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Don Herbert, AKA Mr. Wizard, died this morning. According to his Wikipedia article, he once opened a Mr. Wizard center outside of Boston (now closed). Did anyone here ever go there?
(0) #6/12/2007
Yippee-ki-yay, Mr. Falcon
When I was a kid, Die Hard and Die Hard 2 were two of my favorite movies. (I saw the second one at age 11, my first R-rated theater experience.) Yet somehow, until tonight, I had never seen the 1995 third installment, Die Hard with a Vengeance. Oh, I had heard about how terrible it is, how it wasn’t originally written as a Die Hard movie, how the series’s touchstones are shoehorned in, and how Jeremy Irons’s portrayal of a German villain who tells rhyming riddles in a rapid-fire British accent often makes the movie laughably bad. Still, mostly for nostalgia’s sake, and with the likelihood that I’ll probably end up seeing the fourth installment Live Free or Die Hard this summer, I forced myself to finally watch the Bruce Willis / Samuel Jackson buddy picture.
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Two visceral Lego sculptures. (thx, josh)
(2) #6/6/2007
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Top 15 Google Street View sightings. I’m quite familiar with the truck depicted in #8 – a fleet of eight or so of them would pass by my window every evening like clockwork when I was working for Nevada’s Question 7 campaign. (thx, sean)
(2) #6/1/2007
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Also coming out of Le Conversazioni, a PDF of a David Foster Wallace piece (from his novel-in-progress?): “Untitled Excerpt From Something That Isn’t Even Close To Halfway Finished Yet”. It’s about an evil baby genius, maybe.
(0) #6/1/2007
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Nevada’s incompetent governor Jim Gibbons (R) is now making national news, with a highly negative New York Times profile. Chuck Muth, a local conservative commentator who I sometimes respect, is quoted as saying:
But at this point I would say that as long as Governor Gibbons stays true to his pledge not to raise taxes, as far as I am concerned he is a good Republican and he did well.
Yeah, who needs multi-dimensional metrics?
(0) #5/30/2007
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Five video clips of David Foster Wallace talking about various things at Le Conversazioni 2006, an annual gathering of elite writers held in Italy. “Various things” include: the Italian language, kissing (with reaction shots from his attractive wife), soccer, and how he wants to be labeled as a writer. (thx, tim)
(6) #5/30/2007
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An animated map of home construction in Las Vegas during the past 100 years. Watch it bubble, literally! (via kottke)
(0) #5/30/2007
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Want to drive down the Las Vegas Strip on your computer? Google’s new Street View will let you. It’s only up for select roads in select cities (e.g., SF, LV, NYC), but it’s pretty freaky/cool.
(0) #5/29/2007
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Judge Halverson virtually proves the case against electing judges. I’ve been following this story for weeks, but now that the Vegas-loving Drudge has put it into the national arena, it’s worth posting here.
(0) #5/28/2007
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I have a patent. Number 7,164,779. The application was filed over five years ago, so I had almost forgotten about it, but I looked it up on a whim this morning. Check that off the list. Update: More information about the invention, in less technical language. I also have a VHS tape of a demonstration somewhere that I should dig up and put on YouTube.
(0) #5/24/2007
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The American Civil War in four minutes. There’s something hypnotic about the give and take of the Union/Confederate boundary lines. (via kottke)
(11) #5/22/2007
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Straight from the Festival de Cannes: five clips from No Country for Old Men. The Coen Brothers take on Cormac McCarthy, channeling their old selves from the Blood Simple days. (via aicn)
(3) #5/22/2007
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The first trailer for The Golden Compass , in Quicktime. I read His Dark Materials several years ago, and it’s a great series – it’s darker, richer, and more philosophically interesting than Harry Potter.
(9) #5/21/2007
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I’ve been digging Dan Deacon’s super-upbeat album Spiderman of the Rings recently, and in Googling him found this odd appearance on a Baltimore local morning news broadcast (NBC). Not your usual local news material.
(5) #5/16/2007
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eHarmony doesn’t allow same-sex matches. Competitor Chemistry.com starts running TV ads mentioning this fact, targeting the gay population. eHarmony gets pissed off and asks networks not to run the Chemistry.com ad. I laugh at eHarmony.
(16) #5/16/2007
The Books 'Take Time'
One of the best live events I’ve been to was a The Books concert in Boston, sometime in 2005. Their ability to synchronize their verbal sound collages to equally compelling video collages, all backed by live guitar and cello, was nothing short of amazing. They’re releasing a DVD of this sight & vision experience, and Pitchfork is hosting the video for “Take Time”. It’s not the most sophisticated example of their work, but it’s certainly indicative of where it goes.
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The Hamas version of Mickey Mouse. I’ve been aggressively told that this is “blogworthy.”
(26) #5/9/2007
