Somewhere, Jim Henson and Freddie Mercury are smiling and laughing their heads off...
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
This DESERVES to be a real Thanksgiving TV special...
It's not the first time that I've blogged about this. But a short film this good easily merits sharing more than once. And who knows, there might be some who have never had the pleasure of seeing it before.
Here is that brilliant, spot-on and hilarious spoof of Ron Howard's Apollo 13 that Gene Kranz himself has taken to watching with his family as a holiday tradition.
Behold: Thanksgiving With The Kranzes...
Thanksgiving 2009: And so it begins...
The twenty-pound turkey (what the heck was Dad thinking?!?) that will be our own family's main course tomorrow. Since this is the biggest bird of the batch, I used this one to do the "water trick" with to measure out how much peanut oil to pour into the pot tomorrow morning. That means you put the turkey in, and start pouring cold water into the pot until it meets the top of the turkey. Then take it out and make a mark (I use a piece of tape) at the water line minus the displacement. That way you don't have to rough guess and risk flames and destruction when peanut oil comes flowing over the top of the pot...
So all the birds are now marinaded and well-rubbed in with Cajun seasoning. There'll be several more treatments throughout the day but for now "the chef" is going to take a break and do something I've hardly had time to do at all the past few months: finally get into seriously playing Batman: Arkham Asylum :-)
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Random thought/proverb/wisdom/whatever
There is one letter's difference between "fame" and "fake"... and often not even that much.
BioShock cosplay recreates Rapture at the Georgia Aquarium (WOW!!!)
This is about the most crazy awesome astonishing thing that I have seen all month...
Folks, that is NOT from a BioShock video game! Harrison Krix out of Atlanta built that unbelievably sweet Big Daddy costume, then contacted reps with the Georgia Aquarium and got some time scheduled there for a photoshoot. With Harrison in his Big Daddy gear and his fiancée in decrepit dress and scary makeup as a Little Sister, they brought Rapture to life amid real sharks and jellyfish.
Click here for MANY more images of Harrison Krix's BioShock session at the Georgia Aquarium, including some that Harrison has made wallpaper size for your desktop (and they will certainly be made useful, of that there is no doubt :-)
THE BEST CHRISTMAS PAGEANT EVER: 11 days 'til showtime
Last night we had our first technical rehearsal for Theatre Guild of Rockingham County's production of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. Prior to that co-directors Jeff and Melissa Mericle had a "costume parade" where the cast got to show off the costumes they had put together for approval. The idea is to evoke a Seventies-ish look (since that's the time period of the original novel).
Although I didn't take part in the costume parade itself (since it had been provided by the Theatre Guild with special arrangement with the Madison Fire Department) I did put on my Fireman's getup for the first time, and kept it on when we rehearsed the fire scene...
I have an entirely fresh appreciation for firefighters now, after wearing that for just one evening. It is heavy! And that's still not all of what I'll be running around in during the show. Firefighter's attire is big and bulky and gets hot inside: it's like a Snuggie from Hell. But when you think about the alternative and then realize that at the present time there is no alternative... yeah, I have to really tip my hat to the men and women who choose to do this for real.
"Technical rehearsal" is just what it sounds like: rehearsing just as we've done for the past four or five weeks, but with things like props and furniture in place, going through the lights and sounds, etc. We'll do it again tonight, and then full-blown dress rehearsals next week.
Everyone is stoked about doing this show! The kids especially are doing a terrific job. Hope y'all will get to come and see them shine :-)
Monday, November 23, 2009
Tip your waiter or get arrested in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania!
Leslie Pope and John Wagner were hauled away from the Lehigh Pub in handcuffs by the police in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania last week. Their "crime"? Refusing to pay a tip!
If you're frustrated by poor service at a restaurant, think twice before you decide to not tip. You may be in for a bit more than just a dirty look from the waiter.Bet that's one place that's gonna lose some patronage!"Nobody, nobody wants to be forced to pay a tip or be arrested for terrible service," Leslie Pope said when her happy hour ended in handcuffs.
Pope and John Wagner were hauled away by police and charged with theft for not paying the mandatory 18 percent gratuity totaling $16 after eating at the Lehigh Pub in Bethlehem, Pa. with six friends.
Pope claimed that they had to wait nearly an hour for their order and that she had to get napkins and silverware for the table herself.
"At this point I became very annoyed because I had already gone up to the bar myself to have my soda refilled because the waitress never came back," Pope said.
After the $73 bill came, the group paid for food, drinks, and tax but refused to pay the tip. After explaining the bad service to the bartender in charge, Pope claimed he took their money and called police. The couple was handcuffed and placed in the back of a police car.
"I understand that, you know, we didn't pay the gratuity, but it was a gratuity, it wasn't something that was required," said Wagner.
The owner admitted that the group waited unusually long for their food, but said the pub was extremely busy that night. He said managers offered to comp the food, a claim the couple denies ever happened.
Obviously we would have liked for the patron and the establishment to have worked this out without getting the police involved," said Deputy Police Commissioner Stuart Bedics.
Police charged them with theft since the gratuity was part of the actual bill. However, it is doubtful that the charges will hold up in front of a judge. The couple is scheduled to appear in court next month.
GeekTyrant's retrospective of ALIEN
GeekTyrant has posted a fine retrospective of Alien, including some thoughts and observations that had never occurred to me before, as well as lots of trivia that will now doubt come as new information to many people (like how H.R. Giger's designs for the Facehugger were held up by alarmed U.S. Customs agents at the airport, prompting writer Dan O'Bannon to drive on over and explain that they were meant for a horror movie).
Chad Austin makes THE NEW YORK TIMES!
A little over three years after my photo appeared in The New York Times, now it's life-long friend Chad Austin's turn! New York Times is running a story about the SAS Institute in Cary, where Chad works. The story is mostly about how the company is the biggest independent software company in the world and how its fast gaining attention in the corporate world, but there's also a lot about how SAS gives some awesome benefits to its employees. And among the photos in the slideshow accompanying the story there's this pic...
See those legs in the foreground wearing the blue-trimmed shoes? Those are Chad Austin's legs!
Sorry girls but as nice as Chad's calves are, he is a married man as of this past summer :-P
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Ahead of his time: Michael Crichton on the global warming fraud
"F---ing pissed!" And that was one of the more polite e-mails that have come in since Friday afternoon when this blog and many others spread the news about the Climate Research Unit at University of East Anglia getting hacked. That 61-megabyte .zip archive has gone viral across the Intertubes and bunches of blood-boiling stuff is still being gleaned from the correspondence between climate "scientists" that points to a decades-long conspiracy to promote paranoia about global warming at cost of rigorous and honest study.
Well, many people have been saying for a long time that global warming is fake. And few argued against global warming as articulately and passionately as did Michael Crichton. The acclaimed bestselling author of Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain addressed global warming in his novel State of Fear. It was one year ago this month that Crichton passed away, but I've no doubt that he would have been very pleased with this weekend's news... and would probably smile from knowing he was so far ahead of the curve. If you're interested in some serious discussion about the Earth and its climate, I greatly recommend reading Crichton's 2005 lecture "Complexity Theory and Environmental Management". It's a rather long read, but one rife with all sorts of solid information (the thing about Chernobyl severely made my jaw drop).
And I'm gonna do something that I've never done before: if you maintain a blog, SPREAD THE WORD ABOUT THE HACKING OF THE CRU! I'm seeing the traditional press start to finally disseminate this news, but they're (perhaps understandably but that's still no excuse) being awfully slow-pokish about it. This very well might be the biggest scam in modern history, when you consider all the money that's been wasted and legislation that's been enforced in the name of "global warming". Should that make everyone "f---ing pissed"?!? Yer #&@%ed right it should!!
If sincere investigation bears out that this has been a fraud, then careers must be forever destroyed and I'll even suggest that a lot of climate con-artists need to be strung up from the nearest telephone poles by their circular reproductive units. With piano wire.
Chris Knight's somewhat typical Sunday
Right now: catching up on e-mail and news.
Later: writing more of the novel that I've been working on for National Novel Writing Month, which as things stand now won't be finished by the end of November because of all the good stuff that I'm finding to add into it. But what will be done by then should still be enough to meet the 150-pages needed to qualify as "done" for the month. I'll just put the finishing touches on it later :-)
Later still: painting some more of my army of Orks for Warhammer 40,000 and then laying out all my works for turkey frying on Thursday.
And done already this morning: videography of the baptisms of a friend's children at a church in Greensboro. I'd never done a baptismal job before.
Maybe someday I'll get to film a bris. But please... no tipping! :-P
Linguist spends first three years of son's life speaking only Klingon
An expert at linguistics used nothing but the fictional Klingon language from the Star Trek franchise when he spoke to his son for the first three years of the kid's life.
Dr. d'Armond Speers wanted to observe whether baby Alec would pick up Klingon as naturally as most babies learn English or any other real language. Speers was especially giddy about the prospect of Alec's first word being "vav" (the Klingon term for "daddy"). Although Alec, now 13, doesn't speak Klingon at all, at the time "He was definitely starting to learn it... When Alec spoke back to me in Klingon his pronunciation was excellent."
This dude should have tried getting his son to speak fluent Sindarin or Quenya. Now that would have been impressive!
Boeing creates laser weapon that shoots down flying aircraft
Aim your browser here for more, including the next technical goal that Boeing is setting out to accomplish: mounting these laser weapons onto sharks.
(I'm kidding! :-)
It's an odd commentary on our culture...
...when all the literature on the front shelves of the bookstores is about either vampires, zombies, or Sarah Palin.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Friday, November 20, 2009
CLIMATE RESEARCH UNIT HACKED! 61 megabytes reveal massaged data on global warming?! Did scientists conspire on climate scare?!
Ho-lee HELL!! This could turn into one of the biggest stories of the decade... scratch that, decades!
Could it be that the whole "global warming" thing has been nothing but a colossal scam on damned near every man, woman, child and dumb animal on the planet?!
The Intertubes are smoking hot this afternoon from the news about University of East Anglia's Hadley Climatic Research Unit getting hacked and a heapin' big pile of material being leaked online. The 61 megabyte file can be downloaded here. But if you want the gist of it, Watts Up With That has a bigtime discussion going on, including excerpts from the hacked stuff.
And if this small sample is any indication, a bunch of scientists have a lotta 'splainin' to do. There are e-mail exchanges among researchers about hiding data reflecting temperature decline over the past three decades, and even adding on to temperatures. There is also some troubling discussion of political ramifications of the climate research which strongly suggests that it has been severely tainted with outside interests.
Just... wow.
And according to the story at Watts Up With That, the Climate Research Unit has canceled all e-mail passwords and is now admitting that the breach is real. The plot thickens.
This demands to be the hardest-hitting story of the next week if not the next several months. It also needs to be thoroughly investigated... and let the chips fall where they may.
