Month: October 2005

Dale McFarland of The Specious Report has an interesting article entitled “Coin Collectors Divided over New Bush Half-Penny”:

Enthusiasm for the Thomas Jefferson buffalo tail nickel has not carried over to the George W. Bush horse’s ass half-cent.

The majority of numismatists quickly gave a big thumbs up to the new five-cent piece. But the half-penny, dubbed simply “The Bush” by hobbyists, has sparked a bitter debate.

“Each half-cent will cost about 0.81 of a cent to mint, creating an unnecessary deficit every year,” detractors of The Bush complain. “And it looks so much like a penny, The Bush will facilitate widespread dishonesty. The Bush is doomed to be a miserable failure.”

“These will come in very handy when the President’s Social Security reforms pass,” insist supporters of The Bush. “Once the program is forced into bankruptcy, each retiree will get one in the mail every month. Or they can just feel around under the sofa cushion.”

The traditional slogan “In God We Trust” is replaced by “Trust Me” on The Bush, which will make it highly sought after by collectors of U.S. coins with oxymorons.

I happened upon a MetaFilter thread on concrete ships last week that led me to Concrete Ships.org, a very informative page on the history of such vessels. Even neater is that I saw one of the more famous of such vessels during my vacation to Cape May, New Jersey last month. The S.S. Atlantus is a fairly famous shipwreck just off the shore of Sunset Beach, New Jersey, just west of Cape May.

Sunset Beach also happens to be the site of a flag-lowering ceremony that takes place every evening at sunset. “All of the flags that [are flown at the] mast are veterans’ casket flags that have been donated by the families,” making for quite a solemn and touching ceremony. Below is one of the pictures of the shipwreck that I took at sunset; click on the picture to see a larger version at flickr.

Ruthless Reviews presents its awesome Ruthless Guide To 80s Action, covering 100 of the best ‘80s action movies. Of course, “the best of ’80s action movies” is quite a relative term, but still… 😉

Thomas Mottl created a wild QuickTime panoramic photo/animation from inside a water bottle. Trippy…

Chrisb has a killer collection of TV theme songs in MP3 format.

CNN reported that last week “Southwest Airlines kicked a woman off one of its flights over a political message on her T-shirt.” The shirt in question read “Meet The Fuckers” and had a picture of W, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice. I happen to think that this is total bullshit, but having read through the associated MetaFilter thread, I have to admit that there are some interesting arguments on both sides, and some of the minutiae of the case could actually make a big difference. What do you think?

By the way, T-Shirt Hell, an online T-Shirt purveyor that sells a similar T-Shirt, has used this case to get some publicity, claiming that:

If any T-Shirt Hell customer is kicked off of any commercial airline flight simply for wearing one of our shirts, we will provide you with alternate transportation to get you to your original destination. This transportation includes, but is not limited to, the T-Shirt Hell corporate jet.

I’m now hoping to see a sudden increase in people wearing “offensive” T-Shirts in order to get a ride on the T-Shirt Hell “corporate jet.” 😉

The images at NASA’s Blue Marble were impressive when I first visited several years ago, but the new images released in its “Next Generation” are even more amazing. Beware, as image sizes are large, and it appears that the servers are a bit overloaded at the moment.

Have you noticed that whenever W’s administration faces a new scandal, fiasco, or downturn in public opinion a new Terror threat suddenly emerges? Well, I hadn’t made the connection myself, but Keith Olbermann of MSNBC wrote an article entitled The Nexus Of Politics And Terror in which he presents his case:

[Last Thursday on Countdown] I suggested that in the last three years there had been about 13 similar coincidences – a political downturn for the administration, followed by a “terror event” – a change in alert status, an arrest, a warning.

We figured we’d better put that list of coincidences on the public record. We did so this evening on the television program, with ten of these examples. The other three are listed at the end of the main list, out of chronological order.

He does qualify his findings, even calling them “coincidences,” but a quote from former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge lends some credence to Olbermann’s hypothesis:

More often than not we were the least inclined to raise it. Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment. Sometimes we thought even if the intelligence was good, you don’t necessarily put the country on (alert)… there were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said “for that?”

As Olbermann says, “Judge for yourself,” but I for one don’t put anything past this administration.

I recently came across a couple of excellent sites on video game history. The Dot Eaters divides its history into several eras and includes a lot of images and multimedia. The Timeline of video games is text-only, but iit is extremely thorough as it explores the chronology of video game development year by year.

If you liked the original Flash “game” Freefall, then you’ll love the new version with W. The W version works a lot better if you resize your browser window to make it narrower…