Life On the Wicked Stage: Act 2

Or Maybe Not

Well, nothing like a wave of thunderstorms pushing through at both your departure and your destination airports to put a damper on your trip and leave you dealing with airlines trying to reschedule. We'll try again in the morning.

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Heading Here In a Few Hours

Can't wait to get on moving after a few more meetings.

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Mattress Dominoes

Starting the weekend early with some fun stuff.

Vortex Candle Huffs and Puffs and Blows Things Down

Very cool. A vortex cannon that sends a wave of air flying at a target and knocks it down. Can we turn this on blowhards in Congress and the media? Please?

Via Switched

RIAA Says Nothing Lasts Forever Including Your Access To DRM Content

You’d think (especially these days) that you wouldn’t hear more ridiculous comments coming from the halls of Congress than what our elected leaders have to offer. Well, sometimes the folks called to testify prove that elected officials haven’t completely cornered the market on talking out of orifices that should be left for other purposes.

In hearings in Congress, the RIAA is saying that consumers who have been using content all wrapped up in DRM shouldn’t expect those servers to always be there and thus shouldn’t expect the content they bought to always be accessible.

William Shatner Finds a New Career Interpreting Sarah Palin Poetry

You never know when a new career can start up. Just ask William Shatner. After appearing on Conan O'Brien's show reading Sarah Palin's farewell address as poetry. He's now taking to reading her Tweets with the same poetic grace.

Via BuzzFeed

Business Spam Game Needs to Pay More Attention

We're all used to all sorts of stupid spammers. Stupid, because they just follow a shot gun approach in hopes they'll hit something. Today at the office we got an email from the US Commerce Association telling us we had won an award. Apparently there are more theatres in our little town of Middletown than I thought there were since the award we won 2009 Best of Middletown Award in the Theatres category. (For those who may not know, we are the only theatre in this tiny town.)

Of course the email looks all official and the like, advertising an office in Washington DC on Pennsylvania Avenue, but with no phone number. The folks in our office who got this immediately sniffed a scam, and when one checked up on this they found a press release on the Better Business Bureau's website warning of the scam. Essentially these folks won't you to order plaques and will send you a press release trumpeting your success. Not the most heinous scam in the world, but still, I'm sure it will ensnare a few unsuspecting folks.

So, I'm handing out my own award for stupid spam scam of the week to the folks at the US Commerce Association, wherever you are.

Emu testing

Sent from my iPhone

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Testing cross posting on Posterous

This is a test. This is only a test.

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Highly Recommended Reading: The Idiots Who Rule America

Tough but good reading from Chris Hedges. Tough in the sense that it stings a bit as you read it and if you’ve been paying attention over the last fifteen years or so, sounds far to accurate to dismiss.

Here’s an excerpt:

Our elites—the ones in Congress, the ones on Wall Street and the ones being produced at prestigious universities and business schools—do not have the capacity to fix our financial mess. Indeed, they will make it worse. They have no concept, thanks to the educations they have received, of the common good. They are stunted, timid and uncreative bureaucrats who are trained to carry out systems management. They see only piecemeal solutions which will satisfy the corporate structure. They are about numbers, profits and personal advancement. They are as able to deny gravely ill people medical coverage to increase company profits as they are able to use taxpayer dollars to peddle costly weapons systems to blood-soaked dictatorships. The human consequences never figure into their balance sheets. The democratic system, they think, is a secondary product of the free market. And they slavishly serve the market. 

This spares no one on either side of the aisle. In fact it makes that easy division seem even more irrelevant. Go read The Idiots Who Rule America