cool down

http://desparchando.com/ilustraciones-de-tatsuyuki-tanaka/

All these years...

Why does dublin only ever burn when i want to take the tram?

Little horseys say hello.

Man I hate that first show!

This is relevant to my interests

The pope speaks.

Man, what an outrageous dream. I dreamt that I was present at an address by the pope. He was giving his yearly address on science. There were many important people at the address. Then afterwards I got top wander around in the gardens in the Vatican I took pictures with my camera phone. Then I had a personal meeting with the Pope where he told me about what life was like being the pontiff. Later after my alarm went off and i went back to snoozing I talked to Barny about having met the pope. He didn't believe me and I tried to show him the pictures and was shocked to find that they were all of some previous (also fictitious) visit to a German folk museum.

WTF?

My theory, is that with the recent spate of bad press Pope Benedict XVI (who was the head of the inquisition for 23 years) has had to dust off 'The Throne of the Rock'. A secret mind control device hiding deep under St Peter's, charged with Apostolic power. Of course the main target is Ireland and I must have been caught in the splash damage.

So maybe I will have to write a book about this. Unless somebody steals my tenuous and highly ridiculous story. Dan Brown, I am looking at you!

http://www.privateislandsonline.com/

Play

why do drug barons never dress well?

Withnail & I

The 60s was such that nobody was really quite sure what was going on. Everybody was taken quite by surprise that something was going on. So, as a result all the recollections are of a time that had just disappeared; Spat out into the sad 1970's. All the idealists had to say something profound and just ended up communicating a sense of loss. Withnail and I is a British version of Fear and Loathing. Being British, the description of excess is filled with infinitely more self-loathing and significantly less of a feeling of entitlement.
That said, the brilliant exposition of dank English grime made me miss that horrible country all the more. At least in England you feel like you are somewhere of import. The dreadful closeness juxtaposed with brilliant pastoral countryside made the period seem wonderfully incongruous. Jimmi Hendrix ushered us in and out of London which was the only place the revolution ever made it to while it was still fresh. The English country-side then as now remains firmly planted in post war austerity and an imagined remnant of King George.

I wish I could say more but it made me feel sad and happy at the same time. The drug dealer Danny was the fool and thus was best able to sum up the sentiment of the film:

"If you're hanging on to a rising balloon, you're presented with a difficult decision - let go before it's too late or hold on and keep getting higher, posing the question: how long can you keep a grip on the rope? They're selling hippie wigs in Woolworths, man. The greatest decade in the history of mankind is over, and as Presuming Ed here has so consistently pointed out, we have failed to paint it black. "

3 1/2 stars

Saturday cleaning.

And generic fantasy land is safe once again!

Actually I thought it was a bit short.

What a wonderful world!

Ahahah Scarlett Johannson you nasty tramp, the things I would do to you!

Via: Online Schools

So stinking cute!

F is for the Fantastic Four saving the Finnish Ambassador from Fred Flinstone who's Flinging Flaming Fajitas at his Ford Fiesta.

"Really, you break into my manor wearing bright red leather pants, walk around on a marble floor in hard leather boots, and don't even bother to stuff the god drat baubles you pilfered deep enough into your thief sack to prevent them from falling out and clattering on the floor? Did you just dual-class into rogue from stupid bitch or what? You're a halfling for gods' sakes, not the spider monkeys of Ba'lor. You need a rope to get in and out of a one story residential building?

Okay, now you're crying. I'm sorry, I realize it's tough being a female halfling with a dark and mysterious past in this city, but you did just try to steal my precious wizard jewels. I'll be level with you, you got some pretty banging gams. How about you just prowl around all sexy-like for me, and I'll let you out the front door with a few of those lesser gems?

By the way, did a wizard use your rear end as a spellbook? Because I swear its got Agannazar's scorcher written all over it."

Nom.

YES!!! GTA google maps. That would be good fun.

Satellite Car Chase from Honest Directors on Vimeo.

nerdrage


related

...Oh squiggly line in my eye fluid. I see you lurking there on the periphery of my vision. But when I try to look at you, you scurry away. Are you shy, squiggly line? Why only when I ignore you, do you return to the center of my eye? Oh, squiggly line, it's alright, you are forgiven.

GTA IV and cocaine

Can entropy be reversed?

how many contextual jokes can you fit into one image macro?

Huzzay!

It is time once again for everybody's favourite grey warden to save his beloved generic fantasy land from the blight of evil.

The philosoraptor, discovered?

NOM!

I always wondered how that worked.

Zombieland

How much did I enjoy that... loads. So stupid but... if anything can give me hope for that horrible tired shtick of zombies, it is this.

The story felt like a computer game. Light on plot, lovely meaty extended sequences of posing and zombie killing. you never really got the feeling that any of the characters was in danger so it was about as far divorced from horror as you could get.

yeah, good clean bloody fun! Total stoner fare

i give it 4 out of five nuggets of hash

####

while thinking about movies that are like games.... I watched Silent Hill the other night. that was almost shot for shot a computer game with actors playing the parts of the protagonists. I enjoyed that too. It looked great. But, like Zombieland it was light on the plot and totally genre-iffic.

HORROR

Happy Birthday Einey

March 14th, also Pi day.

Astronomer
Physicist
Mathematician
Austistic
Homeless
Crazy

I had almost this exact thought today

Except it was about sending a terminator back in time to stop St Patrick from spreading Catholicism into Ireland in the 5th century. Would make a fun role playing premise. I had a chat with Zed the other day. He was eager to play some games next time I am in town. It could be fun.

A mathematician and an engineer take part in an experiment.

Each is asked to go into a room and do what needs to be done. In the room, there is a waste basket in one corner with some papers in it, and the papers are on fire. In another corner is a small table, and on it is a small pail of water.

The engineer goes in and assesses the situation. He picks up the small pail of water, and pours it over the fire, extinguishing it.

The mathematician goes in the room and assesses the situation. He does the same thing: picks up the pail of water and extinguishes the fire.

The experimenters take note. They then set up part two of the experiment. Again, both the engineer and the mathematician are asked to go into the room and do what needs to be done.

The engineer goes in. Again, there is a waste basket in one corner with some papers in it, and the papers are on fire. The small table is in the same place, but the small pail of water is now on the floor in the middle of the room.

The engineer picks up the water and puts out the fire.

The mathematician's turn. He walks in and sees the same situation: the waste basket with the papers on fire, the table, and the small pail of water in the middle of the room. He picks up the small pail of water and puts it on the table, thereby reducing the second problem to the first problem, which he has already solved.

click for more

Sydney you dirty whore! I never knew you were such a golddigger.

This is slightly erotic

units

1 attoparsec/microfortnight is nearly 1 inch/second

a Sydharb (or sydarb), is the amount of water in Sydney Harbour: approximately 500 gigalitres or 500 megastères.

a Jiffy is equivalent to a Microshake

I human waste classification to limited? Number two is such a limited description.
Try the Bristol Stool Scale. I just took a number 3.

also

The original ending credits for 'Return of the Jedi'

Where is your revolution now Lenin?!?

seizure town

Lurid Plasmotic Illumination

Finally figured out a way to keep it stable.

Just like Tomb Thumb's blues

I just got more interested in the new TRON movie

America.

Tropico 3

Oh yes in other news. fun but maddeningly simple. nothing compared with RRT3. come back when you have a decent economic simulation. it was like playing an RTS with no enemies abut a tech tree of comparable complexity... actually when i describe it like that i should have liked it.

and yes i did like it. worth about 5-6 hours of your time

oh yes.. terrible voice acting. some of the worst accents ever.

redeeming feature: being called 'El Presidente'

Bioshock

Did not like. I spent sunday evening playing it. The visuals were well polished and the voiceovers were fine. but I think so soon after mass effect the storytelling seemed old fashioned and linear.

annoying mcguffin quests and retracing levels after finished for the little sisters was a god damned chore, maybe if the worm removing sequence was a little more violating it would have been redeeming.

there was that staid FPS trick of having the visuals of the held gun or this case claw-hand with the plasmids bobbing around unconvincingly as you walk around the level. once day we will integrate this a little more convincingly?

i did like the homage to Orson Welles as the bad guy but did not like following around the disembodied voice of some drunk irishman whose plans never worked. Every time he said go somewhere new i just knew that once i had done his fucking fetch quest he would magically be unable to meet me. this would lead to something new yet stale like taking pictures of the fucking monsters. god it made me so mad!

Also I hate steampunk the way I hate pirates, horror, all Montagues and thee.

Steampunk could have been beautiful, instead the internet ran it into the ground with their zeppelins, goggles and complete lack of respect for actual steam. fuck you Cory Doctorow!

Considering #1 barely scratched the surface I like the look of this.

From Newsweek

Ask a kid who just took civics how a bill becomes a law and she'll explain that Congress takes a vote and if a majority supports the bill, the bill goes to the president. That's what we teach in textbooks. In reality, the Senate is a contest to find who's better at manipulating the rules for purposes that they were never meant to serve. For the minority, everything depends on its skill with Rule XXII. For the majority, it's all about its understanding of the budget reconciliation process. For the country, it's a mess.

Rule XXII is more colloquially known as the filibuster. In theory, the filibuster is there to protect the minority's ability to speak its mind. This was particularly important in the days before airplanes and television cameras. The majority could rush something to a vote while crucial members of the opposition were stuck back home in their states. The filibuster gave the minority time to slow the process and rally the troops.

As time went on, the filibuster became more common as a tool of pure obstruction. Originally, a single senator could bring business to a halt indefinitely. In 1917 Woodrow Wilson persuaded the Senate to limit it: now, two thirds of the Senate could vote to invoke "cloture," which would close debate. In 1975 the Congress lowered the threshold once again, to three fifths of Congress, or 60 votes.

In theory, the filibuster should have become less common as it became easier to break. Unfortunately for the theory, between 2007 and 2010 the Senate had to call 214 cloture votes to break filibusters. That's more than had to be called between 1919 and 1976. And remember, 2010 is only three months old.

That's true, in part, because the minority party has started forcing more cloture votes even when it knows it'll lose. The goal is to slow the Senate to a crawl. After you call for cloture, you need to wait two days to take the vote. After you take the vote, there's 30 hours of post-cloture debate. And you can do this on the motion to debate, on amendments, on the vote on the bill itself … on everything, really. A single, committed crank (cough, Jim Bunning) can waste weeks forcing the majority to break his filibusters.

But the filibuster can, in certain circumstances, be defused altogether. The budget reconciliation process was created in the Budget Act of 1974. Back then, Congress passed a budget at the beginning of the year and then an updated version at the end of the year. Budget reconciliation was a way to, well, reconcile them faster than would be possible under the ordinary rules. It limited debate to 20 hours, and since the filibuster is nothing but an endless lengthening of debate (or a threat to do that), it short-circuited the filibuster.

Congress doesn't pass two budgets anymore, and reconciliation, like the filibuster, has expanded beyond its original purpose: it's been used to pass the Bush tax cuts and Reagan's tax increases, welfare reform, the Balanced Budget Acts of 1995 and 1997, the Children's Health Insurance Program and COBRA, and much more. Of the 21 reconciliation bills that have passed since 1981, 16 have been signed by Republican presidents. So the GOP's feigned astonishment that the maneuver might be used to pass a few fixes to health-care-reform legislation rings hollow.

But reconciliation has its problems. It's limited to provisions with a direct impact on the federal budget, and a rule passed by the Democrats further limits it to laws that reduce the deficit (a response to Bush's using reconciliation for budget-busting tax cuts). That means that to activate reconciliation's 51-vote magic, legislators have to write specific bills that abide by the rules of reconciliation. That's fine for a tax change, but it wouldn't work for, say, regulating private insurers. Disagreements are settled by the Senate parliamentarian (the vice president can overrule, though that doesn't happen in practice).

This is the consequence of running the Senate by twisting the rules rather than following their spirit. It's not just that you have the 60-vote filibuster process competing against the 51-vote reconciliation process. It's that you have the Senate wasting days and weeks in cloture votes for doomed filibusters and rewriting legislation to conform to the odd limits of the reconciliation process. And as the minority becomes less responsible with the filibuster (and hoo boy, have minority Republicans become less responsible with the filibuster), the majority needs to use reconciliation more often.

Even a kid in civics class would recognize that this is all nuts. The Senate should eliminate the filibuster and budget reconciliation, and require either a 51- or 60-vote majority. Exploiting loopholes is no way to run a country.

original

Toilets of the Gods

Toilets of the Gods
Or: The Colonisation of Space

By Sir Arthur C. Clarke Space scientists recently completed an examination of orbital debris, recovered after circling the Earth for several years. They discovered that much of it was coated with a thin film of what was delicately described as "fecal matter", attributed to astronaut's sloppy sanitation.

This may solve one of the mysteries of life's origin on Earth: it seems to have arisen almost as soon as conditions were favorable, and not after the billions of years of molecular trial and error required by what Isaac Asimov called the "unblind working of chance."

Obviously, organized life-forms need have occurred only once in this Galaxy, if the very first space-faring civilization was as careless about the environment as we are. Years ago, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe suggested that life had a cosmic, and not terrestrial, origin. They may be right, though not precisely in the way they imagined. It's a humbling thought that we may have arisen from dumped sewage; the first chapter of Genesis would certainly require drastic revision.

On the other hand, if - as some philosophers have suggested- this Earth does indeed harbor the only life in the Universe, that deplorable state of affairs is now being rectified. We may draw some consolation - I hesitate to say inspiration - from the fact that our descendants are already on their way to the stars.

But we certainly would not recognize them, and it might be tactless to ask exactly how they got there.

Rule 193 of the internet. Any image you put online will be used by others with no accreditation. Corollary: watermarks do not work.

http://twas.brillig.and.the.slithy.toves.did.gyre.and.gimble.in.the.wabe.all.mimsy.were.the.borogoves.and.the.mome.raths.outgrabe.jabberwocky.com/

Movie Title

A Trailer for Every Academy Award Winning Movie Ever -- powered by Cracked.com

i went for a walk today. up into the phoenix park and then across over to smithfield. the horsey market was on. i swear to god it was like shedding 100 years. there were barely any tourists and the whole cobbled yard was filled with dads and kids and horses. i talked to one guy who said this is the key horse trading place in co. dublin. A bit further out from the square were kids riding and showing off with (their new?) horses: Just like you would expect with a new scooter or skateboard. I passed one group of country men trying to manhandle a horse float around in a small street while holding a nervous horse. I could barely understand what they were saying, but it was a rich country sound, free of fuck this and cunt that. Good natured whistles and whoops, i think they were having fun?

all of the vendors (i guess, no signs or stalls anywhere) were standing around with grim faces holding their badge of office: a 3 foot dressage whip. Many of the kids had similar canes and lent on them in the same way. there was more than one grizzled whip man leading his boy around, pointing at various horses and grumbling sage advice.

being ireland, booze was seamlessly incorporated. in every hand, or every other hand was a can. The alley leading to the market became a part-converted pissoir-come-vomit-bucket, by 10:30 in the morning. A combined symphony, with the horse piss and shit; the reek helped drag nineteen-ought six ireland out and onto the streets. There was no order and no safety considerations but it was all working. the rough edges of boozed up country folk in the city worn smooth by use and calm by habit. who would have thought an irish utopia?

i did have a very nice walk and by the time i had stopped somewhere to have an irish breakfast (not too big, just about right), it had taken me about three hours. So, now as it is spring and the weather outside is much like it i am going to do the spring cleaning. throw the windows open wide and let some air in!. wash everything and listen to BBC4. the only thing that would make this more thorough is a couple of dexies.

Oxmantown road.

An honest to god plasma fire in the load-lock chamber

I think the gas pressure must have just been too high allowing the more energetic ions to jump the ion trap and start a self sustaining plasma fire in the main part of the chamber. The whole chamber was lit up with the plasma. It's probably pretty clean now. I could see a purple jet from the plasma chamber into the LL chamber.

Most of the heating happened inside the turbopump. The fire only quenched when I flooded the chamber with nitrogen. Exhaust smells like burning semiconductor!

It's a shame I couldn't recover the chamber pressure without venting I would have liked to have seen what came of that. Maybe I can try to recreate the conditions tomorrow. The trouble is that hydorgen pumps very poorly and pumping speed scales non-linearly with pressure so it is a bastard to balance.

Chamber should be still clean. See what pressure is at tomorrow.

Plasma Jockey, signing out...

Black Betty

this can't be real

Dr. Richard (Dick) Chopp is well known in the Austin community for performing Vasectomies.

Crazy weather in Melbourne today

I'll see your megashark and raise you a scalping

Clearly, the shark has jumped the movie

but how??

In the future with AI and sentient robots, they will wistfully think back to this... pastoral life

Robot zen and the art of happiness.

16 tons

Mass Effect 2... in the can!

I always take a Krogan and a Turian to do my dirty work.

Fuck you Illusive man! Shepard don't roll like that.

I'll fuck your genetically-manipulated super-bitch, but you can keep her.

Only lost the one guy in the end sequence.

2 weeks till the sequel to Dragon Age comes out. Whatever will I do in the meantime?

Cries of joy substituted for shellfire across the servers last night, as millions of Allied troops celebrated victory in World War II for the three thousand and sixty-fifth time that day.

“It’s been a hard struggle” said Sergeant Martin, who first answered the call of duty in 2004 (and again in 2005, 2006, and once more in 2008.) “Those dirty Huns sure are persistent, and seem to keep reappearing five-to-seventeen seconds after you kill them, but by God we pushed forward and stood on the designated map marker for thirty seconds. Thereby resolving the entire nightmarish tangle of debts and international pressures which drowned a quarter of the world in blood.”

“It’s strange, mankind seems to keep fighting these same senseless wars over and over again,” said Martin, visibly tensing for the resumption of hostilities. “And I don’t mean wars of greed, or fear, or against those who look different. I mean these exact wars. I’ve taken part in Market Garden so often I’ve left a furrow, and I’m thinking of bringing a bucket and spade for the next time through the Normandy beaches. Desperately fighting for survival there is beginning to get a bit samey.”

from here

What if he became a combination of Salvador Dali and a Chef?!?!

Lady Day

Vader to the rescue!

Earlier today; cars are tipped, all over France. Mad Max is on the scene...

Dance, Dance, Immolation!

Zergling riverdance

If you're blue and you don't know where to go to why don't you go where fashion sits...

had to repost this from elsewhere

Nothing says alternate timeline like Zeppelins

Subtitles

Sop i still have a couple of films in the pipeline waiting for me to give Captain Shepard a rest but, i have had some suggestions so here they are for posterity.

Der Untergang

Le Violin Rouge

Le Dernier Jour

Oldboy (i think this is the second time i have written this down)

Les invasions barbares

I think mum would like this one.

Norma

Stabat Mater

It gets a little bit crazy towards the end. But the first track is solid!