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Saturday, July 30, 2011

http://www.slangsite.com/slang/H.html
has some pretty good slang. i'm trying to remember that hawaian buger - the loco moco?

the murder room
update: frank bender, one of the three co-founder of the murder room, http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifdied two days ago,
natural causes. the murder room is about the vidoc society, a philly-based group that solves old murders. frank's part was that he could take a skull and make a sculpture of how that person would have looked. danny devito owns the tv/movie rights; expect to see something someday. maybe i read about this on redditt? i heard about the group somewhere a couple days ago.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011


Monday, July 25, 2011

tobolowsky files, episode 49. stephen gets shanghaied to norway to hear a drunken eskimo play in hamlet, in the zen story part 2.

http://www.educatedearth.net/video.php?id=5227
(something went wrong with this post. it should start off more like this:)
japanese scientist has overpriced device for turning plastic into oil.
using electricty to make heat, the plastic melts, boils into gas, the gas cools into oil.
i'm a skeptic till i know about the
process, but it's a nice idea. less fuel cost, it looks like he's getting 50 cents a pound for scrap plastic. solar heat could be used to drive, or at least assist, the process.
hat tip reddit
http://www.plastic2oil.com/
http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/plastic-to-oil-fantastic/

Sunday, July 24, 2011

Ted is an upcoming movie by seth mcfarlan about a guy whose teddy bear has come to life.
Marky mark wahlberb, mila kunis, patric warburton, joel mchale, giovanni ribisi.
it filmed in april so it's probably a year away from release by universal.
my teddy bear, g.t.bear (gummi the bear), was not alive exactly, but had a personality, went on adventures, got mail, got email (which he let me share), talked us into going to law school, as part of his plan to someday own a ferrari. didn't quite work out, but was worth a shot. currently gt stays with my ex in kentucky, and doesn't get out much.
needs a new suit and some reupholstering. my other bear, mugwump, still goes to work with me after 30 years. he doesn't have much fur left. but mugwump was never as rambunctious or ego-driven as g.t.


Ted seems a bit like wilfred, which i'm watching on hulu, not sure yet whether i like. wilfred it sort of like fight club, but instead of brad pit it's a dog. my tenants at the other house have cable, so yesterday i watched a bit of ferris beuler, watching from the perspective of the idea that ferris isn't real and cameron is imagining everything.

Saturday, July 23, 2011

fecilia day redditt video

Friday, July 22, 2011

jstor public domain papers from the royal society released by pirate bay in response to the arrest of the guy who downloaded a large amount of jstor papers. he's the same guy who put a lot of PACER filings online, a valuable public service.

troy michigan is threatening to close its library unless residents pony up for a tax increase. here are my comments from boingboing.
arbitraryaardvark
Every Michigan city right now is facing budget constraints.
One ploy I have seen repeatedly when citizens start to object to being overtaxed, is that the authorities will threaten to close the library.
I am a fan of libraries. I grew up reading Asimov and every other science fiction writer on two shelves of SF in my town's library when i was 13-14. I read "I, Asimov" last week after dumpster diving it; mostly I just read stuff online these days.
Tax dollars are fungible. If taxes are raised "for the library" that frees up other tax dollars for, for example, putting black teenagers in jail for having pot, or paving contracts so that contractors can kick back campaign donations, or sinecures for the well-connected, and so forth. What boing-boing could do instead of blindly supporting a tax increase is to open-source a close look at the troy budget,and see if there is other stuff that could be cut to fund the library, at at least some miminal level. I have worked as a librarian. 90% of what the patrons want is for the building to be open and the front desk staffed. But 90% of the staff budget goes to people with MLS's in the back rooms doing whatever it is they do. Half of that could be cut back until the local economy picks back up, without harming the basic function of the library - a big building with lots of books.

these bamboo fences look nice and could easily be done by a doityourselfer rather than buying them from this ad.

here is that asimov book i recently finished.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

george carlin chiche rhymes, possibly rap, technically slam.
tropical fruit video
this carlin isn't as good.
i knew a guy who used to live in a trailer park next to george carlin,and he would get drunk and complain like this.
flying car

Sunday, July 17, 2011

sea shepard v whalers, movie

Friday, July 15, 2011

soda pop shop video. short ad first.

word for the day:
Donaudampfschifffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft.

Thursday, July 14, 2011

holmesburg prison experiments

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

strunk/white:
Obliquely, this reminds me of the old joke about the guy who gets into a cab at Logan and says to the cabbie, "Take me to a place where I can get scrod". And the cabbie says to him, "Mister, that's the first time I've ever heard that used in the pluperfect subjunctive".

Monday, July 11, 2011

The agency suggests that people protect themselves from heat disorders by reducing activity during the hottest part of the day, wearing lightweight clothing and drinking plenty of water.
ok
The agency also asks that people abstain from caffeinated or alcoholic drinks. wait, what?
Even meat and other proteins can increase metabolic heat production. ok.

http://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100111.txt
the 7 pillars of wisdom, lawrence of arabia's story of how the arabs took saudi arabia from the turks in wwI. one of my favorite books, but somehow i'm not up for book length works online; i'd rather be able to read it in the tub. i'm not sure where my copy is right now. i have to many books to be able to find one particular book.
this came up in a discussion on reddit of movies that are better than the book, someone said lawrence of arabia but i dont agree, even if peter o'toole is a great actor.

Sunday, July 10, 2011


tesla's birthday

Saturday, July 09, 2011

8 days till breaking bad season 4.

Wednesday, July 06, 2011

a 7th circuit decision granting a temporary injunction against gun ranges in chicago shows that the 2nd amendment is starting to get taken seriously by the lower courts. a standard of review is beginning to emerge from these caseshttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif.
courts will look to whether the activity in question is within the core rights protected by the amendment,and the degree to which regulation burdens it. substatial or severe burdens on the core rights will get some form of heightened scrutiny.
analogies are made to election law cases, of all things, so what is to me the familar framework of anderson, takushi, and norman v reed, will have a new context.
i guess i'll cross-post this to my election law blog as well.
buckley v valeo exacting scrutiny is mentioned, as well as crawford v marion county, which extended the anderson test to election law cases generally.

the decision cites a number of well known law bloggers, including eugene volokh, instapundit, randy barnett, david koppel.
a longer version of this post is here http://ballots.blogspot.com/2011/07/7th-circuit-decision-granting-temporary.html

Monday, July 04, 2011

1 in 4 men travels with a teddy bear or other stuffed animal, reports reputable sources such as cnn and the frisky. I am one of them.

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