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Oh cool - more info on the Atari Bradley Tank Trainer that gave Star Wars its awesome controller Hark! Starting with a rare 5-star.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★	I Listened Apes of the State	This song resonates for me on a few levels - the defence after being accused of not listening, the sense of dumb but self-aware feminine longing....
	Angel in Flip-Flops Steve Martin & Only Murders in the Building – Cast	Funnyish song... its onomatopoeia for flip-flops ('pitta putta' is catchy)
★ ★ ★ ★	Obsessed Addison Rae	"You say you're obsessed with me / So I took a second and I said me too / I'm obsessed with me as much as you"
	The Slow Drug PJ Harvey	I think I missed out on PJ Harvey a bit. I always think that when I hear Dan Bern's song praising "Chick Singers"
	Bad Liar Selena Gomez	This mode of music is very catchy.
★ ★ ★ ★	Swingin' The Alphabet The Three Stooges	Ripped from the youtube - merry nonsense pitterpatter song, makes me think of my Papa Sam, from traditional watch stooges on NYE.
	Re: Your Brains Jonathan Coulton	Novelty song about zombies. Funnier in theory than practice.
★ ★ ★ ★	Amazing Grace Judy Collins	I'm a secular person but this song is transcendent. If you squint really hard you can make a poetic, non-supernatural interpretation.
	Imperfectly Ani DiFranco	Melissa reminded me of this song, and its mood of being scared of the other person's reaction.
	Beat Goes On (Rhythm to the Brain) Campbell	Goofy fun clubby sound
	Sah Sah Nancy Ajram & Marshmello	Saw this on a Tik Tok about "when you tell your arab mom you're craving hamburgers" (and the bit of food-porn that results)
	Tetris Flap!	Arun got pointed me to this group, kind of a Squirrel Nut Zippers energy, and love this take on "Tetris" (Korobeiniki) - with lyrics about the game. And a tuba.
	Pump It Up (2021 Remaster) Elvis Costello & The Attractions	My friend Carrie mentions if you want this bassline played at about 2/3 to 3/4 speed, she's your woman.
★ ★ ★ ★	Enjoy Yourself Flap!	Always love the vibe of "Enjoy Yourself / It's Later Than You Think" (Thanks Arun)
	Hi Ren Ren	Singer personifying and singing with his mental illness
★ ★ ★ ★	Beastie Boys Tribute Paul Meany / Beastie Boys	I think cmg posted this one ... 3 beastie boy tracks with additional drum and guitar and keyboard tracks you can see being put down live in studio...

Aw, kitty had belly shaved for an ultrasound a while back...

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Wait, what is 'Eating Remote'?

I'm taking Facebook off my phone, I think. Not as a grand repudiation of the site, as problematic as it is (-it's unfortunately about the only place a small-time blogger-wannabe can get eyeballs and feedback...) but just as something that doesn't need to be quite so available to fill idle moments. please gaze upon The Calm Down Toad

via Quincy Jones, a towering figure who is now WAY beyond having any craps to give about what anyone thinks, recently gave an amazing interview - rambling from his thoughts on musical artistry to race and political secrets. Sounds like this joint production / video didn't quite live up to his standards, but I really liked it (always a fan of mashups)

Also, he has a few Stories for GQ....

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Trump's Hair: Republican in the front, dreams of a lost playboy youth and virility that can never be regained and must be guarded with a facade of bluster and piss-colored thread on the sides, skinhead in the back.

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I'd love to see a close reading of "Storage Wars". Between the probability of ginned-up rooms, the silent tragic stories implicit in so many of the abandonings, the so-often-idiotic, so-often-devious machinations of the regulars (conveniently coded as archetypes in the opening credits) the visceral build and release of the gambling aspect, and the weird way the show takes the people's word for the street value of so much of the junk (I mean it's really tough to actually SELL crap, right? Ebay has made everything a buyer's market.)


--from the bootleg game "Mario 3: Around the World" for the Sega Genesis" via SupperMarioBroth. These screens were much more hip than the gameplay video suggests.

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Hate to rain on your parade, Patriots fans, so we're going to go with a wintry mix.

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New weblog entry, about an old blog about a designer horrified at an interview at "X10.com". In thinking about how webdesign has changed over the years, I was trying to remember the URL for http://fabianburghardt.de/webolution/ with a neat time slider for trends over the decades, but I also found a brief history of web design for designers outlining some of the biggest trends.

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Also... my startpage kirkzilla circa 2001 vs now. So funny that I had my own homebrew webmail for a while, til it got swamped by Spam.

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That liberal guilt feel when you realize how much happier you are dealing with a lot of January "at least you don't have to shovel rain" vs what the snow accumulation might otherwise be to this point.

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valentine blender Man. Conceptually brilliant video: riding away "at the speed of light" from the Sun, and all the way out past Jupiter 3/4 hour later. I guess it makes me sad because compared to the distances involved, light doesn't seem all that fast.
It's so weird seeing interplanetary motion put in such human-relatable visual terms. Of course, if you could get up to those speeds, much less time would seem to have elapsed, and there are other reasons this video isn't "accurate". Still, sometimes I think sci-fi that projects us moving inward (to VR) rather than outward (to space) might have it right.

Riding Light from Alphonse Swinehart on Vimeo.

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You know, a decade ago I saw some water marked with a Kosher sign, and it got me wondering how it could possibly not be - I mean how far away from "don't cook a calf in the milk of it's mother, that's cruel" do we have to get? Well, thanks to a reference in "Broad City", now I see a better justification! NYC water is imbued with seamonkeys, basically, and so is not Vegan and maybe not Kosher...

Maradona has the ball, two mark him, he touches the ball. The genius of world football dashes to the right and leaves the third and is going to pass to Burruchaga. It's still Maradona! Genius! Genius! Genius! Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. Gooooooooooal! Gooooooooooal! I want to cry! Dear God! Long live football! Gooooooooooal! Diegoal! Maradona! It's enough to make you cry, forgive me. Maradona, in an unforgettable run, in the play of all time. Cosmic kite! What planet are you from? Leaving in your wake so many Englishmen, so that the whole country is a clenched fist shouting for Argentina? Argentina 2, England 0. Diegoal, Diegoal, Diego Armando Maradona. Thank you, God, for football, for Maradona, for these tears, for this, Argentina 2, England 0.

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"How do you explain a sunset if there is No God?" Dunno, Copper! Maybe--Earth's ORBIT? How do you explain HEMORRHOIDS and BIRTH DEFECTS and RELIGIOUS WARS without GOURD? Did God also make Chex Mix?

For a more measured but less entertaining list of those "Questions by Creationists" making the rounds and some thoughtful responses, see this Slate piece

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If the aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it.

Week 4 Day 2 of RunWalkRun. (It will be interesting to see what Saturday holds, road conditions-wise.) At first I thought it was silly to feel bad about the runners who zip by me even in my "running" phase, since I'm sure they've been doing it much longer than I have, but then it made me realize I don't know if I'm feeling much progress. Looking at the run history, I guess the app is upping the pace gradually. From 15 minute miles to 13. Hmm.

Gradual improvement is really hard to notice.

I wonder if I should adjust the default 1 min run/ 1 min walk to something like 2 minute run / 1 min walk. From that Quora What's Your Favorite Parable? page:

Alice and Bob were walking in the woods when a snarling tiger jumped out in front of them.

Alice bent down and starting changing into running shoes.

"Why are you doing that?" asked Bob. "You can't outrun a tiger."

"I don't have to out..." said Alice before the tiger sank its razor-sharp death teeth into the soft flesh around her jugular. It takes at least a minute to change shoes, and the tiger was only, oh, let's say 20 meters away to begin with.

Then the tiger killed Bob, too. Not because it was hungry. Just because it lived for the moment when it saw the life go out of its victims' eyes.

Moral: Tigers are nature's perfect killing machine. By the time you see one, it's already too late.

--Mark Eichenlaub, graduate student in physics

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atheists in hiding in America. People don't want to know that you don't have to take things on faith.

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It's an atheist straw man argument to say having faith means you have to accept any horrible things done for faith, but you do have to admit something judges horribleness, and that something needs to stand outside and ultimately have precedence over faith. Which would be blasphemy.

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Over a year later and this nearly jokeless cartoon of Einstein thinking "What the Fart?" still amuses me.

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http://debbiespenditnow.com -- most obnoxious political attack page, most fun scrolling up and down HTML5!

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I'd like to believe that I'd know and love "Sam & Dave" even if they weren't what the Blues Brothers had on their car's 8-track.
--via

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Packers really are a special team. Their unique community ownership gives us insights into the NFL's depths as well.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BPFODsob1I - decent enough spot for the Xoom, but wow, the eyes on that gal...
--Elevator Panel Detail from 133 Federal Street in Boston, MA

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Note to self: if the page you googled up about recording video on PC is talking about "Windows Millennium Edition" it's probably too old.

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Things I am sick of: usb gadgets lacking 64-bit windows drivers. Endless Microsoft updates. Shitty HP hardware.

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after the Superbowl Google Ad Hey, this Google thing looks pretty nifty! Ball's in your court, Altavista.

--Maybe you had to be there back in the day, but hearing the "a capella" of the entire Mega Man experience for this level is kind of mind blowing, not to mention super cute. (more of these)

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Watching Vicky Christina Barcelona. Is it me or does everyone in a Woody Allen movie sound like they're doing a Woody Allen impression?

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Only unfufilled love can be romantic.

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Is being out in direct sunlight supposed to be energizing? Do sunglasses diminish that?

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Hearing about Lincoln on NPR makes me wonder if Mel Gibson is like the best John Wilkes Booth our era could come up with.

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I had forgotten that the Little Engine That Could was female. SHE THINKS SHE CAN SHE THINKS SHE CAN I so greatly admire the "push to cross street" button near the Starbucks at Mass Ave and Medford St. You press it, instantly the traffic light turns yellow, then red and you get to cross! It's like some miracle of responsive technological design, I feel so empowered-- I have a simmering suspicion that every other button of this type is a mere placebo.

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Comic of the Moment

--My latest entry to the Sketchbook Conspiracy Less Filling Comic Jam. I was a little grumpy that 2 people had to defer their involvement so I had to do mine much sooner than I would have otherwise, and that explains some of the crapness. (Also I tried just just penciling it as a single sheet, and attempted some shading.) I like this version to the cleaned up higher contrast version Miller made.

click to use

"The Twenty-one Secondary Sins" // source code // built with Processing Click (or drag between) any two sins to see their combination. Creative content lovingly stolen from Jessica Hagy's We're All Going to Hell at Indexed.

Arguably, this misses some of the charm of the the original by removing the formal notation and sense of figuring things out, but I'm going to pretend it has its own sense of exploration. In any case, I hadn't programmed much of anything for a few weeks, and so this was, in part, to keep me in practice. Quote of the Moment

Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence.

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Image of the Moment

--via the Cellar, Massive debris-clearing robot from Japan. Real mecha! Hey, the Pats won again! "Dynas-three": 3 wins, each by 3 points. (I find it kind of neat to look at the "kisrael.com coverage" for the 2002 and 2004.)

I guess the thing I really noticed was how badly the Eagles handled the clock in the last half of the last quarter. The Pats aren't perfect but you never see them making that kind of mistake.

Was over at FoSO's house, with their big old high-def video projector mojo working...Evil B and wife were also in attendance, 10 or so people in all. I apologize for all the cussing. I just love cussing during games, it makes it more fun.

Slate proclaims the Pats the lamest dynasty in sports. Well, whatever. The one point I agreed with was the lameness of most of the Pats' post-score or -interception celebrations-- generally just imitating T.O.'s wing flap. It would have been at least a little funny if they made it into the chicken dance instead. As it was, it just said "Yeah, we know we're not as big a star as that guy, but neener-neener, we scored anyway."

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Quote of the Moment

Once you accept that most women are evil, that most men are predictable pigs, and that someone is always on a moral crusade, the world's not such a bad place.

I used this as the top of the page quote for the February issue of the Blender of Love. Huh, you know what? I totally forgot to call this month's edition the "Valentine Issue" like I usually do...oh well.

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Lego Creation of the Moment

--"Untitled" by Johnson Fan. I brought a Lego Advent Calendar (that I had received too late to use 'properly') into work. I had fun making a big assyemtrical edifice, but Johnson did me one better by using pretty much all the remaining pieces in one giant rolling masterpiece.

Cards of the Moment
The Best Valentine Cards I've seen since the Onion's (second link back to kisrael.com, I don't think they've republished 'em yet this year.)

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Tool of the Moment
So, for a while I was thinking about loading up my Amazon wishlist with the stuff I wanted. The trouble is, for years I've been keeping the same list on my palm pilot...and I still wanted to do that, since for some stuff I do have a preference for buying from a local merchant so I'd like the list at hand. (Or, gasp, sometimes I even use the library.) So what this is is a tool that takes my Amazon wishlist and puts it into a text-only format that I can put onto my PDA.

Enter your email address as it is on Amazon, and it will come back with your wishlist. After you've loaded the full list once, you can then filter by type. (book, video, dvd, etc)

><>    wishfish    <><
email:
format:	html table tab delimited title only title(author) title--author
about

I learned some stuff from this as I transferred my stuff from the Palm into Amazon...it mostly just works for books, most of the videos and cds I listed I mean to rent or research first, I wouldn't neccesarily want to own them, so I only amazon'd the stuff I wouldn't mind having some day. If you're curious, here's my amazon wishlist...

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Link of the Moment
Clinical descriptions of self-bondage related deaths. Sounds extremely humiliating...you'd die of embarrassment if you weren't dead already. (Do a Ctrl-F "Find" for "Volkswagen" for one of the oddest ones.)

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Quote of the Moment

"Worst Vegetable of the Year: The brussels sprout. This is also the worst vegetable of next year."

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Update of the Moment
The new Blender of Love is here. Honestly, I don't think this was one of its better months. There were 2 or 3 really good works, fewer than sometimes. Plus I'm all dark and bitter and goofy in the intro.

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Politics of the Moment
Yet more reasons to be glad Joe Lieberman is out of the race...he might just be the Emporer from the Star Wars prequels... (Thanks John!) As you can see, my new comment system is more or less in place. I still haven't made past comments viewable in the archives, but I'll get to that. I hope it fosters some interesting talk...I think "Bozo" on the guestbook helped to get me moving, with his topical comments. Anyway, it'll be depressing if it's always 0 comments 0 comments 0 comments, and lame if I seed it myself, so feel free to add some comments... (Actually it'll be interesting to see if this site has enough critical mass to make this worthwhile, I don't know if I'll keep the feature if not...on the other hand, even high-traffic sites line boingboing have articles with 0 comments, so I shouldn't be too judgmental.)

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Image of the Moment

--Graveyard at Wansford Church, England, June 2002, taken with IR film. The photographer, J.S. Drewnicki, AIM'd me about the mortality guide. I'm considering adding this image to it... very evocative of other visions of deathscapes I've seen.

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Breaking News of the Moment
Word is (though the story isn't officially out yet) the threat level is being moved to a delightful soothing Orange. Just like the delicious sweet clementines my employer has recently provided for its loyal workforce. Yum, yum! (For a hollow laugh, check out Joseph Calzaretta's threat level reference I kisrael'd previously.)

Here are two bets I'd like to see: will the threat level ever be reduced to "Green" in my lifetime? (Duhrr, no.) And, as a betting pool question:
What's the next attack on US soil going to be:

• Dep't of Homeland Security will work things out, no major attacks.
• Traditional explosive in a public place; NYC = Tel Aviv
• Calvalcade of Snipers
• Anthrax or similar by mail
• Chemical attacks in urban areas
• Biological attacks...sneezing and sniffling warriors for Allah infecting the land
• Dirty Bomb
• Full monty nuke
• Food contamination
• Aircraft or explosives against power plants or fuel supplies

Feel free to use the new Comments page to weigh in...hey, wasn't our plans against Iraq supposed to make us safer? Today...I try to be funny. Or rather, I try to co-opt other people's funny for my own sinister purposes. Also, I made a minor improvement to the archive links, figuring viewing the past two weeks was a better option than only being able go to the by-month archive.

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Drolly Funny Trivia of the Moment

Before the falling-Pinto scene could be filmed, the filmmakers had to get certification from the Federal Aviation Administration for the Pinto. This was done by conducting preliminary drop tests to ensure that it would not behave as an airfoil and drift from its target line when dropped from a great height.

That's a pretty cool mental image, actually.

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Line of the Moment

Peter Marshall: What are "dual-purpose cattle" good for that other cattle aren't?
Paul Lynde: They give milk... and cookies, but I don't recommend the cookies.

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Link of the Moment
Now this is funny: Brunching Shuttlecocks Rates The Powertools. Ok, that's it, I'm not walking to work any more, at least until the weather is nice. Not enough people clear off their sidewalk of snow and ice, and I'm worried it'll give me an "excuse" to stop stairmastering. Considering one is a leisurely stroll and the other is actual exercise, that wouldn't be a great tradeoff.

The cartoon is from doodles I used to at school. It took me a while to realize I had given him the same name as Don Marquis' cockroach poet.

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Link of the Moment
a short and happy life is a great semi-daily-updated website. K.Thor Jensen puts together something that's worth the daily click, pop-culture flotsam and jetsam, personal essays, multipanel cartoons he's done, music from his old two person band. One game he's developed is to masquerade as a_m_b_e_r_4_e_v_e_r, a 14 year old girl, on various chatrooms, trolling for people looking for cybersex then turning the tables on them in various ways. This one made me laugh out loud. Also, a long time ago I featured I Am The Stupidest Man Alive as the love blender feature selection.

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Typo of the Moment

kirkli: good day, sinshine.