Here ya go!
The Nazi lizards from outer space invade again for the first time next week, November 3rd at 8 p.m. ET/PT on ABC.
Monday, October 26, 2009
2012 "end-of-world" date a miscalculation (by more than two centuries)
Somebody get Roland Emmerich on the horn: his upcoming 2012 movie is gonna be off. Like, waaaay off.
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 :-)
Rest in peace GeoCities
Fifteen years after it first offered free web space for anybody, GeoCities is shutting down today.
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.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
So, it has come to this: Chris reviews TWILIGHT
And I have to report to all two of this blog's faithful readers that much to my surprise, I enjoyed Twilight more than I had anticipated. So far as vampire fiction goes I'm still going to consider Dracula to be the high bar, along with Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles (the first several books anyway). But in Twilight I found a satisfying fulfillment of something I hadn't realized there had been a dearth of: a thoroughly modern-day American vampire mythos.
And that's the thing that makes me want to read the other books in the Twilight series: Meyer does establish quite a deep and empathetic lore in her tale of Bella, Edward and the Cullen clan of vampires. Yeah, they're vampires. I can finally buy into that. Up 'til now, what little I'd known of the vampires in the Twilight books had caused me to muster up a "meh". I mean, "vampires" who aren't afraid of sunlight, aren't repelled by garlic or crucifixes, etc.? Those aren't vampires, those are people with severe eating disorders at most. But having the read the book I kinda like this updated take on the vampire physiology, just as I thought Anne Rice had a brilliant and even sensible basis for vampires in her literature.
In other aspects, Twilight reads much like any romantic novel aimed at adolescents and young adults... and that's fine too. Vampire fiction cuts across a huge swath of genre. In this case it didn't detract from my personal appreciation of the novel at all, and I don't foresee it being a hindrance in my reading the other installments of the Twilight series either.
So if, like me, you've been wandering the bookstore aisles and inwardly debating whether Twilight is a book worth sinking your teeth into (or at least sinking into your wallet and plunking down money for), I'll have to give it a good recommendation.
And maybe sometime I'll even draw up the courage to watch the movie...
Right now I'm watching THE SUPER HERO SQUAD SHOW
Y'all have got to check this out! It's on Cartoon Network and it's based on those cute lil' Marvel Super Hero Squad toys from Hasbro. But don't let that mislead ya: The Super Hero Squad Show is really more like Marvel Comics meets The Family Guy.
What sort of funny are we talking here? Captain America was just on the phone while wearing a Confederate outfit, discussing the re-enactment he's on his way to: "Hey it's the Civil War, what's the worst that could happen?"
Looks like I've found something new to DVR (in addition to those reruns of Are You Being Served? on PBS :-)
What if the Internet was turned off?
That's the grim scenario envisioned by Cracked.com, which asked its readers to send in their Photoshop-ped submissions depicting an Internet-addicted society suddenly having to make do without things like Twitter, Nigerian scam e-mails and online porno. At the link you'll find the top twenty entries, each hysterically funny... and clever!
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Obama declares national emergency because of swine flu
Read it here folks.
That's a helluva over-reaction to something that otherwise hasn't been inordinately differently from the typical garden-variety influenza. But to hear it from some people, it's already akin to the 1918 pandemic that killed millions in a very short period of time.
Friday, October 23, 2009
If you can find them, and no one else can help...
...maybe you can hire... The A-Team!
ComingSoon.net has just posted this pic (click to significantly embiggen) of Bradley Cooper as Lt. Templeton "Faceman" Peck, Quinton "Rampage" Jackson as Sgt. "B.A." Baracus, Sharlto Copley as Capt. "Howling Mad" Murdock, and Liam Neeson as John "Hannibal" Smith - along with the team's signature van - from the upcoming film adaptation of the beloved Eighties television series. The movie is out this coming June.
Maybe if we're good boys and girls we'll get a teaser trailer by Christmas :-)
N.C. State engineers create chip with storage out the wazoo
Some cutting-edge stuff coming out of North Carolina State University: researchers there have created a chip the size of a human fingernail that can store... get this... a TERABYTE of data!
In layman's terms that's about 20 high-definition DVDs or 250 million pages of text.
The engineers made their breakthrough using the process of selective doping, in which an impurity is added to a material whose properties consequently change.Click here for the official press release from Dr. Jagdish "Jay" Narayan and his team at N.C. State., including how the processes they've discovered can also be applied to fuel economy, reduction of heat in semiconductors and engine design.Working at the nanoscale, the engineers added metal nickel to magnesium oxide, a ceramic. The resulting material contained clusters of nickel atoms no bigger than 10 square nanometers -- a pinhead has a diameter of 1 million nanometers. The discovery represents a 90% size reduction compared with today's techniques, and an advancement that could boost computer storage capacity.
I'm already giddy about the thought of one of those chips in an iPod...
Nifty, Nifty: "Weird Al" Yankovic is FIFTY!
Fifty years ago today, on October 23rd 1959 in the little burg of Downey, California, proud parents Nick and Mary Yankovic celebrated the arrival of a son. They dubbed their newly-spawned offspring Alfred.
A few years later a door-to-door salesman arrived at the Yankovic home in nearby Lynwood and offered either guitar or accordion lessons at a nearby school. Nick and Mary chose the accordion.
And with that fateful decision, the world would never be the same again...
Along with millions of his fans throughout the world, The Knight Shift blog and its proprietor wishes a very HAPPY BIRTHDAY today to "Weird Al" Yankovic!
God bless you and yours Al. Can't wait to see what the next fifty years bring from ya :-)
(And while we're on the subject, why not celebrate Al's birthday by giving him some hard-earned royalties? Mash down here to order The Essential "Weird Al" Yankovic 2-disc CD set, due out this coming Tuesday!)
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Man pleads guilty on charge of drunk-driving his La-Z-Boy
Anderson has now plead guilty to a DWI charge. The judge has sentenced him to two years of probation.
(That is definitely a new one for the "Hold muh beer and watch this..." file!)
Understanding Einstein's energy
Awright, 'fess up y'all
How many poor saps out there were waiting in line at midnight to buy a copy of the Windows 7 operating system?
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Claudville, Virginia gets first public white-space network
Okay well what I wanna know is: does the Wal-Mart in Patrick Springs carry white-space routers already??
Gears of War Snuggie
Ehhhh... personally I'd rather have official Gears of War Underoos :-P
It's that time of year again
And if you buy extra boxes of chocolate chip, the Girls Scouts will even give "protection" for your place of business.
Russia watches American "Self Immolation"
'Tis painfully ironic that these observations are being made in Pravda, of all places. Stanislav Mishin writes...
It can be safely said, that the last time a great nation destroyed itself through its own hubris and economic folly was the early Soviet Union (though in the end the late Soviet Union still died by the economic hand). Now we get the opportunity to watch the Americans do the exact same thing to themselves. The most amazing thing of course, is that they are just repeating the failed mistakes of the past. One would expect their fellow travelers in suicide, the British, to have spoken up by now, but unfortunately for the British, their education system is now even more of a joke than that of the Americans...Twenty years ago communism collapsed under its own weight and today the people of the former Soviet Union get to watch the same thing happen to the United States, slowly but surely. Those folks know of what they speak probably better than most anyone else on the planet.(snip)
That brings us to Cap and Trade. Never in the history of humanity has a more idiotic plan been put forward and sold with bigger lies. Energy is the key stone to any and every economy, be it man power, animal power, wood or coal or nuclear. How else does one power industry that makes human life better (unless of course its making the bombs that end that human life, but that's a different topic). Never in history, with the exception of the Japanese self imposed isolation in the 1600s, did a government actively force its people away from economic activity and industry.
Even the Soviets never created such idiocy. The great famine of the late 1920s was caused by quite the opposite, as the Soviets collectivized farms to force peasants off of their land and into the big new factories. Of course this had disastrous results. So one must ask, are the powers that be in Washington and London degenerates or satanically evil? Where is the opposition? Where are the Republicans in America and Tories in England?
There's plenty more harsh truth in the rest of Mishin's essay.
