Month: February 2006

ramblings

Do You Take This Goat to be Your Lawfully Wedded Wife?

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A Sudanese man has been forced to take a goat as his “wife”, after he was caught having sex with the animal. I love this world! After the jump, read the text in case the BBC takes down the article…
Happy Friday!
A Sudanese man has been forced to take a goat as his “wife”, after he was caught having sex with the animal. The goat’s owner, Mr Alifi, said he surprised the man with his goat and took him to a council of elders. They ordered the man, Mr Tombe, to pay a dowry of 15,000 Sudanese dinars ($50) to Mr Alifi.
“We have given him the goat, and as far as we know they are still together,” Mr Alifi said.
Mr Alifi, Hai Malakal in Upper Nile State, told the Juba Post newspaper that he heard a loud noise around midnight on 13 February and immediately rushed outside to find Mr Tombe with his goat.
“When I asked him: ‘What are you doing there?’, he fell off the back of the goat, so I captured and tied him up”.
Mr Alifi then called elders to decide how to deal with the case.
“They said I should not take him to the police, but rather let him pay a dowry for my goat because he used it as his wife,” Mr Alifi told the newspaper.

ramblings

We're Number 9!

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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, going to Bingo was a good value and if there one thing that I’ve been programmed to do since birth is to recognize a good value. It seems that Bingo is now the 9th best public university in the country according to US News and World Report (see below).

publicvalue.jpg

Go Colonials/Bearcats!

politics

"What Was Reported" Versus "The Truth"

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Let me sound like Maxwell Smart when I say, would you believe that the 16 year old from Florida who went to Iraq on a “journalism” assignment for school never was enrolled in a journalism class because his school didn’t offer one? That his parents sent a note to school saying he’d be gone during that period even though it was reported that they had no clue he was gone? Would it surprise you to learn his father was arrested for forging 2,000 Iraqi passports and might have been attempting to forge 2,000 more? Here is an article with more about this story.
Via Marla

sports

New Yankee Stadium Only Has One More Hurdle

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Today, the New York City Planning Commission unanimous approved the plan for the privately financed $800 million project and now its up to the City Council, which must vote on final approval within two months, to say whether or not this will be a reality. I know there has been some back and forth about whether or not its a good thing for the Bronx. My opinion? The Yankees should give a little bit more back to the community but all in all, its a good deal for most. You can’t please all of the people all of the time.

tech

Free "Sunday" Silenced

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After the jump, read about how NBC has frozen the viral “Lazy Sunday” wildfire. Man are they missing the boat.
via Jessie
PS – to my loyal readers: sorry for the absense of posts lately. I actually have been quite busy as I resigned from my job to take a new one (my last day is this Friday and have been busy transfering my brain to others), started a new semester of b-school, am working on a big freelance opportunity AND just got back from 5 days in sunny St. Maarten. Be patient – more good posts are on the way…
NBC freezes wildfire spread of ‘Lazy Sunday’
Reported by Media Life
It looked like the perfect example of a viral marketing success story. Unfortunately, the source did not agree. When fans put a skit from “Saturday Night Live” called “Lazy Sunday” onto video-sharing sites, it was watched up to 5 million times on YouTube alone, according to reports. The video, which featured Chris Parnell and Any Samberg, may have provided “SNL” with a lot of free publicity, but NBC Universal has asked for it to be withdrawn from YouTube, along with 500 other clips featuring NBC programming, in order to protect its copyrights, says the New York Times. It is not uncommon for postings on video-sharing sites to contain copyright protected material. However, to date the sites have not faced many problems over this issue. NBC’s action over the “SNL” video, which is now available free on the NBC site or for $1.99 from iTunes, shows the problems that could confront video-sharing sites like YouTube and Google Video now that the networks themselves are getting into on-demand

politics

I love the Olymics: Winter Edition

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In the Winter of 2002, I was recovering from a serious car accident and couldn’t even read due to massive headaches (it hurt too much to concentrate on the words). Thankfully, I had the Salt Lake City games to keep me company. I watched all day every day and for the most part loved every moment. That silly figure skating medal controversy was just too much for me.
There are so many things I love about the Olympics. I love the years of dedication and effort the athletes put in towards sports that for the most part will never make them any money and how they do it for some ideal “greater glory.” I love the pagentry of the opening ceremonies, specifically when all the teams enter the stadium – I just love flags. I love how nations that shouldn’t get along somehow do. At the end of the day, we are all humans. We were only born into our countries/states/cities. I didn’t ask to be an American. Someone in China didn’t ask to be Chinese. It just happened to work out that way when we were born. Sports is truly a global language – hell, North and South Korea are marching together in the opening ceremonies and those nations are still technically at war (a cease-fire was signed on July 27, 1953 but the war has not ended officially).
Specifically for the Winter Games, I love the obscure sports, like curling and the Biathalon, the later being where you cross-country ski as fast as you can for a few kilometers, then take a rifle off your back to shoot at some targets and repeat 5-10 times. Its what I imagine Nordic special forces to be. I’m not a huge fan of ice skating and ice dancing but I love when the Americans win, especially girls from Long Island. So, it is already understood that NBC owns my TV for 2 weeks and that NOTHING else will be watched starting on 2/10.
Torino/Turin is the now. For the future, Vancouver has got the games in 2010 which is pretty cool as I loved Calgary in 1988 (go Saddledome). The contenders for the 2014 Winter Oympics are [in alphabetical by city order]: Almaty, Kazakhstan, Borjomi, Georgia, Jaca, Spain, Pyeongchang, South Korea, Salzburg, Austria, Sochi, Russia and Sofia, Bulgaria . I for one am routing for Kazakhstan, if only because maybe then in a spirit of Olympic goodwill Borat’s web site will be once again live.

music

Music DNA

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Pandora is a neat site run the people who set up the Music Genome Project. For those that haven’t heard of this great idea, it captures the essence of music at the most fundamental level. Here is their spiel:

Hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” have been assembled into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song – everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records – it’s about what each individual song sounds like. Over the past 5 years, they carefully listened to the songs of over 10,000 different artists – ranging from popular to obscure – and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time.

Based on a simple starting point, say “Jeff likes Led Zeppelin,” Pandora serves up songs for your listening pleasure based on the genes that most closely identify with the chosen artist. For instance, “Cemetary Gates” by Pantera, one of my all-time favorite late 90s 104.3 FM songs, was played because it featured hard rock roots, mild rhythmic syncopation, minor key tonality, acoustic rhythm guitars and many other similarities identified in the music genome project. Based on user feedback (thumbs up, thumbs down), it further refines its suggestions until you are getting a steady diet of classics, recent classics and brand new songs and/or artists that you’ve never heard of that are just simply awesome.
I need some time to see how large the music database is because already I’ve heard some songs for the second time and I haven’t been listening that long. However, right now I think its a much better version of Launch.com, which I stopped using after it was bought by Yahoo! because somehow my profile was deleted after the move. After weeks of saying “yes, no, yes, no, yes, yes, yes, no, etc” all of my effort was lost. For shame!
Via Jessie

space

Throwing Out A Spacesuit

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The astronauts at the ISS are stuffing an old spacesuit with discarded clothes and a radio transmitter and will then toss it out the door into space. The transmitter will send recorded messages in six languages to amateur radio operators for several days before eventually re-entering Earth’s atmosphere and burning up. The project, called SuitSat-1, was the brainchild of a Russian ham radio operator.
Cool.
Via Phyl

politics

Truthiness Is Tearing Apart Our Country

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“Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I don’t mean the argument over who came up with the word. I don’t know whether it’s a new thing, but it’s certainly a current thing, in that it doesn’t seem to matter what facts are. It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that’s not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It’s certainty. People love the president because he’s certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don’t seem to exist. It’s the fact that he’s certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?” – Stephen Colbert, from an interview with the Onion in its AV Club section. The rest of the interview is even better.
Via Chris