Odd Lots
- Finland has some of the coolest sky phenomena on Earth.
- Sterile neutrinos? I think particle physics has gotten away from me. At least they didn’t discover it on the bridge of the Enterprise, with the Klingons closing in, right before the last commercial. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- Are hipsters gone yet? Does their Weltanschauung capture the Zeitgeist? Or is it only a façade hiding the real bête noir? Will we miss them? Are you sick of dumb-ass questions yet? (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- And just when you think politics (even in my own relatively sane state of Colorado) can’t get any weirder, well…
- Several people sent me links to reports of an Irish chap who’s spotted a passerby in a 1928 Charlie Chaplin film talking on a cellphone. Gomog’s Razor (i.e., when all possibilities are equally unlikely, the craziest one is true) suggests time travel, but the little old lady in question may also be holding a compact mechanical trumpet hearing aid. Or maybe her ear is just cold. I’ll bank on time travel, and I know what she’s muttering into her Thiotimoline Smartphone: “Look, you idiots, I said send me to the year 2819, not the year 1928!”
- Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy Tab is getting a lot of press these days, but note that this review does not mention ebooks. At all. Wow.
- The Pontiac marque officially died this past Sunday. My grandfather Harry Duntemann always bought Pontiacs. His ’53 had an amber-colored glass Indian as a hood ornament, and my mother owned his loaded ’57 Chieftan from 1961-1967. It was a cool car with a very big engine, and given that my mom was used to driving tiny little Nash Ramblers from the mid-1950s, it was easy for her her to daydream and suddenly realize she was doing 80. I’ll miss Pontiacs. And my next car will almost certainly be a Ford, for reasons I don’t need to explain.
- Sportscasting can be hazardous to your hairdo.
- What if we stopped trying to immunize people against malaria and tried to immunize mosquitoes instead? Takes only one gone link to break a chain.
- “UCLA Seeks to Avoid Turnovers.” Me, I’m leery of cheese Danish.
- Dude, where’s my external tank? (Thanks again to Pete for this and the above link.)
- This is not a hoax. Really, it isn’t. I checked.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: cars · culture · ebooks · hardware · humor · science
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Denver voters rejected Initiative 300 at the polls last Tuesday. Guess they really don’t want to believe. 🙂
(I didn’t get a vote on that; I’m in Arapahoe County, not Denver proper. But I probably would have taken one look at it, thought “WTF is this crap?!?” and voted “no.”)
1928 cellphone: it’s not in a Charlie Chaplin movie, it’s in film of the lobby during the premiere of a Chaplin movie (The Circus). Swallowing the Camel wants to know how the cell phoner is getting service.
“I said send me to the year 2819…”: She’s wearing 1928 costume, so that’s not possible unless the time machine also reclothes the passenger while in transit.
“Sportscasting can be hazardous to your hairdo”: And to your brain. That woman almost certainly suffered a concussion. Probably mild, but any concussion is a a bad idea. Soccer players “head” the ball regularly, often on long kicks, and physicians have discovered that veteran players can accumulate serious amounts of brain damage from this practice.
“This is not a hoax”: Why should it be? Silly String can be messy and hard to clean up. The sign in question implements a law enacted by Los Angeles in response to people “celebrating” Halloween by throwing around great quantities of Silly String which had to be cleaned up later at substantial expense.
Would you consider a law criminalizing the possession of toilet paper in public absurd? But if your city or neighborhood was repeatedly vandalized by yahoos who thought it was clever to blanket every tree and shrub with toilet paper, maybe it wouldn’t be absurd.
Plus all that Silly String posed a hazard to police officers trying to get around to respond to emergency calls, which I gather was one of the main reasons cited for the ordinance.