Links

Stuff I find around the web that interests or amuses me.

Make it rain…

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Well, okay, so I knew that it was raining pretty hard as I went to work today. It had been raining when I woke up, and I hadn’t heard it let up at all, and it’s always kind of fun to see the streams running down the hills in the downtown Seattle area.

I didn’t realize that it was this bad, though (if King5 asks you to log in, use king5\@djwudi.com / kingfive)!

After a brief respite, heavy rains resumed Monday in Western Washington and four rivers that spilled over their banks late last week were on the brink of overflowing again. Motorists were finding flooding on city streets, including Aurora Avenue near the Seattle Center.

Something Positive

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I really was planning on getting something done today. Unfortunately, I haven’t — and it’s all Royce‘s fault.

He sent me a link to Something Positive, a web comic that I’d never heard of before.

I’ve spent the entire day reading it. So far I’ve made it from the very first strip from Dec. 19th, 2001 all the way up to April 16th, 2003 — about a year and a half of strips. I’ve still got about six months to go before I catch up to today. Unfortunately, I do need to take a break for a bit, and go out and bounce around for a bit.

Still, the strip is hilarious. Often very wrong, but that just makes it all the better in my book. Go check it out.

And I want my own Choo-Choo Bear!

You’ll understand if you read the comic.

Trust me.

:)

That Guy

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I’m not a big baseball fan — heck, I’m not a big sports fan — so I haven’t been paying much attention to the baseball games. I’d seen people mention the Cubs here and there, knew that there were big games coming up, but it just wasn’t a big thing for me.

Then the news broke about That Guy in Chicago reaching for the foul ball. So far, I’ve been absolutely disgusted at what has been done to this poor guy — practically within minutes of the event, his name, workplace, and even address had been published across the ‘net, with thousands of angry Cubs fans blaming him for the Cubs loss. Bad enough that the guy might have to wonder whether the ball would have been caught if he hadn’t reached for it — but now he has to worry about his privacy and, quite possibly, personal safety. The handling of the event by the media and various websites has been absolutely horrible.

At least there seem to be as many people also disgusted by this and concerned for the guy as there are people upset with him. Wil Wheaton has a wonderfully written (and funny) open letter to That Guy:

I used to be on this big cult TV show that had lots of very passionate fans. Many of those fans absolutely (and irrationally) hated the character I played on that show. Most of them wrote me nasty letters and heckled me whenever I’d show up at one of their events, they never called my house, or tried to hurt me, but I can sort of imagine what you’re going through. That thing that makes a sports fan wear only paint and a diaper to a ball game when it’s 15 degrees outside? It’s the same thing that makes a Star Trek fan wear the same unwashed uniform for 5 days in a row at a big ass con.

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I’ve read that just about every Cubs fan in the world is giving you hell for going after that foul ball. Well, That Guy, last time I checked, baseball fans like to catch foul balls. It’s something we do, like paying too much for terrible beer and screaming at a player for not picking up that slider that we’re so certain we’d be able to hit if they’d just put our fat asses in the game. Hell, I’ve been going to 20 or 30 games a season at Dodger Stadium for almost 30 years, and I try to catch a foul ball every single time I’m there. I’ve even had my hot wife flirt with the teenage bat boy in a pathetic effort to score one. To date, I am still empty-handed. But that bat boy, Jesse, is convinced that my wife’s going to leave me just as soon as he gets out of high school.

Rock on, Wil. And good luck and best wishes to That Guy.

I used to believe…

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Randomly following links, I just stumbled across I used to believe, a site collecting all the wonderful and weird things that children believe about the world around them. It’s so worth spending some time going through.

When we were little, my mother had bought us a book titled, “How You Were Born”. In this book, there was an illustration of a sperm under a magnifying glass. For years, I thought the magnifying glass was a frying pan and was totally mystified by where and how the frying pan fit into the reproductive process.

I had a strange fear that if I closed my eyes in the bathtub, William Shakespeare would come up through the drain and kill me. I knew his name, but I had no idea who he was, so I just naturally assumed he was some sort of bathtub vampire.

New $20 bills

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The US’s new twenty-dollar bills should start hitting banks today, soon to start circulating around to everyone else.

The most noticeable difference in the new design is the subtle introduction of background color, which makes it more burdensome for potential counterfeiters because it adds complexity to the note. The color will also make it easier to distinguish between denominations because different background colors will be used for each denomination.

Male contraceptive on the way?

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With a few more years of testing and study, it appears that may finally be an effective male contraceptive.

Scientists have developed a male contraceptive which was 100% effective and side-effect free in trials.

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The hormonal treatment is a combination of an implant under the skin and injections – meaning men do not have to remember to take a pill every day.

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Researchers from the Anzac Research Institute, Sydney, Australia, gave the treatment to a relatively small sample of 55 men for a year – and none of their partners became pregnant.

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However, it will be some time before the treatment is widely available.

Very cool. Right now it’s a two-part treatment: a under-the-skin implant replaced every four months, and an injection every three months. Maybe with time it’ll be simplified a bit, but no matter what, I think it’s great that there’s at least an encouraging step towards something like this.

Advice for clubbers and bouncers

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Having DJ’d for around eight years in Anchorage, and having been a clubgoer for many years both before and after my DJ years, I’ve worked with and seen a lot of both really good, and really bad people. Ogre, the doorman at the Vogue, is definitely one of the good ones. He’s just put up two posts that I loved.

First off, what he looks for when hiring bouncers (which also explains much of why I’ve found him to be one of the best bouncers I’ve met):

I have some hard and fast criteria for the bouncers I hire. Right off the bat i have the three rules:

  1. Talk some serious shit. I’d rather you never even touch the person you’re throwing out. This requires a quick wit, an even temper, and a good understanding of how to read people. I had one bouncer who could get people to leave by saying “Leave.” and then staring at them and not saying anything, so it’s not just what you say.

    And secondly, some generic advice for clubgoers:

Drunk normal guys looking to score with hot death chicks with no frame of reference:\
You suck and should be bludgeoned to death with a street sign.

Metal guys who think that a fishnet shirt will make them goth: Most of us think you’re an assclown.

Much more on each of those links, of course.

You will never lose betting on human stupidity

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Every so often I mention to people that I haven’t watched television, for the most part, in somewhere around a decade or more. In today’s mass-media-fueled society, that often gets responses ranging from surprise to out and out shock. I’ve got a whole host of reasons why I don’t bother with television — and today, I just got one more.

A game of Russian Roulette with a real, loaded gun is slated to be broadcast live on British television this Sunday in what is being billed as the ultimate reality-TV stunt.

“It is a real gun with a real bullet and I am really putting it against my head,” said Derren Brown a self-styled “psychological illusionist.”

Brown plans to pull the trigger of a 348 Smith & Wesson several times, sensing which chamber the bullet is in, and plans to point the gun away from his body and fire the killer shot harmlessly into the air.

“If I am not 100 percent sure, I will not pull the trigger,” Brown said, admitting, “It would be humiliating but it would be preferable to the other consequences.”

Brown said the show won’t glamorize gun violence.

“We are dealing with it in the most serious and strenuous way possible. The drama will not come from the gun part, but from the fun and games and entertainment that comes from the selection process.”

The show will air on a several-second delay in case Brown shoots himself. If that happens, viewers will not see the gun fire into his head. Instead, the screen will go blank and display a message advising viewers what’s happened.

This just does not seem like a good idea.

Of course, the ratings are going to be incredible.

(via Lane)

[Update:]{.underline}

The stupid git actually survived (and there’s even a play by play account). He’s lucky. But how about the idiots out there who decide to copy him? Think that they’ll be as lucky?

Genetic Engineering

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NZ billboard protesting genetic engineering

Here’s an eye opener for you — a New Zealand billboard from Mothers Against Genetic Engineering protesting genetic engineering experiments that asks “Why not just genetically engineer women for milk?”

Aside from the obvious (and brilliant) attention-getting shock tactics of the image, there’s some interesting questions being raised here.

New Zealanders are allowing a handful of corporate scientists and ill-informed politicians to make decisions on the ethics of GE. Our largest science company, AgResearch, is currently putting human genes into cows in the hope of creating new designer milks. The ethics of such experiments have not even been discussed by the wider public. How far will we allow them to go?

Unfortunately, it’s time for me to head out the door to get to work. Discuss amongst yourselves.

(via MeFi)