I guess he won't be running now...

I fear that my blog is becoming little more than a passive spam delivery mechanism. On the bright side, it's all really great spam! Yippee!

Like this video/commercial:

Get your trek/geek on!

This is absurdly fun and funny: Play the Kirk vs Picard game! I never thought of using tea, Earl Grey, hot, as a weapon. Nice.

ahem.

(via Daily Kos)

Yay for YouTube!

Seriously, the CNN/YouTube debate last night was vastly superior to any of the other debates we've had so far. How entertaining was that? People are so funny and creative, which was such a nice contrast to the cookie-cutter candidates on stage.

And even Anderson Cooper was good as moderator. I appreciated his attempts to really press the candidates to Answer The Fucking Question!

I'm also surprised to say that the debate helped change my mind a little bit about some of the candidates. Take, for example, Joe Biden, who really seemed to rise above the other candidates on the Iraq questions and, especially, the Darfur questions. He totally shredded Bill Richardson on the Durfur question. Richardson was all, "We need diplomacy!," and Biden was all, "Fuck diplomacy, we need to send troops!" Of course, Hillary chimed in with the appropriate follow-up to Biden, "Too bad all our troops are tied up in Iraq."

Speaking of Bill "This Is What I Would Do" Richardson, who I've had high hopes for. He sucks as a candidate. I don't think he gave one good answer the entire night. Fortunately, he had Mike "It's Not Fair!" Gravel and Dennis "Text Peace" Kucinich to steal the I'm-Stupid spotlight. I mean, come on, "Text Peace"???? WTF? How is a text message going to change anyone's mind? That's gotta be the dumbest campaign gimic I've ever seen.

As for the Big 3, I felt that Edwards surpassed the others, although Hillary really didn't do too bad. Obama, however, not so much. Hillary really spanked him in questions about diplomacy. I really like how Edwards kept hammering at the need to take on the special interests. Good
luck buddy!

I really cannot wait until the Republicans get to do this. I'm sure the questions will be real winners. How many unborn babies have you saved, Senator McCain? Senator Brownback, can you tell us just how much you hate gay people? Governor Romney, I think we can all agree that the French people and everything they stand for is an abomination, but what would you do to address this crisis? Rep. Paul, why are you a Republican?

I Can Get Behind That

I just found the coolest web site, yo! It's so fly!

Okay, sorry, I'm not good at sound hip. And the fact that I just used the word "hip" to refer to something other than the body party pretty much proves that point.

But seriously, you need to go check out Galaxy Zoo. It's a web site put together by some astronomers that lets you help with their research. The basic premise is that they've got all these images of galaxies that have been taken by telescopes over the years, but there's simply not enough people or computer power to look at all these pictures and start classifying them.

So, at the Galaxy Zoo, you can help out by looking at pictures of galaxies and categorizing them. There's a quick 10 minute tutorial, and then a 15 question quiz just to make sure you got the right idea, and then you can start looking at galaxies. But be warned, its strangely addicting and you may find it difficult to stop.

Online astronomical collaboration: I can get behind that!

---

p.s. - In case you're not one of the millions who are already using it, go download the seti@home screen saver and lend your unused computer processor power to the search for extraterrestrial life.

Blenders

I use my blender on a nightly basis, to make my protein smoothie for breakfast the next morning. I'm using this cheap Walmart blender that I think I bought while in college. It's as lame as lame gets with a blender, and it really doesn't do a very good job of blending things.

It's kind of like if you had a car with square wheels. Or if you tried using a walkie talkie as a cell phone to call your friend in Luxembourg. Or if you had one piece of string when what you really needed was a grocery bag. Or if you had ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife.

Anyway, I need something that is gonna last me a while. Also, something that isn't going to cost me $400. And something that won't leak while it sits in the fridge overnight. And something that isn't such a freakin' pain in the ass to handwash. So I went online today to check out some consumer reviews and came across this little gem at Amazon:

I have not actually used this product myself but I purchased it as a replacement for one that broke and it belonged to my sister. She seemed happy to get it and even though I have not asked, I think she's happy with the way it works.

I'm convinced! LOL

want!

What to do the next time a soliciter calls

This guy deserves an award of some kind. It's an 8 minute vid, but its 8 minutes well spent, I promise.

"I had an orange river of grease running down my leg!"

Yep, this story takes the cake for being the most hilarious and disgusting news item of the year:

Dieters have been flocking to drugstores to pick up Alli, the first over-the-counter weight-loss pill to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration, despite the scary warning: Stray too far from your low-fat diet and you just might poop your pants.

It gets soooooo much better from there:

It can strike any time — even in the early hours of the morning. One user writes: “(Y)a know how when you start moving around in the morning ya pass a little gas. Well, I did and then went into the bathroom and to my horror I had an orange river of grease running down my leg.”

I love how the article makes all of this sound like fun. As if its a game to see if you can eat unhealthy while on this pill and avoid leaving a trail of your own shit wherever you walk:

Fellow cheaters advise each other on the best clean-up methods, and some even suggest using panty liners or Depends. One frugal user noted, “I’m thinking that infant diapers might be a cheaper way to go, just use them as a large pad.”

And there you find the truth: this pill is part of a conspiracy to boost sales of Depends adult diapers.

The bright side: You'll be able to smell the stupid people while they're still far enough away avoid.

Live Earth

I watched/listened to quite a bit of the Live Earth concert this weekend while putzing around the house and hanging with the neighbors. I think the best performance I saw was, weirdly enough, Alicia Keyes and Keith Urban covering the Stones' "Shelter." I had no idea Alicia could rock like that. You go girl!

I also really enjoyed Duran Duran in London, KT Tunstall (surprisingly entertaining performer) and Melissa Etheridge in Jersey, and, of course, the penguin band in Antarctica. I caught about 20 seconds of Foo Fighters, which looked fantastic. I hope to find the full video of their performance online soon.

But the two people who hosted the coverage on Bravo? Wow, they need new jobs. I don't think they got through a single segment or interview smoothly. It was painful. Some of the PSAs were amusing though. And was that William Shatner doing the voice overs? Hawesome. ;)

It is rather amazing when you think about all the artists and how diverse they were. You almost can't help thinking instead of those artists who didn't participate.

Hopefully the concerts will do some good. Gore is smart to feed this issue to the public via pop culture and music. And in particular, he deserves credit for gearing the concerts towards younger audiences with artists like Kanye West, Ludicris, AFI, Linkin Park, etc.

I Can't Get Behind That: Special Scandal Edition!

I can't get behind presidential pardons.

I won't regurgitate all of the outrage that has been spewed in response to Scooter Libby's pardon commutation. I'll merely defer to the smarter people: what they said.

But here's the question I haven't yet heard discussed: why should the President have pardon power at all? We have plenty of appeals processes in place to give convicted criminals ample avenues to get out of jail. Why should the President be able to trump the court system? It really does seem like the kind of power a King should have, not a democratically elected (well, supposedly) President.

Or, at the very, very least, shouldn't the President be barred from pardoning anyone who served in his administration? Isn't there just a slight conflict of interest there?

And how long do you think it will be before Scooter Libby is awarded some Presidential Medal? You know its gonna happen at some point. Some day we'll see Bush on TV, at a podium, along side which will stand Rummy, Brownie, Condi, Libby, Gonzie (hey, best I could do) and all the other champions of the "honor and integrity" that Bush promised to bring to Washington. And he'll place shiny medals around each of their necks and say to each of them: "Heck of a job."

That question has always bugged me!

This is so weird. Ever since I took an amateurish interest in astronomy as a child, I've always enjoyed pondering such unweildy and mind-blowing questions as, "What exists beyond the edge of the universe?", and "What existed before the Big Bang?".

Well, about a week ago, I stumbled upon what looked like a nifty astronomy blog, called the Bad Astronomy Blog, that I decided to plug into Google Reader. Today I read my very first posting from that blog, and low and behold, it answered one of my unweildy and mind-blowing questions!! Or at least, it offered a possible answer. It's an enthralling read, check it out: What happened before the Big Bang? Here's the meat of it (elipses are mine, to shorten):

It’s been thought for sometime that there may have been some previous Universe that existed "before" ours. This is a difficult idea, because in the Big Bang model, space and time were created in that initial moment. But if Bojowald’s solutions are correct, it leads the way to understanding this previous Universe. It was out there, everywhere, and it contracted. Eventually it became an ultradense, ultrahot little ball of space and time. At some point, it got so small and so dense that bizarre quantum laws took effect...

What Bojowald’s work does, as I understand it... is simplify the math enough to be able to trace some properties of the Universe backwards, right down to T=0, which he calls the Big Bounce. The previous Universe collapsed down, and "bounced" outward again, forming our Universe. No doubt the physical aspects of this previous Universe were somewhat different; the quantum uncertainties at the moment of bounce would ensure that. It may have been much like ours, or it may have been quite alien. In his equations, it’s the volume of that previous Universe that cannot be determined. How big was it? It may literally be impossible to ever know.

This is great, I appreciate that people smarter than me are putting thought into my unweildy and mind-blowing questions. But I wish they would avoid generating new ones in the process...

So the universes (hm, never used that in a plural sense before -- is it universi?) have been "bouncing" up and down for kerjillions of years. Has that been going on for all of time, or did something happen that started the bouncing? And if so, what was that something and what did the universes look like before that something?

If there are multiple universes, they must be contained within something bigger, right? Just like there are multiple galaxies within a universe, there must be multiple universes within a _____? I need a name here, people. For now, I guess I'll just go with ploink. I wonder if there are multiple ploinks out there, too?

But perhaps most perplexing, if our own universe might have existed in a very similar way before the Big Bang/Big Bounce, then does that mean that we're now living in reverse of our pre-Big-Bounce counterparts? I mean, if they were headed towards a bounce and we're headed away from it, is it possible that their universe worked in reverse of ours? Did they die first, grow younger, and then get shoved inside their mother? Did they walk backwards? Did they read a book from the back page to the front page? Did they always know the winner of a race before it even started? And was pooping like eating to them, and eating like pooping? (Hey, that's where logic took me. Blame the Vulcans.)