Category: Uncategorised

Great Sunflower

The Great Sunflower Project is a pretty simple idea. They’ll send you some sunflower seeds if you’ll spend fifteen minutes, twice a month, watching your blooms and recording how many bees come and go.

They crunch the numbers at their site and you get some nifty flowers – sounds fair to me, and anything that helps stop colony collapse disorder seems like a good idea.

Between The Great Sunflower Project and that recent DARPA balloon spotting competition it sounds like distributed data collection is really starting to catch on, which has me thinking: there have to be some heuristics that can be applied to already existing webcams (traffic cams, monument cams, etc) to determine if that area is suffering a disaster – sort of an early warning zombie detection system.

Still awaiting the sequel, The Nakedest Prey

Speaking of coveting: Have you ever seen that movie, The Naked Prey?

It’s the one where a bunch of “Savage Africans” kill some Caucasian folks who refuse to pay them tribute, then chase the last one around the savannas while the audience shifts uncomfortably in their seats from all the racism.

There’s a school of thought these days that the film is brilliant despite the racial discomfort. There’s very little dialogue, most of the movie is just an underdeveloped white guy running through the grass in tiny underpants, and yet it remains pretty compelling.

The Naked Prey

Weirdly, the plot is supposedly based on a true story, “John Colter’s Escape”, which tells of John Colter and his partner crossing some Blackfoot Indians and having to run away. Not quite Africa, and shooting a fellow in front of his friends isn’t quite the same thing as refusing to give a gift, but still very “The Most Dangerous Game”.

To bring it back to my coveting: the thing that’s really always stuck with me about the movie is the design of the weird person-poker they gave the tribesmen. It’s tough to find a clear picture, but it looks like they got a discount on used swords from an old BBC production, then replaced all of the hilts with two foot poles to make them pass as ‘spears’.

I’ve always found this weird mutant weapon to be awesome – it’s exactly the kind of thing I want my Japanese-RPG character to be carrying, or to have hanging on my office wall in case of zombie attack.

The Venerable Visible V8

The Visible V8

I was digging through picasa the other day and came across this image I shot in the wood paneled basement of an extended family member.

Sweetest Kit Ever.

As a kid I would have gotten about half way through assembly and lost interest, but now that I’m an old man I know how to covet a toy properly.

(By assembling it once, then leaving it somewhere to safely gather dust.)

Maybe for my next ebay-birthday.

Country Life

Living in the country can be weird.

When I came home last night I noticed our mailbox had been vandalized, the door was off and a corner of the body shattered. My first assumption was that it had fallen victim to some mailbox baseball, but then I took a closer look:

Trashed Mailbox

Apparently someone knocked it clean from its post, but decided to correct the situation by re-attaching it with a generous helping of electrical tape. I have to wonder how long someone was standing at the end of my driveway frantically winding the black roll round and round, just trying to get the thing relatively sturdy.

Frankly, I would have preferred a note of apology – or maybe a  twenty.

Functional Friday

Been a while since I’ve done one of these, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been getting things done.

My major focus, Lukas & Nan, is currently at 8.5% for the first draft. I’m pretty pleased with that. Serial 2.0 is currently in the most gooey of embryonic phases, but the broad creative work at the beginning of a project can be the most exciting. The gag comic has sort of stalled, mostly due to a series of funerals which really shook out the funny around here. Hopefully we should be able to get back to work on that in the next week.

Titles

The ColonelI’m under the weather and over-medicated, so please pardon me if I take a ramble:

Back in the late ’90s the internet was a bit of a wild frontier. People hadn’t really figured out what they were and weren’t allowed to get up to, and nothing that happened online seemed quite real in the classic sense.

At the time I was an impressionable youth who felt he needed more respect, so I joined the clergy. It wasn’t an easy thing to do back then, it involved some emailing back and forth as I recall, but I’m glad to see these days the process is more automated.

I’ve never performed a marriage, but I rest better knowing that I legally could. (In case of emergency.)

The discovery that the system had been simplified got me thinking about expanding my proper title. If I can scrape a few hundred dollars together I should be able to get my doctorate, making me The Reverend Doctor Skinner.

If I can then rescue a Southern Belle and get myself a Kentucky Colonelcy – Reverend Colonel Doctor Skinner –  it should be a short leap to British Knighthood – Sir Reverend Colonel Doctor Skinner*.

(As a side note: I was unaware until recently that esquire was a title bestowed on people who weren’t quite Knights, but who were also better than your average Gentleman. So says wikipedia.)

*or maybe The Reverend Doctor Colonel, Sir Skinner? Hmm.

Jim Bridger, Mountain Man

I’m sick, so I thought I’d follow up on some notes I’d left myself to check out.

Maybe the most interesting:

Bridger had a remarkable sense of humor and he especially loved to shock tenderfeet and easterners with his tall tales. He would tell of glass mountains, “peetrified” birds singing “peetrified” songs, and reminisce about the days when Pikes Peak was just a hole in the ground. These stories were related in such a serious manner as to fool even skeptics into believing them, making Jim’s laughter all the louder when his ruse was revealed.

All of these attributes served Bridger well, and made him adaptable to just about every situation he found himself in. By the end of his lifetime, Bridger could claim the titles of trapper, trader, guide, merchant, Indian interpreter and army officer. –Mountain Men

At first I wasn’t sure if Bridger was a real fellow, I picked up his name from a brief mention by LT. Aldo Raine in Inglourious Basterds. Although Bridger had impressive true stories to tell, I find his tall tales pretty brilliant:

Supposedly one of Bridger’s favorite yarns to tell to greenhornswas about being pursued by one hundred Cheyenne warriors. After being chased for several miles, Bridger found himself at the end of a box canyon, with the Indians bearing down on him. At this point, Bridger would go silent, prompting his listener to ask, “What happened then, Mr. Bridger?” Bridger would reply, “They kilt me.” – Wikipedia