Happy Halloween!

The Walking Dead

Man, Ace's commenters are really hating on The Walking Dead... the show has had its ups and downs, but I think overall it's been pretty good, and I really enjoyed last night's episode.  I think my favorite part was the guy they found who had tried to hang himself but just ended up as a zombie dangling there flailing about for who knows how long... and all the flesh from his legs had already been eaten away by other zombies before they found him, it was pretty nasty.

My favorite comment over there so far was this gem posted by AmishDude:

Zombies are a metaphor for communism / liberalism / socialism

Every time you think you have it dead & buried, it comes back as another group of unthinking, resource killing evil that tries to kill everything that is good and living

They have no memory of the past or of prior failures.

But if #OWS has taught me one thing, it's that the Zombie Apocalypse will have rape. Lots and lots of rape.

Heh.

My very first YouTube video ever

I was messing around with the face morph gizmo over at Morph Thing and decided to make a slideshow out of some of my favorites:



All these were made with pictures that were already uploaded and prepared for morphing, I tried to upload a few of my own but didn't have much luck with them.  The piece of music I used was something jazzy called Kool Kats by Kevin MacLeod.

The Council Has Spoken!

This week's results for the Watcher's Council vote are in, they've been posted over at Watcher of Weasels.  The winning council entry for the week was "Is it true that the poor ye always have with you?" by Bookworm Room, and the winning non-council entry for the week was Bruce Thornton's "Obama's Libyan Disaster" over at FrontPage Magazine.  Congrats!

It's nice to see the group is still going after all this time, JoshuaPundit has done a great job taking over as Watcher.  Hopefully it won't make him quite as crazy as it made me.  Hehehe.

Zombie in a Penguin Suit

Here's an awesome short film I found via Allah and HuffPo:

It's based on the short story What's Black and White and Red All Over?, by Hugo Garza.  I'd link to his site but I'm not really sure which Hugo Garza he is.

Running the numbers on OWS

Using some of Nate Silver's crowd size estimates as a starting point, Eric over at Classical Values got out his calculator and crunched a few numbers of his own:

OK, so there are about 15,000 in New York (all of whom cannot fit into Zuccotti park), but let’s be liberal go with the highest possible figure of 100,000 protesters.

What is that in terms of percent? The United States population is 312,441,000, so Occupy Wall Street is less than a third of one percent.

0.032006042740869475, to be exact.

Their claim of 99% seems either a bit high or a bit arrogant. Or both.

If these filthy OWS hippies really represented 99% of the country then you'd think they could manage to gather more people together than the Tea Party movement could, right?  By most accounts, there were well over 100,000 people just at the Restoring Honor rally alone.  And that was just one event... I'm sure if you added up the numbers for all the tea party events it would really put the OWS numbers to shame.  Yet the media constantly fawns over the OWS protests and denigrates the Tea Party.

Update:  Eric updated his post to point out that 0.032006042740869475 percent is actually less than one thirtieth of one percent, not just less than one third of one percent.

The Cosby Doctrine

Jay Tea over at WizBang takes a lesson from one of Bill Cosby's standup routines and tries to apply it to the situation in the Middle East:

But what they did — where they failed to observe the Cosby Doctrine — was they didn’t look beyond getting rid of the dictator. They didn’t ask themselves the most important question: will this make things better? As bad as these dictators are, are we saying that any change would be an improvement?

In brief, they said “things can’t get worse.”

And worse said “oh, yeah?” Next thing you know, Coptic Christians in Egypt are getting run over by tanks and Libyans are looking at each other and saying “Shariah law? Who the hell wanted that?”

Even if we ignore our own self-interest here for a minute, what have you really accomplished for the people of Egypt and Libya if you just end up trading one form of tyranny for another?

Movies about people going nuts

Dave Schuler poses an interesting question over at The Glittering Eye:

What are the best movies, among genre films or straight drama, in which the main character starts sane and loses his or her mind during the course of the film?

Being both a lover of movies and a crazy person, I feel compelled to weigh in on this topic.  Several good examples were already mentioned in Dave's post and by his commenters there, but here are a few more that come to mind for me.

I think the richly bizarre Coen Brothers movie Barton Fink would apply, depending on how you interpret the ending.  Has Barton gone insane?  Is he in Hell?  Or is the whole whole movie meant to be metaphorical?

One that certainly would apply is What About Bob?, in which Richard Dreyfuss plays an egotistical psychiatrist driven completely insane by a patient who intrudes upon the doctor's family vacation... Bill Murray is funny as the clingy patient, but for me Dreyfuss makes the movie.

Session 9 might also apply... it becomes clear by the end that one of the characters is insane, but you aren't quite sure when he became insane.  It may have started before the movie began, or it may have developed as a result of stress and remorse.  There also may have been a supernatural element to the madness, which confuses the issue a bit.

How to reset the PRAM on a Mac

I was having some trouble with my Mac Mini after doing a firmware update.  After trying to reboot there was no video at all, just a black screen with a white box.  It would make the chime sound when I tried to restart it, so I knew it was still alive, but I couldn't see anything... and it's pretty damn hard to do anything on a computer when you can't see anything.

If you are having the same problem I was having, you may need to reset your Mac's PRAM.  You will lose some settings but that's a small price to pay for having a working computer again.  What you need to do is try to boot up the Mac and as soon as you hear the chime sound press Command+Option+P+R if you have an Apple keyboard, or press Windows+Alt+P+R on a Windows keyboard... and once you press those keys keep them all pressed until you hear a second chime.  If you have no video, it can seem like nothing is happening, but be patient... don't let go until you hear that second chime or this won't work.  Eventually there should be a third chime, and then you can just boot normally.

Depending on what problem you are trying to fix, if resetting the PRAM doesn't help, then you might want to also try resetting the System Management Controller.  There are different ways of doing this depending on what kind of Mac you have and how old it is

And if that doesn't work either, you are probably screwed... at that point I think you will pretty much have to make a trip to an Apple Store to get it fixed.

Ugh

Been wrestling with Twitter widgets all day. Made a bit of progress thanks to some good tips posted at ONWEBDEV, but a couple of the widgets still aren't working properly.  Twitter hasn't made a @mention widget available, so you have to use the search widget to search for @mentions... which would be fine, if only the search widget would display the results in chronological order.  Hopefully they will fix that problem someday.

More to Come

Still sorting things out here, and gonna redo the color scheme... not that anyone reading the RSS feed is gonna care too much. By the way, if you see your blog in one of my blogrolls on the right sidebar and then it seems to disappear, that's probably because each one only shows the 5 most recently updated blogs at a time out of several. Or it could mean that I suddenly decided I hate you.

Holy Crap

What the hell is this?

Is the horrible screeching thing in this video a man or a woman?  I really can't tell.

I HAZ A BLOG

Pardon the mess, this is my first post and I'm still getting things set up here.

More to come soon... in the meantime, since today is this blog's birthday,  I'll start things off with some nifty factoids about today's date.

Celebrities born on October 8th:  Frank Herbert(1920), Paul Hogan(1939), Harvey Pekar(1939), Jesse Jackson(1941), Chevy Chase(1943), R.L. Stine(1943), Dennis Kucinich(1943), Johnny Ramone(1948), Sigourney Weaver(1949), Darrell Hammond(1955), Stephanie Zimbalist(1956), Nick Bakay(1959), Peter Greene(1965), Emily Procter(1967), Julia Ann(1969), Jeremy Davies(1969), Matt Damon(1970), Soon-Yi Previn(1970), Bruno Mars(1985), and Molly C. Quinn(1993).

Politicians who died on October 8th:  John Hancock(1793), Franklin Pierce(1869), Wendell Willkie(1944), and Prescott Bush(1972).

The Great Chicago Fire started on October 8th, 1871.

Bruno Hauptmann was indicted on October 8th, 1934 for the murder of Charles Lindbergh's infant son.

(Some sites list Che Gevuara's death as being on October 8th, 1967 but that was the date of his capture... he wasn't actually executed until the next day.)

The Weather Underground started The Days of Rage riots on October 8th, 1969.

Tom Ridge was sworn in as the first Office of Homeland Security Advisor on October 8th, 2001.