Let me first warn you that I’m saddling up the high horse.
I have no problem with the childfree — if you don’t want kids, don’t
have ’em — but geez, are the human-only-by-biological-classification
folks in the Childfree LiveJournal community seem as petulant, self-centred and simple-minded as the children they despise.
Bonus reading: Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article Big and Bad: How the S.U.V. ran over automotive safety, in which the author talks about what people worry about when they worry about safety: “not risks,
however commonplace, involving their own behavior but risks, however
rare, involving some unexpected event.”
Both Wendy and I ended up in a dream Kim had the other night. Weird.
I’m extremely busy this week (two major product launches at work), so I present to you some audio from my collection…
Three tracks from the classic 1970s self-help cassette by Eric Weber titled Picking Up Girls Made Easy. I posted The Walking the Dog Pick Up back in June; I’ve included the other two tracks I have from this (unintentionally) hilarious tape:
I
downsampled these and changed them from stereo to mono to shrink the
file sizes; email me if you’d like to get the full-sized versions in
their hi-fi glory.
Also in the “Why the hell was this ever recorded?” category is Brent Spiner (you know him better as “Data” from Star Trek: The Next Generation) singing a barbershop quartet-ish number called It’s a Sin (To Tell a Lie)
[3.8 MB MP3]. What really makes the number is Patrick Stewart
(you lnow him better as “Captain Jean-Luc Picard“) doing the narrative
over the instrumental section.
Colin Viebrock, whom I know through PHP development and other professional channels has an interesting non-programming project: he’s the director of Top Gun! The Musical.
Here’s a quick synopsis from the Top Gun! The Musical site:
comedy about mounting a mega-musical based on the movie Top Gun, make
it Top Gun! The Musical. You’ll laugh. You’ll hum. You’ll believe
a jet can fly!
For anyone who’s ever cringed through Cats, felt the need for speed, or
wondered “who thought that would be a good idea?”, comes this
new satirical musical. Writer Billy Palmer is about to crash and burn.
His musical adaptation of Top Gun is going off the rails and he really
needs a hit … especially after the debacle of Apocalypse Wow!
Instead, he’s saddled with a quarrelling cast, a shady ex-Navy SEAL
producer, and a bit of bad luck. Now if only everyone would stop singing!
Although Top Gun! The Musical has received plenty of critical acclaim
and good “word-of-mouth”, I never got it together to actually go catch
a show…until now. Colin informs me that they’ve been invited to
perform at the first annual New York Musical Festival, and they’ll be doing a couple of perfomances this weekend in order to warm up for the New York shows. You can see Top Gun! The Musical at the Robert Gill Theatre (214 College Street
at St. George Street — 3rd floor, enter off of St. George Street) this
Friday and Saturday. Both performances start at 8:00 p.m. and tickets
are $20.00.
I’m thinking of catching the Friday performance. Who wants to be my wingmen?
Bonus trivia link: Top Gun quotes!
It’s an incredibly busy day today, but here’s some reading material that I recommend:
Mustard now comes in dozens of varieties. Why has ketchup stayed the same?
Because there’s no tentacle hentai, schoolgirl uniforms or good sushi or Kashyyyk (the wookie homeworld).
Back in high school, I’d have gone for the keyboard girl.
use an increase in our incomes, as many of us do, simply to buy bigger
houses and more expensive cars, then we do not end up any happier than
before. But if we use an increase in our incomes to buy more of certain
inconspicuous goods — such as freedom from a long commute or a stressful job — then the evidence paints a very different picture.”
A nice chart [1 MB PDF] for those of you who are following the productivity program outlined in David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done.
A wiki, in case you haven’t heard of such a thing, is a piece of
software (usually web-based, but not necessarily) designed to
allow people to collaboratively add, edit and delete content. Some
notable features that separate a wiki from a plain old content
management system are:
If an entry titled “Accordion” is in the wiki, any occurence of the
word “accordion” in any entry in the wiki will be automatically linked
to the “Accordion” entry.
Wikis keep track of every change made to them and make it possible to
“undo” changes. Coupled with a community, this feature helps to ensure
the integrity of the wiki and protects it from malicious acts while
still maintaining openness.
The best-known wiki at the moment is Wikipedia,
an incredibly useful encyclopedia which boasts over 350,000 articles.
If you’re looking for information, say a quick overview of the Treaty of Westphalia or Maimonides, it’s a good wiki to consult.
But what if you want to know how to win a kinfe fight? Or in a less lethal vein, how to fight and not get your ass kicked? Or even less lethally, how to win a hot dog eating contest? You know, useful stuff? Then you want to consult Everything2.
It’s not quite a wiki — where wikis present articles as a whole, you
append your own two cents to Everything2’s articles rather than edit
them.
Oh yes, you’ll find boooooring articles like a rather detailed summary of the Count of Flanders and a discussion of MP3 sound quality, but you’ll also find:
You know, useful stuff.