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Inmate Idle Singing Con-Test.

Such a simple idea, "let's hold a singing contest". That was the start of things in Arizona's Maricopa County. It's a great article and YouTubes are included of all the finalists performances. Stick around for some soulful renditions of Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay and My Girl.

movie: Fallout 3 Tech demo and gameplay.
The first two were arguably two of the best RPGs ever released for the PC. An apocalyptic setting with 1950s retro style. Black humour and comical violence. Seeing this movie makes me sad it will never be; seeing it set to "Dream a little dream of me" and I'm ready to cry.

For nostalgia's sake, the first intro movies to the first two games.
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These are the winners in the Feature Photography category. Caution: may cause you to tear up.

2007: Renée C. Byer of The Sacramento Bee for her intimate portrayal of a single mother and her young son as he loses his battle with cancer.

2005: Awarded to Deanne Fitzmaurice of the San Francisco Chronicle for her sensitive photo essay on an Oakland hospital’s effort to mend an Iraqi boy nearly killed by an explosion. longer story from SFGate

.Certain that he would die, Hurtubise decided to go out with a bang. He leaped to his feet and pulled out not one, but two, hunting knives (he carries as many as 10 at a time) and, according to his own account of the incident in Outside magazine, told the bear, “Take what you want, but I’ll take both of these knives and I’ll shove them right up your ass.”

More about Troy Hurtubise

A long long weekend, lots of guitar playing and watching movies. What to watch, and what to watch out for:

Grindhouse (2007). A 3-hour flick made up of two 75 minute movies: Planet Terror and Deathproof. PT delivers the goods I expected, zombies, guns, and girls. Respectable, and going beyond the B-movie it could've been. Deathproof brings that wonderful momentum to a screeching halt. The first 40 minutes of the movie are filled with inane back-and-forth between four girls. Maybe there was some witty dialogue in there, but the slow pacing just killed my interest. 2/4

Man of La Mancha (1972). The story of Don Quixote, told by Cervantes, adapted from the Broadway musical play. The word quixotic has popped up in my life from time to time and it was great to see the man for whom the eponym was claimed. The story is inspirational and the songs back up the message well. Sophia Loren is oh so sexy with her accent. 4/4

Ikiru (1952). A change of pace for Akira Kurasawa, there are no samurai or ninja present through the entire 2-1/2 hour film. Instead we follow the office worker who just discovered he has terminal stomach cancer. 30 years in the office doing nothing, his death sentence is his call to ikiru (to live). A beautifully done story. Kurasawa has a great talent for capturing all the human interaction that goes unsaid or might be cut off in a shorter shot. 4/4

Lone Wolf and Cub (1972). Six movies were made from the original manga. For fans of the whole samurai genre it's a must see. Episodes 2-6 each end with Ogami slaughtering an army single-handedly. Also cute are the torrents of blood that gush from each defeated opponent, almost comical in the quantity and velocity.

You got Walt Whitman in my Sinfest!

Fray Tormenta: The real Nacho Libre


amazing. The real Fray Tormenta (Friar Storm) is about 60 years old, still wears the mask and manages an children's shelter, teaching the boys how to wrestle. 

Together with four other luchadors they are the Super Amigos, fighting social wrongs and subject of a documentary of the same name. I will have to watch.

Why Having More No Longer Makes Us Happy

This article popped up in the AlterNet feed today. Lots of great little figures, like income up to $10000 per capita greatly increases happiness, then falls off after that. How in our society community (friends) are more valuable than another coffeemaker. And a strange detour into the efficiency of local farming and how it could yield more per acre than industrialized farming.

Sister Judith Zoebelein, who runs the Vatican's website was recently interviewed. There are several sparkling moments in there, like her humourous take on the question "do you see the possibility of services being run in Second Life?". Invalid video URL.

Anyone know the origin of the phrase "hit its weak point for massive damage"? I've heard it before and I'm guessing it's something as obscure as AYBABTU. My Google-fu has produced nothing so far.

Anyone have a 56k modem (PCI) they would like to sell/give me? My parents decided to save money by going with dialup instead of cable (noone lives at home). I thought I had two, but I must have thrown them out in an tech purge long ago.

My domain expired last night, but thankfully was placed on hold so I could pay. I found out this morning when some pictures I placed on my site were unavailble. It's paid and back now, but there was that brief brief outage.

So, if you sent some really important e-mail in the past day or so, please resend.

Discourse on Kissing

Kissing may be said to be like swimming. The kisser must abandon himself wholly to the business—close his eyes, as it were, and trust to the natural buoyancy of his body to recover himself after the ecstatic plunge. A girl takes a kissing as kittens take to sport, with a natural appetite for the quintessence of its delight. Under the tuition of any girl the most bashful youth soon learns the operation of the lips, and once learned the art is never lost. No rules can be given for the pursuing or the placing of the lips. The suggestion that it might be practiced before the mirror is not worth considering, as there is an intellectual process in the artistic development of a kiss which cannot be stimulated or invoked save under the eye of the owner of the lips that invite and under the tender spell that transforms those lips into the one object in all the world that the lover yearns to taste. The sign of the right sort of a kiss is unmistakable. There is a mounting color in the cheek and a softer glitter in the eyes that tells the story with youth or maid. There is a theory that the mustache plays a leading part in the perfect kiss, but this must be a matter of option, as Byron—who was so fond of kisses, longed to have all the kissable lips in the world made into one mouth that he might kiss it—had no mustache. Julius Cæsar, too, who dropped into kissing as a relaxation, had no beard. Indeed the chronicles of kissing would probably show that the beardless gallants, whose kissing made the happiness of the queens of beauty of old, were none the less effective with lips that knew no beard.

Sweet! Make your own paper Katamari Damacy Guy!

Seeing, touching and smelling the extraordinarily Earth-like world of Titan

Thus, while many of Earth's familiar geophysical processes occur on Titan, the chemistry involved is quite different. Instead of liquid water, Titan has liquid methane. Instead of silicate rocks, Titan has frozen water ice. Instead of dirt, Titan has hydrocarbon particles settling out of the atmosphere, and instead of lava, Titanian volcanoes spew very cold ice.

I don't think I've heard anything that cool about the universe since I was a little kid.