Manufactured Lightning

My favorite Tesla Coil. ClintLightning@Aol.com
Originally uploaded by tesla1000.

Their electric bill is probably enormous.

Chicago O'Hare UFO Incident Redux

The unresolved November O'Hare UFO incident I wrote about here and here gets a little more coverage in this article from The Providence Journal. If you ask me the questions that are hardest to answer are usually the most interesting.

Clear The Air

I can envision a time when we will have individual citizen air monitoring networks. These would be much like the amateur weather monitoring networks that currently exist and would enable a much more localized view of air quality. In the mean time we have the AIRNOW website.

What does Marcellus Wallace look like?

If that sentence makes you smile you might enjoy this. Someone has taken one of Samuel Jackson's best scenes from Pulp Fiction and animated it with typography. Quite enjoyable but turn your speakers down if your at work or among children because this is definitely not safe for work (NSFW).



Via Boing Boing

It's The "Freak" Accidents That Bum Me Out

This Chicago Tribune article got my attention.



Your minding your own business driving in your car and a frozen piece of mud comes crashing through your windshield and your dead before the car rolls to a stop. I should just add this to my increasingly lengthy list of unfair stories in the news.

Fast Food Blog

Here's something you don't see everyday...

A blog dedicated to fast food appropriately titled Fast Food News.

Fear Sells and We're Buying

This post from Xeni Jardin over at Boing Boing captures the current fear based media culture in a nutshell. Why is a major American charitable organization (the American Red Cross) with a charter to provide aid and comfort running advertisements that do exactly the opposite? I wholeheartedly support preparedness but I suspect hope we are quickly approaching a tipping point where such scare tactics will not only draw the wrath of Boing Boing readers but of NASCAR fans. Not that the two (Boing Boing readers/NASCAR fans) are necessarily mutually exclusive, just somewhat uncommon.

P.S. I currently gather most of my news via the RSS powered Google Reader. This tool helps me to sample the main stream media gestalt from a safe distance and then quickly route around it to learn more about the things that I believe matter most.

MTV in 1983

Via Digg:
A Google Video of MTV back in 1983. Watch it before the lawyers send there letter and it gets pulled. Be sure to note the awful advertising and shocking abundance of "music" on MTV.

Palm Beach

Palm beach
Originally uploaded by Lennart Woltering.

Some warm thoughts to combat the Midwest cold.

How Clean Are Your Word Documents?

NSA offers tips on how to sanitize your Word documents. via: Lifehacker

Whoa

This sort of blew my mind. Follow the link to see photos representing how much stuff America consumes. If I think about how much we consume I have a hard time believing we find places to bury the stuff when we are done with it.

You Already Have Pictures, Turn them Into Posters... For Free

Block Posters is a tool that turns your pictures into wall sized pictures for free. I have to try this.

Chicago Winter = Brrrrrr!

As a Midwesterner with 30+ years under my belt I am used to cold but enough already. I take solace in the fact that March is only a few short weeks away and then we should turn the corner.