Dick in a Box

Somehow I missed this on SNL.
Thanks once again to jaz for producing another gem.

Mind Games Day

No, this isn't a day you should spend playing games with the heads of others. Mind Games Day is a day of mind puzzles, games and skill. Brainteasers, Rubik's cubes, puzzles, Sudoku, Kakuro, interlocking metal thingees...you get the idea.

Merry Christmas 2006

Merry Christmas. Whether you are traveling from house to house delivering presents or staying home playing with your own, enjoy the day.

My 5 all-time holiday films, in no particular order:

• A Christmas Story
• Elf
• It's a Wonderful Life
• Scrooged
• The Santa Clause

R.I.P. James Brown

On a day mostly affiliated with the joys of morningtime gift giving and recieving,
sad news comes out of Atlanta as James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, has died at age 73.

Rest in peace, Mr. Brown.

Brainworks: Spelling is for kids

I got this in an email once from AL-9000.

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid is aamznig. Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and you awlyas thought slpeling was ipmorantt!

R.I.P. Joseph Barbera

Joseph Barbera, half of the famous Hanna and Barbera, died of natural causes yesterday at the age of 95. This duo is responsible for some of the most famous and beloved cartoons of all time: Tom and Jerry, the Jetsons, Yogi Bear....the list is pretty long. There have been several movies made based on Hanna-Barbera cartoons including Scooby-Doo, Josie and the Pussycats, and The Flintstones (the Flintstones, for the record, was the first cartoon ever aired in prime time). They made tons of other cartoons we all loved as kids, spread over half a century. In going over the long list of characters they created in preparation for this post, I found several I had no idea they'd made, including the Smurfs and the Snorks (sorta the same, I know). They'd even made one of my all-time favorite non-animated shows from my childhood: the Banana Splits.


My personal Hanna-Barbera favorites are:

• Captain Caveman (Captain...Caaaaaaaavemaaaaaaaaaan)
• Huckleberry Hound (one of my favorite shirts as a teen proudly sported Huckleberry)
• The Herculoids (what were the names of those glob-guys?)
• Jonny Quest (Haji! Bandit!)
• Superfriends
• Jabberjaw (who can resist a big funny shark?)
• Top Cat
• Hong Kong Phooey
• Quick Draw McGraw
• Great Grape Ape (the song sticks with me mostly)
• Birdman
• Space Ghost (who can be seen even today on The Cartoon Network)

Which were your favorites?


Rest in Peace, Mr. Barbera.
 

Happy Agnostica

Happy Agnostica! This holiday, celebrating Science, continues for an indeterminate amount of time, as dictated by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (duh). What I didn't know until today was that it is a holiday placed in the holiday season with specifically a non-religious nature. The definition given at agnostica.com is decidedly less, well, agnostic in tone:

Agnostica is the only truly secular winter celebration. It is a celebration for the scientist in all of us, celebrating not some contrived story written thousands of years ago and translated seventeen times over until the Hebrew word for "rope" gets turned into "camel," and then inexplicably the whole deal is replaced by consumer-frenzy dictated to us by a fat child-labor mogul in a fur-lined red suit, but rather of ourselves, the perfect self-defining nature of the universe, and of being proud of the human intellect.

I guess Atheistica didn't sound as good. Other links of interest include the Nukees cartoon strips and the all-in-one Agnostica page.

Time Waster: Bubble Trouble

This is maybe time waster of the year...
for the larger, more official version, click here.

...I'm a VAIO???

The "I'm a PC. I'm a Mac" campaign is no doubt one of the most popular on TV right now. It's also one of the most successful...for Apple anyway. For the rest of the computer companies out there (i.e. those who make "PC"s), it's proven to be fairly destructive to any kind of image they promote for themselves. It should be no surprise, then, that at least one company has tried to distance itself from that boring, pudgy, and uncool visual metaphor. Sony Australia is pushing their new VAIO laptops as "The non-pc pc" and their website sports a small Flash app that asks "Who do you want to play with?" and has likenesses of both the "PC guy" and the "Mac guy" along with a new character: the "VAIO girl". The app itself does nothing more than make sounds when you roll over the characters (they give no love to the PC guy), and leads me to believe that Sony couldn't beat 'em, so they're trying to join 'em.

Somebody should tell Sony that the VAIOs still run on Windows.

Day of the Ninja

Yes, folks, it's true. Today is the "Day of the Ninja", though I'm not sure why it's today. Actually, I can't even really think of a reason why this is a holiday to begin with other than the fact that Ninjas around the world were jealous that Pirates, their arch-nemeses, had their own day. Eh...pirates are better (with the possible exception of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello and Rafael, of course).

No Mo NoBloPoMo

Yeah...bye November. 30 up, 30 down. Thanks for playin.

Boston Accents

We all have those friends who find it necessary to forward to us every chain email, list of tasteless jokes, and "big opportunity" from some prince in South Africa, and I am no different. Occasionally, however, you find something of actual interest. Today was such a day for me.

I got sent a link to a quiz that claimed to be able to ascertain what type of accent I had. I couldn't resist, as accents and dialects are parts of linguistics I have always had an interest in. I was skeptical at first, but the test was short and, amazingly, pretty accurate (see my results below). I do, in fact, have a Boston accent....and am damn proud of it, too.

But what about the various sub-types of the Boston accent? We all know about the Beacon Hill / Ted Kennedy / Mayor Quimby brahmin accent, as well as the ever-stereotypical "pahk your cah in Hahvid yahd" popularized by the SNL Jimmy Fallon / Rachel Dratch "Nomaaah" skits and, of course, bad acting in every movie ever shot in Boston....but anyone from around here knows there's much more to it than that, and some people claim to be able to tell just what part of Boston or the Boston Metropolitan area one comes from by merely listening to them speak. Is there a difference between those from the north shore and those from the south shore? Can one find subtleties in accents and discern whether they are from Eastie or Southie, Worcester or the Cape? There are lots of guides to "Boston English" out there, but I think it would be a very interesting undertaking indeed to try to find patterns in the actual Boston accents, and ultimately come up with an almost mathematical way to connect them together and differentiate between them. Until then, I'll have to pass my time doing things that are actually realistic....

Oh, and for the record, nobody here says "wicked pissah".

What kind of American accent do you have? Your Result: Boston You definitely have a Boston accent, even if you think you don't. Of course, that doesn't mean you are from the Boston area, you may also be from New Hampshire or Maine.
The Midland
The West
North Central
The Northeast
Philadelphia
The Inland North
The South
What American accent do you have?

The Beermapping Project

I love mashups, and while going through some old unread items in my newsreader, I came across a cool one in The Bostonist's feed. In a post called "Finding Beer In The Dark", they review a site called "The Beermapping Project" that uses the Google Maps API to highlight, well, beer things, including places to buy, places that brew, places to drink, etc. There are lots of cities with entries already, and I am happy to report that Boston is one of them. I even submitted our favorite local packey here in Weymouth, John's Liquors (should be up soon, I think). Go beer!

Homeland Security - Native American Style

One of my co-workers who'd recently returned from a conference in New Mexico brought us back gifts in the form of big buttons with this not-so-subtle reminder of just how relative things can be. It made me chuckle, but is humor the only goal of the message, if a goal at all? Do Native Americans still resent the fact that 500 years ago Europeans came to this continent and eventually wiped out an enormously large number of their ancestors? Perhaps the fact that as recently as 50 years ago television shows like "Bonanza" and "The Lone Ranger" celebrated this time period leaves a bad taste in their mouths. Or maybe the fact that current day sports teams have names like "Indians", "Seminoles", "Sachems" and "Redskins" (a racial epithet not that long ago, by the way) bugs them a little....go figure.

This makes me think, even a little angry. Almost as angry as when I lose money at Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun.

Losing Your "Frame" of Reference

I'm not sure what's more disturbing, finding yourself transfixed on the hypnotic spin of the frames, or occasionally focusing accidentally on the head of the guy holding it.