Whoops!

Dead celebrities come and go, revolution is forever (or for at least 30 years)

If the government of the Great Satan can’t say it, let me do the honors…

Iran: The votes are fine, and the U.S. is behind all this protesting! They’re meddlers! They meddle!

U.S.: (silence)

GOP: Dude, are you gonna take that? You should go right over there and meddle, THAT will teach them for calling you a meddler!

Iran: (bangbangbang) Nothing going on here, there’s no shooting, the internet is lying to you (bangbangbang). Go on about your business.

U.S.: You know, we can SEE you dumbass. You really shouldn’t be shooting your own people like that.

Iran: SEE!?! We told you!! They meddle!! they’re meddlers!! We’ve said it all along!! Now you march right up here (mind the dead bodies on the ground there) and say you’re sorry!

Random American Blogger Not Affiliated With the Government: Man, you can just go right ahead and go f*** yourself!

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. A near-Medieval government whose motto is “Death to America” doesn’t strike me as being overly rational. It’s like someone left a pack of Nazi skinheads in charge of the country, and some old racist cowboy is the guy who tells them what to do (when he’s not watching reruns on TV).

Anyone who saw the documentary about Dr. Jerri Nielsen, the lady doctor who discovered breast cancer in herself while stationed at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in 1999, will probably always have that story lodged in their memory.

Nielsen caught the nation’s attention in 1999, when she found a lump in her breast while wintering at the South Pole station. After finding the lump in June, she diagnosed herself with breast cancer and began treating herself using chemotherapy agents that were parachuted to the station, and would later perform a biopsy on herself with the help of non-medical crew, who practiced using needles on a raw chicken.

Well it’s ten years later, and the world has discovered that she died from that cancer this morning, at the age of 57.

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Why can I never get a roommate who is easy to live with? Is that too much to ask? OK maybe it is, but what about one who is Not Difficult To Live With? To cut down on descriptive text I offer you this video…

…yes that is my roommate, Paddy O’Shuttup. The part-time salesman who loves nothing better than to tell you how Irish and how Republican he is (not that you asked, mind you). Continue Reading »

My family came to visit this weekend (it was my sister’s birthday) and went to Shelburne Museum, where I took a closer look at the “Kalkin House” exhibit they had on the grounds. The Kalkin House (for lack of better titles I suppose) is a home made from three shipping containers, designed by New Jersey architect Adam Kalkin. Was a neat place (I blogged about it last week), and at a final cost not at all unattainable to your average home buyer.

More detail on these “QuikHomes” can be seen at This Website (and I apologize in advance for what this website will do to your eyes). You can also see some of his container homes at THIS website (less info but much easier on the eyes). There are several styles of this particular house, one of which even using 12 containers, and from the small photos, it looks just plain huge!

Naturally, my partner and I, who are junkies for innovative modern architecture and for “green” technology, looked at this home in terms of “You know, we realistically COULD have a house just like this.”

Well maybe not EXACTLY like this, but similar. This house is quite open, both to the outdoors as well as indoors… we like innovation but we like privacy very much as well. No fret - we could easily re-design to suit.

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Acrassicauda is purportedly Iraq’s only metal band, the feature of the surprisingly-moving Heavy Metal in Baghdad documentary. If you’ve not yet seen it you really should, it’s a fantastic movie. In short, the band was treated just as you might expect a western-style heavy metal band to be treated in pre-war Iraq (death threats, branded as Satanists, barred from playing, etc etc etc), wartime Iraq was little better, and as their fans scattered and disappeared so did they. The movie ends with them in Istanbul… living large in their newly bought leather jackets and now-long headbanger hair, but unsure of where they would be resettled (they WERE officially refugees, and not in control of where they would call “home”).

Out of curiosity I looked them up again to see whatever became of them. Were they allowed to stay in Istanbul? Is the band still together? Is the band still alive? The New York Times gave me some good news: Acrassicauda is alive and well, and living in New York!

The United States government has granted them refugee status, which allows them to apply for green cards in a year, and the International Rescue Committee has placed them in a modest one-bedroom apartment in Elizabeth, N.J., where there are as yet no Metallica or Slayer posters on the walls but a bundle of guitars are piled in one corner.

“This is more than we ever could have expected or dreamed of,” said Firas Al-Lateef, 27, the bassist, who arrived four months ago.

From a bombed practice space in Baghdad to backstage with Metallica, it’s like a heavy metal fairy tale. Good luck guys, keep fighting the good fight - and let the world know when you’ve got an album for us!

• Link to New York Times Article
• Link to theirc.org Article

Troubled economic times inspire innovation. While it’s by no means a new invention, “pod homes” and homes made from shipping containers are being seen as a viable alternative living structure (Recycled Homes). At a fraction of the cost of traditional wooden or brick homes you too can have a home built from recycled shipping material - and why not? It’s not as though building homes from aluminum is a new technology, plus consider what these shipping containers are built to withstand.

“The containers are designed for hostile dynamic life at sea … capable of carrying 60,000 pounds. It just made imminent sense, that with minor modification, it could become a multi-family living system.” Continue Reading »

How many characters do I need to type into Google before it auto-completes my search? I wondered about this last night, and today I discovered…

…it takes ten characters. Ten characters in a 14-character name, and I appear in the auto-results window.  Guess I’m not famous yet, but I DO have (apparently) 61,600 results. Is that good? Is it bad? Is it irrelevant? At least, with my long-winded ethnic name, I can be fairly assured that the majority of these results actually ARE mine… as well as some Connecticut “businessman” who seems to like cigars, and a Maltese football player. I wonder if I can get his jersey.