brainrow

Via Boing Boing: here’s news from a better world.

You might not want to click the links on that page; they lead to news stories from this world, which is pretty depressing.

Via Eschaton: The McCain campaign is selling golf gear as a fund-raiser. The product page originally invited customers to leave a review, and some people weren’t taking it seriously.

Punk kids ruin everything for everybody!

When I was very young, I concluded, all by myself, that trees made the wind blow. They could rustle their leaves to make a light breeze, or shake their limbs to stir up a great gale.

I was two or three years old, I suppose, when I noticed a fly, fairly high on my bedroom wall, that never moved. (Flies were interesting, because they seemed able to blink out of existence — flying away faster than my eyes could follow.) For days or weeks, the fly on my bedroom wall didn’t vanish, and didn’t move. Eventually I pulled up a chair or something and climbed up to get a closer look. It was a nail. My conclusion: by standing very still for a long time, a fly could turn into a nail.

As I said, I was very young. I now believe that the wind moves the trees, and not vice versa. I now believe that the nail on my bedroom wall was never a fly — that I had been mistaken when I thought it was. I now believe that a fly is a fly and a nail is a nail.

I could never be a modern politician. I’m a flip-flopper.

Bo Jackson was a professional baseball player and a professional football player, and he was pretty good at both jobs. But, according to this 1989 Nike commercial, he couldn’t play guitar.

Bo Diddley, rest in peace.

At first I was amused by this post from This Modern World:

If John McCain was hoping to use his speech at the Republican convention in September to try to woo working class voters away from Obama, he might have hit a snag. It seems that McCain’s speech (which traditionally happens on the final night of the convention) will be happening at the same time of the NFL season opener between the Superbowl champs NY Giants and the Washington Redskins.

On reflection, I think this is part of a massive conspiracy by the NFL to get McCain elected. I mean, if people actually heard his convention speech, what chance would he have? The NFL is helping to hush up the Republican agenda, and this year there’s no greater service they could render for the Republican Party.

The Daily Show on what went wrong for Obama in West Virgina (some crude humor):

Daily Kos notes the anniversary of VE Day:

CHEERS to real “Mission Accomplished” moments.  Today is the 63rd anniversary of VE Day, commemorating the surrender of the Nazi terrorists during World War II.  If Bush and had been in charge, we’d probably still be fighting that war … in Mexico.

This blog has already explored that particular alternate history.

Kos also notes that today is Harry Truman’s 124th birthday, so go there and scroll down to the Bush-Truman debate:

Bush: Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.

Truman: In the circumstances, alarm is justified. The man who isn’t alarmed simply doesn’t understand the situation — or he is crazy. But alarm is one thing, and hysteria is another. Hysteria impels people to destroy the very thing they are struggling to preserve.

History’s interesting, isn’t it?

The Daily Show brings us the presentation ceremony for the Pollies:

The best political ads have the ability to mislead us, demoralize us, and disenfranchise us from the political process. But on a night when we celebrate the attack ads that have touched so many, let us also remember those whose careers were so tragically lost.

The Daily Show opens Panderer’s Box (strong language):

The Daily Show goes to the Pollies — the Oscars of political advertising.

John Oliver: A candidate like Barack Obama has a hopeful glow about him. How would you extinguish that?

Ben Chao: It’s pretty simple. The first thing you would have to do is to undercut people’s ability to truly hope for his vision. So, if you undercut the vision of Barack Obama, you take away hope.

Stephen Colbert says McCain and Clinton’s “gas tax holiday” doesn’t go far enough.

I’m sure you’re asking, folks, how will we pay for unlimited free gas? Well, the answer is simple: I don’t care. Besides, have you forgotten about a little thing called our grandkids? Because they are very generous, even though they don’t know it yet.

History is closer than you think:

Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager, believed to be the last surviving member of the inner circle of plotters who attempted to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944 with a briefcase bomb, has died. He was 90.

The German military said in a statement Friday that the former army major died Thursday night. It did not give a cause of death.

Von Boeselager was part of a group of officers who tried to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944, supplying explosives for the operation led by Col. Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg.

Von Stauffenberg placed the bomb in a conference room where Hitler was meeting with his aides and military advisers. Hitler escaped harm when someone moved the briefcase next to a table leg, deflecting much of the bomb’s explosive force.

Almost immediately afterward, von Stauffenberg and many of his cohorts were arrested and executed in an orgy of revenge killings that saw some hanged by the neck with piano wire.

Though many of those rounded up by Nazi officials were tortured in the hopes they would give up other conspirators, von Boeselager’s name was never divulged and he was never found out.

History trivia: twenty-five years to the day after the Hitler assassination attempt, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. The Saturn V rocket that started them on their way was designed by a team led by Wernher von Braun, who had formerly designed rockets for the Nazi war effort. Small world.

Via A Blog Around The Clock: an artist named Christiaan Postma has created a remarkable clock.

I put together more than 150 individual clockworks and made them work together to become one clock. I show the progress of time by letting the numbers be written in words by the clockworks. Reading clockwise, the time being is visible through a word and readable by the completeness of the word, 12 words from “one” to “twelve”.

An animation shows the clock in action. In the photo here, you can see the word “three” falling apart and the word “five” not yet fully formed.

The clock doesn’t give you a lot of information when you need to know what time it is, but it’s a triumph of human ingenuity.

Via Boing Boing, we have the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, ABC-style:

GIBSON: If your love for America were ice cream, what flavor would it be?

LINCOLN: (pausing with disgust and turning back to camera) Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.

DOUGLAS: He didn’t answer the question Charlie. This fall, that question is going to be on the minds of the American public. I’ve proudly stated that my love for America is Very Berry Strawberry.

(Bartleby.com is one of many sites with the real Lincoln-Douglas Debates.)

Via Gizmodo, an internal Microsoft video to motivate the Vista sales team.

Caution: May induce self-inflicted eye gouging and/or eardrum piercing.

So you see, even the biggest companies have horrible, horrible internal videos.

I wonder if it’s possible to die of embarrassment.