Archive for April, 2008
Mitch Hedberg has become, quite possibly, my favorite comedian of all time. And while a lot of people know about him, I’m pretty sure that most people never really got the chance to get to know him and his unique and brilliant sense of humor. Like so many great comedians, he died way before his time – in 2005. In fact, I think the first time I’d ever heard of him was soon after that. It breaks my heart a bit when I watch him because there is something so tremendously lovable and sweet about his way of observation. So, for today’s entry, I want to do my part in spreading the word of Mitch Hedberg in the hope that through time, his legend will grow. If you like him, there are plenty more clips of him on youtube.
Wow… I’m speechless. I did not know such things existed and I really really hope never to run into one.
Don’t worry, that’s not a photo of a meteor that’s rocketing towards our fair planet. It’s actually a high res picture -one of the first ever- of Phobos, one of the twin moons of Mars. These pictures were captured by the Mars Orbiter recently. Phobos, you may recognize as the Greek word for “fear”. The other twin is called Deimos, which means “panic”. They’re the names of horses that pulled Aries,the sun god, through the sky…. even though in reality they look more like giant potatoes. To find out more, Wired Science has the full article. Or you can go right to the source and click this link to explore some much higher resolution photos.<a
If you’ve got a Mac and a clear conscience, you’re going to thank me for finding this for you. Mojo is basically Napster 3.0. It’s a program that allows you to look at your friends’ iTunes libraries, listen to their songs. If you like one, with one click it’s downloaded into your iTunes library. Even better though is that you don’t share with the whole world – you add friends like you would in a standard chat application. So, presumably, the people you share with on Mojo are your real world friends, making it more likely that you’ll like their music and less likely that you’ll get ratted out to the RIAA. Now, I’m not advocating that you steal music of course… but I ain’t gonna tell you not to either. That’s for you and the little voice in your head to work out for yourselves. There’s a Windows version too but it seems to be a few generations behind the Mac version. By now we all know that “super delegates” are going to be the ones who ultimately decide the Democratic nomination since it’s mathematically impossible – or to be more accurate, ridiculously improbable- for it to be determined in any other way. So then the question is, “who are these super delegates?”. In order to clarify any ambiguities that may exist in your mind, here’s a handy clip, entitled “What is a Super Delegate?”, from the Daily Show.
Given that we’re producing an Obama Action Figure here (and only him), I’m clearly not in the Hillary camp. And I must confess that I don’t find her to be a particularly sympathetic character these days. But this picture takes me back to a brighter, kinder, and entirely imaginary time when me and Bill and Hill used to just kick it, sitting around parks and cafes, talking about big ideas and how we’d change the world some day. Man, those were the days…
Once a very unlikely pairing, the fields of science and art are now more than ever like peanut butter and jelly. Thanks to regular updates from the Buckminster Fuller Institute I was tipped off to these excellent articles on some current projects that are converging these once divergent fields. Served tastefully by our good friends over at NPR. 
I wouldn’t normally post an ad for a car company on the Jailbreak but this one is just too damn cool to pass on. Citroen, I tip my hat to you. While I was sitting here tipping my hat, I discovered this gem of a parody of the ad above. Play it just right and you can have an old school break-off right on your desktop!
There’s also a good interview with Bjork and the guys who made the video on the New York Time Website where they cop to eating mushrooms for inspiration. 
I’ve made a total of twenty-two different Oddfellows now and I had to go and do research for each one of them. Now here I am putting up my second Tesla post in two days when I haven’t even put up a single story about anyone else. So what gives? Well, plain and simple, Tesla got a raw deal. I mean a really really raw deal. And yes, many of us get raw deals in life but Tesla also happens to have been, I’d argue, one of the ten or twenty most brilliant people to ever walk this planet which makes his raw deal a bigger deal than mine or yours. It’s not just that he got a raw deal in life though. It’s that, to this day, he’s practically forgotten by popular history. Every other person I’ve made into an Oddfellow has been sainted by history in one way or another. Tesla though, was simply forgotten for the most part (at least until Bowie took up the cause in The Prestige.) His mind was every bit as brilliant as Einstein’s and the reason we don’t know about it is that every idea he had threatened established business models. (See my post about free wireless electricity for the whole world) So you’d think at the very least anti-corporate hipsters could start plastering his face all over their T-Shirts. Hell, if no one else does it, I will.
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