Ol Triple-F points us to the Ten Worst Album Covers of All Time, or at least what Pork Tornado considers them to be.
We’ve given it thought, and have a hard time arguing with his selections. Particularly No. 7.
What you need to do if you live in Houston
See this play. My friends at IBP have staged the best goddamn Medea you’ll ever see, as God is my witness. I’ve seen it twice already, and I’ll see it at least twice more. It’s fucking AWESOME; it may be the best thing they’ve ever done, and we’re talking about a group over a decade old with a cover of American Theater to their credit already.
See. This. Play.
Even more reason to loathe Microsoft
They’ve been using Ralph Reed’s lobbying company.
And now, via Rude Pundit, the single most NSFW thing ever posted here
In which we contemplate the wholesale collapse of society
There now exist bras designed for unaugmented women to give the distinct impression to observers that they have in fact joined the silicon masses.
The Evolution bra is aimed at “women who lust after the look of cosmetic breast implants,” according to Brastraps Inc., a Florida-based company that introduced the new bra on Friday. The Evolution features a sculpted, graduated cup “specially designed to mimic the appearance of cosmetic breast implants.”
In other words, they produce ersatz fake breasts.
Like Sisyphus, but without the boulder, and only downhill
Mmmm, delicious creepiness
Yet Another Talking Head
Via Boing Boing:
It amounts to a kind of cultural censorship. Call me paranoid, but given all the manipulative tricks the Republicans have gotten up to recently, I am prepared to believe that this has less to do with Homeland security and more to do with keeping the American public ignorant and free of foreign influence and inspiration. An ill-informed, isolated, ignorant populace is a populace easily manipulated. Fed a diet of reality shows coupled with faith-based reasoning (an oxymoron if ever there was one) and you have a perfect recipe for a country in which the government that can do more or less whatever it wants. [Emph. added] Democracy becomes a farce without access to information. David Byrne
We think this might be more fun than Presidents and Assholes.
Mao sounds like an interesting game.
In which urge discretionary spending
Amazon is selling the Canon Digital Elph S410 for $249, which is (notionally) about $200 off. This is a 4 megapixel camera just shy of the top-end for its year. It’s also accessory-compatible with the prior Elph generations (batteries, memory cards, etc.).
Presumably, Canon is trying to clear the channel for the new SD500/400/300 Elph line, which are nicer — bigger LCDs, higher resolution — the SD500 is a SEVEN megapixel point-and-shoot) — but which also use the (more expensive) Secure Digital storage medium, so we’re happy to take last year’s model on the cheap.
Ah, the shame builds
Apparently somehow threatened with the frequency with which our native state embarrasses us, our adopted state of Texas has elected to step up the bigotry. Lovely.
Everything old is new again
“Seaside is a framework for developing sophisticated web applications in
We’re posting this just because they use the term “faith-fucking”
Dept. of Geeky Shit We’re Not Sure Is A Good Idea
Rhino: an implementation of Javascript written entirely in Java for embedding in Java apps.
Um.
We understand there’s a joke here at Heche’s expense, but, frankly, it’s below us
This guy put together a video clip of the original Psycho shower scene and Van Sant’s 1998 shot for shot remake superimposed. Cool. (Local copy here; via jwz.)
Presumably, this means we may now repurpose the term as a disparaging name for our Roomba.
Best. Headline. EVAR.
“Police in Ariz. Seek Monkey for SWAT Team“
(Thanks, Triple-F!)
What you see isn’t what you think you see
As it happens, our eyes are fucking liars. Bastards.
More Wrong Badness
Remember “doing a Lynndie?” Well, now there’s “doing a Schiavo.” Enjoy. But if you do, you’re goin’ to hell. (via)
In which we discover some amusing bits about Google Satellite Maps
We pointed out earlier the cool and somewhat creepy fact that satellite imagery of Heathen Central is available online. Turns out, we’re not the only ones who think this is at least slightly creepy; some images have been obscured to frustrate terrorists or attackers who might target somewhere like this or this; what’s odd is that a certain 5-sided DoD structure southwest of these two didn’t get similar treatment.
Dept. of Satirical Popery
Ol Diz has a whole category of Guest Popes lined up until those Cardinals get their little conclave done; our favorite should be easy to ascertain.
NOTICE
Just because we here at Miscellaneous Heathen are, paradoxically, Christian in nature does NOT mean we cannot be amused at Rude Pundit’s use of the phrase “batshit insane Jesus babblers,” especially when used to describe folks like Roy Moore and the Family Research Council.
He’s talking about the, well, batshit crazy Jesus babblers who are now all up in arms about the “out of control” judiciary who refused to keep the Florida state vegetable drawing breath. It is difficult to overstate how wrong these goons are when they start this crap. Ol’ Mr Pundit puts it this way:
See, the difference is that the legislature and the executive branches are elected, by majorities (allegedly), and thus the majority of the nation has a voice through those branches. The judiciary exists, ideally outside the realm of elections, to give the minority a voice. The logic’s simple: the majority will always have a voice through elections. But there’s others, up to 49.9% of the population, who’d like to be considered as part of the nation. And, sure, sometimes the judiciary will piss off the other branches, but, fuck ’em, welcome to the Republic, you know? Isn’t this basic civics class? Didn’t we all learn this back in middle school? Admittedly, the Rude Pundit was taught the Constitution without a Bible present to coordinate the articles with, but, still, and shit, this ain’t brain surgery. Hell, it ain’t even temperature taking.
Noo-ne-noo-ne-noo-ne-noo…
Here’s a fine listing of someone’s 25 favorite Sesame Street moments. The only thing that could make this better would be Quicktime clips.
Just too damn fine not to port over
Check out BoingBoing on the subject of Unintentionally Suggestive Comic Book Covers. Example at right.
Remember when we said Ridge was a useless dufuss?
Our recollection of Ridge’s speech makes us view this Wired piece as “astoundingly charitable” with respect to former Secretary and current Dufuss Ridge. However, the balance of the story is worth reading, as the writer spoke to industry experts with a more reasonable view of RFID in security.
Why travel?
JWZ points us to Google Sightseeing, which is darn cool.
How we at Heathen feel about the RIAA
(via, but being build on in several places.)
Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright…
We suppose they may have a point, but it’s still cool as hell.
At least some people find Google’s satellite integration a touch creepy.
[He’s] Lost Control
Twenty-five years ago today, Ian Curtis committed suicide.
Dept. of In-No-Way Surprising Developments
Back in the boom, serious web application development more or less began and ended with some kind of application server and lots and lots of Java. Now that many simpler technologies are growing more and more capable, though, plenty of folks are reconsidering this assumption, and with good reason. While Java is great for some things, when it comes to complex or demanding automated web applications, there’s almost no reason at all to touch Java. The LAMP architecture (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/Python/PHP) replaces it very, very well and much lower development costs and much greater flexibility. Don’t like MySQL? Use Postgres. Don’t like PHP? Use Perl and a framework like Mason. There are even whole new frameworks (with real-world examples) coming up behind LAMP, too, that will further push Java aside in this market.
(Obvious in the above is that there’s also no reason for most people to consider paying good money for a database server. This is why Microsoft is glad it has other products, and why Oracle has been busily finding other database-based businesses to move into as the database server itself becomes a commodity item.)
In which we explain why we’re quiet.
We’re in Chicago at a trade show, where we learned many things, among them “Tom Ridge is a terrible, incoherent speaker.”
April 8, 1915
Today is my grandmother’s 90th birthday. I spoke with her on the phone just now, and she sounds better than she has in months. It was a rough year for her, and we weren’t sure she’d make it this far, but we’re damned glad she did.
Happy Birthday, Mom.
Joe has a blog.
(Shut up. It is too a blog.)
It’s Two-Snark Thursday!
On the heels of Mr Diz’s bit below, we find this delicious smackdown in response to more blathering from Paul Graham. You have to be sorta geeky to get the context, but the actual bitchslapping is accessible to all.
In which we tease the Catholic Heathen
We link because we care
We care, that is, enough to make you watch the final scene from Seven as performed by stuffed animals.
Uh-huh. Somebody gettin’ bitch-slapped.
Mr Diztopia — not to be confused with briquet magnate Ol’ Diz, who is oddly appropriate just now — has turned both barrells of his snarkotron on some silly little filly foolishly babbling on in the Observer about being Southern in New York. Enjoy. We certainly did.
Why We Love Living in the Future
Our friend Rob just moved from Austin, where he lived for many years, to Chile to write code for a telescope. This is exciting for him, but sort of sad for those of us left in Texas. Or it would be, but for the whole “living in the future” thing. See, we here at Heathen Central won’t really notice Rob’s absence except under some very specific circumstances. He and his wife have an Austin-based VOIP telephone number that rings in his house in South America, and he still surfaces on iChat just like he did when he was in Austin, complete with the voice chat option.
When would we notice? If we went to Austin, in which case they would be unable to meet us for dinner without substantial notice and cost, or if we decided to visit Chile, in which case their location would be very, very convenient indeed.
This just in: BestBuy? Jackasses.
Dept. of Cool Shit, Disqualified Division
We think a literal Lightning Field sounds like a cool place to visit — or, rather, that it would be, if they weren’t such jackasses about photography.
Dept. of Terrible Ideas That Nevertheless Make Us Giggle
How about a 3U 19″ Rack-mounted Wine Rack? Hold four of your favorite bottles in the cool confines of your server room. Excepting, of course, that while the room itself may be cool enough, the space in your racks likely is NOT. (As of this writing, the internal temp of one of the boxes Chief Heathen is responsible for is a cool 95 degrees, or about 25 degrees higher than ideal cellar temp. Actually, that’s the ambient temp around CPU 1; its internal is 107. And this is with fans running at better than 4,000 RPM, so there you go. (How much do we love Apple’s Server Monitor? [HDANCN?]))
Hunter gets his wish
As requested, his remains will be shot out of a cannon. Said cannon will be atop a 53-foot Gonzo-fist sculpture, according to his widow. From the AP:
“It’s expensive, but worth every penny,” Anita Thompson said. “I’d like to have several explosions. He loved explosions.” She said planning for the fist has been guided by a video of Thompson and longtime illustrator-collaborator Ralph Steadman, recorded in the late 1970s when they visited a Hollywood funeral home and began mapping out the cannon scheme.
Godspeed, Hunter.
(Via BoingBoing, which is running pretty much exactly the same entry, graphic and all.)
Egghead-Simpson Collision
A linguistics blog provides for us an excellent (and hilarious) summary of language jokes on the Simpsons.
It’s not just “different” in eastern Europe. It’s also cheesier.
Or, at least, that’s what we take away from the web site of Belinda Bedekovic, Croatian remote-keyboard virtuoso. (Don’t miss the press pages, where she’s pictured with Steve Vai in an article that also name-checks Joe Santriani and Robert Fripp.)
Sailing 101
“The big pole with the fabric on it? Yeah, that should point UP.”
We kept waiting for the punchline.
It turns out, there is no punchline: Worst. Video. Evar.
Dept. of Selective Luddism
Them what know us know we’re gadget-happy here at Heathen Central. We get a new phone every year. We have a Tivo, and we’ll run on at length about it at cocktail parties. We live out of our Powerbook. We had three Newtons, for the love of Mike.
That said, there are certainly places where we prefer the old to the new; most all of our watches (and all of them that matter) have springs, not batteries. Our pens have nibs and are filled from bottles. Our cars have clutches, and one of them doesn’t even have a radiator. We like them this way.
Ergo, it comes as a bit of a surprise to us that we’ve not yet heard of or adopted this trend, but we have spent part of the afternoon window-shopping here, and considering if perhaps this isn’t all that and a bag of chips after all, especially if we replace it with one of these.
Well, this is sort of interesting
Heathen Central from Space (Actually, it’s a little off — Heathen Central is closer to one block west of the arrow.)
More Format
This video from DJ Format and friends has an amusing conceit. It’s not as fantastic as his prior work, but it’s still fun.