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Flavor flav turns five-oh next month.
Not that I miss his show(s), but isn’t that the dividing line for the “dirty old man” demographic?
And not to kick him while he’s down, but my friend Manuel Lora wonders “will he hang a grandfather clock from his neck now?”
If it makes Will “Flavor” Drayton feel any better, Michael Jackson hit the magic number last August… and no one is calling him old. Or maybe that’s because he doesn’t stop producing, right?
The shark jumping checklist:
While Shaun of the Dead arguably did to zombie movies what Blazing Saddles did to spaghetti Westerns (both were funny for their time), Planet Terror was still pretty decent because it was so over-the-top.
28 Weeks Later was good for the first 5 minutes; I Am Legend pretty much sucked. And Zombie Strippers… was well, you know.
Fortunately, you don’t have to be a fan of zombie movies to appreciate this well-edited stop-motion GI Joe zombie slasher:
Be sure to also check out the parodies of the classic GI Joe PSA’s:
Haha, I haven’t played with it yet, but Microsoft’s music project Songsmith gets my stamp of (temporary) approval. Great way to listen to previously unbearable songs like Roxanne:
Although, I do have to admit, the original Enter Sandman was a good song to workout to or for a video montage of action sequences. Ulrich is probably shitting himself now:
Plan A: Ray Kurzweil saves us all
Plan B: Aubrey de Grey saves us all
Plan C: Ron Paul saves us all
So like most techno-libertarian geeks, I’ve looked into cryonics. And while I’m not nearly as bullish as the average extropian or singulitarian geek (what is the bar for an average one?), I think that organizations like Alcor provide at least a statistically plausible form of a genuine second chance. Arguably a secular version of Pascal’s wager.
Anyways, if you’re interested in the early history of the cryopreservation industry, including the Chatsworth disaster, be sure to listen to episode 354 of This American Life (starts at minute 8). That’s a lot of drama.
See also: SENS
Cryonics
Singularity
So somewhere around 1993 or so I was hanging out at a friends house while he played around on AOL. I thought it was cool that you could graphically interact with information (like the Mac GUI, which we had at home) as opposed to haplessly pounding command lines into the dreary green-and-black text-based machine our school library had (TelStar something was the name of their service).
Anyways, shortly thereafter I asked my dad if we could get AOL and he said “why? We have the internet.”
Disappointed I told my friend that I couldn’t play with him on AOL because “we used the internet.”
Within months, similar conversations took place when my friends got on CompuServe and Prodigy.
Damn that internet!
Fortunately by the time Mosaic had came out my dad had explained where bits and bytes come from. (Not from storks or yellow stick figures). “Son, this is email, this is a web site, this is an ISDN line, that is a modem, this data sits on a computer in a different country.” And the tides turned.
Exhibit A: in late 1994 I was taking an English class and the teacher assigned us a project and said we can use whatever resource we wanted to complete it.
I asked her if I could use sites on the internet. She said “what’s that?”
Exhibit B: early in high school, for kicks my (cool) nerd friends and I would make fun of nerd-wannabes that still used walled gardens like AOL. “Oh, no he doesn’t have the internet… he still uses AOL. He’s a total loser and not 31337!”
And on that note, here is a funny news story from 1981 about accessing newspapers via an old school Novation CAT:
