No Zytrons In Range

A quick series I did on Twitter:

SOMEONE PAY ME A MILLION BUCKS FOR ALL MY GREAT IDEAS

Here’s great idea number 1: Tail warmers for furries who wear fake tails during winter months

Here’s great idea number 2: Ad campaign where man opens woman’s Coke to make it go flat as a prank, copy “I popped her Cherry Coke!”

Here’s great idea number 3: RFID chips for wigs, so bald men can tell if their wigs are on straight without a mirror a’la Surface tables

Here’s great idea number 4: An adapter to let game-addicted kids drive their parents old beater car using an Xbox/Playstation controller

Here’s great idea number 5: A closet-sized dryer so consumers don’t have to separately dry and stack their clothes

Here’s great idea number 6: A sitcom entitled “Hex for the Memories” about a witch who has amnesia moving in with a psychologist

Here’s great idea number 7: Movie promotional stunt, fill a subway car full of pyro effects and run though crowded station at full speed

Here’s great idea number 8: A web forum that only allows drawings, no text. (Instead of textarea, you get HTML5 drawing tools.)

Here’s great idea number 9: Jason Bourne vs. Godzilla

Here’s great idea number 10: Another moon shot, while there build little Smurf villages to confuse the heck out of future generations

THIS CONCLUDES MY GREAT IDEAS.

Since it’s impossible to search Twitter further back than a few days, I actually had to write a quick-and-dirty app to get this.

#didyouknow Mozart coined the word “Comcastic” but it couldn’t be put to good use until the Comcast corporation was formed centuries later!

#didyouknow that King Richard III’s favorite brand of yogurt would have been Yoplait, had it been invented centuries sooner!

#didyouknow a P-51 fighter is 24 times longer than a 1/24th scale P-51 fighter model!

#didyouknow the city of Cutoff, TN is world famous for its f

#didyouknow webcams got their name by providing access to a dark web of intrigue?

#didyouknow the word “fortitude” comes from the roots “forty” + “tude”, and means a person with enough ‘tude for 40 people?

#didyouknow cylindrical Pringles containers can be used as bearings for tank tracks in time of war?

#didyouknow credit cards were originally used to jimmy open stuck locks, a use almost forgotten after scientists learned they produce money?

#didyouknow a group of crows is called a “murder.” A group of apes is called an “apeshit”?

#didyouknow I’m not writing #didyouknow tweets today because I have too much work to do?

#didyouknow goldfish can survive up to 30 minutes outside of water, but only if distracted by a Nintendo DS?

#didyouknow sound cannot travel in a vacuum? The motor is too loud and drowns it out.

#didyouknow Larry Bird, during his NBA career, was constantly being mistaken for Larry Fine?

#didyouknow the Japanese language is so hard to learn that even native-born Japanese only pretend to know it?

#didyouknow the Chinese word “li” means “a deep feeling of sadness upon hearing the ice cream truck jingle and realizing you have no cash”?

#didyouknow your stereo has “speakers” instead of “singers” because music was illegal when it was invented in 1924?

#didyouknow your stereo has “speakers” instead of “singers” because music is illegal in Taiwan, where it was built?

#didyouknow that dyslexia claims more than 100,000 lives a year in the town of Edicius, Pennsylvania?

#didyouknow the Puget Sound is “swiiish”?

#didyouknow hydrogen bombs are useful for those hard-to-reach areas?

#didyouknow the dollar coins featuring Andrew Johnson were originally planned to feature Slater from Saved By The Bell?

#didyouknow Friends is a spin-off MacGuyver? The role of “coffee shop customer” links the two shows together.

#didyouknow while the Maneki Neko figurine in Japan brings good luck, the same statue when placed in the Philippines brings dandruff?

#didyouknow before the potato was introduced to the British Isles, fish and chips shops used paint chips?

#didyouknow daily newspapers now get over 80% of their revenue from ads for adult diapers?

#didyouknow George Washington Carver made peanut butter as a marinade for roast beef?

#didyouknow when in the hand of middle managers, PowerPoint is a powerful sleep aid?

#didyouknow Coke Zero is named after the famous Japanese WWII fighter?

#didyouknow IPv6 is two better than the current IPv4?

#didyouknow whiteboards were originally sold under the brand Her Majesty’s Enwhitened Blackboards?

#didyouknow lard is considered to be the first aphrodisiac?

#didyouknow Microsoft owns a large warehouse solely to store all 358 Xbox prototypes discarded before the Xbox 360 was released?

#didyouknow GPS stood for Gloucestershire Positioning System until they decided to go global?

#didyouknow Microsoft changed .doc to .docx to make Word 2007 more XTREME?

#didyouknow you can empty a swear jar by standing near it and saying “gosh darn?”

#didyouknow Bishops in chess were originally allowed to move in a drunken swagger?

#didyouknow I didn’t do any #didyouknow today?

#didyouknow working with the Twitter API has been known to cause face-reddening and steam emitting from the ear canals?

#didyouknow that you dream during the REM stage of sleep? During the Nirvana stage of sleep you head-bang.

#didyouknow the first unsuccessful version of Facebook was called BackOfHeadBook?

#didyouknow Federal Law states steak-cut fries must only be served with steaks?

#didyouknow Twitter had to hire a sorcerer to figure out how to highlight hash tags as you type them? His name was Ted.

#didyouknow the new $1 coins feature Andrew Johnson because Paul Revere was unavailable for the photo shoot?

#didyouknow traffic cones are painted orange so other traffic barriers know they are poisonous?

#didyouknow Sunlight laundry detergent is not recommended for use on solar panels?

When I was a kid, our family lived in a house that was right next to an electric fence. Since you’ve likely never lived next to an electric fence in the world before cable, let me just explain: it completely destroys your TV reception. So your choices are either to order cable, or give up on TV altogether. Obviously no red-blooded American would give up on TV, so our family was one of the absolute first to get cable.

Back when Nickelodeon was brand-new, they didn’t have a lot of their own programming, so they’d fill most of their airtime with foreign cartoons that were completely unlike anything on American TV:

• The World of David the Gnome which looks like a cute happy kiddy show, but actually has a decent amount of action and (kid-friendly) violence (against trolls) and ends with the main characters dying. Seriously.
• The Mysterious Cities of Gold, a French-Japanese co-production, which had a 39-episode plot arc and ended up with strange mutants trying to take over the world with a flying Olmec statue head, defeated only by a golden, solar-powered, condor-shaped airplane much footage of which is in this badass techno music video. Seriously these cartoons rocked. This series is available on Netflix.
• Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea

Spartakus was by far my favorite, and it’s really hard to explain, because the show is so surprisingly complex. It’s a French cartoon. The premise is, basically, that while two kids are out camping with their family, they paddle their canoe into a cave and fall into a fantasy world that lives beneath the Earth’s crust. That world consists of “stratas” (basically, huge floating continents), and the center-most strata has the titular “sun beneath the sea” (called Tehra, artificially created by the Arkadians eons ago). The Tehra is dying, and nobody knows why, so in violation of the law some Arkadian children enter the archives to research the problem, which is where they find Tehrig, and Bic and Bac.

Tehrig had a huge influence on me as a kid. He’s basically a giant trilobite-shaped sentient hovercraft/computer, which the cast uses to travel between the strata. He looks like this:

(He also has dozens of little helper robots called Triggies:

If you’ve seen Farscape, now you know where they got the idea for the DRDs. And possibly Moya as well. But I digress.)

I won’t spend the rest of this post gushing over the cartoon, which frankly was poorly-animated and poorly-dubbed. But for a little kid with very little exposure to sci-fi concepts, this thing was mind-blowing.

But pangolins, yes. So the comic relief characters are a pair of immortal identical twin creatures who can start fires by rubbing their noses together named Bic and Bac. It sounds stupid, but they’re awesome. They also have their own little music video in the series, although unfortunately it’s always cut-off in the English dub:

(Link in case embedding breaks.)

If you read the show description or fan sites, you’ll soon learn that Bic and Bac are described as pangolins. What the hell is a pangolin? This is a pangolin:

Pangolins are awesome. They’re basically anteaters, covered in scales, and when in danger they can roll into a ball. (Which Bic and Bac did as well, by the way.) According to their Wikipedia page, someone once made a coat of armor out of pangolin scales, which strikes me as insane. They’re also somewhat endangered, because crazy Chinese people think you can use pangolin scales to reduce swelling.

So, yeah… that’s pretty much all there is too it. I was nostalgia-ing out one day, and came across a couple fan sites for this show I watched as a tiny tot. I read the description of the characters, and came across the pangolin. A basass-looking animal with a goofy-name.

Just something I thought of when reading about Apple’s App Store rejections.

(Click for enlargification)

(Click to see full-sized)

So I just watched the trailer for James Cameron’s Avatar.

View it at IMDB– Oh wait, there’s an annoying long ad you have to view before the trailer. Try viewing it at Apple– Oh wait it requires QuickTime. Well, let’s try viewing it at YouTube– Hey look, it just starts playing without any bullshit. Attention Internet company big-wigs: this is why people like Google!

So anyway, according to the trailer, a bunch of space marines with headless robots land on this planet. They volunteer one of their guys to transfer his brain into the body of one of the natives, who are blue elf creatures named the “Na’vi” which is obviously a Native American analogue. They have little tails. He’s released to live among the blue elf dudes, possibly to spy on them, and over a period of time he comes to appreciate their culture more than his own. He also meets some blue elf chick with a bow. When the space marines start to attack the blue elfs, he joins the elf side and leads them in battle with the marines.

So it’s Dances with Wolves.

Separated at birth?

Oh, but also the blue elfs train giant cats and ride dragons, apparently. That would be cool, if they didn’t look like blue elfs.

One of my buddies brought up that having the aliens in your movie be, basically, Native American elfs is pretty goddamned uncreative. Especially since this movie has a budget of over $300 million. Obviously none of that money went into hiring somebody who can come up with a creative and original alien race– hell the guys working for Lucas came up with like a dozen more creative and original alien races in the cantina scene alone! Seriously.

My original theory was that, due to the dragon riding and giant cat taming, the aliens in this movie were just way to obviously bad ass compared to the space marines, and so the space marines lost any sense of threat. So Cameron redesigned them to be elfs, and added cute little tails, to offset the bad ass-ness. (Note: this is also probably why he would add headless robots to the marines, so they kick more ass.) Good theory, but probably not true.

My second theory is that someone involved with this movie thought to themselves, “we need the audience to make an emotional connection with the Na’vi… I don’t think people will make a connection to something that doesn’t look or act human.” To that, a brief rebuttal:

Think about it.

Oh, and when we have guys in a movie riding dragons? Please make the dragons bigger than that. It just doesn’t satisfy the “wait a minute, this looks totally wrong” test if you have a human-sized guy riding a dragon with a wingspan of maybe 15 feet. Let’s see some dragons on film that are actually big enough to carry people around, not these wimpy ones.

Inspired by this article in The Guardian, I present:

The Wen Jiabao Brady Bunch

Bridge demolition on Virginia’s Department of Transportation’s YouTube page:

Bridge demolition on Washington’s Department of Transportation’s YouTube page:

You win this time, Virginia!

I’ve been inspired by LiveJournal’s Virtual Gift Store, but I think I can do them one better. I’ll make you a deal, for a limited time only, you can be the proud owner of this icon:

Yes, you’re seeing it correctly. That’s over four thousand pixels available at a single low price. Not only is each pixel painstakingly selected from one of over 16 million individual colors, but this lovely showpiece even includes transparent pixels. Transparency not available for most icons at twice the price!

But wait, there’s more! In addition to the normal sized icon, you’ll also receive, not one, not two, but five (5) small wallet-size icons! Use on your iPod, Zune, Cellphone, or any electronic device– perfect for showing off your icon while on-the-go!

    

What, you ask, is the price for this tremendous collection of beautiful hand-crafted butterfly icons? You might want to sit down for this:

ONLY $1.99!

That’s less than two dollars, less than your morning coffee! But I still don’t think that’s a good enough bargain, so let’s sweeten the deal. Order in the next 10 minutes and you’ll also receive the versatile large icon:

This large icon is perfect for those formal occasions, when not just any icon will do. Your friends will be amazed at the detail and clarity!

ONLY $1.99!

Call now, operators are standing by.

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P.S. Yes, Firefox 3 apparently does support the blink tag. Go figure.

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