Category: goo brain

Tomorrow's Buildings/Today's Heat Rays

This is a fantastic little story about an accident of engineering that I couldn’t pass up, despite the fact that it’s making the rounds pretty vigorously.

Vdara Death Ray

Among the victims is one Bill Pintas, whose tale of woe was recently printed in the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

[A]fter a brief dip in the hotel pool, he was sunning on a recliner. He was on his stomach, relaxed, eyes closed. But suddenly, the lawyer became so uncomfortably hot that he leaped up to move. He tried to put on his flip-flop sandals but, inexplicably, they were too hot to touch. So he ran barefoot to the shade. “I was effectively being cooked,” Pintas said. “I started running as fast as I could without looking like a lunatic.” Then he smelled an odor, and realized it was coming from his head, where a bit of hair had been scorched. (Via my friend Anycheese, Via engadget, Via BoingBoing)

Never mind that any comic book fan will tell you this is a heat ray and not a death ray, this is exactly the kind of thing we need to be considering as design technology becomes increasingly flexible in its usage.

Who has to live in the shadow of a space elevator? Who  gets to live next to the genetically-modified-animal MegaZoo? How much polution does a floating city put out, and where does it go?

Personally, I’d like to see some of these proposed Choi & Shine Architects’ electrical towers roaming the landscape.
Choi + Shine Architects' Power Pylons

Another Round

From the CNN front page:

CNN InterviewNo, dammit, YOU interview someone interesting.

What is this supposed to even be, advice on how to spend your Sunday?

Other possible CNN suggestions for ways to fill your time:

  • Find a decent 30 seconds of live video and loop it on your DVR throughout the entire day
  • Work on your James Earl Jones impression
  • Write some decent commercial break intros and outros for Rick Sanchez
  • Buy Wolf Blitzer a scotch

Update: Whoa! How did I miss that Sanchez got himself fired!?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrFoLZqY_s4]

The Art Of The Deal

Listen, I’m no genius – as evidenced by the fact that I went to McDonald’s for food yesterday – but I’m fairly sure this sign could just as easily say “pick any 254 for $505.46” and it would be just as useful. 

I mean, it would make sense to me if it was pick any 2 for $3.50, or even $3.97, but, as it stands, it’s just a suggestion for those who are really terrible at math.

My TV Idea

It seems to me the age of Seasonal DVDs has killed water cooler chat.
Battlestar GalacticaSomeone needs to create an ‘Old Show Forum’, broken down by series and episode.

That way, people running through something on DVD like LOST, or Battlestar Galactica, or Babylon 5, (or whatever,) can visit and chat up the episode they’ve just watched, without running the spoiler risk that any sort of discussion of a completed television show holds.

Idea Hole

Found at http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/mattador/aussie07-08/1190869800/tpod.html#_Speaking of things that are horrible – I had this idea pop into my head the other day, and I have yet to find some sort of use for it: Sky Leeches.

Swarms of buzzing sky leeches settling upon the land; clouds of them laying waste to cattle and poultry; black, sloppy hives hanging from eavestroughs.

Their natural predators? Possibly Air Pirates or The Great Polynesian Winged Turtle.

Gowns and Needles

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hek2KQcD8_M]

So, I was listening to Danny Barker’s version of St. James Infirmary the other day, and I once again came across the line regarding “The Gown Man”, which had previously sparked my interest.

And sure enough my poor dead baby was still laying there with a sheet over her head
(she looked like a gown-man)

After a little google-action, I found this:

The gown man was a bogey man like creature that was talked of in the New Orleans African American community in the early part of the 20th century. He was a white man in some sort of white robes who would snatch you to dissect your body. The tale supposedly arose from avid medical students at Charity Hospital who would snatch bodies for their studies. – Posted at No Notes

This actually reminded me of another story, also from New Orleans, that I’d read on Snopes years ago.

The legend in its current incarnation (teenage girls in darkened theaters jabbed with needles) dates back to a much older non-HIV story, one rampant in the New Orleans area in the 1930s. Toothsome young girls were told to beware of Needle Men. Young ladies were strictly instructed to sit at the end of the aisle in moviehouses, not in the middle, lest they attract the attention of white slavers working in pairs who would sit down beside the girl, one on each side, inject her with morphine, and carry her out of the theatre and into a life of shame.

The New Orleans Needle Men rumor circulated in another form besides the “white slavers after young girls” — others feared these syringe-armed fiends were in fact medical students harvesting cadavers for dissection. Women jabbed by them would quickly succumb to the poison contained in those needles, with their lifeless bodies soon afterwards delivered to a local teaching hospital. Such deadly attacks were said to take place in theaters, but also on the street.

I actually wrote a story regarding The Needle Men after originally reading the Snopes article, but it’s probably best left in the dusty bin of my juvenilia.

Found at http://johnedwinmason.typepad.com

Backin' Up

This was exactly the Monday antidote I required.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIoG4PlEPtY]

I eagerly await the news show that’s a combination of auto-tuned stories and those fantastic Tawainese digital re-creations of vaguely true events.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLFRtleBAlo]