humor

Christmas Hero

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By now, as I’m a little late to the game in posting this video, you may have seen the video of how former Disney Imagineer and special effects wizard Ric Turner installed 21,268 lights and LEDs and turned his entire front yard into a game of Guitar Hero. To start the game, you ring the doorbell. I love when people pull off hacks like this – I just wish I was handy enough to do it (and the thing is I probably am, I’m just too lazy to learn).
The demo in the video below shows a kid rocking out to Eric Johnson’s Cliffs of Dover which I too have played GH style:

Sick. Love it.
Via Sara

ramblings

On Being Thankful

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It’s Thanksgiving, our national holiday of overeating mixed with family agita, and the Gray Lady has a good op-ed about it. It says in part:

It’s worth raising a glass (or suspending a forkful for those of you who’ve gotten ahead of the toast) to be thankful for the unexpected, for all the ways that life interrupts and renews itself without warning. What would our lives look like if they held only what we’d planned? Where would our wisdom or patience — or our hope — come from?

From the last Turkey Day to this one, a lot has changed in both my personal and professional lives. It’s true: the one constrant in life is change. While this change may often bring sadness and unhappiness, it can also brings delight and joy. The op-ed closes with:

Most of what life contains comes to us unexpectedly after all. It is our job to welcome it and give it meaning. So let us toast what we cannot know and could not have guessed, and to the unexpected ways our lives will merge in Thanksgivings to come.

Gobble gobble.

politics

Independence Day

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A few years ago, I remarked when listening to the cacophony of fireworks exploding in the same suburban neighborhood that I was in this past weekend that “this is what it must be like living in Iraq.” Well, this past July 4th made me feel like I was in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, the unruly Chinese province that is in the news now and every other war zone in the world combined for a few hours.
There was the pop-pop-pop of firecrackers, the whistling and bang of bottle rockets and the boom and eventual crack of larger fireworks. As the tree cover was dense, you could rarely actually see what was exploding and the noise lasted for hours and hours and hours.
What I experienced was not the “oohs and ahhs” I experience normally while watching a nice, big professional display and instead of enjoying the explosions, I actually found them frightening. I never knew how far away the explosions were or if one shell or rocket was going to go off in an errant direction and possibly land in my backyard, hit the house or even somehow hit me. I never knew if my dog was going to start to howl and therefore wake up my sleeping and oh-so-tired daughter or if some of the explosions were going to wake her up outright.
This non-stop noise once again made me think about war, about how there are many places in the world where war is either raging or where it could break out at a moments notice and how supremely lucky I am to be an American because all else being equal, I’m pretty sure that a sustained war will not be fought on these shores and in my backyard anytime soon.
July 4th has therefore turned into another form of Thanksgiving. I get to experience a pseudo-war zone, where there are explosions for sport, clay pigeons – no harm, no fowl – with a bit of danger thrown in because you don’t know if the person aiming at the bird is blind, for 1 day a year in order to appreciate the fact that I don’t live in a real war zone for the other 364 days of the year.
For that, I am very thankful.

humor

Happy St. Paddy's Day

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While I haven’t posted in a little while (I’ve been so busy at work that at night I’ve just wanted to chill combined with the fact that I am still trying to figure out what to say about the Hampton Phish show on 3/6 and how to say it), I could not resist honoring today’s holiday by posting the video below:

I’ve heard that today is the one day of the year when everyone wishes they were Irish. I’m not sure if that is truly the case – it might just be because they wish it was socially acceptable for them to be in a bar by 11 AM on a Tuesday. Was that too stereotypical? Not if I look across the street at Puck Fair

ramblings

Eat Some Candy You Pagan

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Halloween originated from the Pagan festival Samhain, celebrated among the Celts of Ireland and Great Britain. Irish and Scottish immigrants carried versions of the tradition to North America in the nineteenth century. That is why the pic below (which I carved last night) is called a Jack-O’-Lantern.
hday.jpg
It can be traced back to the Irish legend of Stingy Jack, a greedy, gambling, hard drinking old farmer who tricked the devil into climbing a tree, and trapped him by carving a cross into the trunk of the tree. In revenge, the devil placed a curse on Jack which dooms him to forever wander the earth at night. While this bedtime parable was told by Irish parents to their children for centuries, the American tradition of carving pumpkins is known to have preceded the Great Famine period of Irish immigration. The carved pumpkin was associated generally with harvest time in America, and did not become specifically associated with Halloween until the mid to late 19th century.
The Wikipedia entry that I quoted above really made me laugh when it talked about the whole “trick or treat” phenomenon in these terms (emphasis mine): “Although the practice resembles the older traditions of guising in Ireland and Scotland, ritual begging on Halloween does not appear in English-speaking North America until the 20th century, and may have developed independently.” Hysterical!

ramblings

Taco Liberty Bell? Left-Handed Whopper?

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The Museum of Hoaxes has an area devoted to the Top 100 April Fools Day Hoaxes of all time. A number of them are really funny. I especially liked numbers 4 (Taco Liberty Bell) and 8 (Left-Handed Whopper).

Here is a brief description of #4, the Taco Liberty Bell:

“In 1996 the Taco Bell Corporation announced that it had bought the Liberty Bell from the federal government and was renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. Hundreds of outraged citizens called up the National Historic Park in Philadelphia where the bell is housed to express their anger. Their nerves were only calmed when Taco Bell revealed that it was all a practical joke a few hours later. The best line inspired by the affair came when White House press secretary Mike McCurry was asked about the sale, and he responded that the Lincoln Memorial had also been sold, though to a different corporation, and would now be known as the Ford Lincoln Mercury Memorial.”

Enjoy reading about the Whopper, Sidd Finch, The 15th Annual April Fools Day Parade and all the rest.

Thanks Jason

ramblings

Hey – It’s the Holidays

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Outcast’s “Hey Ya” has not surprisingly been chosen as the song to feature on two good holiday related flash movies that I’ve seen recently.

The first movie splices up the Charlie Brown Christmas Special (which I missed this year, something that I’m actually sad about) so that the children are singing and dancing to “Hey Ya.” It is very well done.

The second movie is a low-budget flash movie that features a “Hannukah” song sung to the tune of, yes, you guessed it, “Hey Ya.” It is kind of well done because the animation is pretty poor but the music is snappy.

Enjoy.

Thanks KT and Phyl