Category: ramblings

ramblings

Freedom Will Ring a Tad Bit Later

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The Media has been buzzing today about a couple things, like a pineapple grenade going off in midtown, and the Freedom Tower is one of them. It seems that Gov. George E. Pataki, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the lead developer at ground zero said yesterday that the soaring office building known as the Freedom Tower would be significantly redesigned to satisfy security concerns.
In an email I received yesterday, my friend Ben put it best:

“I’m glad to know that when it comes to massive undertaking public construction, Boston is not the only major city fully of a bunch of colossal idiots.

Listening the news the other day I had to shake my head that construction on the Freedom Towers will be delayed because the building needs to 100 feet from the street, due to security concerns resulting from…9/11/01. Four years of planning and these geniuses accepted plans that don’t meet the basic specs for security that were put in place as a result of the destruction of the buildings … they… are… rebuilding. Cue the circus theme.”

Thanks Ben – that is the best op-ed I’ve read on the subject yet…

ramblings

Freak of the Week – 4/25/05

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If you thought Michael Jackson was weird, check out this Peter Pan wannabe. I don’t even want to think about what he looks like without the wig and all these handmade fancy clothes. He says that his “day” job is in computer programming – lovely. He also has a IT company called Elfin Technologies. I love it.

I never before thought I would see these two sentences together: “I also started this site so that Tinkerbell would have an easier time finding me! So first of all I should say that I’m 50, and I live in Tampa Florida…”

Thanks Phyl, I’m sufficiently weirded out.

ramblings

Spam from Spamalot

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I read recently a NY Times article about how somebody pretty easily cracked the e-mail signup page at montypythonsspamalot.com. There were all 19,000 registered e-mail addresses, ripe for copying and adding to mailing lists. Which, of course, leads to spam. The irony is just too rich. The very term “spam,” as applied to junk e-mail, originally came from an old Monty Python skit.

By the way, you gotta love Eric Idle, the driving authorial force behind “Spamalot.” In his show memoir at the Web site, he writes: “Thank God for computers, because mine tells me I began writing the first draft of Spamalot on Monday December 31st 2001. I downloaded the text of the [Monty Python and the Holy] Grail [movie] from one of the many illicit websites, which thankfully saved me all the bother of typing out the script and I could paste and cut and rewrite as necessary.”

He downloaded his own illegal script to save himself time the lazy bastard. I love it!

Via Pogue’s Post

ramblings

Flying Cars Coming Soon

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This week inventor Woody Norris will receive America’s top prize for invention. It’s called the Lemelson-MIT award — a half-million dollar cash prize to honor his life’s work, which includes a brand new personal flying machine called the AirScooter (it goes on sale later this year at $50K per scooter).

The AirScooter can fly for 2 hours at 55 mph, and go up to 10,000 feet above sea level. This is not a joke – go and read the CBS News story and how NASA’s “The Highway in the Sky,” a computer system designed to let millions of people fly in their very own vehicles, will help make this a reality sooner than you think.

“Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need any roads…”

Via Slashdot

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

Malta & Yalta

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Do you know the difference between Malta and Yalta? I didn’t except for the fact that they are both small. I didn’t know if one was a city and the other was a country, if it was vice versa, if they were both countries, if they were both islands, etc. I knew one hosted a very important Allied conference during WWII. Which one though? I could never be sure.

Today, Malta came up as a cross word answer in a puzzle I’m doing – “island nation south of Sicily” – I knew the last four letters were alta and I could not decide if it was malta or yalta for about 10 minutes, until i figured out the four letter word for ramble – “roam” – which happened to end where “_alta” began. So, “malta” was the answer to the clue and I decided that I would do some research and figure out once and for all the differences.

After checking with Wikipedia, here is what I found:

MALTA: The Republic of Malta is a small and densely populated island nation in southern Europe. It consists of an archipelago in the Mediterranean Sea directly south of Italy. These strategically located islands have been ruled and fought over by various powers over the centuries. It is finally its own nation, having fully divested itself from Britain, the last nation to hold dominion over it, in 1979 and it joined the EU in 2004.

YALTA: Yalta is a town in the Crimea in southern Ukraine, on the north coast of the Black Sea, that was the site of the Yalta Conference. It has about 77,100 inhabitants (2004). Near Yalta is the Livadia Palace, the former summer palace of the Russian Imperial family, where the conference actually took place. Throughout the Soviet era it continued to be an important resort for the Soviet elite. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union it has, however, struggled economically.

Who knows? Maybe one or the other or both will be on Jeopardy one day…

ramblings

Lack of Posts

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March was an incredibly busy month for me, I closed on my first apartment and spent a week in the UK (in essence celebrating), so my apologies for not posting in a while. I actually just noticed that it has been over 1 month since I last posted which I find completely galling.

So, this is to let you know that I’m back, I’m recharged, and there will be a slew coming shortly. Hold tight…

ramblings

A School Named After Me

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A few years back, I first found about Lipson Community College which is located in jolly old England. Tonight, being totally unable to sleep, I decided to google it and man am I weired out. I grew up on Plymouth Place. Lipson Community College is located in Plymouth, England. Here is a description of the school straight from a job posting:

“Lipson is a thriving Specialist Community Arts College on the eastern edge of Plymouth. Ofsted described the College as “an outstanding ethos for learning.”

Even though the web site sucks, my sister will happy to know that the school that carries our name is focused on the arts as she is at SUNY New Paltz studying how to harness her talents to become the next Michelangelo, or at least Raphael. I really want to get a college tee shit. I think that would be cool, that is unless they are ugly, which would be a shame for an arts school.

Names and places keep following me around between the US and UK. For instance, when I lived in London in 1998, I lived in an area of North London called Highgate. I loved Highgate and will be back there in less than 3 weeks – I cannot wait! Highgate is located on the right hand side of Hampstead Heath, the huge urban yet untamed park in the northern part of London, which is just about 800 acres in size. After college, when I moved into Manhattan from Long Island, I wound up in the Upper East Side living in a building called “The Highgate.” Needless to say, the UES is in the northern part of Manhattan and its on the right hand side of NY’s huge urban Central Park, which happens to be 843 acres in size. Double weird.

Wait, it gets better and spookier. The town I grew up in on Long Island, the one where Plymouth Place lays is called East Meadow. The part of Central Park that is closest to my old apartment in “The Highgate” is called, yes, you guessed it, the East Meadow.

Weird, weird, weird!