Ultimate Fishing Video

So two guys take a high powered flashlight on a fishing trip somewhere in South America. The fish go wild. After a couple of minutes, they cover the floor of the boat. This is wild!

End of the Rainbow?

Taco Hell

Speaking of money, there is a story of a Taco Bell employee refused a $2 bill because he thought it wasn't real.

http://www.snopes.com/business/money/tacobell.asp


And here is a whole page of similar incidents. Apparently some of the serving public is not completely aware of their own government's currency.

http://www.snopes.com/business/info/tacobell.asp

Stamped Money

Apparently there is an underground movement afoot using our money as a vehicle for social and/or political statements. Here is a site that tracks "rubber-stamped" money with messages.

http://www.cruelty.com/money/


One of the best of these sites is called Wheresgeorge.com
It is an anonymous database that tracks money usage using the serial number. It is kind of cool to see where money has been. There is a corresponding Canadian site called Whereswillie.com

http://www.wheresgeorge.com/

http://www.whereswilly.com/

Cashing a $93,000 Junk Mail Check - The Patrick Combs Story

So this guy gets a fake check for $93,000 as part of a junk mail get-rich-quick ad. He deposits it in his ATM as a joke. The bank credits him with the money and even allows him to draw a cashier's check for the amount. Now they want their money back. Here is the story of a little guy (OK, so he is a wise-ass), fighting the big guys. The story goes on for several pages, but I guarantee you will tell others about it.


http://www.goodthink.com/writing/view_stories.cfm?id=11&page_id=2

Fourteen-foot grizzly killed in Alaska

Deer hunting is one of the major seasons in Oklahoma. What would you do if you were doing just that and a huge bear charges you? An employee of the U.S. Forest Service in Alaska recently faced just that scenario. Although it was not bear season in the Last Frontier State, he was justified in killing the bear in self defense.

He was out deer hunting when a large grizzly bear charged him from about 50 yards away. The guy emptied his 7mm Magnum semi-automatic rifle into the bear, and it dropped a few feet from him. The big bear was still alive so he reloaded and shot it several times in the head.


The bear also had 4 .38 slugs in him and the remains of two hikers. Yikes

Sorry there aren't any pictures.

http://www.mwcsun.com/sports/local_story_207100046.html?keyword=topstory

Nostalgia Central

Here's something for my little sister on her birthday. Nostalgia Central is a site specializing in the things of our youth, Music, Movies, and Television. Enjoy a trip down Memory Lane:


http://www.nostalgiacentral.com/index.htm

The Urban Dictionary

I have always been suspect of slang dictionaries. They are usually hopelessly out of date or are written by and for corporate advertising types. This one is a bit different. Kind of like Wikipedia. This one is a slang dictionary that can be edited by everyone.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/

Technological Singularity

In futures studies, a technological singularity represents a hypothetical "event horizon" in the predictability of human technological development. Past this event horizon, following the creation of strong artificial intelligence or the amplification of human intelligence, existing models of the future cease to give reliable or accurate answers. Futurists predict that after the Singularity, posthumans and/or strong AI will replace humans as the dominating force in science and technology, rendering human-specific social models obsolete.
Those who believe such an event may occur most often see it as either an effect of the first smarter-than-human entity capable of recursive and indefinite self-improvement, as the culmination of a pattern of accelerating technological progress persisting throughout history, or both

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

Why the US will be the only superpower in 2030

http://futurist.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/05/why_the_us_will.html

Here is an interesting blog related to future studies. I am fascinated by this. Is anyone else? Talk to me about this.

Guide to useless Windows XP services

If you run Windows XP and you know what a service is, then this article might just allow you to free up some valuable memory on your machine. If you need help with this, ask Dataman.

http://www.techtree.com/techtree/jsp/article.jsp?article_id=70112&cat_id=584

Raise a glass and remember Mako.

Mako Iwamatsu (December 10, 1933 - July 21, 2006), was a Japanese-American actor. He was born in Kobe, Japan, moved to the United States of America in the late 1940s and joined the military in the 1950s. Many of his acting roles to date credited him simply as "Mako", omitting his surname.
He was known for his role as the Wizard opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in the two Conan movies Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer. In 2001 he appeared as Admiral Yamamoto in Pearl Harbor.

You may not have known the name, but his face is very recognizable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mako_(actor)

Fire Safety

Something for the fireman in all of us. Here is helpful info for everyone concerning home fire safety. It may seem like common sense, but only if you already have a plan in place. Do you have a standard day of the year to test all of your smoke detectors and batteries? Don't assume that it's Dad's job to do it.

http://www.ou.edu/oupd/fireprev.htm

http://www.ou.edu/oupd/fireprev.htm

Motionbox

New video-sharing service Motionbox lets you trim videos down to their best parts and share those highlights.

The only thing more annoying than a rambling blog post or a never-ending photo album is amateur home video that just goes on and on. At Motionbox you can upload your own videos or view others' by tag or user. Using their swanky Flash 9-based in-browser editor, trim a video down to the good parts and share 'em with a permalink or via email. Motionbox is pretty scant on the stock social/sharing features you'll find on other video sites, but I'll take a well-edited video that doesn't waste my time over a friends list any day. Full disclosure: a few of my pals work at Motionbox. — Gina Trapani
Motionbox

Hat tip to Lifehacker for this.

Shop Wiki

ShopWiki is a shopping site that covers more than 120,000 online stores to shop from. What a great place to waste a great deal of time!! It also gives you a bit of exposure to Wiki technology (in case you haven't been to Wikipedia).

http://www.shopwiki.com/

Student Regains her Thesis

Here is a story of a student who had ben working on her thesis for a couple of years. She kept it backed up on a thumb drive. You guessed it, the drive was in her purse when it was stolen. She was able to retrace the thief's steps by tracking how her credit cards were used. She looked into a dumpster and found her gym bag and her missing drive. Quite a story.

Student Finds a Stolen Thesis by Thinking Like a Thief:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/21/AR2005122102311.html

The History Place

From the History Place, an article describing the top ten battles in world history.

http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/topten/index.html

Who is Reading Books (and who is not)

One-third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives. Many do not even graduate from high school.
58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.
42% of college graduates never read another book.
80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.
70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
57% of new books are not read to completion.
--Jerrold Jenkins. http://www.JenkinsGroup.com

This list was found in :

http://parapublishing.com/sites/para/resources/statistics.cfm

The entire site is pretty interesting. It tells a lot about the book market and about America.

Notable Quote

"He's as sharp as a sack full of wet mice." - Foghorn Leghorn

Before the white man came? War

We've deluded ourselves into believing in the myth of the noble and peaceful primitive
Nicholas Wade's Before The Dawn is one of those books full of eye-catching details. For example, did you know the Inuit have the largest brains of any modern humans? Something to do with the cold climate. Presumably, if this global warming hooey ever takes off, their brains will be shrinking with the ice caps.
But the passage that really stopped me short was this:
"Both Keeley and LeBlanc believe that for a variety of reasons anthropologists and their fellow archaeologists have seriously underreported the prevalence of warfare among primitive societies. . . . 'I realized that archaeologists of the postwar period had artificially "pacified the past" and shared a pervasive bias against the possibility of prehistoric warfare,' says Keeley."

http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/article.jsp?content=20060724_130456_130456

A Happy Airline Passenger

Frank Martin thanks United for delaying his flight--and there's no snark involved....

http://varifrank.com/archives/2006/07/thank_you_for_d_1.php

Don't Be Like Uncle Rico

Everybody over 30 knows an Uncle Rico. I hope you are not one of them because if you are you will lead a life of longing and constant disappointment.
In case you don’t know, Uncle Rico is one of the oddball characters in the popular movie Napoleon Dynamite.

For those who haven't seen the movie, Uncle Rico is stuck in the past. He longs for his "glory days" of high school where he was on the football team. In one scene, he asks his nephew "Do you ever wish you could go back?" Throughout the movie he tries everything to recapture his past including buying a time machine off the Internet that leads to some painful outcomes for him and Napoleon.

http://goalsuccess.typepad.com/goaltips/2006/07/dont_be_like_un.html

The Dread Pyrate Roberts

Those of you who are familiar with the story of the Princess Bride will no doubt recall the name of the Dread Pirate Roberts. He is a swashbuckling rogue who is actually the hero in disguise. But did you know that there really was a Dread Pyrate Roberts? He was actually the most successful pirate of all time, having captured more than 400 ships in less than five years.

I found out about this through a show on the History Channel this month called "True Pirates of the Caribbean". I can easily recommend it. History comes alive.

Here is the article from Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartholomew_Roberts

And here is a site that documents his journeys:

http://www.bartholomewroberts.com/

Here is an excellent e-book on pirates, free for the month, care of the Gutenberg project.

http://worldebookfair.com/Members/WorldeBookLibrary/bookspirate.pdf

Raise a Glass

Raise a glass and remember my favorite living writer, Mickey Spillane. I'm sure you have all heard of Mickey Spillane and his creation, Mike Hammer. It wasn't until I actually read one of his novels that I realized what a truly great writer he was. If you want to give it a try, I would suggest a little gem called One Lonely Night. It is a great story about a private eye, commies, and a couple of dames. Great stuff for a summer night.

You can read an obit here:

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20060717/D8IU1A2G3.html

You can read his bio here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_Spillane

Bulwer-Lytton Update

The results are in from the annual Bulwer-Lytton writing contest. Named for the mediocre Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. He is the person who penned the infamous opening line: "It was a dark and stormy night". (And you probably thought it was Snoopy, who started all his work that way).

The winning entry from this year's talent pool is this gem:

Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you've had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean.


http://www2.sjsu.edu/depts/english/2006.htm

Voter Registration

Many people around the world admire the right of every American to vote for their choice of elected officials. This year will be an election many New Yorkers will want to participate in because of the numerous issues facing our state.

If you have not already done so, please register to vote. August 18th is the last day to postmark your registration to vote in the September 12th primary election. October 13th is the last day to postmark registration for the November 7th General Election.

You can download forms from the following web site:

http://www.thepartnership.org/Home/GetInvolved/Councils/GovernmentAffairs

Don't waste this valuable right. Register to Vote! Of course, I would prefer that you would all register as Republicans, but I promise to respect your registration no matter what party you choose.

MySpace is #1

MySpace gains top ranking of US Web sites.

Online teen hangout MySpace.com ranked as the No. 1 U.S. Web site last week, displacing Yahoo Inc.'s top-rated e-mail gateway and Google Inc.'s search site, Internet tracking firm Hitwise said on Tuesday.
News Corp.'s MySpace accounted for 4.46 percent of all U.S. Internet visits for the week ending July 8, pushing it past Yahoo Mail for the first time and outpacing the home pages for Yahoo, Google and Microsoft's MSN Hotmail.
Wow! Myspace didn't even exist a couple of years ago. I see that is owned by Newscorp which is owned by Aussie rich guy Rupert Murdoch.


http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyID=2006-07-11T154250Z_01_N11382172_RTRUKOC_0_US-MEDIA-MYSPACE.xml

An Unsung Hero

Wes Hill, who has died aged 76, was a riverman at Niagara, Ontario, responsible for saving 50 people from drowning in the rapids above and below the falls and for pulling out the bodies of more than 400 suicides or failed daredevils.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/news/2006/07/11/db1103.xml

Raise a Glass

Raise a glass and remember Syd Barrett, the founder and major influence on Pink Floyd. Shine on You crazy Diamond was a clue that the song was about Syd. He may well have been a musical genius. In the end he was a sad example that mental problems and hallucinogenics are a very bad mixture. I still like his music.

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20060711/D8IPRAD8A.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syd_Barrett

101 Cookbooks rates Lunch at the White House

Self explanatory, but interesting.

http://www.101cookbooks.com/archives/001441.html

Project Gutenburg

Free Access to the public from July 4th to August 4th, in celebration of Project Gutenberg's 35th Birthday

July 4th to August 4, 2006 marks a month long celebration of the 35th anniversary of the first step taken towards today's eBooks, when the United States Declaration of Independence was the first file placed online for downloading in what was destined to be an electronic library of the Internet. Today's eBook library has a total of over 100 languages represented.
The World eBook Fair welcomes you to absolutely free access to a variety of eBook unparalleled by any other source. 1/3 million eBooks await you for personal use, all free of charge for the month from July 4 - August 4, 2006, and then ½ million eBooks in 2007, 3/4 million in 2008, and ONE million in 2009.

http://www.worldebookfair.com/

Bibliodyssey

Check this out:

Here is an interesting literary site. I said that so you won't wander into it by accident. If you are interested in old, sometimes ancient books and illustrations, this is the place.

http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/

Also here:

http://www.georgeglazer.com/prints/prints.html

The Ten Commandments of cell phone etiquette

There comes a time in any technological revolution when some basic guidelines need to be laid down. It happened when e-mail exploded on the scene and people started to learn some basic dos and don'ts around the new medium. For example, if you copy the boss in on an e-mail message to a colleague, it means that you are through kidding around. No one teaches these things in company training; they are just things that get learned.

1. Thou shalt not subject defenseless others to cell phone conversations.
2. Thou shalt not set thy ringer to play La Cucaracha every time thy phone rings.
3. Thou shalt turn thy cell phone off during public performances.

You get the idea.

http://www.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/00/05/26/000526opwireless.html

Bald Eagle-DDT Myth Still Flying High

"Pennsylvania officials just announced success with their program to re-establish the state’s bald eagle population. But it’s a shame that such welcome news is being tainted by oft-repeated myths about the great bird’s near extinction".

The inconvenient truth about DDT and the demise of the Bald Eagle. Another excellent article from Steven Milloy, editor of JunkScience.com

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,202447,00.html

www.junkscience.com

Free Spyware Detectors

Here are a couple of spyware detectors. You definitely need to be running these (or something like them).

Try either Ewido (originally a Czech product)

http://www.ewido.net/en/download/

or Ad Aware

http://www.download.com/Ad-Aware-SE-Personal-Edition/3000-8022_4-10045910.html?part=dl-ad-aware&subj=dl&tag=top5

Danger ahead!

Welcome to the world's most dangerous road. There are no words on this site. They aren't needed.

http://javimoya.com/blog/pics/200607/bolivia.htm

For my little brother, on his birthday

Here is a trip down memory lane. This was a wonderful magazine that brought us both countless hours of entertainment. We both grew up on a steady diet of the monster movie classics from Universal. There was no better place to start our early adolescent reading than in Famous Monsters of Filmland.

http://www.filmlandclassics.com/

World's Largest Economies

I liked this article so much I thought I would post it. The economy of the USA, at just over $12 Trillion in GDP per year, is nearly three times the next largest economy, that of Japan at $4.5 Trillion. China is presently number four at $2.2 Trillion. I expect that this will change soon.

http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DATASTATISTICS/Resources/GDP.pdf

Notable Quote

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”

-- Sir Francis Bacon

The Deep Web

Estimated to be 550x larger than the "surface web" you know and love. The deep web is all those sites and pages that are "missed" by the web crawlers and spiders used by the search giants.

http://brightplanet.com/pdf/deepwebwhitepaper.pdf

And, of course, you can always read about it at the Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_web

We will talk about this more in the future.

Independence Day

Today, it seems very appropriate to present the document that started it all. Here is the Declaration of Independence. You owe it to yourself to read the original text. It is surprising how appropiate and timely it is. Remember that the signers "mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor". It would be hard to find enough leaders with enough character to sign it today.

Would you have been able to sign it? Would you sign it today?

http://www.washtimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20060703-102558-7068r

More Fourth of July Celebrations

Here is a neat little site that lets you run your own fireworks over the Statue of Liberty, complete with music.

http://www2.aristotle.net/july4th/fireworks/show.html

Unchained Melody

Ask anyone over the age of, say, 30, if they remember the song "Unchained Melody" and they will likely begin to sing you the lyrics — "Oh, my love, my darling/I’ve hungered for your touch/A long, lonely time...".

Here is the story of a 16-year old boy with stars in his eyes, and the girl he wrote about.

http://newstranscript.gmnews.com/news/2003/1203/Front_Page/047.html

Space Shuttle Foam

Did you know that the foam used on the space shuttle was replaced during the Clinton administration with a more environmentally friendly, but more brittle and dangerous foam? Yes folks, the space shuttle was made less safe in the name of political correctness. Now that's what I call an inconvenient truth!

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,77832,00.html

Crushed Hopes

The mayor of New Orleans turned down an offer for the city to make $5 million on the removal of vehicles wrecked by Hurricane Katrina and instead opted for plan that would have cost the city $23 million, for a total swing of $28 million. What a genius.

http://www.snopes.com/katrina/politics/carcrush.asp

Happy Fourth of July!

Here is a little video for the fourth. It shows someone lighting 16,000 firecrackers. Cool. It is amazing how quickly they all go off! Sit back and enjoy it.

http://www.break.com/index/16k.html

Well, I thought that was cool. Then a little while later the boys at Break published an update. A group put together 200x as many firecrackers, for a total of 3.2 MILLION. They set the whole thing off with one fuse. Wow. I wish these guys lived in my neighborhood.

http://www.break.com/index/ultimate_firework.html