This is kind of cool but also kind of creepy. Just watch the video. It’s a video of a japanese robot onto which they put a head of Albert Einstein.
Cool or Creepy?
Aug 30
Tuesday Trivia
Aug 30
Well,
I joined a team of friends for Tuesday night trivia at Vituchi’s on North Ave. Short story, we won the second round and got a $100 bar tab there. Woo!
A Weekend at the Fair
Aug 9
I was never really a ‘State Fair’ type of person. I have no disdain or active dislike towards fairs, I just don’t feel any pressing need to go to them. When I was younger and in scouts, I recall going to the Wisconsin State Fair a few times, but since then it had probably been about 20 years since I had stepped foot on the grounds.
That trend seems to be changing as I’ve now gone to the State Fair three times in the last three years; Each time for the sole purpose of seeing a band. This year it wasn’t even for a nationally known act, but rather to see a local cover band called Rhythm Method. Rhythm Method is a band I discovered about 4 years ago while at Summerfest. That day I had gotten to the Summerfest grounds a bit early and had several hours to kill before any of my friends would be coming down to meet me. Looking on the schedule I saw a band called ‘Light Up’ which was billed as a Styx tribute band. Having always liked Styx (one of top 5 bands all time) , and at that time, having never seen Styx live, I figured I’d check them out. I was blown away. The singer sounded exactly like Dennis Deyoung and the band recreated the Styx sound to perfection. They sounded more like Styx than the real deal did since Styx was no longer touring with Dennis DeYoung. After their show, they mentioned that ‘Light Up’ was the named they used for their Styx Tribute show but for most of the year they went by the name of ‘Rhythm Method’ and were a 70′s and 80′s rock cover band. I made it a priority to see them in their Rhythm Method guise. They did not disappoint, and have completely changed my opinion on cover bands…in that they have set the bar in which a cover band should strive for. They are just that good.
Anyway, I went to the Wisconsin State Fair on Friday with my friend Gwenn to see Rhythm Method. She was very impressed with the show and vowed to see them again with me sometime. The fair itself was uneventful, we had no time to look at anything else, so other than drinking and eating fair food we did little beside listen to the band.
On Saturday I went to the Ozaukee County fair with a bunch of people. The itenerary there was to walk around the fair for a few hours and then go see the Demolision Derby at 7pm.
The Fair, being a county fair as opposed to state fair, was somewhat small but they did have the usual buildings full of animals so I saw my fair (pun intended) share of pigs, rabbits, chickens, ducks, horses, cows, goats, and rednecks.
The last, being a species our group actively seeks out during fairs outings as part of a drinking game. The rules of which are simple and few:
1) If you see a mullet, everyone drinks.
2) If you see a family or couple in matching outfits everyone drinks half their glass.
The girls in the group decided to play a game in addition to this one they called ‘Your new boyfriend’, which was basically finding the most redneck, or red neckish stereotype they could find and declaring that this would such and such’s new boyfriend. Ok, stupid but we were pretty drunk by the end of the day.
My highlight of the day was winning a stuffed monkey at the midway in a game of Carney pool. Carney pool is basically a regular bar-sized pool table in which there are 4 balls racked. You need run all four without missing or scratching to win.
Now I’ve been practicing my pool game quite a bit over the last 6 months or so, and for me to run 4 balls in a row (in any order) is frankly somewhat easy. I should be able to do this 75-80% of the time. One of my practice/warmup drills is to throw 4 balls on the table and then try to run them IN ORDER, and I can do this about half the time, so having to do it in any order seemed pretty easy to me.
I realize that not everyone is good at pool and that for an average person running four balls without missing is going to be somewhat difficult. Still, I wondered if the game was rigged somehow to prevent a good pool player from just cleaning the carney out. Well once I saw the pricing I realized there was no gimmick to the game. For this particular game the pricing had 4 tiers, each tier allowing you to pick a larger stuffed prize if you won; $2, $5, 10$, $20. In essence, all you were actually doing was buying the stuffed animal outright and then playing the game for the right to take it home. Whether you made all 4 or not, the Carney still had your money for a prize in which he probably paid half as much for to stock.
Still, I won on my first try and gave the prize (A stuffed monkey riding a banana) to Gwenn for her kickball team (The Drunken Monkey).
The demo derby was very fun for about the first 10 minutes, after which I became increasingly bored. Thankfully, a steady supply of beer and good company help pass the time.
I will say one thing about fairs I don’t like; The food. Well, let me rephrase that, I like the way the food tastes, I just don’t like the what it does to me. I gained almost 10 pounds over the weekend due to eating nothing but deep fried snickers, oreo cookies, cheese, nachos, burgers, brats, and various other fair goodies. Ah well, just need to make my bike rides this week a bit longer to work it off.
I Am Not A Techno-idiot
Aug 4
It’s come to my attention that lately there has been a lot of talk on the Interwebs about my speech regarding network neutrality and how the intertubes work. Most of this criticism seems to be coming from a vocal minority of the interweb community known as the bloggerings. Well, I’ve had my staff do some research into this community and let me tell you, this is a whole lot of ado about nothing.
These bloggerers, are trying to make it seem like I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about when it comes to the inner workings of the interweb. Well I have one question to put to these spoiled brats who have nothing better to do all day than to do bloggering, play games on their Playboxes and X-Stations, and download stolen music onto their iTunes pod, and that is, ‘Are any of you Chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation?’ No? I didn’t think so.
So I don’t know where you get off telling me I don’t understand how the internets works. I am not a techno-idiot. When I said the internets is made up of a series of ‘tubes’ I wasn’t being literal. I was using an analogy for the benefit of all my less techno-savvy constituents. I know damn well the interweb isn’t literally made up of tubes, it’s made from pipes. Everyone knows that. Now pipes have been around for ages, however in times past they mostly were used to carry water, and that’s how most of my older constituents perceive them. When the new internet pipes came out in the 90′s many people became confused on how they worked. So to prevent confusion and prevent having to go into a long drawn out explanation of how interweb pipes don’t carry water but rather carry the internets, bloggerings, and other material I chose to use the term tubes as an analogy.
So all you bloggerers out there can just stick your bloggerings where the sun don’t shine. It may come as a surprise to you, but not only am I fully versed on how the interweb operates, but I also keep up with technology in other niches. For instance I have my own space site, which I use for my fan club. Go internet it at http://www.myspace.com/tedstevensfanclub. That right, it’s my space site, you spoiled bloggerers are not the only ones who have your own space site.
I also have an iTunes pod which is filled with empty three files from all sorts of wholesome artists such as Neil Diamond and The Osmonds. I’d just like to mention that unlike most of the bloggerers out there, I didn’t steal my empty three files from any interweb peer sharer either. I paid for them online from the ipod tunes.
Finally, I’d just like to say that these bloggerers are clearly unfamilair with economic issues such as how supply and demand can affect limited resources such as the interweb pipes. If we don’t provide a means for companies to control the material flowing through these pipes we’re all going to be in trouble once they all get clogged up. Even I will admit that the concept of having an interweb that isn’t regulated is a great idea, but it just doesn’t work in real life. What happens is people start to use the interweb for frivolous activities such as sharing, personal opinion, bloggering, and access to non-government supplied information. We didn’t build it for that. If that’s what you want to use it for then I think you should either build your own internets or be forced to pay a fee for the priviledge of forefilling your dalliances. That’s all I’m saying. Everyday I hear of some new way to use the interweb. Just a few days ago I heard of a site called U-tube. This interweb lets people internet videos and creates just vast amounts of material in the pipes. This hurts the company’s which lay the interweb pipes because now they can’t charge as many people to use the pipes as they once could. This isn’t right, and it’s isn’t American! So to all you bloggerers out there, get off your high-horses and stop playing your X-stations for a few minutes and try to educate yourself on how the real world operates, because you’re not living in the real world. You’re living in the cybermatrix, and the cybermatrix is just an imaginary place, regardless of how much you think it isn’t.
Thank you,
– Senator Ted Stevens (R)
As a Guinness drinker and a fan of darker beers in general, The various Miller products (MGD, Lite, etc) have always tasted like water to me, so I couldn’t help but find this story quite funny.
Basically a judge ruled that a man being accused of buying beer for a minor could not be prosecuted because the prosecution could not prove that Miller MGD was in fact beer.
The Judge must be a microbrew or Guinness man. Too bad an appeals court overturned his ruling.
Also ironic is the fact that the judge’s last name is ‘Sprecher’ (as in Sprecher Breweries). Hmmm. Either this story is bogus or it’s a case of delightful coincidence
New Favorite Blog
Jul 31
Well it’s not really a blog, or at least not a real one. It’s a satirical personal journal of President Bush, so if you get upset at things poking fun of our president, do yourself a favor and just don’t follow the link.
I happen to think it’s pretty funny and quite well done (though I think the mispellings and grammar are a bit over the top even for satire), but I know many out there will not find it funny in the least.
Here is the link to Dear Leaders Daily Thought
Relaxing
Jul 31
Well I had the first nice relaxing weekend in awhile now. No schedule, no pre-set plans or ideas, just driving up to my parents camper/trailer on the 28th and coming back on Sunday the 30th.
My good friend Evyn joined me for the weekend, which worked out well I think as she has been under some stress as of late and I think the ‘laid-back’ weekend was helpful for her as well.
As much as I tease my parents about their ‘camping’ due to their trailer which has a shower, microwave, sink, toilet, oven, refrigerator, freezer, 21″ TV, VCR/DVD, 2 easy chairs, a couch/pull-out bed, and a king sized bed, I was thankful for it this weekend due to the heat. Their trailer has air conditioning and I shudder to think how terrible the weekend could have turned out if we had to sleep in tents or had no respite from the 94+ degree weather.
I brought my telescope, guitar and amp up, Evyn brought her bocce ball set. We played an ‘improvised rules’ version of bocce ball that I’m sure would have made any self-respecting Italian man cry, but I’ll argue our version was much more fun. Since it involved a playing area with no boundaries, a beer in one hand at all times rule, and since obstacles on the playing field were allowed (including dogs), it made for a rather exciting and fun game.
I was also able to get a hand-me-down digital camera from my parents as they had just purchased a mid-range 6 megapixal model. So I finally have a digital camera. I plan on getting a nice SLR pro-sumer camera sometime in the next year, but this will hold me over until then, and at least it will allow me to start posting some pics.
On Sunday after packing, but before leaving to head back to Milwaukee, one of the local hummingbirds found my parent’s feeder and spent most of the next hour or so sipping from it for a few minutes, then flying away only to return a few minutes later to repeat the process. I tried to get a good picture of him, but he is still too untrusting of me and flew off when I tried to move in closer, here is the best shot I was able to get.
Shuttle Docking
Jul 28
A very cool picture of the Space Shuttle as it approaches the International Space Station to dock.
Louisville, KY – A small tsunami measuring approximately 4 feet high terrified small children and frightened dozens at a local park pool in Louisville today. The wave, which originated in the deep end of the pool traveled the nearly 100 feet to the shallow end in under 6 seconds, giving parents and children wading there little time to react.
Though there were no reported casualties, several small children were knocked off their feet, pushed into the side of the pool, or became caught in the undertow as the wave receded and dragged out towards the deep end of the pool. The wave also reportedly caused several items of property to be displaced or lost.
‘It was horrific!’, Patty Gilberg sobbed, ‘ There was nothing I could do. One minute I was playing with my daughter Hana, and the next thing I know is this giant waves hits me, and before I can recover I see Hana being dragged back towards the deep end of the pool screaming’. Pausing to compose herself, Gilberg continued, ‘If it wasn’t for rope dividing the deep end from the shallow, my Hana might have been swept completely out of her end.’
Eye witness accounts indicate that the source of the wave came from the failed dive attempt of one Derrick Higgins, 32. Higgins, who weighs a reported 368 pounds, stated that as he moved towards the end of the diving board on the 5 meter platform, he slipped, causing him to fall the 15 feet to the water in a spasm of uncontrolled contortion and flailing and not in the graceful splashless dive he originally intended.
Officials have promised an investigation to determine if any policy should be created or if they should install some type of tsunami warning system. In the meantime Robert Yuless, Louisville Parks Supervisor, gave the following advice regarding pool tsunamis.
Who thinks of this stuff?
Jul 18
This was actually pretty funny (at least I couldn’t help laughing). Pong and space invaders done stop motion style with people seated in an auditorium. It’s better than it sounds.
Some people just have way too much time on their hands.
CORRECTION: This is not stop motion video, but rather was put together using digital processing. Still cool nonetheless.