Taste the Horror

Skittles commercials have, for a long time, been sometimes amusing, often odd, many times downright irritating. But am I the only one who thinks that lately they've taken a decided turn toward the macabre?

By the way, I can't stand those things.

And they know how to do research at the UNM

The 2008 Ignobel Awards have been awarded:

NUTRITION PRIZE. Massimiliano Zampini of the University of Trento, Italy and Charles Spence of Oxford University, UK, for electronically modifying the sound of a potato chip to make the person chewing the chip believe it to be crisper and fresher than it really is.

[...]

LITERATURE PRIZE. David Sims of Cass Business School. London, UK, for his lovingly written study "You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations."

Lots more at the link.

A good point

Seen at Atlas Blogged:

It just occurred to me that if McCain is elected, Sarah Palin would be the President of the Senate, where she would preside over Barak Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton.

For sheer entertainment purposes, I don't see how I can vote against that scenario.

Double heh.

Not with a roar, but a murmur

A strangely quiet beginning to the latest sunspot cycle:

But many of the other competing predictions — more than 50 over all — pointed to a quieter-than-average cycle. “They do kind of go all over the map,” said Douglas Biesecker, a physicist at the Space Weather Prediction Center who led an international panel that reviewed predictions.

The solar wind is another piece of the puzzle. David J. McComas of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio and one of the researchers who analyzed data from the Ulysses Sun-watching spacecraft, said that the strength of the solar wind seemed to be in a long-term decline. The pressure exerted by the solar wind particles during the current minimum is about a quarter weaker than during the last solar minimum, Dr. McComas said.

Dr. McComas said scientists were still trying to figure out how all the data fits together.

“There are a number of researchers who predict the next solar cycle,” he said. “There are also a number of investment counselors who predict the future of the stock market.”

Heh.

So I'm not the only one who sees a Nyarlathotep connection...

From the Unspeakable Vault (of Doom).

Ballista for sale

Yes, this is for real. We are selling a full-size Roman siege catapult (or ballista), which we believe to be the only one of its kind (for at least 2000 years).

The catapult was recreated by a team of experts, following all known records, as accurately as possible – and then successfully fired. It was created for the BBC, for a programme called Building the Impossible, in 2002. It was built by the timber-frame team at Carpenter Oak & Woodland.

The ballista weighs approx 12 tons so postage or even buyer collection is not an option. Fully built, it is approx 7.5 metres tall and 8.5 metres long.

Originally, this cost over £120,000 to build – so we are only looking for serious bidders.

Our reserve price of £25,000 includes the cost of essential repairs to bring it back to a condition where it could be displayed, and includes delivery to any mainland UK destination.

Please note: if erecting is required at the buyer’s site, it will cost an additional £17,500 to the purchase price. It is essential that the site has adequate space for the crane and space for setting up. This will not fit in your average garden!!

At eBay. Starting bid £25,000. Auction ends October 10. More pictures and a video at the link.

Hitler's Books

The New York Sun has an article about a new book titled Hitler's Private Library by Timothy Ryback:

Yet this man with such an anti-intellectual approach to reading came to own an enormous private library of around 16,000 books, kept in his residences in Berlin and Munich, and in the mountain retreat he had built above Berchtesgaden.

The first description of this book collection, published in 1942, divides the volumes into military history, the largest grouping; a section on art and architecture; another comprising many works on astrology, spiritualism, nutrition, and diet, and around a thousand books of often trashy popular literature, including a complete set of the Karl May cowboys-and-Indians stories, of which he was particularly fond. Most of Hitler's books, those kept in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, were shipped off by the victorious Soviet authorities to Moscow. They allegedly surfaced in a disused church in the city in the early 1990s, but then disappeared without trace. Many of the books in Munich and at the Berghof near Berchtesgaden fell victim to souvenir hunters among the American soldiers trampling through the ruins of the Reich in Bavaria, but around 3,000, discovered in a Berchtesgaden salt mine, found their way to the Library of Congress in Washington. These were eventually weeded out to leave around 1,200 books — less than 10% of the original collection — that contained undoubted evidence of Hitler's personal possession. Another 80 books that belonged to Hitler were identified only recently in the basement vault library of Brown University. Others doubtless still exist in private hands.

Read the whole thing for a basic book review and perhaps an insight or two on the mind of you-know-who, and the "bizarre note" upon which the book ends.

A pet for Cousin It

Mysterytopia posts some photos and information about strange, or at least strange-looking, animals. I don't know why a couple of them (like the alpaca) are included, but some of them look quite strange (check out the blobfish).

The thing at the right is an Angora rabbit.

Proprioception

I hate to keep linking to dinosaur comics like I'm some kind of fanboy, but this comic just keeps cracking me up.  (P.S.  Don't forget to read the mouse-overs).

I actually experienced this once, without any kind of chemical enhancement.  It occurred during a period of meditation that followed a 2-hour stretch of yoga.

(Stretch of yoga!  Hee-hee!).  It was actually very enjoyable.

He wonder'd...

Brer at PowerOfBabel recently posted an old poem by Eugene Field that echoed some of the sentiments I have expressed on occasion. Not to be completely outdone, I would like to offer this poem by John Keats.

The Naughty Boy

There was a naughty boy,
And a naughty boy was he,
He ran away to Scotland
The people for to see--
Then he found
That the ground
Was as hard,
That a yard
Was as long,
That a song
Was as merry,
That a cherry
Was as red,
That lead
Was as weighty,
That fourscore
Was as eighty,
That a door
Was as wooden
As in England--
So he stood in his shoes
And he wonder'd,
He wonder'd,
He stood in his shoes
And he wonder'd.

Also, make sure the computer is plugged in

I am still officially on break and trying to decide if I even want to keep this blog going or not, but I thought I'd share today's lesson, called: Don't Overlook The Obvious.

For some time, I've had a few minor problems with my computer. I recently started doing regular weekly maintenance and things have improved a lot (thanks mostly, I think, to CCleaner). But there were still two things wrong and I was afraid I'd have to go through that "start over again from the recovery disk" routine, which I really don't want to do unless the machine just flat stops working.

Problem 1: IE would not connect to the internet. Firefox worked. Opera worked. Everything else worked. But not IE. For several months I would go a-googling every now and then to see if I could find any solutions, or at least get a vague idea of what might be the actual problem. I had not been able to find anything that solved the problem. But I had overlooked the obvious. I don't know why I hadn't thought of it before, or why it finally came to me today, but I suddenly thought: What about the firewall? So I checked and, sure enough, my firewall was blocking IE from accessing the internet. I don't know how that happened. So I checked the "allow" button and poof! I have IE again. Although I hardly ever use it, unless I come across something that looks like it isn't displaying properly in Firefox, then I might fire up IE to get another look at it. Also if I make any changes to the template here I like to be able to look at it with different browsers because I know other people out there will be using them.

Problem 2: Gimp was not displaying properly. You know that section on the bottom where all the tool controls are, where you can drop down the menu for different fonts and so forth? That was gone. I don't know how it disappeared or why, but it was just gone. I haven't really felt like learning some new software because I've come to know Gimp pretty well, but I couldn't find anything that might tell me what was going on. So today, since I was on a roll from fixing IE, I took another look at it. I simply went to File > Preferences > Window Management and clicked on "reset saved window positions to default values." That was all it took. I have a suspicion this problem was caused by my daughter because she likes to play around with Gimp and Photofiltre a lot, but she doesn't always know exactly what she's doing (contrary to popular opinion).

So maybe I can start doing some p-shopping again now that I have Gimp back the way it should be.

And don't forget today's lesson: Don't Overlook The Obvious.

Taking a break

For a while.

The "psychopomp in the field"

Brer at PowerOfBabel has graced us with an excellent post on scarecrow lore, Season of the Scarecrow:

No-one really knows the origin of the scarecrow. Some hold they derive from the old Roman custom of having a herm in every field, and are thus of sacred origin as a guardian of the crop. According to one tale they arose from a grim necessity. In the old days it was the task of the very old and the very young to protect the fields from birds and other marauders by shrieking, waving their arms, or chasing them away when they approached; so the weakest and feeblest could still serve the needs of their folk. When the Black Death swept across the land, the old and the young were hardest hit. In their absence, and with spare clothes suddenly in abundance, the scarecrow was created to fill the gap, and since then its' enigmatic figure has strode across the landscape of our imagination.

It is that time of year, after all. And there's a little bit of pipe-smoking lore in it as well.

The Weekly Googthulhu

It is told that in the immemorial years when the world was young, before ever the men of Sarnath came to the land of Mnar, another city stood beside the lake; the gray stone city of Ib, which was old as the lake itself, and peopled with beings not pleasing to behold. Very odd and ugly were these beings, as indeed are most beings of a world yet inchoate and rudely fashioned. It is written on the brick cylinders of Kadatheron that the beings of lb were in hue as green as the lake and the mists that rise above it; that they had bulging eyes, pouting, flabby lips, and curious ears, and were without voice. It is also written that they descended one night from the moon in a mist; they and the vast still lake and gray stone city lb. However this may be, it is certain that they worshipped a sea-green stone idol chiseled in the likeness of Bokrug, the great water-lizard; before which they danced horribly when the moon was gibbous. And it is written in the papyrus of Ilarnek, that they one day discovered fire, and thereafter kindled flames on many ceremonial occasions. But not much is written of these beings, because they lived in very ancient times, and man is young, and knows but little of the very ancient living things.

--H.P. Lovecraft, The Doom that Came to Sarnath

I went looking for something a little more obscure this time, and found this image of Bokrug at Monster Brains. Not quite as horrifying as I would think, but still a good effort and excellent detail.

There's also a death metal band named Bokrug, I discovered.

I admit it...

I would be totally hosed without a Dremel tool.

The negative battery contact on my truck was in pretty bad shape due to corrosion buildup, but the cables were still intact and very heavy-duty. So I used the Dremel to cut what was left of the contact away, then cut through the old bolt because it was too corroded to unscrew. Then I drilled out the hole where the old bolt had attached the contact to the cables, widened it and got rid of all the leftover corroded metal shards, then put on a sander and ground the whole thing until all the corrosion was gone and I had a bright, shiny, smooth contact. Then I just bolted it onto the new heavy-duty contact I got from NAPA yesterday and now the truck starts with no problem.

But if I didn't have a Dremel tool, I don't what I would have done. My only complaint is that it's one of those single-speed (30,000 rpm) models, but then it was a gift, so I'm not complaining. But I would like to get a variable-speed model.

"Dear Media"

An excellent rant at Cracked:

I feel like all we’re getting are lies and lines, and no one’s talking about the issues and no one’s holding anyone accountable. Media, you’re supposed to be on our side. Stop repeating the same sound bites over and over again. In the history of forever, has a President’s ability to do his job been enhanced or impaired as a result of how they feel about moose-hunting? Then shut up about it.

Yes, the media has been failing us for a long, long time.  It's encouraging that more people are finally waking up to the fact, but what the heck too you so long?

Ahoy, me hearties!

'Tis Talk Like a Pirate Day, and I was so busy hangin' scurvy dogs from the yardarm that I almost forgot! So quaff some grog and don't forget the wise words o' Cap'n Blackbeard: Beware all wenches!

I really need to buy a DVD of Blackbeard's Ghost. I haven't seen that movie in such a long time. Seems like the scurvy dogs at Disney could take a break from that Montana wench to show an old movie or two now and then. They should all be keelhauled.

Another free download: Six Degrees--An Amazon Sampler

Here's another free download mp3 album that I forgot to mention: Six Degrees. All instrumental, and uh...I suppose you want a genre, don't you? Let's call it worldbeat ambient. Yeah, that's the ticket. A little too much up-tempo for chill. And it's free. If this is your kind of thing, don't miss it!

Ambrose Bierce and crystal skulls

The Mitchell-Hedges Official Website posts a long but interesting exploration of how Mitchell-Hedges may have acquired the famous crystal skull, and how Ambrose Bierce figures in, in The real origins of the skull?

Question

Has anyone heard from Kelly since Ike went through?