Behold...
It's 35,200 times smaller than an actual train.
Now that is some practical nanotechnology! :-)
It's a fine costume. Movie quality at that! And staffers from Lucasfilm have told me that the lightsaber I made is like something they would have made for a real Star Wars film! Yes, I'm very proud to own some real Jedi threads :-)
But you know: we all have to start somewhere. Every journey has a first step. And it's true with being geeky enough of a Star Wars fan as to make a costume - or more than one - inspired by the saga. When I was a younger punk and going out trickster-treating on Halloween, I usually had one of those vinyl "costumes" with the cheap plastic mask. I was Darth Vader and Yoda and a Stormtrooper back in the day but...
...well, when you get older, and bigger, you realize that you deserve something a bit more "boss".
It took me longer than most would have expected, but in October of 1996 I made my very first "serious" Star Wars costume. It was for the Halloween party the Baptist Student Union at Elon was having at Blue Ribbon in Burlington. I'd been wondering all that month what I should wear. And then one day at Spencer's at Four Seasons Town Centre in Greensboro, just over a week before the party, I spotted a two-piece Darth Vader mask (the kind that Don Post Studios used to make).
"And that's when I went mad, Your Honor..."
Well, "Darth Vader" was a hit! I even wound up winning the "Best Costume" award at the BSU party. And for the rest of the evening I enjoyed strutting around Elon's campus as the Dark Lord of the Sith (something that would kinda be repeated a week before Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace came out, but that's a story for another time). The one thing that I wish could have been better, though no fault of my own, is that I'm admittedly not as tall as Darth Vader was in the movies! To really pull off a persuasive Vader, you need to be at least six feet tall. Most folks aren't anywhere near David Prowse's height and build. And some people who build extremely good Vader costumes wind up compensating by wearing way padded boots: almost like something you'd find in Gene Simmons' closet. I don't have that sort of stature, and I don't plan on ever making a Vader costume as awesome as some of the fan-made ones that I've seen...
...but on Halloween night 1996, none of that mattered. For one wonderful evening, I was Darth Vader, baby! :-)
So that was what I did with a week to work with. But come the following Halloween, I wanted to spend more effort on the matter. Baptist Student Union was having another Halloween get-together at Blue Ribbon. And emboldened by the previous year's costume, I got a bit daring.
There was no question what I had to do to top Darth Vader. For 1997 it had to be Boba Fett. Including the jetpack.
And the jetpack? Cardboard, for the most part. The "rocket" on top of it was fashioned from three of those cone-shaped air fresheners that you can buy at any grocery store or Target or Wal-Mart. I used two of the bases from the fresheners (I'm telling y'all here and now, that the apartment "Weird" Ed and I had smelled glorious for over a month) to make the tops of the side "cylinders" on the pack. The nozzles were small plastic cups epoxied to balls I found in the sporting goods section of K-Mart, then spray-painted silver and attached to the sides of the pack. The whole thing attached with Velcro and a hidden piece of belt to a strip of armor (also made from placemat) that extended down the back from the collar armor.
Granted, it's possibly the cheapest Boba Fett costume ever assembled. I think the entire thing cost about $200 (and most of that was the price of the helmet). But it looked hella kewl! My friends in Baptist Student Union loved it, and the kids who came into the restaurant couldn't stop oggling it. Then the next day (which was the actual Halloween 1997) I put it on that afternoon and Ed and I walked all over Elon's campus and saw jaws dropping all over the place. The funniest moment came when we went into the student center where a group of prospective students and their parents were being given a tour: I did my best Boba Fett walk, came in, and nodded my helmet toward them. Ehhh... wonder how much enrollment money that lil' stunt cost Elon that day? :-P
Well, that first Boba Fett costume was a knockout! But someday I want to make a much better one: out of vacuu-formed plastic and whatnot. I've met Jeremy Bulloch before: he's the actor who portrayed Boba in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and he and I are the exact same height! So a Boba Fett costume would be all-around sensible to have if I'm gonna dress up as a Star Wars villain.
But in the end, it really isn't how much money and material you can pour into a Star Wars costume, or any costume for that matter. It's the passion you have for a character or a story which really counts. People aren't gonna be impressed by a thousand-dollar getup as much as they are by seeing you having fun with the role and enjoying being something different or odd or both... if even for just one night.
Happy Halloween y'all! :-)
Yah you read that right: one thousand, nine hundred and ninety pages.
It's calculated to cost $1.28 trillion.
So what's in this... thing?
Abortion funding.
The so-called "death panels" that we have been told repeatedly were just a figment of some people's imagination.
And... get a load of this one:
"Pelsoi inserted a provision which would punish state governments who attempt any kind of law suit abuse reform that would impact lawyers fees."What. The. Hell. ???
So it's not enough that Congress has decreed that pharmaceutical firms are to be protected from lawsuits stemming from any injury or death that even untested vaccines might cause. Now our "lawmakers" are shielding trial lawyers from tort reform... by way of "health care" legislation?!
Who the hell do these people think they are?
I know what they are not. They certainly do not qualify to be our "representatives". With the exception of possibly two or three people that I can readily think of that are in Washington today, the members of the House and Senate and the Obama White House are so detached from the reality outside the Beltway that they have no understanding or empathy at all with the American people. Pardon my French folks, but these idiots don't have a f#&@ing clue at all about the lives of the people they allege to be "serving".
Do you think Nancy Pelosi gives a flying rat's ass about you or me or anyone else? "Let's hear it for the power!" she cried out when she became Speaker of the House. And that's all that matters to these bastards.
We don't have a government of the people, by the people and for the people anymore, friends and neighbors. Sane people are incapable of even desiring to write up nearly two thousand pages of legislation that will take away personal liberty and put their children's grandchildren into hopeless hock.
So what kind of person is capable of such a thing?
Mull that one over in yer gray matter...
The White House economists are calling these figures "calculator abuse". Wish I'd have thought of that one during those many times that I struggled with algebra in eighth grade!
Pssst... hey, President Obama. Wanna really use the government to create jobs and bolster the economy? It's very very simple:
NO country in history has ever spent itself into prosperity. America can not possibly be any different.
So what did I do for this year's Halloween?
It's ME!
THAT'll make the neighborhood kids think twice before knocking on the door for candy! :-P
People with a particular gene variant performed more than 20 percent worse on a driving test than people without it - and a follow-up test a few days later yielded similar results. About 30 percent of Americans have the variant.And we are now one step closer toward understanding my family :-P"These people make more errors from the get-go, and they forget more of what they learned after time away," says Dr. Steven Cramer, neurology associate professor and senior author of the study published recently in the journal Cerebral Cortex.
This gene variant limits the availability of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor during activity. BDNF keeps memory strong by supporting communication among brain cells and keeping them functioning optimally. When a person is engaged in a particular task, BDNF is secreted in the brain area connected with that activity to help the body respond.
Previous studies have shown that in people with the variant, a smaller portion of the brain is stimulated when doing a task than in those with a normal BDNF gene. People with the variant also don't recover as well after a stroke. Given these differences, the UCI scientists wondered: Could the variant affect an activity such as driving?
"We wanted to study motor behavior, something more complex than finger-tapping," says Stephanie McHughen, graduate student and lead author of the study. "Driving seemed like a good choice because it has a learning curve and it's something most people know how to do."
The driving test was taken by 29 people - 22 without the gene variant and seven with it. They were asked to drive 15 laps on a simulator that required them to learn the nuances of a track programmed to have difficult curves and turns. Researchers recorded how well they stayed on the course over time. Four days later, the test was repeated.
Results showed that people with the variant did worse on both tests than the other participants, and they remembered less the second time. "Behavior derives from dozens and dozens of neurophysiologic events, so it's somewhat surprising this exercise bore fruit," Cramer says.
In Monrovia, Liberia, there's a guy taking the matter of a lopsided, state-run media and reshaping it into a free-of-charge, independent news-aggregator—all accomplished with dry-erase board and couple markers. (Sorry, internet!) Each morning, at 10:45 AM, Alfred Sirleaf wakes up and heads down to his bulletin board to post the day's news, culling together a slate of stories his countrymen might otherwise never see. Grateful readers line up in droves, on foot and in cars, to read these updates, in what has been described as the country’s—and probably the world's—only analog blog.Hit the above link for video of Mr. Sirleaf and his unique "website"!
Be mindful of that before you click this link.
Remember: it's your choice. Consider yourself duly warned.
Crash here for the tale of Daniel East, his sister Tevyn, and how they inadvertently brought Tricky through a harrowing eight-hour scenic tour of the desert wasteland of Utah and Nevada.
Tricky not only lived, but he suffered just a few minor scrapes on his paws.
(And methinks Tricky should sign an endorsement deal with ACME while that iron is still hot.)
The Electronic Frontier Foundation - which many of y'all will remember came to the aid of Yours Truly two years ago during that very bizarre situation with Viacom - is now setting out to document "the worst of the worst" of bogus copyright complaints. Hit here for the Takedown Hall of Shame, featuring outrageous acts of DMCA abuse by Warner Brothers, the Nation Organization for Marriage and many more!
(By the way, in my opinion there are few finer organizations out there than the Electronic Frontier Foundation: those guys really go all-out to defend the rights of content creators. If you're feeling so led, ya might wanna consider making a contribution to 'em 'cuz they definitely more than earn it :-)
And you'll still have plenty of time for trick-or-treating, too!
And it looks like things have gotten even worse in the ten years since the events of BioShock...
BioShock 2 beckons us back under the sea on February 9, 2010.
Originally buried in Mt. Sterling in North Carolina, Popcorn's widow Pam Sutton cited "problems with vandalism" as the reason for moving and re-interring Popcorn's casket at Resthaven Memorial Gardens in Dandridge, Tennessee: not far from Popcorn's home in Parrotsville.
The move was scheduled for this past Saturday. A public memorial service was also held, attended by hundreds of people including country music legend Hank Williams Jr.
An old-fashioned horse-drawn hearse then brought Popcorn Sutton to his final resting place.
WBIR has more about the service for Popcorn Sutton, including a rather intriguing comment from Hank Williams Jr.
And here are three videos of the service, courtesy of aliciajose on YouTube (thanks aliciajose!)...
And if y'all wanna know why so many of your friends and neighbors have found Popcorn Sutton and his craft so endearing and enchanting, I cannot possibly recommend enough Neal Hutcheson's award-winning documentary The Last One. This has become the most-watched DVD of my collection in the past year (mostly 'cuz of all the people who keep asking to borrow it! :-)
The Nazi lizards from outer space invade again for the first time next week, November 3rd at 8 p.m. ET/PT on ABC.
Per the reckoning of a group of scientists being reported in a Dutch journal (link goes to English translation) the popularly-held belief that the Maya calendar predicts the destruction of the world in 2012 is a miscalculation and doesn't even have anything to do with the end times whatsoever. The real end of the Maya cycle of time, according to what these researchers have found, is around 2220... and then the calendar just goes back to the beginning, even as ours ends on December 31st and goes into January 1st.
So like Lt. Commander Susan Ivanova of Babylon 5 once said: "No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There is always boom tomorrow."
(But if this kind of thing floats your boat, we've still got Sir Isaac Newton's prediction of a 2060 apocalypse looming before us :-)
I can't remember the last time that I went to a GeoCities-hosted page. But once upon the time they glittered across cyberspace like sand on the seashore, mostly for "personal home pages". Those are dying out now, being supplanted by blogs like this one.
It can't be said enough though, that a lot of us today took our first steps into that larger world with GeoCities. Mark Milian writes a fine send-off for the service at the Los Angeles Times site and if you want a tribute to just about every GeoCities page that ever got created, click here.
