Month: March 2004

China’s Ministry of Education acknowledged that the Great Wall is not visible from space, in contrary to decades of assertions that the structure was large enough to be seen from orbit. Chinese astronaut Yang Liwei was the country’s first man in space, and he reportedly made the observation last year while orbiting the Earth in the Shenzhou V. I’m glad to hear that they’ve taken this step and am actually quite surprised that they capitulated in this way. Only time will tell whether they will be as conciliatory about more important issues…

Worth1000 is well-known for its PhotoShop contests; visit the site to see some amazing work. Here is a tribute with some really nice examples of Worth1000 PhotoShopping, mostly animal-related. I really like that Blue Angels shot…

Ze’s page presents How To Dance Properly, which features several Shockwave movies of dances that were surely inspired by Terpsichore herself. I’m torn between “Basic Twirl” and “Ride The Pony”…

Is Rock-Paper-Scissors getting too predictable? Then try Rock-Paper-Scissors-Spock-Lizard, which adds two delightfully devious new methods of destruction. Just remember:

Scissors cuts Paper covers Rock crushes Lizard poisons Spock smashes Scissors decapitates Lizard eats Paper disproves Spock vaporizes Rock crushes Scissors.

Simple, really.

Yetisports 3: Seal Bounce continues the saga of our penguin and Yeti friends. Just remember, you have to hit those sea lions just right… 🙂

John Hargrave of ZUG, posing as a 10-year old working on a school project, sent letters to all 100 senators requesting their favorite jokes. It’s nice to see that a good amount indulged the request of an elementary schooler (or so they thought), although most of the jokes are pretty lame. However, there were notable exceptions, both good and bad, which are of course duly noted.

Hopefully you are acquainted with Homestar Runner, one of the funniest sites out there. If not, visit now; you’ve got a lot of catching up to do! I’m a little behind in my regular visits, so I missed out on Strong Bad’s 100th e-mail. It’s pretty cool to see that they’ve been around for so long…

For anyone that has not yet seen Lost in Translation, I highly recommend it. As I mentioned earlier, I am very happy that Sofia Coppola won the Oscar for best screenplay. Coppola masterfully develops a connection between Bill Murray’s and Scarlett Johansson’s characters in a way that I have seldom experienced, and although some might complain about a thin plot, I think that overall the movie is captivating.

Anyway, back to the post. In the movie, Bill Murray plays an actor promoting “Suntory Time Whiskey” in Japan. In one scene, he is shooting a television commercial, and the director keeps yelling instructions at him in Japanese. These directions are dutifully translated by an interpreter that is obviously leaving some things out, confusing the hell out of Bill Murray’s character. Here is a complete translation of that scene, although I suspect that the deliberate lack of subtitles is half the fun.

MSNBC reports that city officials of Aliso Viejo, California “fell victim to one of the many official looking Web sites that have been put up by pranksters to describe dihydrogen monoxide as ‘an odorless, tasteless chemical’ that can be deadly if accidentally inhaled.” Apparently, “City officials were so concerned about the potentially dangerous properties of dihydrogen monoxide that they considered banning foam cups after they learned the chemical was used in their production.” For those of you who haven’t figured it out yet, the chemical symbol for this compound is H₂O: water. Looks like some paralegal will never hear the end of this… 🙂

Check out these cool Star Wars paper models. Unfortunately, the instructions are in Japanese, but the downloadable Adobe .PDF files allow you to make a TIE Fighter, TIE Interceptor, AT-ST, AT-AT, Y-Wing, Star Destroyer, Sand Crawler, and of course, the Millenium Falcon.

Update: I took a closer look at the site, and there are some other models available as well. Check out the “DERORIAN” (I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist; I’m going to Hell, I know it…) from Back To The Future and some Star Trek craft in the “Science Fiction” section. There’s also some more in the “Japanese Science Fiction” section that look vaguely familiar, although I’m not sure what they are exactly. Very cool…