Early Birds

Early birds may get the worm, but I'll be getting vine-ripened tomatoes in October.

Where's your early planting now, Martha Stewart?!

The Wish Tree

The Museum of Modern Art here in NYC is currently showing several of Yoko Ono's older pieces. One of the more popular pieces is her "Wish Tree," which is set up in MoMA's sculpture garden. Guess which wish is mine.

Encore Godzilla Lecture @ 3rd Annual Nerd Nite Nerdtacular

Tomorrow, Friday, September 10th, I'm giving an encore presentation of my lecture, "Godzilla: History, Biology and Behavior of Hyper-Evolved Theropod Kaiju" as part of Nerd Nite's 3rd Annual Nerdtacular, at Galapagos Art Space, Brooklyn, NY.



This year's Nerdtacular is a "Greatest Hits" event, featuring other encore presentations on Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ride, the causes, treatments and science of cancer, and a discussion of race in role-playing games.

The evening will also feature "music and mental hygiene videos by indie-rock supergroup Overlord between presentations, and you’ll even have a chance to get the autograph of one of the original 20,000 Leagues crew members."

For more information on the presentations and presenters, go here: http://nyc.nerdnite.com/

And to purchase tickets, go... here: http://www.smarttix.com/show.aspx?showcode=3RD10

Cosplayers Fear Sunlight

Do they explode, or merely smolder slowly... then explode? We may never know.

An Open Letter to YouTube - "Charts"

This month, YouTube revamped it's "Most [Blank]" lists with "Charts." It's yet another pointless revamp of something for the sake of seeming busy. And so, an open letter that no one in power will read:

***********

Dear YouTube,

Why do you insist on "fixing" things that aren't broken and, in fact, making them worse?

- You now have to go through multiple clicks to get to these "charts,"
- They display LESS information at a glance than the previous Most Viewed/Subscribed/etc... format (only 10 videos/channels per page?), forcing people to go through twice as many pages to view the top 100 of any particular category.
- it wastes half the screen with blank space, which is probably part of the ultimate plan, leaving a spot to clutter up the page with Google ads and forcing users to look at twice as many.
- You still only allow access to the Top 100. What if I'm tired of the same 100 channels and want to see, say, the Top 400-500th most subcribed channel, to get a sense of what everyone else is doing?

Your layout changes in general just seem to be for the sake of moving things around, not for any practical reasons. YouTube's design philosophy should be to ADD functionality, not just CHANGE functionality. Give us MORE features, don't bury existing features in an endless hole of drop-down menus.

I realize in the corporate world, various departments have to "show their work," so they can justify their existence, but this is pointless.

At the very least, do the following two things:

1. A view-style option so that people can go back to viewing more than 10 videos per page, and
2. For frak's sake, let us see the channel/video database past the 100th; it's favoritism of the worst kind.

Sincerely,

Me

Slovenian Tango

Direct from Johannesburg, South Africa - Behold the beauty and majesty of the Slovenian Tango!

Instructions:

1) Grasp your partner, preferably American, firmly from behind.

2) Hold on tight

3) Don't let go until your partner is called for a foul, offsides and/or has their goal disallowed by Koman Coulibaly.

Now everybody try it!

Lost (in 10 seconds)

Missed the Lost series finale and don't have 2 hours to kill online? Here's the whole series in 10 seconds:

Here's the thing, I actually like Lost a great deal. And while I GET this "ambiguous" ending (all the mysteries are extraneous to the personal journey of each of the characters, blah, blah, blah), leaving major questions unanswered after SIX YEARS is just plain lazy writing. Much like Abrahms Star Trek reboot, rather than go for something complex that interweaves both revealing the science fiction/fantasy elements of the Lost world and completing the spiritual arc of all the characters at the same time, the runners of the show copped out, choosing instead to cheaply tug at heartstrings with touching flashbacks set to swelling music and a cowardly and non-committal final act.

At least we got a fight on a cliff in a storm...