Someone Really Likes Commercials…

Black Table often culls Craiglist for material to make fun of, and I happened upon a particularly scary entry in this recent edition:

For the past 20 years I have recorded EVERY television commercial on CBS, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. From Sony to Salad Shooter from Pontiac to Prego, I’ve captured them all!

Each day at midnight I let a tape record for 6 hours, insert a new tape for recording, and repeat twice more. After that, on my other VCR’s I edit out all the shows, which yields roughly 6 hours and 24 minutes of commercials daily. I now have 46,720 hours of commercials stored on 7,787 VHS tapes.

But I have grown old and weary and would like to leave this legacy of tapes to someone with an equal passion for television commercials who wants to continue the work. Please write to me and let me know why my collection would mean the world to you. Be very specific! The person who shows me the greatest interest will carry on the project.

Regards,

Paul

I should have prefaced this post with the fact that I have every episode of The Simpsons on tape since it started 15 years ago, although I only had the time to edit out the commercials for the first couple of seasons or so :-p. Still, I am now secure in the knowledge that I am not even close to being as obsessed as “Paul,” although it would obviously be an immense undertaking to top the idée fixe that is his “work.”

W Got A Boo-Boo

W got a boo-booW got away from Cheney again this weekend, and this time he fell off his bike at his Crawford, TX ranch, suffering “minor abrasions to his chin, upper lip, nose, right hand and both knees.” An unnamed White House source confirms that W chose a red lollipop and was a “brave little boy” during his subsequent visit to the doctor.

Sometimes, When A Man Loves A Woman…

This is an older story, but I finally read it. Ananova reports that “A German couple who went to a fertility clinic after eight years of marriage have found out why they are still childless – they weren’t having sex.” Apparently, the couple was “brought up in a religious environment [and they] were simply unaware, after eight years of marriage, of the physical requirements necessary to procreate.” Wow, talk about a lack of sex education…

Hubble vs. Webb

Forbes has a nice article about the Hubble Space Telescope and its proposed replacement, the James E. Webb Space Telescope, as Slashdot reports:

Roland Piquepaille writes “According to Forbes, reporting in ”Peering Back At The Universe’s Past,“ space telescopes are really acting as time machines. They can watch objects which are so far from us that light has taken billions of years before reaching their mirrors. The Hubble telescope is able to look at events that took place 13.3 billion light-years ago. But the James E. Webb space telescope, currently under construction, and scheduled to be launched in 2011, will be able to see even further and catch phenomena which happened 13.5 billion light-years ago. The astronomers think the Webb telescope might even be able to see up to 13.7 billion light-years ago, when our universe was just 200 or 300 million years old.

The Robert Piquepaille link contains a table comparing the two telescopes side by side, and the Forbes article does a good job explaining some of the technology behind the Webb telescope.

I posted a couple of months ago that NASA decided not to send a repair mission to Hubble in 2006 that would extend its life, and I still think that is a bad decision. However, in the wake of widespread criticism it sounds as if NASA is developing contingency plans to remotely repair the Hubble rather than sending a manned mission. I wonder whether coming up with an entirely new means of robotic repair will be riskier than sending a manned mission using proven methods, but at least NASA has reopened the door to keeping the Hubble in orbit…

GMail Swap

Google’s new Gmail free e-mail service sounds pretty cool, but I had no idea just how popular it was. Gmail is still in “preview release and limited test” and is by invitation only, but I happened to get one because I am considered an “active Blogger” (Blogger and Google merged last year). What I didn’t know was just how many people were hoping for an invitation. Apparently, hundreds of people clamoring for an invitation are willing to trade all kinds of things (you might just be surprised how far they’d go!) at gmail swap. Maybe I should take a look and see what I can get… 🙂