Month: November 2006

Cinematical reports that Brian De Palma is making a prequel to The Untouchables entitled Capone Rising. Although De Palma’s involvement is a good sign, I’m thinking that messing with The Untouchables is just sacrilege.

Stylus Magazine has a pretty thorough article entitled U2 vs. R.E.M.. What do you think?

A couple of weeks ago, NASA decided that it would authorize a Space Shuttle mission to save the Hubble Telescope, reversing its earlier controversial decision to allow the telescope to fall into disrepair. In celebration of this great news, take a look at the Top 100 Hubble Images and a short documentary video on The Hubble Deep Field, one of the most important images taken by the telescope.

Update: Parallel Divergence has an informative post sensationally titled How Hubble Killed God that does a good job explaining the significance of the Hubble Deep Field image.

If you were into Commodore 64 games like I was, then most likely at some point you encountered a “cracked” game with an elaborate video “demo” preceding the game. Check out Commodore 64 Demomania, a YouTube compilation of some really cool C64 demos.

The saga of Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager continues in Episode 3 and Episode 4.

Jeremy Zawodny posts:

What if you were planning to retire a Boeing 747SP and leave it on static display?

Easy. You’d get a pilot to fly it there and park the plane.

But what if the facility had a much smaller landing strip than 747s typically land upon?

Easy. You get a really good pilot to land it.

Check out the YouTube video of the 747SP landing at Rand Airport.

Lifehacker posted a pretty neat tip about getting a quick weather forecast. The link weather.gov/#####, where ##### is your ZIP code, goes to the NOAA weather forecast for that ZIP code. This handy URL makes it easy to bookmark a forecast for your city, and it is also a prime candidate for a custom Firefox keyword bookmarklet. To create one, open your Bookmarks menu and add a new bookmark. Add these entries:

• Name: NOAA Weather  [my choice; call it whatever you want]
• Location: http://weather.gov/%s
• Keyword: wx  [my choice; use whatever you want]
• Description:  [optional]

Once you add that bookmark, to get weather for any ZIP code, just type “wx 20657” for this example (substitute wx for whichever keyword you chose). Very cool… 🙂

I use the Firefox keyword bookmarklet method for many other sites, including dictionary, thesaurus, acronym, IMDB searches. I’d be happy to detail those if there’s any interest; let me know in the comments…

In a stunning turn of events, The Onion reports that Politicians Sweep Midterm Elections. Republicans quickly blamed their losses in the election on the Democrats.

Now that George Allen has conceded to Jim Webb, Democrats have taken control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, a sign that voters are fed up with the current administration and the Republican-led Congress.

As a result of these sweeping changes, Stephen Colbert called it quits on his show last night in an angry tirade.

The Right Was Right has a 25-point manifesto of immediate changes that the new Democrat-controlled Congress will now implement, including:

• Border fence replaced with free shuttle buses
• Pledge of Allegiance in schools replaced with morning flag-burning
• Comatose people to be ground up and fed to poor
• Outlaw all firearms: previous owners assigned to anger management therapy
• Ban Christmas: replace with Celebrate our Monkey Ancestors Day
• Carter added to Mount Rushmore

One of my favorite classical works is Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite. WFMU’s Beware of the Blog has a nice post detailing songs influenced by In The Hall of the Mountain King, the last and probably most famous piece in the suite. Some of the influenced songs may surprise you, and the post includes MP3 excerpts of those songs as well as some performances of the original work.

Cinematical reports that a sequel to Harold and Kumar is in the works, supposedly to take place in Amsterdam. I hope it’s as funny as it sounds…