This isn’t new news by any means, but the linked image is just too cool to not share. So Sesame Street turned 40 on January 30 this year to those not keep track.
It is crazy to even think how old Sesame Street has been entertaining our kids. I remember my mom forced me to watch the show every day before Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles came on. Hey, I’m not complaining.
Hit up this link for a guide to the puppets that probably raised you.
In North Carolina Cook-Out fast food restaurants are big. Think In N Out but East Coast. Open until 3 AM Sunday-Thursday and 4 am on Friday and Saturday, Cook-Out has what you want late night after your crappy first date, a bad breakup or a sports victory. The only problem is that the menu is so huge that you often wonder if you did it right. Sure, the chicken nuggets are good but have you ever had the Cheddar-style buger? Or the Cook-Out Fries with chili and cheese? The cappuccino shake?
Fret no more. Since Cook-Out refuses to create a website, someone went to the liberty of creating a virtual menu you can download to your iPhone or contemplate during your workday. Check it out.
The article might be a bit old [July 2] but the story is fascinating. A man, Ron James, who recently went through a divorce after thirteen years of marriage decides to “get back on the horse.” He joins JDate, one of the largest dating sites for Jewish men to try to find his perfect match. Since his job didn’t pay well he would often “stack” dates at the different Starbucks’ near Grand Central Station in New York City. When he finally finds the woman of his dreams, Sheryl Daija, it turns out she got married on the same day he did back on May 30, 1993. Eeerie.
The strangest part of all this is that the article mentions numerous twenty somethings joining JDate that weren’t Jewish. I guess I am going about my “glory years” all wrong since I could be hitting on 44-year old shayners. I’m just glad that this story isn’t about someone finding their perfect someone on plentyoffish.com. Eeesh.
In the world of ridiculous collector’s items there are a few well-known goods that anyone who is a true collector has to have. A suped up 1966 Corvette might fetch a good deal of money or possibly even an original work by Thomas Heart Benton. In the world of video games one of the rarest items is a golden NES cartridge known as the Nintendo World Championships.
26 of these cartridges were made for a sweepstakes in Nintendo Power in the early 1990s. The prize was a gold (spray paint) edition of the grey cartridge given to winners of the actual Nintendo Championship. According to Wikipedia, the gold version is considered by game enthusiasts to be the “Holy Grail of video games” as only 12 have ever surfaced of that original 26 (How many mothers threw out or sold their son’s cartridge at a yard sale for a couple dollars?).
JJ Hendricks recently paid $17,500 on one of the 26 cartridges. Typically, a gold copy of Nintendo World Championships goes for around $25,000 so technically JJ got a deal(?). He has written up a response to the month-long tide of emotions that went into the fine art of selling used, golden video game cartridges.
The next day, June 12th, I [JJ Hendricks] email him saying we have a contract and I will not accept his cancellation. He calls me 15 minutes later apologizing repeatedly saying he felt really bad the rest of the night because he felt like he had cheated me too. He says he will ship it that night via FedEx overnight with guaranteed 8AM delivery. I’m a bit skeptical but double check he has the correct address and pray for the best.
That night FedEx emails with a tracking number again. 1 hour, 2 hours, 3 hours go by with no cancellation email. I refresh the tracking page on FedEx about 100 hundred times and finally it shows it was actually picked-up. I might finally get the game!
The next morning at 7:30AM the FedEx man comes to the door. I’m holding my 7 week old baby, probably have a ridiculously big smile on my face, and sign for the package. I quickly open everything up half expecting some other problem.
Nintendo World Championships Gold is neatly packaged inside with a custom built display case and looks just as good as I imagined it would. I have the “Holy Grail of Gaming” and the emotional ride is finally over.
After reading his account one gets a sense that his seven-week-old kid is either going to have an awesome childhood or be completely neglected by a dad spending his Friday nights trying to buy a copy of Kizuna Encounter.
The Pirate Bay was once referred to as the most well-known Bit Torrent tracker website in the world. Everyone from member of the Pirate Party to anarchists to hippies to cheapskates filled their hard drives with every known reincarnation of Mega Man X3. Times were golden as stealing involved a quick search and a tiny download. But like all good things in life it was not meant to be.
Other Bit Torrent tracker websites such as the UK’s OiNK and US’s Suprnova bit the dust after government server raids. The fact that The Pirate Bay continued to exist this long is nothing short of a miracle – The Netherlands’ law almost completely ignored torrent tracker sites until recently. The Pirate Bay moved its main servers to Stockholm with the long term interest in purchasing a small, private island with which to be immune from international copyright law. Unfortunately, things didn’t pan out for The Bay as a nine-day trial in Stockholm ended with a guilty verdict for “assisting in making copyrighted material available.” The Swiss court ruled that the four defendants serve a sentence of one year and were fined the equivalent of $3.6 million.
To add greater damage for pirates, software company Global Gaming Factory X AB paid $7.4 million to run the website “legally.” The company intends to utilize the new business model to compensate copyright owners – a Bit Torrent Napster of sorts. How the news will pan out among users is pretty obvious.
According to a statement from The Pirate Bay, “If the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That’s the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want to.”
Well, I suppose the pirates will just move back to Coda.fm or Mininova and not notice any difference at all. Why pay when you can just steal the Blu-Raaarrrrrrrry edition? I’m here til Sunday, ladies and gentlefolks.
For those unfamiliar with Volkswagen’s “Pink Moon” ad it goes like this: Four friends are riding in a Cabrio at night to a house party. There are lots of quick shots cutting to the moon and the four friends enjoying a night drive. The wind whips their hair about as they make off-screen stares into the light created by the headlights. Upon their eventual arrival at the party the four friends silently decide that the ride over was more fun than the party they are going to will be. The final scene shows the friends enjoying the expansion of their carbon footprint.
So what makes this ad so great? Unlike the newer VW ads that use shock value to grab the viewer’s attention it is the seamless use of music and visual imagery to tell the story. Nick Drake’s Pink Moon provides a haunting backdrop for the beautiful cinematography. There are no spoken lines by the actors in the entire commercial but we are fine with that. Like the iPod commercials it just isn’t necessary. We get it.
I get the sense that after this ad was shot and was being presented to Volkswagen there were more than a few tears shed. I keep hoping that VW will pick up this campaign at some point and create some more nocturnal wandering.
The news of Michael Jackson’s death didn’t hit me at all yesterday. I was too busy being down in the dumps after not receiving $1,000 scholarship grant from H&R Block (not that big of a deal in the long run). So how do I feel 24 hours later? Different. This afternoon I re-listened to Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Dangerous and parts of Off The Wall at work. Michael Jackson left a considerable dent on my childhood but in retrospect I’m not sure I enjoy what I remember of him.
It’s hard to hate Michael Jackson, well, it is hard to hate Michael Jackson if you knew him before the mid-1990s. I can clearly remember a VHS recording my dad made of the music video of Jam wherein Michael played basketball in a rundown gym with none other than Michael Jordan. Everything from the fact that I was watching it on a big screen television set to the fact that it was on MTV made him the “man” in my opinion. I grew up listening to Thriller each year during the weeks leading up to Halloween because my dad made a mix tape with assorted “monster-related” songs (i.e. Purple People Eater, Ghostbuster’s Theme, etc.). The first cassette tape I put in my first home audio player was Sting’s Mercury Falling. The second cassette tape I put in my audio player was Michael Jackson’s HIStory.
Michael Jackson gave me a link to R&B which was a wildly exotic world for me at the tender age of 8 or 9. I grew up loving jazz mainly because I knew that the jazz greats (excluding Kenny G.) were black and that was something I could never be. Michael Jackson gave the world R&B by making it mainstream. Sure, Motown and disco did a lot to help the music genre but it was Michael’s tender ballads and fancy footwork that set the world on fire.
The past decade hasn’t been easy for Michael or the rest of his fan base. I still haven’t listened to Invincible, his last major effort at a career revitalization. To me Michael Jackson stopped being “cool” after his duet with Janet Jackson in 1996’s Scream. The music video, another Jackson tool, shows just how amazing his effect on music was. Who else could command a music video that cost the same as many major motion pictures of the same time period? Michael. His allegations of sexual molestation and constant abuse of pain killers haven’t helped his situation. Nor has his gross negligence of his financial spending (he spent thousands of dollars on candy and ice cream). In short, Michael’s fantasy life may have provided him refuge from his abusive childhood but it only led to his public downfall.
After listening to Thriller today I can officially say that I enjoy every one of the nine songs on that album outside of his duet with Paul McCartney (The Girl Is Mine). I also noticed that the only song where Michael sounds aggressive or angry is Billie Jean (Beat It and Thriller have a distinct tongue-in-cheek to them). I kind of enjoy the Smooth Criminal that inhabited Michael’s earlier efforts. When it came time to preaching his messages of global peace, racial equality and love I don’t think the world was quite ready.
I think Thriller’sThe Lady In My Life is the best send-off I can think of for his tumultuous career. Everything from the jazz guitar to the disco-esque keyboards give the song a beautiful sound that almost made me cry. If only Michael evolved that sound instead of heading in a popier direction. Thanks for all you gave us, MJ. You single-handedly proved that disco isn’t dead and that we can never Blame It On The Boogie.
Even When We’re Old And Gray
I Will Love You More Each Day
‘Cause You Will Always Be The Lady In My Life
South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford during a press conference Wednesday, June 24, 2009. AP Photo
Quick linked goodness tonight as I am busy working on applications for graduate school but I couldn’t not post this one. As my dad said at dinner, “In Washington it is either money, power or sex. Pick which one brings you down.” To that I say, why stop at one?
Pixar is the film studio that can do no wrong. With a better track record than the Japanese economy, Pixar now has… count them… 10 hit films under its belt. When your two worst received movies earn $825 million together (A Bug’s Life and Cars) you would think the studio could begin slacking off (*cough* Dream Works) and we would be none the wiser.
Not Pixar. Colby Curtin was a 10-year-old girl living in Huntington Beach, CA diagnosed with vascular cancer in December 2005. At the beginning of June it became apparent that Colby would die soon. Her dying wish? See Pixar latest film Up.
“When I watched it, I had really no idea about the content of the theme of the movie,” said Curtin [Colby's mother], 46. “I just know that word ‘Up’ and all of the balloons and I swear to you, for me it meant that (Colby) was going to go up. Up to heaven.”
Pixar heard of Colby’s story from a friend of the family that made frantic calls to the studio. The studio flew an employee with a copy of the movie to the Curin’s home in Huntington Beach. Sadly, Colby died a mere seven hours after viewing Up on June 10 at her home.
Apparently, Colby saw Dream Works’ Monsters vs. Aliens in April but was impressed by the preview for Up. When Colby’s condition worsened on June 4 her mother asked hospice workers for a wheelchair so she could go see the movie in theaters. That wheelchair was never delivered. Five days later it was apparent that she could not leave her bed and all hope was nearly lost for Colby.
When asked by her mother if she was ready to die Colby said:
“I’m ready (to die), but I’m going to wait for the movie.”
Popular web-translating tool, Google Translate, now allows users to convert English into Farsi and vice versa. Farsi is of course known as the language of Persians.
The service is free, “whether it’s a news story, a Web site, a blog, an e-mail, a tweet or a Facebook message,” a Google news release said. “We feel that launching Persian is particularly important now, given ongoing events in Iran.”
The ongoing events in Iran have gotten even more contested as Iran’s Supreme Leader supports the decision of last week’s election wherein Former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad beat out popular candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi. The service could help millions better understand the events going on in a country that has repeatedly suffered biased news services and Internet “blackouts” during the 2009 election.
Google Translate now translates in over 45 languages (46 by my count).
This isn’t new news by any means, but the linked image is just too cool to not share. So Sesame Street turned 40 on January 30 this year to those not keep track.
In North Carolina Cook-Out fast food restaurants are big. Think In N Out but East Coast. Open until 3 AM Sunday-Thursday and 4 am on Friday and Saturday, Cook-Out has what you want late night after your crappy first date, a bad breakup or a sports victory. The only problem is that the menu is so huge that you often wonder if you did it right. Sure, the chicken nuggets are good but have you ever had the Cheddar-style buger? Or the Cook-Out Fries with chili and cheese? The cappuccino shake?
In the world of ridiculous collector’s items there are a few well-known goods that anyone who is a true collector has to have. A suped up 1966 Corvette might fetch a good deal of money or possibly even an original work by Thomas Heart Benton. In the world of video games one of the rarest items is a golden NES cartridge known as the Nintendo World Championships.
The Pirate Bay was once referred to as the most well-known Bit Torrent tracker website in the world. Everyone from member of the Pirate Party to anarchists to hippies to cheapskates filled their hard drives with every known reincarnation of Mega Man X3. Times were golden as stealing involved a quick search and a tiny download. But like all good things in life it was not meant to be.
For those unfamiliar with Volkswagen’s “Pink Moon” ad it goes like this: Four friends are riding in a Cabrio at night to a house party. There are lots of quick shots cutting to the moon and the four friends enjoying a night drive. The wind whips their hair about as they make off-screen stares into the light created by the headlights. Upon their eventual arrival at the party the four friends silently decide that the ride over was more fun than the party they are going to will be. The final scene shows the friends enjoying the expansion of their carbon footprint.
The news of Michael Jackson’s death didn’t hit me at all yesterday. I was too busy being down in the dumps after not receiving $1,000 scholarship grant from H&R Block (not that big of a deal in the long run). So how do I feel 24 hours later? Different. This afternoon I re-listened to Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Dangerous and parts of Off The Wall at work. Michael Jackson left a considerable dent on my childhood but in retrospect I’m not sure I enjoy what I remember of him.
Pixar is the film studio that can do no wrong. With a better track record than the Japanese economy, Pixar now has… count them… 10 hit films under its belt. When your two worst received movies earn $825 million together (A Bug’s Life and Cars) you would think the studio could begin slacking off (*cough* Dream Works) and we would be none the wiser.
Popular web-translating tool, Google Translate, now allows users to convert English into Farsi and vice versa. Farsi is of course known as the language of Persians.