Category: Things

A compliation of motorcycle race crashes, with no apparent injuries and some remarkable saves. Plus, a few minutes in, a cobra (the snake, not the car) wanders onto a track and starts snapping at the riders.

It’s about twice as long as it needs to be, it only has three notes, and it’s full of horrible 80s video cliches (wait for the sax solo with animated background during the bridge), but it’s such great fodder for samples that I have to share it.

The Waitresses singing “I Know What Boys Like:”

See also the more recent I know what girls like…

I learned today that I am the number one search result for the term “horrifying video.”

So, here’s some stuff to make you uncomfortable: riot police and protestors in Cancun, a movie about a far-right children’s summer camp, a drunk falling off a motorcycle, a kid on rollerblades hitting his nuts on a railing, and a kid on rollerblades hitting his nuts on a skate ramp.

There you go, audience. Don’t tell me I never gave you anything.

The Wikipedia entry on cat-blogging states that it consists of blogging about cats. But it’s not just that. Oh no. It is, in fact, secretly ironic (just like me). The idea is not to have a blog about kittens, but to point out that blogs are not just pictures of cats, but in fact are citizen journalism.

Anyway, here’s a picture of my cat hogging the damn remote:

From C|Net:

Security companies also have been crying foul over the new OS–and they might have been heard if only they had gotten into a meeting scheduled to field their complaints. Microsoft had set up such a meeting with security companies to discuss some of the changes it has promised to make to Windows Vista in response to competitive concerns. But the conference, which used Microsoft’s Live Meeting technology, crashed about 15 minutes after it started, and both Symantec and McAfee were unable to log back in.

This weekend, we rode out to Stow and put the motorcycles in our friends’ garage for the winter. We probably could have kept them in town another couple weeks, but we had a ride back this weekend, so yesterday was my last motorcycle day until maybe April ’07.

It makes me sadder than I’d like to admit. I’ve never wanted to be the kind of guy who gets attached to mere consumer goods. I mean, it’s an expensive, dangerous, toy that wastes gasoline and is bad for the environment. How can I be so insistent on wanting to ride it until the weather turns bitterly cold?

But it feels like I have put my manhood into winter storage, and I’m afraid that when I get it back, it’ll be all moth-eaten.

And now for the final Snakes on a Plane reference ever: laptop explodes on plane at LAX.

You just know that this story is going to turn into “Linux Causes Murder” right away. It just brings back this feeling I had from when I was working for Novell/SUSE, that Ext3 was way, way better.

I’ve been thinking about the old-fashioned rules for art materials this week, but I can’t quite remember the list from art history, nor can I quite seem to find the right search terms for it. I did manage to find the hierarchy of genres on Wikipedia. The idea is that the best paintings are of allegorical and historical scenes. Lesser subject matters are portraiture, landscape, and finally still life.

But there’s a parallel set of rules for what you make the art from: bronze or marble is the best for sculpture, followed by other stones, followed by plaster or wax or wood. Oil painting is better than watercolor, ink is better than charcoal.

Like the white-after-labor-day rule, the art hierarchy rules barely matter now they go back to the 18th century French academy and the formation of the discpline of art history, and they’ve been toppled and challenged and explored by every generation of artists since 1850. Besides, they fail to take into account things like video art, electronic prints, lithographs…

But on the other hand, the old rules still matter at least a little. And without being formalized, they’re still part of the air and they still influence the way people feel about art. A handmade photo print with silver emulsion is somehow better than a computer print, even if they appear identical. You’ll find acrylic paint in the official canon (that is, H. W. Janson’s History of Art— see Barnett Newman, for one) but oils are still the tool for most “serious” painting. And you certainly won’t find a lot of airbrush or spraypaint art in galleries, a few representatives of street culture notwithstanding. If your drawing is pencil instead of loose charcoal, it might not look different, but it’s different. And when you say pen-and-ink, you better not mean ballpoint.

I’m not sure why I’m saying this or where I’m going with it so I’ll stop now.

Parody of “Riding Dirty” with the lyrics “White and Nerdy.”

Fred Phelps insults Colbert and Stewart. This can only end in disaster and hilarity.