10 packaging fails. Ha.
October 21, 2009
The Boing
Website boingboing has taken on Ralph Lauren and its lawyers in a hilarious battle over free speech and fair use. You can read the details here. Today, boingboing upped the ante significantly when it posted that Ralph Lauren’s lawyers could “sue and be damned”, and that they would continue to post the lawyer’s threatening letters with a healthy helping of very public laughter.
Boingboing intends to keep this ugly behavior in the public eye and “publish your spurious legal threat along with copious mockery, so that it becomes highly ranked in search engines where other people you threaten can find it and take heart.”
Take that, meanies.
October 20, 2009
Free Fall
A really cool picture of my really cool brother, Ross. He just got his solo free fall skydive certification. Congrats, woth!
October 17, 2009
Yup
Morning
by Billy Collins
Why do we bother with the rest of the day,
the swale of the afternoon,
the sudden dip into evening,then night with his notorious perfumes,
his many-pointed stars?This is the best—
throwing off the light covers,
feet on the cold floor,
and buzzing around the house on espresso—maybe a splash of water on the face,
a palmful of vitamins—
but mostly buzzing around the house on espresso,dictionary and atlas open on the rug,
the typewriter waiting for the key of the head,
a cello on the radio,and, if necessary, the windows—
trees fifty, a hundred years old
out there,
heavy clouds on the way
and the lawn steaming like a horse
in the early morning.
My feeling exactly. Thanks, Daniel
All Quiet on the Leftern Front
Today the Obama administration’s “pay czar” demanded that Ken Lewis, Chairman of the Board of Bank of America, work for free. The “czar,” Kenneth Feinberg, pressured Lewis not only to forgo all remaining compensation for 2009, but to repay the $1 million he has already received this year. Lewis acquiesced, saying that “he felt it was not in the best interest of Bank of America for him to get involved in a dispute with the paymaster.” I’m sure he was right about that.
Response to this outrage has been surprisingly muted. In my view, it is hard to imagine anything more un-American than a “pay czar” empowered to order businessmen to work for free.
The main point here is not sympathy for Mr. Lewis, although I am, in fact, sympathetic to him. He is about to retire and will receive a substantial retirement package–only, perhaps, because the pay czar lacked jurisdiction to negate it. But the idea of empowering the federal government to dictate businessmen’s compensation based on political favoritism is absolutely chilling.
This episode illustrates the problem perfectly. Lewis took on the federal government by testifying that Fed chief Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson, a Democrat who was then Secretary of the Treasury, bullied him into committing what was, in effect, an egregious violation of the securities laws. Bank of America was due to close on its purchase of Merrill Lynch, and Lewis knew that Merrill’s value was plummeting. Lewis testified under oath that Paulson and Bernanke threatened to fire the entire management and board of Bank of America, including Lewis, if Lewis backed out of the Merrill deal or communicated to the bank’s shareholders what a bad deal the purchase had become.
So, according to Lewis, the federal government forced him to violate his duty to his shareholders in order to advance the government’s objectives. The feds were unhappy with Lewis’s blowing the whistle on their actions, which I believe would have been criminal if carried out by private citizens. Bernanke, at least, denied Lewis’s version of events.So Lewis took on the feds, and now he’s paying the price. The Obama administration has taken away his entire salary for 2009. Political payback, or just a coincidence? In a banana republic, you never know.
If true, the implications of this article are truly frightening. When GWB was president, several left-leaning friends were aghast that conservatives were blind to how the administration was “shredding the constitution” and “trampling on individual rights”. I’ve been distressed to see how quiet the left has been the past few months when government has become, if anything, even more willing to do things that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.
One might take a certain amount of schadenfreude in a fat cat having his payday retroactively rescinded by a non elected government “czar”- something that is a flagrant example of an ex post facto order. But what’s the saying?They came for the business owners and I said nothing…
Why is it okay for the government to step in and disallow a lawfully negotiated payday (obscene though it might have been)? It was lawfully negotiated, and Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution is ironclad about this. Answers like “well, it’s the taxpayer’s money” don’t cut it either, since the bailouts (which were forced on Lewis) never included any stipulations that he work for free. I would be interested to hear a rational defense of this, but I can’t think of one.
Why is the left so quiet? Why is the media?
October 15, 2009
VAT
Are we going to get a European-style Value Added Tax in America soon? Washington politicians want one, but with a rather ugly catch. Watch this so see what it is.
Why not this solution: if Washington can’t manage to make ends meet, it’s not because they don’t have enough revenue, it’s that they can’t control their spending, and we haven’t held them accountable in a meaningful way. The solution isn’t more taxes, it’s to stop spending so much of our money. Pork barrel spending and fiscal waste should become a matter of public embarrassment on a national scale, and any politician that shows a propensity to spend tax dollars to buy votes in their district should be removed from office quickly and without remorse. Alas, that would require a level of sophistication and selflessness on the part of the electorate that I doubt we will see.
October 14, 2009
Extreme According
I usually view accordion with a certain amount of ironic distain (subconscious, but still). No longer. Vivaldi’s Summer (3rd movement: Presto).
*UPDATE*
Great Jumping Judas on a Vespa:
*NOW I’ve Gotta Go Practice*
Okay, this is stupidly fast. Flight of the Bumblebee. On guitar. At 320bpm. (ffwd to about the 6:00 mark):
Tech the Tech to the Techno Tech
At his recent keynote speech at the New York Television Festival, former Star Trek writer and creator of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica Ron Moore revealed the secret formula to writing for Trek.
He described how the writers would just insert “tech” into the scripts whenever they needed to resolve a story or plot line, then they’d have consultants fill in the appropriate words (aka technobabble) later.
“It became the solution to so many plot lines and so many stories,” Moore said. “It was so mechanical that we had science consultants who would just come up with the words for us and we’d just write ‘tech’ in the script. You know, Picard would say ‘Commander La Forge, tech the tech to the warp drive.’ I’m serious. If you look at those scripts, you’ll see that.”
Moore then went on to describe how a typical script might read before the science consultants did their thing:
La Forge: “Captain, the tech is overteching.”
Picard: “Well, route the auxiliary tech to the tech, Mr. La Forge.”
La Forge: “No, Captain. Captain, I’ve tried to tech the tech, and it won’t work.”
Picard: “Well, then we’re doomed.”
“And then Data pops up and says, ‘Captain, there is a theory that if you tech the other tech … ‘” Moore said. “It’s a rhythm and it’s a structure, and the words are meaningless. It’s not about anything except just sort of going through this dance of how they tech their way out of it.”
the writer concludes:
The biggest weakness of the entire genre is this: the protagonists don’t tell us anything interesting about the human condition under science fictional circumstances. The scriptwriters and producers have thrown away the key tool that makes SF interesting and useful in the first place, by relegating “tech” to a token afterthought rather than an integral part of plot and characterization.
Priceless! I’ve always thought of modern television and movie “Sci Fi” as being nothing but thinly veiled fantasy with a jargony veneer. There are some movies (like Solaris, for example), that are pretty true to the sci-fi tradition of meaningful commentary, but on the whole Hollywood dresses up explosions and sexy actors in a SF gloss and tries to pass it off to the Star Wars crowd. Read the whole thing here and despair that we’ll ever get real SF into the mainstream.
October 13, 2009
daVinci
A new da Vinci portrait is discovered by finding a faint fingerprint of the master.
Sharpener Finished
Tonight I finished the sharpener I detailed here. It’s not quite as tidy as I would like it to be, but it does the job spectacularly well. I’m finally resharpening chisels that were badly chipped three years ago when a well meaning but inexperienced person tried to use one of them as a paint can opener. The new finish is literally mirror smooth (I can see myself in it!) and I can shave the hairs off my arm.
And, unfortunately, I can cut myself with one of them. When I was done sharpening one had an itch so I absent-mindedly reached down and scratched the outside of my left leg below the knee. Using the chisel. I now have a nice 6″ long cut on the outside of my leg! Stupid. It’s the kind of cut you don’t notice until you look down an hour later and see the thin red line. Good thing my tetanus is up to date.
There Goes My Afternoon
Google introduces Building Maker, which is nothing short of their attempt to get you to build out their infrastructure for free. And it’ll work, because it’s cool.
I’ve been brushing up on my SketchUp skills lately by designing props that I’ll build for the upcoming show (one fun and large one that’s straightforward and one thats… a challenge). Building Maker helps you build real-world buildings and drop them right into Google Earth.
We’re making the Matrix, a vertex at a time.
Contract
Just discovered the Contract FROM America website, where citizens of both parties post their ideas for improving our currently busted system. Some brilliant ideas there, which is encouraging to me (one of my favorites: move tax day to the day before voting day to encourage responsible use of our tax dollars).
October 12, 2009
October 11, 2009
Wet
Long day in the saddle today, but it rained all day. Love it! I’m so happy the cooler, wetter weather is here. And I have green grass in front of the house! Who knew?
October 8, 2009
So Bad It’s Good
Oh, the horror. The horror.
“It comes from outer space. From some godforsaken anti-matter galaxy millions and millions of light years from earth” And it attacks HO-scale trains with impunity.