Here’s one pulled out of the archives. I originally saved this link for blogging purposes on July 13th of ’08!
I’m a fan of Eddie Izzard, but it turns out his bits are even funnier when performed by little lego guys:
You can see many, many more here. Aparently doing Eddie Izzard bits as stop action lego guys is quite a thing because there are many, many more users with the same, but that link goes to the original ones I saw.
My mom and dad had this cuckoo clock that my uncle had sent from Germany when I was very little. It is quite something to behold, resplendent with a deer head, crossed rifles and not one but TWO dead animals hanging by their feet. It looks almost exactly like this:
Complete with the dead rabbit and chicken. On the hour (and half hour) a tiny wooden bird comes out through the door and emits a pleasant “cuckoo!” The counterweights are large metal pinecones. Yes, it is hideous, but it is somehow beautiful in its hideousness. It may even be worth some money. And now my mom wants to get rid of it.
As I’ve stated, I love clocks. When the sad little clock downstairs fell off the wall and broke (an accident, I swear) we wanted to get a clock that Evie would enjoy. We toyed with the idea of getting a cuckoo clock, but we ended up getting a “birdie clock” similar to the one my grandmother has with different bird calls on the hour.
Now I admit that the grotesque hunting clock doesn’t exactly fit with our decor. There is no “hunting lodge” room in our house. That being said, there has to be a place for it somewhere in our house. I’d hate to lose such a old, well constructed clock*.
So please leave some comments and help me convince Sara this clock is worth saving!
*Note that I have no reason to believe it is old or well constructed and is probably a knock off to begin with.
I just wanted to share this link about the creation of various muppets. Of couse, it foils our theory about Elmo being cooked up in a lab for maximum cuteness and commercial appeal, but I thought it was interesting nonetheless. I like how a lot of them sort of evolved over time from one shot puppets or commercials, or else they were just thrown together by whatever they had backstage. I assumed they were intentionally made with personalities as they are today fully intact. Also, I liked some of the things like how the Count used to be evil and Telly Monster was hypnotized by TV.
I don’t know, I thought it was interesting even if Sara thought it was dumb.
This season of LOST has got me thinking a lot about time travel. I agree in principal with the way they handle their time travel, namely that when you are back in time you cannot change anything.
So I was prepared to write a large post about my theories on time travel, and then I discovered that it was already completely covered on BaconBach, almost word for word what I was going to write. I guess that means that when I search my own blog to see if I have already talked about something, I better start searching his blog too.
Anyway, you can check that link out to read about it there, or you can read my summarization here (EDIT: I think this ended up being longer than the original, so perhaps summarization isn’t the best word).
If you go back in time, I don’t think you can change anything because anything you would have done back then would have left evidence for us to find in the future. For example, you can’t kill Hitler before WWII because here in the present we all know about Hitler and WWII and they happened. If you had killed Hitler, then we would live in a world that never knew about any of that stuff. So obviously, you didn’t.
Let me give you another example. Right now, as we sit here, we don’t know anything about time travel. But lets say in the future someone invents time travel and goes back in time and leaves a novel there, say a “lost work” of Shakespeare, so that in the future generations of people grow up believing that novel is a work of Shakespeare (thank you Chrononaughts for the plot line). So here in the present day, we have all grown up with this book. We’re taught it in class, we’ve seen the movie version, countless other works have been based off of that book, basically the entire landscape of pop culture has been affected and all of our thinking is suspect.
“But”, you say, “so what? At the moment he placed the book, all of the future that did not contain this book was wiped out and a new one was created in which the book existed.” Okay, that’s possible. But if that were true, then time would probably need to be redone every time any time traveler went back to the past, based on changes they did or did not mean to make. And I’m assuming that if we had a time machine, there would be lots and lots of trips to the past. So whatever mechanism governs the deleting and re-making of time would be constantly doing nothing else than changing our lives. It’s CPU would be pegged out at 100% so to speak. And I just can’t imagine a world whose governing laws would allow for the constant erasing and re-doing of every detail of everything.
There is the possibility that going back and changing something spins off an alternate reality in which that event did or did not occur. I’m not saying that’s not true, and this doesn’t preclude that. I’m just saying I don’t care because A) if there are alternate realities then I think all possibilities already exist (so you are not creating a new one) and B) who cares what happens to those evil me’s that exist in those alternate realities, I only care about what happens to this one!
…And thus am at risk for assassination.
I thought I had blogged about this before, but I couldn’t find it. There was a comment over on BaconBach about Fort Wayne being “on Hitlers list of cities to bomb during WWII.”
This is a particular pet peeve of mine, which goes to show you how many times I’ve heard such silliness. First off, I’d imagine Hitler probably would have been happy to bomb any U.S. city, so maybe his list included every city in the entire country. The commentor doesn’t mention how far down the list Fort Wayne was. But, Hitler never bombed ANY U.S. city, so whether it was on the list or not is sort of irrelevant. What I’d really like to know is how this mysterious commenter got his hands on such an amazing piece of WWII memorabilia as a list of cities to bomb, scrawled in Hitler himself’s handwriting I’m sure.
I’ve heard this rumor about Fort Wayne before of course and, although I don’t doubt the psychological damage that could be inflicted on the U.S. by the destruction of the fighting Tin Caps or the military implications of Old Fort Wayne, when I questioned why it would be a target the best answer I ever got was that Raytheon has a location there. Well guess what, by my unofficial count there are 114 Raytheon locations in the United States (as well as others in other countries).
The odd part is that everywhere I have ever lived, I have heard the same story. At Purdue they said it was due to a large ROTC program and a defunct nuclear reactor buried under the engineering campus (why would that even be a target, even if it wasn’t really just a particle accelerator?) In Philadelphia it was more based on the size of the city, it’s naval yards and the psychological blow that could be caused but blowing up the liberty bell and the nation’s first capitol. That last one actually has some merit. Assuming someone destroyed every military base, the 5 cities larger than Philly and Washington D.C. and the U.S. still hadn’t retaliated, I could imagine someone taking a shot at Philly. I haven’t specifically heard the same in Chicago, but I’m sure I will sooner or later.
So why does everybody spread this bit of urban legend? I think it’s because they want to feel important and because it is kind of like telling a ghost story; just enough danger to give you a thrill. Even the most cursory examination reveals how asinine the stories are though.
And even though Fort Wayne has the most self inflated image of its importance, let’s not forget that it lies in the state that lists a popcorn factory on it’s Terror Target List.
Shane Halbach 