putative.com

Mmmmm, slippers

Hammering Man *finally* getting fixed!

Silas has always been excited about Hammering Man (and doing his Hammering Man impression, with sound effects), and we walk by it at least a couple times a day—so we've been bummed that it hasn't been running for... months now? At least a couple months.  

Finally, it looks like it's being fixed! A couple of guys were up on a lift this morning, and a crane was holding the arm up over a sort of band-aid-type thing: 

(This was also a helpful tableau, seeing as I had been trying to explain to machinery-obsessed Silas the difference between "cranes" and "lifts." The nice guys on the lift even waved when they saw us looking up.) 

Bank failures, Wargames-style

Great interactive, time-lapse graphic from the WSJ:

 (found via the Big Picture)

Overheard at the Susan Hutchison party

This was my favorite quote of what turned out to be (so far!) a pretty downright decent election night:

"The whole country's going to hell because of that president. I can't imagine what Dow will do to the county. Talk about a Ron Sims clone—dip him in tar and he'd be the same guy!"

Too bad about Maine, but any day that Tim Eyman and Sarah Palin don't get what they want is okay by me.

More travails of being on Facebook

Obama's favorability and unfavorability in the South

Let the record show that this is utterly nutbar: 

"Obama's favorability-unfavorability rating in the South is 28-67, while it is 68-23 in the rest of the country." 

I'm sure—utterly, completely positive—that race has nothing to do with it. Nothing. How could it? Doesn't make sense. Nope, not race. Nuh-uh. Racism couldn't possibly be a factor. Nothing to see here. Move along.

The "Stranger Testing Department"

FWIW, FYI, ETC., Rob and I have started writing about games for the Slog. So far, I have been riding on Blighty's coattails of awesomeness, but you can check out my first solo entry today. The highlight for that one (aside from the virtual ass, of course) was learning the html tag for the infinity symbol. If you have tips, suggestions, whatevs, please to let us know. We'd love to write about local stuff.

Genius from xkcd: a nutty, super-nerdy, Tufte-style graphic of movie narratives

Wow (and ha, so much setup for a punchline about Primer!):

From the author of the Righteous Porkchop

Why won't these vegetarians stop killing the planet with their support for Big Soy? (I kid, I kid. But it's nice to know that eating local, responsibly raised meat is indeed as—if not more—eco-friendly than eating the veg.) 

Much Brazilian deforestation is connected to soybean cultivation. As much as 70 percent of areas newly cleared for agriculture in Mato Grosso State in Brazil is being used to grow soybeans. Over half of Brazil’s soy harvest is controlled by a handful of international agribusiness companies, which ship it all over the world for animal feed and food products, causing emissions in the process....

Unfortunately for vegetarians who rely on it for protein, avoiding soy from deforested croplands may be more difficult: as the Organic Consumers Association notes, Brazilian soy is common (and unlabeled) in tofu and soymilk sold in American supermarkets.

The Halloween "parade"

All the kids at Silas' school trooped up First Avenue yesterday, stopping at various businesses to pick up candy, from the Harley Davidson store to Fran's Chocolates to the new Four Seasons. It was cold unfortunately, so Silas was wearing his coat and all you could see of his "Knight/Prince/King/something" costume was his crown. The doorman at the Four Seasons was very funny and "on brand": he saw Silas and said, "Oh, a *king*! We'll see you *later*."

Here they are straggling down some stairs later on their chain-gang rope (got to dig that double Elmo, you know that):

First Person Cat!

Just came across this:

 

"...  the book is written from the point of view of Tiffany, a humanesque diva-feline brought up on caviar, Perrier, mansions, and an acute appreciation for diamonds, a girl's best friend. This regal Tortoise shell Persian, witnesses the murder of her owner-mother, a Cher-like rock star with two hot daughters living at home in Beverly Hills. Like the blockbuster twentieth century novels famous in American literature and written from the animals point of view, (Jonathon Livingston Seagull, Watership Down, Charlotte's' Web, and Animal Farm), Heebner's tome brings back the excitement of breakthrough communications with the animal world. But First Person Cat takes it to a higher level of communication—that with humans."

"...Combining ingenuity, a whole lot of attitude, and natural born talents, Tiffany makes it her job to see that justice prevails. She hooks up with a handsome detective on the Beverly Hills police force, wraps her charms around him, and flirtations begin between them and with only one thought—to avenge her human mom's death."

HA!

"Let me Google that for you"

OMG, http://lmgtfy.com/ is so'er funny:

(Found, in context, in the comments of BJC's sad Slog post.)

Seattle earthquake simulation video

Welcome to my neighborhood:

"Reversed Internet Protocol Process" as seen on CSI

If you are a nerd, this is some pretty funny fake computering:

  

My favorite Digg comment:

Found her by IP?
*puts on sunglasses*
Guess there really is no place like 127.0.0.1

Runner-up for favorite comment:

YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

"He failed everything"

Want this chair? You can buy it in a police auction: "Man pleads guilty to DWI in motorized La-Z-Boy."

Hosting your own Windows 7 torrenting party

"I found a tiny chair"! Much funnier if you've seen this.

Hosting Your Windows 7 Torrenting Party

We are so dead.

Pentagon Researchers Unveil Blob-Like Robot.

(Thanks, Chris!)

The McFarthest Spot...

... is somewhere in South Dakota, north of State Highway 20—i.e., that is the farthest away from a McDonald's that you can get in the continental U.S., only about 107 miles as the Fry Guy flies. 

That's according to this great map of McDonald's density in the U.S., via Sullivan: 

A classic xkcd comic on security theater

(If you think that's funny, click through for the mouseover text.)

Nerd alert!

I knew Silas was a boy before he was born, but I had to wait until today (before the Seahawks game, specifically) to find out that he's... a two-weapon fighter.

I'm a hammer and shield guy myself, maybe a glaive-guisarme from time to time, but apparently he has the dance of blades in his blood. And by "dance of blades in his blood," I mean he suffers from congenital super-nerdism:

 

 

Whoa, when did this become a dad blog? Sorry about that. Look, funny Jesus picture/commentary on health-care reform!

Rain day

It's on-and-off drenching, but still in the low 60s—so all in all a perfect day for puddles:

Best Death Troopers trailer

Okay, Mike just sent me the best of the trailers for Death Troopers, the new Stormtroopers-as-zombies book: 

Science is awesome

An explanation for why the Large Hadron Collider still doesn't work:

A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Trippy music video made entirely from fan webcam footage

Clever that, via Boing Boing:

Noam Chomsky has a van

The effect of incentives

Via the Freakonomics blog:

Regretsy!

I love the idea of Regretsy, showcasing the most notable horrors of Etsy. The sculpture below is actually one of the *least* horrifying things I could find, just to show a sample image that was SFW. 

(Don't believe me? Check this out. Or this bad boy. Or, ouch my eyes, this.)

The first fall of fall

Silas playing with Isaac and Ferdinand up at Volunteer Park, in chronological order:

 

 

 

 

Literal LOLcats

Here I thought that LOLcat technology had reached its zenith, but no. Coming to you from the cutting-edge of cat-based Internet humor theory, it's... literal LOLcats:

"This page under construction"

An insane visual treasury devoted to the classic '90s Web-ism. Definitely worth a nostalgic scroll-through. E.g.: