Rage Against Mr. Clean I just couldn't resist the seductive populism of his ideology. My gang colours will be polka dots, and yours can be Burberry check. Remember when we said there was no future? Well, this is it. Laugh all you want...I'm the one goin' down in history as the Thomas Jefferson of squirrels. Whether they find life there or not, I think Jupiter should be called an enemy planet. My mailman won't deliver 'til I swear allegiance to Moloch, the Assyrian fire god. We're all too lazy to think up a humorous response, so here's an adorable anime rabbit-cat thing. Enjoy. Your apology is insufficient! I believe your blood in pint sized containers in a refrigerated box may be enough to pardon your remarks! Ah, gunpowder! A thousand and one uses around the house! Do you actually think about what you are saying, or is it an improvisational game of mad libs that you play in your head? We are on the verge of unzipping the secrets of creation and peering into the pants of God Himself. Sam, my unappeased hunger for bloodshed has reached a nearly palpable level.
The second and
third most
dangerous intersections in
the United States (according to State Farm) are not only just a few miles from me in
Northeast Philly, but are also places I used to drive through every week.
28 June 2001
Microsoft's Smart Tags (as mentioned here earlier this month) have been
pulled
from Windows XP.
Glenn Juskiewicz
This is a philosophical
mystery story which includes the sentence: "'Another possibility,' he added, 'is that
A.M. Monius may be a bright and ambitious, but somewhat shy, Rwandan gorilla.'"
27 June 2001
Sick as a dog. No updates today, sorry!
26 June 2001
The online comic strip Narbonic follows the
life of a mad scientist, her evil intern, and her computer specialist (who is currently dead)
as they do Mad Science stuff. Inspired, clever, and silly. The strip's creator
likes Daniel Pinkwater and his late, great comic strip, Norb, so she's aces in my book.
A one million pound turbine, trundling through town
like a very slow dinosaur.
The space cases in the White House are still
trying to overturn the separation of church and state, even though the plan is reviled
by the Democrats in Congress and has no chance of passing muster. Can I return the
Republican Party and get a refund on the unused portion?
Wow. A large (1.9 MB, or 2 - 10 minutes over a modem) movie of the recent eclipse moving
across Africa, seen from space. This
was created from pictures taken from a satellite in orbit over Africa. Beautiful.
CNN provides a really nice
painting
of the Huygens probe landing at Titan. The page containing a caption for the painting is
here, but based on the
URL I expect it to be out of date in a week or so. Click it while you can!
Ben Loukota
A man, possibly carrying a gun, climbed into a crane being used to construct a building
in Atlanta and had to be pulled out by police. What struck me was the sentence:
"An armed officer was seen
climbing an adjacent crane." Was the officer going to get involved in some
kind of Errol Flynn crane-duel with the suspect? "Ha! I have you now,
blackguard! Take that!"
My mother (hi, Mom!) asked me to put some means for interacting with me on this page.
So you will see a "Discussion"
link off to the right. It leads to a handy discussion page,
which will be free until the dot-com providing it dies.
The fact that Glenn chastised me for not having a link regarding the
eclipse shows just
how predictable I've become. This shows how prophetic the "Make Your Own Default Link" game,
below, is.
It's "Make Your Own Default Link Day" day here at Angels from Another Pin.
Try it, it's fun!
Scientists today discovered
which is connected to , and which casts
light on .
Phil Hendrie is
to talk radio as a nuclear bomb is to a slow, stupid, hyperconservative block of ice in
the shape of the American electorate. I wonder if he's on the radio in Philly.
Modern pirates haunt Indonesia.
The Indonesian authorities refuse to allow the navies
of concerned countries, like Japan, help police the area, and the Indonesians also
refuse to allow the crews of freighters to arm themselves.
Ben has never heard of his general,
Omar Bradley, who commanded
the Americans at Normandy. Ben's high school history teacher is being tracked down
and shot.
This little test will tell you what kind of
general you are.
Email me and tell me what general you are,
and I'll post a list here in a few days!
(Your humble correspondent is apparently Robert E. Lee. Y'all.)
The Deep Space
Network, the contellation of radio dishes that transmit and receive data for
interplanetary probes, is getting overloaded because of all the new science missions being
launched.
I'll bet that some day, far in the future, scientists will point to the coming of Modern Man
as cause of the Great Extinction that ended the
Cenozoic Era. Don't think
so? It has
happened before. (The email Ben sent me regarding this contained no text, and
was simply titled "Depressing commentary on the nature of man.")
Ben Loukota
Soon, now, NASA will have put up the
Microwave
Anisotropy Probe, far beyond the Moon, to measure the microwave echo of the Big
Bang with a new level of discernment.
Senator Lieberman, having learned his lesson from his defeat in the 2000
vice-presidential election, courts the voters of the future in
this photo op.
12 June 2001
Bush went to Europe, and among the many new friends he made was none other than
Adolf Hitler! (This picture really
appeared on the front page of the news site MSNBC.com. The part of Der Fuhrer is being
played by the Prime Minster of Spain, who should probably shave off his moustache.)
This is the strangest thing I have seen in a month of Sundays. It is
"Weird Al" Yankovic drawn in an anime
style.
Jan Vermeer, using a camera
obscura, created photgraphically realistic paintings. It is possible that he got
the lenses for his camera obscura from van Leeuwenhoek, the discoverer of microscopic animals.
Robert Bigelow is
a whacko. But he's a whacko who is trying to build a space hotel. More importantly, he's
a billionaire whacko who is trying to build a space hotel.
The TV show Max Headroom was eerily precognitive, forecasting
such things as infotainment, media-driven political events, culture jamming, and tie-ins
between the evening news and whatever product the network is selling today. The
series program guide is brought to
you by Zik-Zak ("We make everything you need and you need everything we make").
8 June 2001
There are a number of efforts going on to provide a short-hop suborbital tourist service,
both overseas and here in the US. Jon's money is on the Japanese, who are
test-flying
a kewl little miniature
DC-X knockoff in preparation for an eventual suborbital tourist biz.
I haven't liked The Onion much lately, but Ben has found
an article about quantum
pants which is actually pretty good. The quantum slacks represent the first
wearable pair of non-Newtonian pants, putting America one step closer to a complete
casual wardrobe that transcends classical physics.
Microsoft's beta version of Windows XP includes a feature,
Internet Explorer Smart
Tags, that allows Microsoft to add links to Web sites when they are viewed by users,
without the consent of the user or of the Web site creator. I can't be the only person
on Earth who thinks this is utterly wrong. (I searched for the purported meta tag which
would innoculate one's pages against this thing, hoping to make Angels from Another Pin the
first IEST-free site in the world, but MS isn't making that tag available. Hmmmm.)
From the Department of Really Really Big Numbers:
You know he's never going to see the money, but it's heartening that a tobacco company
just got slammed with a three
billion dollar award, to be paid to cancer patient Richard Boeken.
Glenn Juskiewicz
People are beating the tar
our of their computers, according to a survey by the British company
Novatech. "We treat our machines as if they are
persons. We talk to them, we name them, we even sometimes plead with and try to cajole the
little god inside each machine. And when the little god turns out to be evil we beat the
machine to purge the demon."
Glenn Juskiewicz
The most popular online game in the world right now isn't Everquest or Asheron's Call.
It's Lineage,
a South Korean game which is so popular it has spawned real-world fistfights. Real-world
gangsters have taken a shine to the game, and brag about their online exploits after
offline robberies. Surreal.
Glenn Juskiewicz
6 June 2001
A store clerk was
shot
in a store a block from my house. This is...unsettling.
Pictures of the scramjet failure.
Razzafrackin' bazzlerack! Now I'll never get into space!
Plutonium is radioactive, and poisonous, and
explosively
flammable. Would you like to
design a memorial to keep the
stuff safely contained for thousands of years?
Mike Ryan
You may wish to read the historical reasons why Strom "Senile Old Bat" Thurmond is
third in line for the Presidency
in case the office should become empty.
This is pretty darned cool. Not only can you see my house in
this
satellite photo, you can also see my car. (You can look up your house, and possibly your
car as well, on GlobeExplorer.)
You know, I think the guy who wrote the
shortest
implementation of the DeCSS code might be the same annoying Charles Hannum whom we
all wanted to kick in the head back at Penn State.
1 June 2001
A new video game called
"State of
Emergency" allows the player to control rioters at an economic conference. Not
surprisingly, the office of the mayor of Seattle is complaining.
Glenn Juskiewicz
Is there some specific reason why everything in Idaho has to be resolved by the
presence of a squadron of armed federal
agents? Is there something in the water up there?
Glenn Juskiewicz
At the beginning of the First Millennium, the Chinese drove out
the Xiongnu, some of whom left
the Chinese sphere of influence and built a new society which, several centuries later,
dove down upon the Romans--who called them
the Huns.
It's interesting to see American national heroes, like
the Marquis de la Fayette, through
the eyes of others. (In this case, those "others" are the French.)
