Cinematical reports that the final Rocky Balboa trailer is on the Interweb. I'm not going to watch it, as I've seen enough from the other trailers to convince myself that it might actually be good. Also, although its plot will more than likely be predictable, I don't want to spoil things by watching too much of the movie in trailers. Rocky Balboa comes out on December 22nd, and it might even get me into a movie theater, although I'll admit that's unlikely... :-p

Check out the new trailer for Spider-Man 3 at iFilm. Looks like it's going to be pretty damn good...

ZDNet.com reports that Google Earth has added the ability to overlay historical maps in its latest version. kottke.org demonstrated how to come up with some interesting imagery by adjusting the opacity of the layer(s). Very cool...

JibJab (best known for its hilarious John Kerry versus W political video) made a video for "Weird Al" Yankovic's Do I Creep You Out. Pretty funny...

PC World presents The 13 Most Embarrassing Web Moments.

Radiohead's cover of Nobody Does It Better (YouTube video) was surprisingly good...

Deep-fried flags removed from museum.

A KFC news release reports that

KFC Corporation... today became the world's first brand visible from outer space by unveiling a record-breaking 87,500 square feet, updated Colonel Sanders logo in the Area 51 desert.

Apparently there is some controversy as to whether this is the first corporate logo visible from space, but it's still a disturbing trend.

For more information, Michael Castellon's post contains images and video of the logo's creation.

Cabinet Magazine Online has an interesting feature entitled A Timeline of Timelines. There is a good introduction to the feature here.

Binary Bonsai reports that composer Basil Poledouris died at the age of 61, losing his battle with cancer. The Official Basil Poledouris Website has a forum where people are leaving their thoughts and memories of him. Basil Poledouris was quite a prolific movie and TV soundtrack composer; some of his better known works include Conan the Barbarian, The Hunt For Red October, Starship Troopers, Red Dawn, and RoboCop. I'm quite sad to hear of this loss...

I'm sure that most of you have heard of the allegedly synchronicity between Pink Floyd's album Dark Side of the Moon and the movie The Wizard of Oz. If not, the Wikipedia entry Dark Side of the Rainbow explains a bit further.

Someone has taken the trouble to create The Wizard of Floyd, a Google Video of the entire movie with a Pink Floyd soundtrack. You should probably have The "Definitive List" of synchronous instances handy to see the allegedly significant moments, if you're up to the challenge...

Check out this hilarious video filmed at a Tenacious D concert in New Zealand in which Andy Serkis, in Gollum/Smeagol character, joins the D in a rendition of Grease's You're The One That I Want. Hilarious...

The AtomFilms video Animator vs. Animation II is sequel to Animator vs. Animation, in which an animator's creation battles him in the Flash software interface.

Cinematical has some news on the theatrical adaptation of Mötley Crüe's bestselling book (!) The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band: Val Kilmer is allegedly playing David Lee Roth and Christopher Walken is supposedly playing Ozzy Osbourne. Now that's some inspired casting! :-)

To coincide with the release of the newest James Bond movie, Casino Royale, Cinematical has posted YouTube videos of the movie trailers to every James Bond movie.

Craig Ferguson of The Late Late Show has fond memories of Rumsfeld in this YouTube video...

Armed Forces Journal has an interesting article entitled Blood Borders exploring the notion that the current international borders are at least partly to blame for the ethnic and religious strife in the Middle East:

While the Middle East has far more problems than dysfunctional borders alone — from cultural stagnation through scandalous inequality to deadly religious extremism — the greatest taboo in striving to understand the region's comprehensive failure isn't Islam but the awful-but-sacrosanct international boundaries worshipped by our own diplomats.

It's an interesting article, but the most interesting (and controversial) part is their proposed new map of the Middle East...

This YouTube video of a Bank of America executive (badly) singing U2's One is making the Interweb rounds.

Cinematical reports that The Sarah Connor Chronicles, a TV series follow-on to the Terminator movies, will star Lena Headey as Sarah Connor. Although I thought Headey did a decent job in The Brothers Grimm, she is definitely no Linda Hamilton. As for the show, I have no idea what to think yet, but something tells me it will suck...

Now that I've finally gone through all of our Scotland vacation pictures, I've finished posting to my DrikoLand Gallery as well as to my flickr photo set. I came upon a very cool application called PictoBrowser that allows you to embed Flash slideshows of Flickr photosets in a slideshow, which you can see above. Enjoy!

Update: I also wanted to mention that the flickr map for the Scotland photo set gives you a neat way to see where we visited in Scotland and which areas we considered the most photogenic. However, I should point that some of the "blank" spots are because of bad weather, although thankfully we were lucky enough to only have a couple of days of really bad rain.

Check out the YouTube video trailer for Office Space re-cut as a psychological thriller.

This 60 Minutes YTMND video is funny...

The YouTube video Michael and Dwight: SexyBack is a hilarious montage of scenes from The Office set to Justin Timberlake's SexyBack. Go watch it!

Denmark came up with an innovative way to combat speeding on its roads: have topless women hold the speed limit signs. Check out the YouTube video Speed Bandits for the unusual story (note: quite NSFW).

Did you catch the trailer for The Simpsons Movie during the episode last Sunday? If not, you can watch it here.

Now that you've seen it, are you as disappointed as I am? Although I previously shared the enthusiasm of sites like Cinematical, if that trailer is any indication, the movie is going to blow. It's sad to say, but I'm not all that surprised. At least now I have pretty low expectations and could possibly be pleasantly surprised...

The Online Education Database presents Research Beyond Google:

Got a research paper or thesis to write? Want to research using the Internet? Good luck. There's a lot of junk out there — outdated pages, broken links, and inaccurate information. Using Google or the Wikipedia may lead you to some results, but you can rarely be sure of accuracy. And what's more, you'll only be searching a fraction of all of the resources available to you.

Google, the largest search database on the planet, currently has around eight billion web pages indexed. That's a lot of information. But it's nothing compared to what else is out there. Google can only index the visible web, or searchable web. But the invisible web, or deep web, is estimated to be 500 times bigger than the searchable web. The invisible web comprises databases and results of specialty search engines that the popular search engines simply are not able to index.

Do you think your local or university librarian uses Google? Sure, but certainly not exclusively. In order to start researching like a librarian, you'll need to explore more authoritative resources, many of which are invisible. Note: Although some of the following resources are visible and indexed, they have all been included here because of their authoritative nature.

CNN reports that Oscar-winning actor Jack Palance died at the age of 87 on Friday of natural causes. Jack Palance's movie and TV career lasted over 50 years, finally earning him a Best Supporting Oscar Award for 1991's City Slickers. The entire Best Supporting Oscar Award segment is viewable in the embedded YouTube video above, including Palance in all of his one-handed push-up glory and classic quip "That's nothing, really. As far as two-handed push-ups, you can do that all night, and it doesn't make a difference whether she's there or not."

I think I first saw Palance when he hosted Ripley's Believe It Or Not, or was it on Buck Rogers in the 25th Century? In any case, he never failed to entertain, and I had a soft spot for him ever since. I didn't find out until much later that he was of Ukrainian descent, born Volodymyr Palanyuk, which made him that much cooler to me. He will most definitely be missed... :-(

Did you know that Google Video has partnered with the NHL?

Now you can download full-length NHL games and watch them on your time. Whether it's a memorable game or a keepsake of your first in-arena experience, NHL Video is always available on Google.

Sweet...

In my opinion, HBO's Six Feet Under was one of the best TV dramas ever, and watching its final episode last year was quite sad. I never explored HBO's web site for the show in detail, but I stumbled upon a neat section dedicated to Claire Fisher's Artwork on the show that's definitely worth a look.

Guardian Unlimited's feature The works of art that matter most attempts to "compile the definitive list of the 50 works of art to see before you die," supplying its list of 20 works and opening its comments thread for suggestions to round out the list.

Cinematical reports that Brian De Palma is making a prequel to The Untouchables entitled Capone Rising. Although De Palma's involvement is a good sign, I'm thinking that messing with The Untouchables is just sacrilege.

Stylus Magazine has a pretty thorough article entitled U2 vs. R.E.M.. What do you think?

A couple of weeks ago, NASA decided that it would authorize a Space Shuttle mission to save the Hubble Telescope, reversing its earlier controversial decision to allow the telescope to fall into disrepair. In celebration of this great news, take a look at the Top 100 Hubble Images and a short documentary video on The Hubble Deep Field, one of the most important images taken by the telescope.

Update: Parallel Divergence has an informative post sensationally titled How Hubble Killed God that does a good job explaining the significance of the Hubble Deep Field image.

If you were into Commodore 64 games like I was, then most likely at some point you encountered a "cracked" game with an elaborate video "demo" preceding the game. Check out Commodore 64 Demomania, a YouTube compilation of some really cool C64 demos.

The saga of Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager continues in Episode 3 and Episode 4.

Jeremy Zawodny posts:

What if you were planning to retire a Boeing 747SP and leave it on static display?

Easy. You'd get a pilot to fly it there and park the plane.

But what if the facility had a much smaller landing strip than 747s typically land upon?

Easy. You get a really good pilot to land it.

Check out the YouTube video of the 747SP landing at Rand Airport.

Lifehacker posted a pretty neat tip about getting a quick weather forecast. The link weather.gov/#####, where ##### is your ZIP code, goes to the NOAA weather forecast for that ZIP code. This handy URL makes it easy to bookmark a forecast for your city, and it is also a prime candidate for a custom Firefox keyword bookmarklet. To create one, open your Bookmarks menu and add a new bookmark. Add these entries:

• Name: NOAA Weather  [my choice; call it whatever you want]
  
• Location: http://weather.gov/%s
  
• Keyword: wx  [my choice; use whatever you want]
  
• Description:  [optional]

Once you add that bookmark, to get weather for any ZIP code, just type "wx 20657" for this example (substitute wx for whichever keyword you chose). Very cool... :-)

I use the Firefox keyword bookmarklet method for many other sites, including dictionary, thesaurus, acronym, IMDB searches. I'd be happy to detail those if there's any interest; let me know in the comments...

In a stunning turn of events, The Onion reports that Politicians Sweep Midterm Elections. Republicans quickly blamed their losses in the election on the Democrats.

Now that George Allen has conceded to Jim Webb, Democrats have taken control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, a sign that voters are fed up with the current administration and the Republican-led Congress.

As a result of these sweeping changes, Stephen Colbert called it quits on his show last night in an angry tirade.

The Right Was Right has a 25-point manifesto of immediate changes that the new Democrat-controlled Congress will now implement, including:

• Border fence replaced with free shuttle buses
  
• Pledge of Allegiance in schools replaced with morning flag-burning
  
• Comatose people to be ground up and fed to poor
  
• Outlaw all firearms: previous owners assigned to anger management therapy
  
• Ban Christmas: replace with Celebrate our Monkey Ancestors Day
  
• Carter added to Mount Rushmore

One of my favorite classical works is Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite. WFMU's Beware of the Blog has a nice post detailing songs influenced by In The Hall of the Mountain King, the last and probably most famous piece in the suite. Some of the influenced songs may surprise you, and the post includes MP3 excerpts of those songs as well as some performances of the original work.

Cinematical reports that a sequel to Harold and Kumar is in the works, supposedly to take place in Amsterdam. I hope it's as funny as it sounds...

Everybody pretty much knew that Kevin Federline's new album would suck, but leave it to amazon.com users to really let him know just how much. amazon.com users have taken advantage of a feature that allows you to add custom tags to products and have mercilessly tagged K-Fed's album. My addition was "magically hurlicious" :-). Hilarious...

Danny Elfman directed The Killers' new video Bones, which ensures its innovative creepiness...

Mmmm...deep fried pizza (YouTube video).

The Wikipedia entry List of Homer Simpson's jobs is quite thorough...

Pioneering 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley died today of leukemia. I hadn't even realized that he was sick! His professionalism and class will most definitely be missed... :-(

"Weird Al" Yankovic parodies Bob Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues in Bob (YouTube video). One fun thing that you may not notice is that every verse is a palindrome... :-)

It'll be very interesting to see the results of tomorrow's midterm election, especially whether enough seats in the House and Senate change hands to allow the Democrats to win a majority. I shouldn't have to say this, but go out and vote!

Google has come up with a really nice Google Earth voter guide that adds a layer to Google Earth mapping software (a must-download if you haven't already!) with information and news about candidates in every district. It's amazing that they have compiled so much information and still made it easy to navigate.







With some of the races as close as they are, I bet we won't know anything for sure tomorrow, and I wouldn't be surprised if touchscreen machine problems figure prominently, among other possible snafus. Time magazine has an interesting article going over some of the possible "glitches" and their implications. The two cartoons above lampoon issues with "e-voting" on touchscreens in particular, as concerns over their security and lack of a paper trail in some instances bring back nightmarish thoughts of "hanging chads" and the like. Here's hoping that things don't get too ugly...

Some of you may have noticed that the DrikoLand Gallery has a new look. Although I recently redesigned with the MG2 gallery software, I found it too unwieldy and difficult to customize. After playing around with several software applications again, I decided on JAlbum, a free photo album creation and management application that has a large user base and extensive support, offers many customizable templates, and allows for very easy website synchronization. I'm using a slightly modified version of the Chameleon template's "Black" style (grey title bar backgrounds rather than the amber defaults), but there are dozens of other templates to choose from with their own styles. The smart upload option automatically uploads changed files to an FTP account with the click of one button, much simpler than the manual uploads I had to do before. If you're interested in more details, feel free to contact me; their website is chock full of information as well.

Now that I've finished transitioning, I've finally started to post pictures from our recent Scotland vacation to the DrikoLand Gallery. As of this post, I've added photos from ten of the thirteen days we visited and hope to finish the rest soon.

Speaking of Scotland photos, one of my Scotland photos that I posted to the flickr Scotland Pool was nominated for inclusion in the Flickr Scotland blog (actual post permalink here). The picture (seen above) is entitled Glenmorangie Barrels 5 and depicts empty whisky barrels outside of the Glenmorangie Distillery. I really liked their arrangement, and in particular I composed it so that one of the foreground barrels clearly showed that Jack Daniels bourbon barrels are used in the aging process. It's always nice to be appreciated... :-)

Crazy Chess is a pretty neat game where you have to move a Knight around and capture Pawns and various power-ups. No, really, it's actually pretty fun. ;-)

McSweeney's Internet Tendency presents a quiz entitled Prescription Drug or Metal Band? How did you do?

Check out two photos of a recent Space Shuttle Launch taken from the window of the International Space Station a WB-57 chase plane, one of which I've posted above.

Update: Looks like I messed up again, as apparently these pictures were actually taken from a WB-57 chase plane monitoring the launch. It figures that I held off on posting this and I still missed the comments thread in the post with a correction. Thanks to DaveNASA for the heads-up in my comments...

Kick Ass Classical presents "Classical Music's Top 100 Greatest Hits," including mp3 audio clips of the "hooks" to give you an idea of whether you'd like to seek out the entire piece as well as snippets of trivia about most composers and pieces. Very nicely done...

PC World's Techlog presents A Brief History of Computers, As Seen in Old TV Ads, with YouTube videos of commercials for many classic computers.