloween!
It was Jack-O-Lantern night at the Foil house earlier this week!
Friday, October 30, 2009
Philip Glass is Ira Glass’ Great Uncle!
It’s true. It must be. I read it in Wikipedia …
Speaking of Philip Glass, Amazon is currently offering “The Orange Mountain Music Philip Glass Sampler, Vol. 1” free for nuthin’. Click here right away because I don’t know how long this will last.
I’m downloading my tracks right now…
Thanks to Jason Kottke’s blog for the heads-up!
Speaking of Philip Glass, Amazon is currently offering “The Orange Mountain Music Philip Glass Sampler, Vol. 1” free for nuthin’. Click here right away because I don’t know how long this will last.
I’m downloading my tracks right now…
Thanks to Jason Kottke’s blog for the heads-up!
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Chimpanzee Grief
From The Telegraph in the U.K…
When Dorothy, a beloved female chimp died at the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center in Cameroon, her burial was witnessed by the rest of the chimps residing there.
Monica Szczupider took this photo that showed a wall of grieving chimps paying their last respect:
Speaking about Dorothy, Miss Szczupider, 30, said the chimp was a "prominent figure" within a group of about 25 chimps.
"Chimps are not silent. They are gregarious, loud, vocal creatures, usually with relatively short attention spans", she said.
"But they could not take their eyes off Dorothy, and their silence, more than anything, spoke volumes."
Thanks to Neatorama for the heads-up!
When Dorothy, a beloved female chimp died at the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center in Cameroon, her burial was witnessed by the rest of the chimps residing there.
Monica Szczupider took this photo that showed a wall of grieving chimps paying their last respect:
Speaking about Dorothy, Miss Szczupider, 30, said the chimp was a "prominent figure" within a group of about 25 chimps.
"Chimps are not silent. They are gregarious, loud, vocal creatures, usually with relatively short attention spans", she said.
"But they could not take their eyes off Dorothy, and their silence, more than anything, spoke volumes."
Thanks to Neatorama for the heads-up!
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Al'right!
There is a lot of shit on our plate right now. You know, as a nation. We've got the financial collapse to deal with. We've got terrorism, Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea and Iraq to figure out. We've got to get our arms around health care too.
I mean, we've really got to sit down and get this stuff figured out.
Which is why I'm getting sick and tired of people injecting mis-information, myths and outright lies into the debates. I'm talking about things like death panels and the Birther movement just to name two.
And damn it, its the right wing and the Republicans who do this the most...and most effectively.
So it's refreshing to see someone beat down the purveyors of this kind of misinformation and in the clip below Al Franken does just that.
He takes down Diane Furchtgott-Roth, a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute who has the nerve to argue that health care reform will increase medical bankruptcies in the US.
Pay close attention at the 2:04 mark. Look at her face. As Franken dismantles her she glares, tilting her head slowly to the left, shooting daggers from her eyes. That is pure evil you’re seeing there… no movie villain ever captured it so perfectly.
BTW, the The Hudson Institute is one of these neo-conservative think tanks commited "to free markets and individual responsibility, confidence in the power of technology to assist progress, respect for the importance of culture and religion in human affairs"
Yup, sure. Just trying to make the world a better place...yup...
I mean, we've really got to sit down and get this stuff figured out.
Which is why I'm getting sick and tired of people injecting mis-information, myths and outright lies into the debates. I'm talking about things like death panels and the Birther movement just to name two.
And damn it, its the right wing and the Republicans who do this the most...and most effectively.
So it's refreshing to see someone beat down the purveyors of this kind of misinformation and in the clip below Al Franken does just that.
He takes down Diane Furchtgott-Roth, a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute who has the nerve to argue that health care reform will increase medical bankruptcies in the US.
Pay close attention at the 2:04 mark. Look at her face. As Franken dismantles her she glares, tilting her head slowly to the left, shooting daggers from her eyes. That is pure evil you’re seeing there… no movie villain ever captured it so perfectly.
BTW, the The Hudson Institute is one of these neo-conservative think tanks commited "to free markets and individual responsibility, confidence in the power of technology to assist progress, respect for the importance of culture and religion in human affairs"
Yup, sure. Just trying to make the world a better place...yup...
We Have Ice
The Guardian published an article on Friday about the birth of the Internet.
And while it’s hard to pin down the exact date, they make the case that October 29, 1969 is as good as any, making next week it's 40th birthday.
When it was twelve years old, there were…
“…still only 213 computers on the network; but 14 years after that, 16 million people were online, and email was beginning to change the world; the first really usable web browser wasn't launched until 1993, but by 1995 we had Amazon, by 1998 Google, and by 2001, Wikipedia, at which point there were 513 million people online. Today the figure is more like 1.7 billion.”
What rocked my boat though was this…on New Years Day in 1994 there were a grand total of 623 websites.
I can’t even get my mind around that because later in that same year I bought a used PowerMac from my friend Nick’s office and built the first Tim Foil web page. It wasn’t much…links to books, records and movies that I liked and a bulletin board which actually had quite an active little community.
I do remember a conversation with Nick about the nascent world wide web in which we kind of agreed that there wasn’t much out there. I remember searching and searching and searching for something – anything - interesting. People used to publish lists of interesting web sites because they were so seemingly few and far between.
Now I can’t even keep up with my RSS feed.
I wish I could go back in time and check out that first Tim Foil website again. I remember the front page had a picture of me singing into a mic in an old rehearsal space we used to rent. There was a sign behind me that read “We Have Ice.”
Turns out we had no idea what we had!
And while it’s hard to pin down the exact date, they make the case that October 29, 1969 is as good as any, making next week it's 40th birthday.
When it was twelve years old, there were…
“…still only 213 computers on the network; but 14 years after that, 16 million people were online, and email was beginning to change the world; the first really usable web browser wasn't launched until 1993, but by 1995 we had Amazon, by 1998 Google, and by 2001, Wikipedia, at which point there were 513 million people online. Today the figure is more like 1.7 billion.”
What rocked my boat though was this…on New Years Day in 1994 there were a grand total of 623 websites.
I can’t even get my mind around that because later in that same year I bought a used PowerMac from my friend Nick’s office and built the first Tim Foil web page. It wasn’t much…links to books, records and movies that I liked and a bulletin board which actually had quite an active little community.
I do remember a conversation with Nick about the nascent world wide web in which we kind of agreed that there wasn’t much out there. I remember searching and searching and searching for something – anything - interesting. People used to publish lists of interesting web sites because they were so seemingly few and far between.
Now I can’t even keep up with my RSS feed.
I wish I could go back in time and check out that first Tim Foil website again. I remember the front page had a picture of me singing into a mic in an old rehearsal space we used to rent. There was a sign behind me that read “We Have Ice.”
Turns out we had no idea what we had!
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
XKCD Comes to Life
I like the web comic XKCD and have shared quite a few over the years...
Just tonight I found a video that animates and puts music to this particular strip and it made me feel good. Maybe it will work for you too!
(Click to embiggen...)
Just tonight I found a video that animates and puts music to this particular strip and it made me feel good. Maybe it will work for you too!
(Click to embiggen...)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
