Saturday, September 8, 2012

Insect Power: Remote-control tech turns Cockroaches into Beasts of Burden

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I’ve always assumed that cockroaches would someday be the only living thing on the planet. Until that happens however, scientists have harnessed the disgusting little things with a high-tech backpack that allows them to remotely control where they scurry.

While the concept may sound terrifying, anyone buried alive under rubble in an earthquake will shout for joy at the sight of one of these bugs. The shout will be relayed to rescue teams. (Story here)

Coca-Cola sees big profit in little drops despite risk to other units

Coca-Cola will introduce its Dasani Drops, which can be added to water for some on-the-spot fruity flavor. And Coca-Cola is betting that there's big potential for growth.   ASSOCIATED PRESS

Coca-Cola’s newest drink won’t come in a bottle or a can. Also, people will only need a squirt or two to quench their thirst.

In the coming weeks, the world’s largest beverage company is introducing its Dasani Drops, which can be squeezed into water for some on-the-spot fruity flavor. Coca-Cola is betting that there’s big potential for growth.

Coca-Cola says the drops will boost consumption of water, whether it’s tap water or bottled. Ideally, of course, people would use the drops with its Dasani water, which already saw sales volume rise 13 percent in the first half of the year, according to industry tracker Beverage Digest.

Overall consumption of bottled water has also been growing, although at a much slower pace than in the early 2000s, according to Beverage Digest, which reported last week that Coca-Cola planned to introduce the drops.

The drops may hurt Coca-Cola’s other units, however. The company also makes enhanced waters, such as Vitaminwater Zero. (Read story here.)

A look back at some of the most humorous Quotes & Jokes from the Democratic National Convention

Funny Democratic Convention Quotes

                     Good Day Humboldt County! 

 True axiom: politicians provide easy fodder for ridicule. Sometimes they even tell funny jokes and quotes about each other. The Democratic National Convention was a good place to pull to joke around and drop pithy quotes books this year.

Oh! The games these kids play…    

                                    President Obama – Quotes
"You might not be ready for diplomacy with Beijing if you can't visit the Olympics without insulting our closest ally."

They want your vote, but they don't want you to know their plan. And that's because all they have to offer is the same prescription they've had for the last thirty years: 'Have a surplus? Try a tax cut. Deficit too high? Try another. Feel a cold coming on? Take two tax cuts, roll back some regulations, and call us in the morning!'"

"If you're sick of hearing me approve this message, believe me, so am I."

Bill Clinton: Miss Met Yet?

Bill Clinton – Quotes

"In Tampa, the Republican argument against the president's reelection was actually pretty simple — pretty snappy. It went something like this: We left him a total mess. He hasn't cleaned it up fast enough. So fire him and put us back in."

Read More...

Jimmy Fallon – Jokes

"The Democrats are going all out to top last week's Republican Convention. In fact, I heard they're going to have Clint Eastwood yell at a couch."

Conan O’Brian – Jokes

"If you're a donor to President Obama's campaign, you were promised exclusive access to Joe Biden - and for an extra $10,000 absolutely no access to Joe Biden."

Jay Leno – Jokes

“What a different four years makes. At the lastDemocratic Convention the theme was 'hope and change' this time it's 'hope you don't make a change.'" 

Read more DNC jokes...

Time for me to walk on down the road…

Friday, September 7, 2012

Odd News Alert! What happened to the missing silver SpongBob coins!

ODD BREAKING NEWS…

“When Peregrine Financial Group collapsed in July after revelations its chief executive allegedly stole client money for years, it was not just customer assets of the futures brokerage that went missing.

Some 76 sets of silver coins sporting the image of cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants were also unaccounted for, according to a note buried deep in a filing by Peregrine Financial's bankruptcy trustee late Thursday. Thirty-nine ounces of gold were also missing. (read the rest here)

The Toxic Avenger: All you ever wanted to know about cult films and more

                            Good Day Humboldt County!

There’s a lot of categories under cult films so let’s just dive right in and start with Troma's Intentionally-Trashy Cult Films:

 Troma Studios, founded in the early 1980s, has either produced or distributed some of the most astonishing, sleazy, gross-out, tasteless movies ever made - revitalizing the entire horror/sci-fi genre with campy comedy. One of their most successful, bad taste, low-budget cult films, a spoof of heroic monster films, was director Michael Herz' and Lloyd Kaufman's The Toxic Avenger (1984). The B-film was about a weakling who was transformed into a vengeful, rampaging, crime-fighting creature after tumbling into green radioactive waste. It was so well-received that it was followed by three sequels about the mutant super-hero: The Toxic Avenger, Part II (1989), and The Toxic Avenger, Part III: The Last Temptation of Toxie (1989), and Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV (2000). It even spawned a light-hearted Saturday morning cartoon called The Toxic Crusader, about someone named Toxie - who was exposed to toxic chemicals, and his other mutant friends who fight crime.

Film titles from Troma tell all - their iconoclastic films are deliberately manufactured to be silly, offensive, absurd, and harsh, and venturing toward lurid sexploitation, although many have become gore-fest cult favorites of the midnight movie crowd: Jim Mallon's parody slasher film Blood Hook (1986), Class of Nuke 'Em High (1986) - a combination teen-sex comedy and slime monster film (followed by two sequels: Class of Nuke 'Em High 2: Subhumanoid Meltdown (1991) and Class of Nuke 'Em High 3: The Good, the Bad and the Subhumanoid (1995)), Surf Nazis Must Die (1987) - about violent rival gangs fighting for beach turf, Fortress of Amerikkka (1989), Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D. (1991), Tromeo and Juliet (1996) - a perversion of the Shakespearean story, and Terror Firmer (1999) - a 'film within a film' based in part on director Kaufman's 1998 book about his career with Troma, All I Need To Know About Filmmaking I Learned From The Toxic Avenger. GO HERE TO CONTINUE READING ABOUT MORE CULT FILMS.

Time for me to walk on down the road…

Thursday, September 6, 2012

As the day slips away Water Dancers come alive beneath the moon

Water Dancers is another magnificent illusory painting by Rob Gonsalves, a Canadian painter of magic realism with a unique perspective and style.

Rob’s paintings include one additional aspect - sometimes it’s not that easy to dissect and pinpoint where one motive ends and its transformation into another begins (see Camels in The Night, Cathedral of Commerce and Ships and Arches for better understanding).

Although Gonsalves’ work is often categorized as surrealistic, it differs because the images are deliberately planned and result from conscious thought. (source)

All you have to do is take the ‘Test’ to stimulate your brain today

                     Good Day Humboldt County!

Are you ready to have your brain stimulated today?

 Would you like to know how your consciousness is connected to the world?
Are you ready to explore the unconscious functions of your brain with visual illusions
and mysterious perceptual phenomena?

                        Click here to take the TEST

It’s time for me to walk on down the road…

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

A look at the Right’s bizarro Constitution fetish – or, how you can tell when a Tea Party person crosses the road

             Good Day Humboldt County!

I’ve found an interesting Op-Ed writer for your consideration today. He offers unique insights into politics without being too boring!

Seth Ackerman, a doctoral candidate in History at Cornell, is an editor at Jacobin. He has written for Harper’s and In These Times, and was a media critic with Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

An excerpt from “Burn The Constitution” by Seth Ackerman

“It’s easy to make fun of the Right’s bizarro Constitution fetish, especially in its current Glenn Beck-ified form. Beck’s late guru, the Bircher and Mormon extremist W. Cleon Skousen, is now the main source of the Tea Partiers’ constitutional wisdom; his books, once out of print and gathering dust, have become posthumous bestsellers and required reading at Tea Party training courses.

A true fanatic and weirdo, Skousen believed the Founding Fathers were inspired by the example of the ancient Anglo-Saxons, who in turn were inspired by the Biblical Israelites. All adhered to the divinely sanctioned principles of limited government, a system under which America made more progress in its first century than the world had made in the previous 5,000 years (hence the title of Skousen’s magnum opus, The Five Thousand Year Leap). But it all started falling apart at the start of the twentieth century, when progressives and socialists attacked the Constitution and Woodrow Wilson embraced their Satanic cause, taking the first fateful steps on the road to the serfdom we know today: minimum wages, a Federal Reserve, national parks, Medicare — all, Skousen insists, are unconstitutional.” Read the whole article here.

Time for me to walk on down the road….

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Under Public Transportation: Would You Be Willing to Travel on the World’s Largest Bus?

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 Good Day Humboldt County!

I’m not a bus kind of guy, so the possibility of riding in this caterpillar-like vehicle would never enter my skull.

Just wouldn’t happen. But, in all fairness, it may have it’s good points. The German company that makes these mega-buses is touting them as being “environmentally friendly.” For the life of me, I can’t see anything green about this machine. What am I missing? It looks like a commuter’s nightmare:

At more than 100-feet end-to-end, a bus capable carrying 256 passengers and driving nearly 5 miles in all-electric mode is the world’s longest bus.The people mover was developed to “bridge the gap between conventional city buses and [street cars], offering new possibilities for an environmental friendly public transport,” the German research institute Fraunhofer IVI noted in a news release.

Potential clients include burgeoning cities in Asia and South America where rail transport is unrealistic due to cost, space, or time restrictions.The AutoTram Extra Grand, as the three-segmented bus is called, has a multi-axle steering system, which allows it to be maneuvered like a standard 39-foot bus, the university said.”  – via Clean Technica

Time for me to walk on down the road…

Monday, September 3, 2012

No profound message today: But some really cool street signs might stimulate your minds!

                  Good Day Humboldt County!  

I thought I’d start this Monday off with the most nonsensical thing I could as it’s a holiday.

 Happy Labor Day!

Watch out for cows in Taos, New Mexico, and Hookers in a town near you! You want to see more crazy road signs?

Go to Weird road signs contest: Which one is wackiest? By Paul A. Eisenstein, The Detroit Bureau of LIFEINC.

Sunday, September 2, 2012

AS IT STANDS: Beware of politicians promising a return to the ‘Good Old Days’

             Dave Stancliff/for The Times-Standard
   What Good Old Days?
   I know there are people who pine for the years following WW II, from 1945 to 1965,when “everything was better.” America had emerged as a superpower and a manufacturing force second to none in the world. We were number one.

  Historians quickly called the generation that won the war the “Greatest Generation.” Their children were given the best of everything in life. The American Dream was within every man’s or woman’s grasp.
  But something happened. When those children became teenagers, the world shifted slightly and societal changes came hard and fast. Vietnam, Hippies, Drugs, Free Love, and college students leading  protests against war.

  Let’s hold it right there. I want to discuss the “Good Old Days” (as defined above) a little further.

  Do you think African Americans and other people of color thought those were the Good Old Days? Frankly, I doubt it.
  If you were an African American living in the deep south from 1945 to1965, you lived in another America. One that had no dreams. No hope. You survived at the whim of the white man. You couldn’t eat in the same building or shop in the same store because of your color.
 Let’s not linger on this aspect of the supposed Good Old Days too long, but it does have to be examined. Instead, let’s look at a whole new view of the Good Old Days. Are you ready?

  The reason they were considered the Good Old Days was simple; people didn’t know what was happening everywhere in the country and the world. They were uninformed for the most part, especially in rural America.
  So they didn’t know all the terrible things that happened in a 24 hour news cycle worldwide. They were not bombarded with all that negative news and views. There was no internet. Sure, they heard news on the radio,  but music dominated the airwaves and the movies from 1945 thru 1965.
  I wouldn’t say ignorance is bliss, but in some cases it seems preferable to knowing too much and being stressed out about things you can’t do anything about. Try to imagine what it would be like to not to hear all the negative things you hear every day.
  I think it’s fair to say technology has advanced considerably since those Good Old Days. We’re living longer in the 21st century. Because of robotics, we’re actually more productive in the workplace than in the Good Old Days when we were a world leader in manufacturing.
  I know that sounds odd, especially when you compare the workforce in the Good Old Days when jobs were plentiful, and the workforce today with over 8% of all Americans unemployed, and jobs as scarce as water in our current historic drought.
  Moving on, I really don’t think there were ever any Good Old Days in the sense that every thing was rosy, or people were all nice and respectful to each other. Progressive and regressive forces have always battled it out.
 
  Some people have selective memories, which make those days of yore so special. Which leads me to a warning about politicians who use our faulty memories of a golden age that never existed to political advantage. You know the ones I’m talking about. They promise to “turn the clock back to a better time.” Whatever that means.

 They pledge to bring morals back to the country, and more of the Christian God to our government. They invoke memories of the “Greatest Generation,” and promise a new one - just like the old one  - is on the way. They lie.
  You can’t restore a myth. You can’t change a society and turn the clock back to a dream that only existed for some white Americans.

There were wars being fought worldwide, crime at home, segregation issues and all the terrible things we face as a society today were going on back then, too.

  Some politicians, vultures seeking your votes, will try to tell you they can bring back the Good Old Days, and say we once lived in a patriotic utopia.

   As It Stands, when you hear people calling for those Good Old Days, take a moment and ask them to what good old days are they referring? 
                                                                    
        
                    Reader response VIA Emails: 

“Right on! Yesterday on FaceBook, I posed the question,"What does it mean, 'take our country back.' Back where, how?" Strangely enough, no one responded either negative or positive.
Your column makes so much sense.
Admittedly, i have liberal leanings, and fail miserably in understanding how anyone with an ounce of intellect can honestly believe that the Republicans have the answer to take our country forward. Thanks for writing.”
- Pam Cavanagh

                                               Websites that have picked this column up:

1) Go here to SiloBreaker

2) Schema.root.org - United States politicians at the federal level

3) Journalism Newswire

It's Time to Pay Up Donnie!

It's looks like there will be some prime real estate going on the market soon in New York City. Convicted rapist and former president ...