everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Category: Current Events

  • Balloons

    The presidential campaign is not even over but I think they’re right to say that this is the dumbest quote from the 2004 campaign:

    “Go, balloons. I don’t see anything happening. Go, balloons. Go, balloons. Go, balloons. Stand by, confetti. Keep coming, balloons. More balloons. Bring them. Balloons, balloons, balloons! More balloons. Tons of them. Bring them down. Let them all come. No confetti. No confetti yet. No confetti. All right. Go, balloons. Go, balloons. We’re getting more balloons. All balloons. All balloons should be going. Come on, guys! Let’s move it. Jesus! We need more balloons. I want all balloons to go. Go, confetti. Go, confetti. Go, confetti. I want more balloons. What’s happening to the balloons? We need more balloons. We need all of them coming down. Go, balloons. Balloons. What’s happening balloons? There’s not enough coming down. All balloons! Why the hell is nothing falling? What the f— are you guys doing up there? We want more balloons coming down. More balloons. More balloons.”

    –Democratic Convention producer Don Mischer, overheard on CNN having an apoplectic seizure when the balloons failed to drop from the ceiling of the Fleet Center in Boston

  • Try, Try Again

    genesis_ground.jpg

    Launched in August 2001, NASA’s Genesis was a delicate unmanned spacecraft designed to collect solar wind samples for further analysis on Earth. The pod was to enter the atmosphere and deploy a chute to slow down it’s speed and while drifting to the ground was going to be intercepted by trained helicopter pilots who would snag the pod mid-air and bring it down safely without damaging it’s delicate sapphire collection plates.

    I knew about this mission because the retrieval methods were covered by NPR on the radio when they interviewed the helicopter pilots who were actually stunt pilots from Hollywood. NASA usually turns to the military for such tasks but they decided that the stunt pilots would be better experienced for such a mission.

    Things did not go as planned. Hopefully they can piece things together enough so the mission isn’t a total loss.

  • Dancin’ in the Streets

    Dancin’ in the Streets

    Songwriter for The Grateful Dead and, more recently, The String Cheese Incident, cattle rancher and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is organizing spontaneous outbreaks of senseless dancing in and around the Republican National Convention. It’s become a movement

    We just had another brilliant expedition into elephant country. We encountered many of our quarry, converted a few, and made the rest so nervous you would have thought their thin smiles might shatter their faces. One of them said that he knew we were mocking George Bush. “How are we doing that?” we asked. “By dancing,” he snarled.

    And that, my pesky friends, is paydirt!

    John Barlow

  • Electric Coils & Chickens

    Our kitchen/dinning room looks like one of those life-sized dioramas in the Smithsonian that should be titled something like “Rental Apartment in Alameda, circ. 1980.” Behind me on the wall someone thought it’d be funny to put up a Norman Rockwell print (signed litho by the way) of some Pilgrim in the stockade with the words “Ye Glutton” on a sign around his neck – not exactly the thing you want to see while eating dinner.

    The stove has those electric coil things which never really works for cooking anything but Campbell’s soups because it takes forever to heat up. Also, the largest of the coils is busted so we only have three tiny ones to work with.

    But the strangest thing in the kitchen are these two stuffed roosters up on the shelf. I know they want to put things up there to fill up the space and make it cozy but stuffed poultry? When you look at them up close, as in the shot below, you’ll see that the one on the right is particularly menacing. There’s really not a good seat at the dinning table – you either have to look at “Ye Glutton,” the menacing chicken, or out the window at this weird stone cherub/angel thing that’s placed right outside the window with the plastic ivy.

  • Krugman v. O’Reilly

    Caught the tail end of the “gloves come off” debate between Paul Krugman and Bill O’Reilly on CNBC tonight. The sparring melted down to the point of name calling with Krugman, The New York Times Op-Ed columnist dutifully trying to read choice quotes from a transcript of choice O’Reilly quotes while the conservative host from Fox chastised him for taking queues from Media Watch.

    Not sure if this got us any closer to the truth but it was a highly entertaining political cat fight in which host Tim Russert wasn’t even able to get a word in edgewise. I sense, as did Mr. Russert, that this debate will be continued.

  • Toilet Tank

    Toilet Tank

    Don’t worry, the toilet flushes without disturbing the fish and you have to admit, it’s something to look at while relieving yourself. What’s interesting is that Aquariass was covered by Popgadget, which advertises itself as a personal tech site for women, who will not be able to enjoy it’s beauty in quite the same way as men.

    Order yours today

  • Wonderful Web World

    Wonderful Web World

    As I look for the cross-section of schools and interesting-but-reasonably-priced places to exist (does such a thing exist in the Bay Area?) I found myself wanting for a school district map overlayed on top of a map showing available placed to live. I’ve found pieces of the puzzle:

    SF School District Map
    greatschools.org
    SF Zip Code Map

    If only I could overlay the available listings which you can pull up in realtor.com or apartments.com using a zip code then I would be set.

    In the course of looking for a tool that could tie zip codes to neighborhoods to school districts, I ran across this wonderful site by MIT Media Lab doctoral candidate, Ben Fry. His interactive Zip Code tool is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in awhile.

    UPDATE: Now 10 years later Google Maps has started to layer this information as an extension of their Google Maps service. Check out the mash-up of greatschools.org ratings and Google Maps.

    Check out more mashups at the Google Maps Gallery.

  • Scam Baiter

    Funny story posted on BBC about a man who got a Nigerian scammer to paint the number 9 on his chest.

    We’re jumping on to a plane that will take us all home from Tokyo. I’ll post photos later!

  • Oops!

    The New York Post jumped the gun on their morning edition and picked the wrong horse for the Democratic Vice Presidential nomination on their cover story. The offending file was quickly removed from their web site but not soon enough for Reuters to pick it up and get a comment from the Post’s rival across town, the Daily News.

    Media sources said the News sent a case of champagne to Post editors and a note, “Congratulations on your front page. Have a nice day,” with a smiley face. The barb refers to a Post advertisement near the Daily News building showing improved circulation figures, with the words “have a nice day” and smiley face

    Meanwhile, my sources in the Blogsphere scooped the popular media with this mention on a US Airways forum:

    John Kerry”s 757 was in hgr 4 pit tonight John Edwards vp decals were being put on engine cowlings and upper fuselage. :up:

    I think there was a story on how the AOL Time Warner merger almost broke early because someone in the copy shop that printed up the signs for the press announcement almost leaked the story to the press. It was squelched but only just in time.

    How rumor becomes reality – some operations are better at fact-checking than others.