Good to see Three Sheets coming to the travel channel in HD. Carrie and I have been watching since the Mojo days. Zane travels the world showing us the local spirits, drinking customs, and hangover cures. Entertaining and educational. Check it out.
Personally, I think Charlie Whitehurst is bizzaro Hasselbeck....
I Like Hasselbeck, and am a bit of a sentimental fan, so in solidarity, I shaved my winter beard... That and my fear of a 'beard tan'. Oh yeah, and I was starting to look like they pulled me out of a 'spider hole'.
I am excited for the Whitehurst era (If there is an era, that means he was worth every cent...) and hope he does well (duh).
An Icelandic volcano, dormant for 200 years, has erupted, ripping a 1km-long fissure in a field of ice.
The volcano near Eyjafjallajoekull glacier began to erupt just after midnight, sending lava a hundred metres high.
Icelandic airspace has been closed, flights diverted and roads closed. The eruption was about 120km (75 miles) east of the capital, Reykjavik.
...
There had initially been fears that the volcano could cause flooding, as it causes ice to melt on the glacier above it, but that scenario appears to have been avoided. However, it could cause more activity nearby, scientists say.
"This was a rather small and peaceful eruption but we are concerned that it could trigger an eruption at the nearby Katla volcano, a vicious volcano that could cause both local and global damage," said Pall Einarsson, a geophysicist at the University of Iceland's Institute of Earth Science, Associated Press news agency reported.
The big chief is now three years old! Getting a little grey beard, though in real life it is quite a bit less. The flash reflects off of the silver pretty strong.
Note - I use treats to get his attention. While it works good, it has it's side effects.... (look closely at #1, easy to spot in #2)
“Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”
-Tom Hanks
Uh, no, it doesn't.
Boy I really wish entertainers would keep their mouths shut, it really puts a sour taste in my mouth when I want to enjoy their product. Sorry Tom, it may sound familiar to a simpleton, but in reality that is a load of crap.
Before WWII we had good relations with the Japanese. China was our ally, a country that is also different racially, and even more culturally than the US.
How does he explain the brutal wars between the Japanese and Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, and Pacific Islanders? The US allied with them against Japan because Japans policies in the Pacific were in tune with Nazi Germany, not because of the Japanese 'believed in different Gods'...
Hanks suggests they wanted to 'kill' us, we wanted to 'anninilate' them. Had they developed a WMD, does TH think they would have hesitated to use it? (They too were working hard to develop them...) Would Tom Hank's Los Angeles look today like a prosperous and modern Tokyo if they instead of us had been successful?
Almost immediately after the war, Japan was an ally with the US against Communism. ...Despite horrible battles such as Iwo Jima and Okinawa that were still pretty fresh in memories...
Hanks apparently has confused the furor of combat — in which racial hatred often becomes a multiplier of emotion for the soldier in extremis — with some sort of grand collective national racial policy that led to and guided our conduct.
Could an innately racist society go through the horror of Okinawa (around 50,000 Americans killed, wounded, or missing), then a few months later in Tokyo have MacArthur ensure a relatively peaceful transition to 'a rather radical new independent and autonomous democratic culture'? (Something that I think is usually overlooked, people stop reading at the signing of the surrender documents on the battleship Missouri)
In Hanks’ case, he is either ignorant and has done little real research, or in politically-correct fashion has taken a truth about combat in the Pacific (perceptions of cultural and racial difference often did intensify the savagery of combat) and turned it into The Truth about the origins and conduct of an entire war — apparently in smug expectation that such doctrinaire revisionism wins applause these days in the right places (though I doubt among the general public that he expects to watch the series.)
I don't think Hanks is a stupid man, so I see it as more of the latter. I find it both sad and scary that there are many who digest crap like this as truth. War is a very ugly complicated bitch, to summarize it like Hanks did above is unfair to history and especially unfair to those who fought for his freedom to live his life how he does.
I'll let Victor Davis Hanson finish it off...
All in all, such moral equivalence (the Japanese and the U.S. were supposedly about the same in their hatreds) is quite sad, and yet another commentary on our postmodern society that is as ignorant about its own past as it is confused in its troubled present.
Slick video of what it would look like if you hung on for dear life to the nose gear of a 747. For kicks, the pilot then lowers the nose gear alone so you could see the aircraft clean. Beautiful!
Came across this while pounding through the Reader today. It is a book on the graphic design of race cars by Sven Voelker.
Most people don’t know that racing cars from the likes of Porsche and Ferrari were given their looks not by marketing strategists or designers, but by chance. Go Faster is a collection of over one hundred examples of racecar design that documents the carefree anarchy in which they were created. In the book, each colorful racing car is featured next to a blank, white model. Thanks to this juxtaposition, Go Faster shows its readers exactly how graphics modulate the look of the vehicle. The neutral models also give readers ample opportunity to imagine their own possibilities for graphic design in motor sports.
Check the video from Gestalten...
Damn, if that isn't in my wheelhouse! Back in the day, I was mesmerized by these cars and their design. The Gulf Porsches? C'mon! I could stare for hours at pictures of them as a kid (magazines were my internet). The book looks so cool that I made my way over to Amazon and ordered up a copy (not a bad price either). This looks is gonna look good on the coffee table.
If I had a good place to display them tastefully, I wouldn't mine having some diecasts of the cars that I love. (That is a Christmas hint y'all, but it doesn't mean get Mike a hundred of the things...)
Note: I am starting a Christmas hint tag so that certain people that complain that they can't find anything for me, can have a few clues to what might make a cool gift.
Read more...
OK Go who first came to my attention with the amazingly simple (yet complex) video on YouTube for their song 'Here it Goes Again' (watch it again, it is genius), has released just released another video. No way could you describe this one as simple!
What a fabulous Rube Goldberg machine! My fav part... The TV.
Added bonus, it is embeddable, thanks in part to an open letter by Damian Kulash of OK Go. It is a good insight to the going ons of the modern music industry.
So, if you liked it, do like I'm going to do, once I repair the powercord to my desktop (Clyde) that has my music collection because I have yet to transfer it to my NAS so I can access it throughout my house... (deep breath) and by a song or two or a whole album of theirs.
Gotta keep your head on a swivel when driving through a construction site...
If that were a real wrecking ball, that thing would have gone right through that car, barely slowing down. That and someone probably wouldn't have yelled "cut!" at 0:16.