It was Nate’s 21’st birthday so give him a shoutout at natemcguire.com. We had a fab time in downtown Austin, and cheering on the Texas Longhorns to their first of many victories this season. As I moved back into cyberspace today I hit up on some VERY interesting stuff. So here goes with a quick recap :
1. This is pretty crazy if true and the evidence is mounting. Mostly circumstancial but some very weird things going on at the least. Sarah Palin, the republican VP nominee, you may better know her as the attractive one McCain has been walking around with for a couple days… may not be the mother of her youngest daughter. She may be the grandmother. You need to read this one, it will take 5 minutes, and take it with a grain of salt its not a news network or anything, but I’ve seen it pop up in a couple places in the last 24 hours.
2. Also, Sarah Palin related, I saw a fox news clip where her experience on the national stage was cemented in place by the assertion that Alaska is the closest state to Alaska. Let me tell you what, all questions I have about her viability are now cleared.
4. If you have been hiding in advance of Gustav, here is an up to date tracker. Yours truly might have a quote in a local newspaper cause of a quote I gave. Hooray.
via :http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20222358,00.html
The fact that I am reporting on celebrity gossip is downright distressing to me. However, this is Californication, its a different thing. Its an amazing show, and for that reason, I will bring you this news.
David Duchovny has entered a rehabilitation center for sex addiction, his lawyer, Stanton “Larry” Stein, tells PEOPLE exclusively.
“I have voluntarily entered a facility for the treatment of sex addiction,” the actor says in an exclusive statement. “I ask for respect and privacy for my wife and children as we deal with this situation as a family.”
Duchovny, 48, has been married to actress Téa Leoni since 1997. They have two children, daughter Madelaine West, 9, and son Kyd, 6.
Holy Smokes Batman. I thought you were acting in Californication.
I am slightly distressed because I heard this show was filming as of early August, and if they still are then we might have to put up with a short season. Son of a ……. Funny quote from forum : “how can you be addicted to sex? thats like being addicted to ice cream… or life… or anything else awesome.” — I do not condone this quote.
I had a house. It was destroyed by this big predictable hurricane called Katrina. After Katrina I asked you for money and took that money to rebuild my house exactly as it stood before. Even though it happened once, it couldn’t happen again. But now there is another hurricane coming called Gustav, so I’m evacuating again. I’m gonna come hang out with you for a little while, and before I go back will probably need some cash to rebuild my house again. No actually, I’m going to demand the cash, and then blame the hurricane on you.
That is what I imagine New Orleans residents are saying to FEMA right now, which I don’t understand. How can you build an entire city in a below-sea-level area, in a hurricane-prone area, with sub-par levees? The argument that Katrina was an extraordinary storm are just wrong. Katrina was a strong hurricane, but its not like Andrew wasn’t as bad, or a number of other storms that have hit in the four decades since the construction of the levee system. NOLA rolled the dice for 40 years and when it finally got unlucky it decided to call on FEMA / our government … to rebuild it.
Now here is the thing. You would think that that money would go towards a) building the sickest sea wall ever or b) moving out. However, the levee system is not nearly enough to stop another hurricane (like Gustav) or anything else for that matter until up until 2011. What? How does it take 6 years to throw some dirt on a hill. I know thats an extreme exaggeration but you think a little bit more effort would go into fortifying an entire city. So, 15 billion is going into a ‘plan’ to re-protect the city, but only 20% of that is done and the rest won’t be done for some time.
I wouldn’t rebuild a house there. In 2008 there are expected to be 8 hurricanes that hit the US, 4 of which will be major hurricanes, along with 15 tropical storms (because parts of the levee may not hold up to that). Note that these are on the east coast (since on the West they are tsunamis), and that the Gulf of Mexico is sort of Hurricane Alley. So any resident of NOLA is rolling the dice that between 2005 and 2011 (6 years), that 1 of 48 (predicted) hurricanes will not hit close to the city (because if you remember Katrina wasn’t even a direct hit) . Yikes. Not odds I would bet my livelihood and home on.
While looking up some of these facts I found some other interesting tidbits such as parts of NOLA have sunk 3 feet in the past couple of decades, and some parts quite a bit more than that. Meaning a) the levees are lower than designed and b) the future of the city as a whole is seriously in doubt. Yikes, again.
So, it is with the above statements that I kind ask my government to not send my money to New Orleans this time around, that they can keep it and use it for other things, like re-painting the white house pink for Obama’s daughters…
P.S. Why stay in NOLA anyways? It sorta sucks outside the French Quarter, and really, you can move that anywhere. I hope I get hate mail.
In honor of tomorrow, the first game of the Longhorn season, I must say hook’ em. VY is stopping by to get his jersey retired so I expect a raucous crowd even though the game is against Florida Atlantic and we are 25 point favorites. Hopefully our team plays like it did in the Holiday Bowl for the length of the season and we just might have ourselves another ring.
About the Hook’em sign (Via Wikipedia) :
In some European cultures, the identical corna gesture is used to suggest spousal infidelity or Satanic association. Images of Jenna Bush publicly “throwing the horns” resulted in startled reactions in Norway. In 1985, five Americans were arrested, due to its satanic connotations after dancing and displaying the gesture in front of the Vatican while celebrating the victory of the Longhorns.[9]
I’m an idiot, and even though I have done it a thousand times I designed this at 3200×2400 instead of 3200 x 1200. So, you dual monitors out there are in trouble. The monster size below , along with a 1600. Maybe some day I will rework it into dual, for now, suck it up.
School started today and I am in-between classes the wonderful (but currently very busy) University of Texas in Austin.
So, I give you some links I visited and found somewhat fantastic. somewhat.
Jaredigital does a review of some pretty nifty computer speakers… if you’re a mac fanboy. However, they don’t pass muster for a real listening device I could see this as a cool thing for a non-music aficionado.
Nate agrees with my analysis of Hulu embodying the correct way to do online video.
… and Cracked talks about the 5 experiments most likely to go wrong. Which if you haven’t noticed (one of the top 5 is going to start working itself out next week) Hold onto your seats people.
Facebook was the reason I wanted to go to college. Forget about the girls, alcohol or graduation process… it was all about getting my .edu email address and being able to sign up for facebook. I even chose an early orientation week at UT so that I could get my e-mail address first and be the first of my friends on it.
And it was glorious…. for 3 years. Now, I don’t find myself checking it …. even the email updates I have turned off, and the ones I do get I have forwarded to skip my inbox in Gmail so I don’t have to deal with them. Every month or two I check it and delete all the crap I don’t want and leave… I don’t stalk anyone, or care about updates and so I have come to the conclusion facebook is dying.
How can it be dying you ask since its growing like madness and it is the host of the town?
I know its dying because compared to the normal world I am a geek. Not to toot our own horns but the technically savvy internet users normally lead the charge and if our trends are followed the validity of websites can be predicted. Web 2.0 was originally a group of websites and ideas that these internet users flocked to and from there it grew into the movement that we have today.
Facebook is still regarded as a cool tool, but its not the destination site it once was, now its another in the list of sites most people check on daily, but are becoming annoyed with some of the ‘features’ that have accompanied its growth. Among my group it is being derived as myspace 2.0 with its facebook apps, integration with ads, and most importantly the users that exist on it. Originally it was the college crowd, and not every school either, when I joined I believe the list of colleges was less than 100. Now, its any teen, pre-teen, 6-year old, company, corporation or band with a facebook page, all sending messages, infiltrating your inbox and cluttering the community.
Part of the ‘geek’ mentality is to be seperate from the masses … the flow of people into the facebook system has reduced its gleam in the eye of the geek. It also brought with it some of those apps and service-complicating features I mentioned before.
There is no specific movement by the facebook team, or data I can point to showing an exodus of a certain group of people from the website, but a warning that I believe it has peaked, or will soon in the same way myspace did. The addition of users will continue for years as it continues to expand its base in markets where the name ‘facebook’ is still an untarnished cool thing-to-do, but the ebb of geek users fortells a future where they will have to do some re-invention to keep it going.
I love how the vice-president choice is huge for the election and has a great impact on who is the leader of the free world, but as soon as they are elected they lose all that power and become a speech-giver / policy-follower for 4 years.
Anyways, Joe Biden is probably Barack’s running mate. We know this because he now has a secret service detail that was just dispatched to watch his back. AFter chicking out his website…. I’ve come to the conclusion that he has nice teeth.
Below, for your viewing pleasure, and to laugh at … I have included the losers.
Just saying that if elections were based purely on what side could write better music…. well, it wouldn’t be much of an election.
He’s got a new one, complete with celebrity cameos and an MLK speech voice over.
The new one for Barack from Dave Stewart : American Prayer :
We Are The Ones Song by will.i.am - Obama
and the now famous…. Yes We Can by will.i.am
and McCain’s cover of the Beach Boys :
…. I guess we know who has Hollywood’s support in that one.
Cool thing to note is that Microsoft has teamed up with Rock the Vote to allow you to register to vote via Xbox Live. Pretty cool to do it at home like that, real easy supposedly, in the near future.
BucketofAwesome.com is almost done. Go ahead and go there, bookmark the feeds, add it to your favorite technorati sites, etc…. and then submit some content. There are still one or two pages that aren’t there or need work, but the basic system is in place.
Currently, the top post is Jon LaJoie’s - Show me your genitals…. a classic by all standards. Thats the type of high brow posting you can expect there.
TJL 1600×1200
