I used to spend time with this lady from New Orleans, whom everyone called VooDoo. I should have taken that as a warning, but I didn't. Besides her brown eyes and her magical elven voice, my main purpose for keeping her around was that she was a professional horticulturalist and could identify any plant or tree I pointed to. I tested her skills quite often. She might have just been making up names for plants, but I believe she was pretty earnest and most likely very accurate.
She eventually discovered my ulterior motive (or she got a better offer) and invited me to no longer spend afternoons and evenings with her. That left me with no way to identify plants and trees afield, but it left me with a desire to know what they were.
For many years, I gave up on my quest and wistfully lamented losing my infinite font of knowledge about plants. Then, the latest generation of smartphones came out, and a friend told me about an application called "Picture This" that could identify any plant and give you care guidelines for it. For about six dollars, I could once again know the name of any plant I looked at without having to worry about the capricious nature of brown-eyed girls from New Orleans or anyone who even their dearest friends called VooDoo.
I've seen this painting making the rounds today and really wanted to know more about it. It looks like a medieval painting, but it's not. Its title is "Okra Smugglers" by Henryk Fantazos, who painted it in 2007. Born in Eastern Europe in 1947, he now lives and works in North Carolina.
Filmmakers for the History Channel's MonsterQuest recently discovered something totally unexpected in Scotland's famous Loch Ness.
Using remote operated vehicles to film underwater, Mike O’Brien of Louisiana-based SeaTrepid LLC was hoping to find evidence of the Loch Ness Monster when his cameras showed something else...
Golf balls, thousands and thousands of golf balls.
Besides mysterious lake monsters, Scotland is famous as the birth place of golf. Apparently locals and tourists have been using Loch Ness as a driving range for some time now and evidence of their activity is building up on the lake's bottom.
Although the monster can probably handle it, there is some concern for other life in the lake as golf balls can emit toxins as they deteriorate. Even though the ecology is somewhat fragile, there is no plan to retrieve the golf balls yet because they're in a part of the lake that's too deep to use regular scuba equipment.
Wildlife photographer Andy Rouse made a series of photographs showing Mountain Gorillas in Rwanda who had been eating the fermented sap from bamboo shoots.
"It was not exactly Gorillas In The Mist, more like gorillas who were pissed," said Rouse.
"Some were running round cackling to each other, others were going mad swinging through the trees, some were just lying on the ground in an inebriated state."
Gorillas eat bamboo all year and can tolerate a lot of it before getting intoxicated; usually they eat it with a handful of other greenery to water it down. Sometimes however they over-indulge, a habit they share with chimps and elephants.
"When I went back the next day," says Andy, "it was all very quiet, as if they were nursing gorilla-sized hangovers"
Every style and trend has a life span, and for some time now, I've been wondering what would signal the end of the tattoo trend in western cultures. This might be it.
Barbie, still the best selling girl's toy (now that they've eliminated those pesky Bratz dolls with fancy legal footwork) turns 50 this year and to celebrate Mattel introduces the Totally Stylin' Tattoos Barbie, which features both tattoo stickers and washable ink tattoos girls can apply to their dolls.
Most fashion trends last about a generation, then they're verboten for a while before they have a brief revival as "retro". It's been about 20 years for tattoos so they're probably headed for the Elysian fields with poodle skirts and flat-top hair cuts.
Nothing kills an edgy fashion statement like seeing it show up on a barbie doll.
Much has been made of the battle between the staff at CNBC and Jon Stewart over a bit Stewart did criticizing CNBC for their bullish comments before the bear market kicked in.
Business news makers, commentators and journalists are used to operating in their own little sphere, hardly noticed by the rest of the world, but when the economy became the biggest story in the world, they found themselves suddenly thrust into a much larger spotlight and they're not at all comfortable there.
These guys are just going to have to butch up about it though, because the market crash and the credit freeze and the housing bubble happened on their watch. It was their job to warn us about this disaster before it hit and most of them didn't.
There's going to be a lot more uncomfortable comments thrown their way in the days ahead, so they'd better get used to it.
Jon Stewart's initial Volly
Jim Cramer at CNBC Responds
Stewart responds to Cramer's Response
Oh yeah, by the way, Cramer's advice to sell everything at the bottom of a Bear Market? Not a good idea.
As you've probably noticed, I've been experimenting with advertising on my blog.
It's not making much money, but that wasn't the point. I wanted to experiment and educate myself on this business of online advertising since I believe that's where the web and the world is headed.
The ads that interest me the most are the Google AdWords. The premise is that it reads your blog and then presents the most appropriate ads based on your content. That idea fascinates me. If I write a blog entry about two-headed zebras, then AdWords will pick ads for people who are interested in two-headed zebras (if there are any).
I've been monitoring the ads and so far it's been pretty cool. It's not always perfectly accurate though. Sometimes I might write an article about how the lawyers involved in the Dickie Scruggs scandal all suck, and AdWords will serve ads for people looking for cheap lawyers in Mississippi or I'll write about the president dealing with the economic crisis and it'll serve ads for schemes on how you can get in on all this stimulus money.
A couple of weeks ago, I started noticing AdWords serving more and more ads about hair loss and baldness cures. Now, I am bald, but I've never actually written about being bald. I looked over my old posts just to make sure.
Where were these ads coming from? At first it was a real mystery, then I started to look over the whole site and I noticed that, even though I've never written about being bald, on every page was my little profile picture that, sure enough, showed my shiny head in all its glory.
I can't find any confirmation that google is using images to gather information for their AdWords program, but it's the only way I can figure they would serve these ads. Google does have technology where computers can read images though. If you use google image search, it has a program that can look at pictures and filter out the ones that might be nude or depicting sex acts, so maybe they can read my picture and tell I'm bald.
It's a little intimidating to think computers might be that sophisticated, but it's pretty cool too. It's not artificial intelligence yet, but it gives you an idea of how people might use artificial intelligence in the future.
In America, strippers dance on poles to show off their acrobatic skills and their tramp-tattoos. I've seen some girls do pretty amazing things on poles, but these guys in Africa make American pole dancers look like sorority girls trying to do the solja boy dance after nine beers. For one thing, their poles aren't attached to anything! They never had an act like this at Danny's.
For many years, scientists have argued whether or not marijuana smoking has any detrimental effects on the brain, particularly in the areas of logic and cognitive functions. Recently a story out of Nebraska provided evidence to support the argument that pot can really fuck up your mind.
Police sought Twenty-year-old Acea Schomaker of Lincoln Nebraska on marijuana charges. When they found him, he was smoking a home-made bong made of plexiglas and rubber tubing, with a six-month-old kitten duct-taped inside.
Schomaker said he put the kitten inside the bong because it was high-strung and needed the marijuana smoke to calm down. Police incarcerated Schomaker, seized the bong and took custody of the cat who was turned over to an animal shelter to be checked out by a vet to see if the experience damaged its health.
Schomaker said he had smoked the cat several times before. Police charged him with animal cruelty and possession of marijuana. So far, the kitten seems to be recovering.
It's a lap dancing spider man with red bikini bottoms entertaining office workers which is strange enough on its own, but when mini gay spider man joins in, who is either a child or a little person also in a spider man costume (without red bikini bottoms) the whole video becomes something one might expect if Salvador Dali's retarded little brother had a YouTube account.
A lot of times people don't really appreciate the true back story of every day things. Mel Gibson is a guy who's had his share of personal problems, but there's no question that he's a real genius when it comes to the bio-pic.
Gibson's latest project tells the story of a man who lost everything in America's most tragic war, but took that lost and built a life for himself from the ashes of the old and battles the dual demons of vengeance and loss.
This is a really funny short film about a young boy who sets out to write an essay on the truth about women. This video doesn't embed so you'll have to follow the link below.
Even though it's a film about sex there's only very brief partial nudity. I can't decide if it's cynical or sweet. Maybe some of both, but it's more than worth the twelve minutes it takes to watch.
Lille mand / Little Man Directed by: Esben Tønnesen, 2006 Mathias, age 8 years old, is writing an essay for school entitled "How to Understand Women". Obviously, his fieldwork turns out to be quite difficult. English Subtitles
Success breeds imitators, both in the form of parody and rip-offs. There are dozens of 300 Parodies, but my favorite by far is the Latino Comedy Project's version of the 300 trailer.
There's an old showbiz adage: never work with children or animals. The reason you never work with children or animals is because, no matter what you do, they're always going to upstage you.
Penn & Teller are two of the most seasoned performers in the business. They've done television, movies, live traveling shows, and they're one of the hottest acts in Vegas. They perform at Harrah's Casino (not far from The Mirage, where Siegfried & Roy also learned it was a bad idea to work with animals for a completely different reason.)
They also have a pretty popular program on showtime called Bullshit.
While filming a recent episode on the bullshit of insomnia cures, Penn & Teller discover yet another reason why you should never work with children or animals: in this instance, Turkeys.
There's pretty much nothing a performer can do that tops copulating turkeys.
Many people remember the now infamous incident where former governor Kirk Fordice threatened to kick the ass of Jackson reporter, Bert Case for revealing the home Fordice bought for his girlfriend. (Why the heck can't I find video of this?) Link: Salon.com Link: Weekly Wire.com
It turns out Fordice might have made a mistake threatening Case, because Bert's a bad-ass.
Below is video of Bert getting attacked by a pair of Pitt bull terriers while investigating another story. Looks like the pit-bulls picked on the wrong dude and Bert emerges victorious.
My favorite part is that Bert ends the scuffle with the command "You GO!" gesturing with is free hand, and the dog does!
Since everybody seemed to enjoy my earlier post on the the impotence of proof reading by Taylor Mali, I thought I'd include this one of him reading his poem: What do Teacher's Make. This is really great stuff if you're a teacher and really important stuff if you're a person who doesn't think much of teachers.
After that I've included some random chick on Youtube reading the same poem as an audition piece. My point in doing so is to show how Poetry read aloud as poetry can be brilliant, but poetry read aloud as an audition piece generally sucks sweaty donkey balls. (sorry, random chick on Youtube, you seem talented, but choose another piece.)
If you're going to read poetry aloud, use the music of the poem first, before you try to make it sound "natural".
Taylor Mali:
Random Youtube Chick:
Here's the text of the poem: What Teachers Make, or Objection Overruled, or If things don't work out, you can always go to law school By Taylor Mali www.taylormali.com
He says the problem with teachers is, "What's a kid going to learn from someone who decided his best option in life was to become a teacher?" He reminds the other dinner guests that it's true what they say about teachers: Those who can, do; those who can't, teach.
I decide to bite my tongue instead of his and resist the temptation to remind the other dinner guests that it's also true what they say about lawyers.
Because we're eating, after all, and this is polite company.
"I mean, you¹re a teacher, Taylor," he says. "Be honest. What do you make?"
And I wish he hadn't done that (asked me to be honest) because, you see, I have a policy about honesty and ass-kicking: if you ask for it, I have to let you have it.
You want to know what I make?
I make kids work harder than they ever thought they could. I can make a C+ feel like a Congressional medal of honor and an A- feel like a slap in the face. How dare you waste my time with anything less than your very best.
I make kids sit through 40 minutes of study hall in absolute silence. No, you may not work in groups. No, you may not ask a question. Why won't I let you get a drink of water? Because you're not thirsty, you're bored, that's why.
I make parents tremble in fear when I call home: I hope I haven't called at a bad time, I just wanted to talk to you about something Billy said today. Billy said, "Leave the kid alone. I still cry sometimes, don't you?" And it was the noblest act of courage I have ever seen.
I make parents see their children for who they are and what they can be.
You want to know what I make?
I make kids wonder, I make them question. I make them criticize. I make them apologize and mean it. I make them write, write, write. And then I make them read. I make them spell definitely beautiful, definitely beautiful, definitely beautiful over and over and over again until they will never misspell either one of those words again. I make them show all their work in math. And hide it on their final drafts in English. I make them understand that if you got this (brains) then you follow this (heart) and if someone ever tries to judge you by what you make, you give them this (the finger).
Let me break it down for you, so you know what I say is true: I make a goddamn difference! What about you?
