Unsought Input

This is a cute little animation about two gentlemen fighting for the hand of a fair(ly well endowed) maiden.  Don’t let me ruin it for you by telling you there is a little twist.  Please enjoy!

Some quick links for you.

The Pinky Show. Cats talking politics. Cats making sense of politics. They are so cute it hurts.

Sugar cubes used to be the “in thing”. Now it’s honey cubes.

Geek Apparel. Check it out.

Monk caught being human, looking at porn.

Guy wins jackpot at casino, employee unplugs machine just in time to save company 5.5 mil

Peep research underway. 

Sci-Fi movies invariably have cool, futuristic gadgets that are much more interesting than silly things like characters and plot. Luckily, the future is getting closer all the time. Although we don’t have flying cars, we do have four move technologies that will make you feel like you’re living in the future.

1. Tech: Kaneda’s electric motorcycle

Movie: Akira

Akira opens with a battle between two motorcycle gangs in Neo-Tokyo in the year 2019. The bikes are fast, dangerous, and apparently electric.

Leave it to the Japanese to make geeky future tech happen. This version isn’t quite as fast or mean looking, but paint it red and throw on some decals and the clowns won’t mess with you.

Tech we really want: SOL

Although Tetsuou eventually makes mincemeat of the The Satellite Orbiting Laser, it’s the only thing in the whole move that was able to hurt him. Plus, how cool would it been to be able to rain down laser on command? Think of all the popcorn you could make!

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According to BusinessWeek, the Lunesta ad is one of the least-skipped commercials on TV. This is an important metric for advertisers. Ever since TiVo and other DVRs have made it easy for people to jump past commercials, advertisers have tried to find ways to get them to watch.

If you look at the rest of the the list, it’s hard to see what makes a commercial less skipworthy. I have a theory in the case of Lunesta. I think people don’t skip because they are mesmerized by the soul-eating Lunesta butterfly. Watch the video:

…And now you tell me: doesn’t it look like the butterfly brought that woman the sweet gift of a quiet death? Every time that commercial comes on, I point to the screen and yell to my wife, “That butterfly is going to steal her breath!”

Apparently I’m not the only one creeped out…

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You probably got to this article by Googling “how to be a hipster” or “learn to be a hipster.” If that’s the case, it’s too late, don’t even bother, you’ll never be a hipster - the fact that you want to be one enough to type it into a web browser means you are already trying too hard.

Besides, are you really still using Google? Or the word “googling”? What is this, 2002?

So enjoy this video, it’s funny enough to make you feel better but it’s a shallow enough commentary that you’ll remain plainly not a hipster.

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Senator Larry Craig from Idaho, who had plead guilty to disorderly conduct for coming on to a male police officer in an airport bathroom, says the whole thing is a huge misunderstanding.  In fact, he went on national TV to proclaim (again and again) “I am not gay!”

I don’t know if he’s gay, but the musical he’s been cast in is fabulous:

We’ve seen a lot of really bad movies based on video games. From Wing Commander to Super Mario Brothers to, well, everything Uwe Boll has ever made. And they don’t seem to be getting any better, or really making much money at the box office, so I can only imagine that producers green light them to punish humanity for some horrible war crime.

Once again, a million random people on the Internet are churning out better video than companies with $100 million dollar budgets. Well, they’re turning out better movie trailers, anyway. Below are the five funniest video game movie trailers we’ve seen on the web.

1. From the geniuses at College Humor, Where the f#ck is Carmen Sandiego

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The year was 1992. Although we didn’t know it at the time, America was on the tipping point of a major paradigm shift in fashion, music, and body image. For years, Cosmo had been telling women that they were fat, and a self-reinforcing stereotype of beauty required that there be little, if any, junk in the trunk if a woman was going to be considered attractive.

Sir Mix-a-Lot burst upon the scene with his seminal song and video, “Baby Got Back.” Watch the video below and marvel at the audacity, the boldness of his declaration: “I like big butts and I cannot lie.”

“Baby Got Back” has gone on to be one of the most frequently covered songs of all time. You may have noticed this if you’ve ever gone to a bar with karaoke. Baby Got Back is almost inevitably sung. This retrospective is not, however, about the drunk and deeply embarrassing crooning of your uncle about his anaconda. There have been many skillful reinterpretations of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s masterpiece that we will examine today.

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The Nintendo Wii is a lot of fun, but it’s in a bit of a new game drought right now. While the rest of us sit with bated breath awaiting Super Smash Brothers and Metroid, some folks have made some Wii games of their own. Or at least they pretended to and put videos on the Internet.

Here’s a whole series of rejected WiiPlay games from the folks at Loading.Ready.Run.

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I had to post this video: Mr T. busts through a wall, alarmed by the jibber-jabber of a fat-headed consultant. He proceeds to show the consultant that Mr. T puts the “T” in IT.

Best lines:

“You know you got a lot of mouth, and I’ve got a lot of fist for your mouth!”

“Intelligence in the network? That’s for suckas. That’s for routing stuff, not data, fool!”

This is a video for Hitachi, but that last quote could also be seen as an argument for net neutrality. Somebody call up Mr. T. and get him in front of Congress.

And in all seriousness, Mr. T. is a really interesting guy - check out his profile on IMDB.

“I think about my father being called ‘boy’, my uncle being called ‘boy’, my brother, coming back from Vietnam and being called ‘boy’. So I questioned myself: ‘What does a black man have to do before he’s given the respect as a man?’ So when I was 18 years old, when I was old enough to fight and die for my country, old enough to drink, old enough to vote, I said I was old enough to be called a man. I self-ordained myself Mr. T so the first word out of everybody’s mouth is ‘Mr.’ That’s a sign of respect that my father didn’t get, that my brother didn’t get, that my mother didn’t get.”

As I write this, Google has a market cap of about $148 billion, compared to Verizon at $124 billion and AOL parent Time Warner at $82 billion. Google might rule the Web search market, but Verizon’s $88 billion and Time Warner’s $44 billion in revenue last year dwarf Google’s $10 billion.

Why would a smaller company that makes less money be worth more to investors than larger competitors? Are they just being irrational? Maybe so, but I think there is at least one good reason why Google has been so successful: it has focused on providing services, rather than content or infrastructure.

Why is this important? Think about it this way: whenever you do anything on the Internet, chances are you can break it down into three layers:

1) Infrastructure - your connection to the Internet, whether it’s Cable, DSL, dial-up, FIOS, etc.
2) Service - the application you use to get what you want done, for example the search engine you use to find things or the mail client you use to read you email.
3) Content - the stuff you read, watch, listen to, or create yourself for others to see.

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In honor of the passing of Jerry Falwell, who made a mockery of Christ’s teachings, we present the best mockeries of Jesus himself. Actually, that’s a bit harsh - these aren’t really mockeries, more like satire.

1. First off, in Passion of the Christ 2, Judgment Day, we see Hollywood logic extended to Mel Gibson’s blockbuster. A box-office hit deserves a sequel, and any self-respecting sequel needs twice as many explosions.

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We can agree to disagree about the political messages in the movie 300, whether it was propaganda or gay-bashing.  But I think everyone who saw the movie will agree it was quite violent.

But was the violence excessive or gratuitous?  The only empirical way I can think of to find out is to remove the violence from the epic:

Just last year I wrote a little bit about why YouTube works. Since then, two major things have happened: YouTube was bought by Google, and large copyright-holding corporations finally noticed it. The almost inevitable result? Billion-dollar lawsuits.

I’ll let The Daily Show explain the situation better than I can:

But really, who cares?  Two multi-billion dollar companies duking it out in court surely doesn’t effect you or I.  But there are at least two reasons why it does matter.

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One of greatest tragedies of American history is the untimely death of Abraham Lincoln. Having done a great service to us all by ending slavery and preserving the Union, Lincoln had a plan for southern reconstruction that was more moderate than the measures taken after his death.

Although I sympathize with the radical Republicans of the time and their desire to quickly end slavery, give voting rights to freedmen, and crush the power of slavery as an institution, their methods lead to the “redemption” where conservative whites dominated southern politics for decades. This left a legacy of racial segregation and distrust that lingers to this day.
What if Abraham Lincoln had lived? Countless historians and authors have pondered this, but I think the video below gives the most insightful analysis.

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