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Monthly Archives: December 2005

This one’s for Shannon.

Apparently, someone with way too much time on their hands has timed their entire holiday home lights display to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s piece, “Wizards In Winter”. The video is quite a testament to the rock band. If anyone has any more info on where this house is located or who made it, let me know.

Trans-Siberian Home Lights Display

You can learn how to do this yourself or listen to more Trans-Siberian Orchestra pieces.

Update: Amanda writes, “Where else would you find such craziness than Mason, Ohio. Unfortunately the light show was cancelled last week.”

Troop in IraqLast week, a group of seven House Democrats wrote a letter to President Bush that accused the Pentagon of “under-reporting casualties in Iraq by only reporting non-fatal casualties incurred in combat.”

Current Pentagon casualty reports state 2,390 service members have died from the operations In Iraq and Afghanistan with over 16,000 wounded. Salon, however, has published details of the October Veteran Affairs report which show that 119,246 now off-duty services members who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan are receiving health care from Veteran Affairs. From Salon:

Presumably, some of those health problems are unrelated to the war. But the statistics seem to show that a lot of those health problems are war-related. For example, nearly 37,000 have mental disorders, including nearly 16,000 who have been diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder. Over 46,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan receiving benefits from the V.A. have musculoskeletal problems. These are all veterans who within the last four years were considered by the military to be mentally and physically fit enough to fight.

Sad that Cedar Point is closed for the winter? Well, worry no more! Get together with your closest buddies and build your very own Redneck Rollercoaster! It is an awesome video.

Redneck Rollercoaster

(via Neatorama)

Is this how we support our troops?

From 10News:

A local family said fallen soldiers and Marines deserve better and that one would think our war heroes are being transported with dignity, care and respect. It said one would think upon arrival in their hometowns they are greeted with honor. But unfortunately, the family said that is just not the case.

Dead heroes are supposed to come home with their coffins draped with the American flag — greeted by a color guard.

But in reality, many are arriving as freight on commercial airliners — stuffed in the belly of a plane with suitcases and other cargo.

John Holley and his wife, Stacey, were stunned when they found out the body of their only child, Matthew, who died in Iraq last month, would be arriving at Lindbergh Field as freight.

Dead Marine Shipped As Freight

“Relativity” in Lego is Shui and Lipson’s fourth Escher picture rendered completely with LEGOS.

Escher's Relativity

Escher's Relativity

(via MAKE)

President Bush Looking Down…of Americans want a timetable for troop withdrawal. That is just one of a series of questions about the Iraq war found in the latest CBS/NYT poll. Here are a list of other interesting numbers from their survey:

HAS THE BUSH ADMIN. EXPLAINED U.S. GOALS IN IRAQ?

Yes: 35%
No: 61%

DOES GEORGE W. BUSH HAVE A PLAN FOR VICTORY IN IRAQ?

Yes: 25%
No: 68%

DOES GEORGE W. BUSH HAVE A PLAN FOR BRINGING TROOPS HOME?

Yes: 25%
No: 70%

WHY DID BUSH ADMIN. DECIDE TO GO TO WAR?

U.S. Oil interests: 17%
Fight terrorism: 15%
Finish what his father started: 13%
To depose Saddam Hussein: 10%
Find/stop WMDs: 9%
Because of 9/11: 8%
Protect U.S. generally: 4%
Promote democracy in Mideast: 2%
Cheney/Rumsfeld wanted to: 2%

Giant Jellyfish

If you can’t beat ’em, eat ’em!

That is exactly what Japan is doing with their sudden jellyfish infestation. From the Times Online:

THEY are called echizen kurage and they sound like monsters from the trashier reaches of Japanese science fiction.

They are 6ft wide and weigh 450lb (200kg), with countless poisonous tentacles, they have drifted across the void to terrorise the people of Japan. Vast armadas of the slimy horrors have cut off the country’s food supply. As soon as one is killed more appear to take its place.

Finally, the quarrelsome governments of the region are banding together to unite against the enemy.

In the meantime locals are making the best of it — rather than just complaining about jellyfish they are eating them.

(via Collision Detection)

Bill ClintonLast Thursday at the U.N. Climate Change Conference, the U.S. delegation staged a dramatic walkout in order to ‘scuttle’ the negotiations. They stated it was in response to Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin’s Wednesday remark, “To the reticent nations, including the United States, I say there is such a thing as global conscience, and now is the time to listen to it.”

Most other delegations said the American actions had less to do with Martin’s comments and more to do with the fact that for two weeks they have only been trying to prevent other countries from making progress rather than adding anything helpful. What’s worse, the U.S. delegation has not been regularly attending the meetings and so to show up at one just to leave it is even more embarrassing for us as a country.

Our delegation even resorted to bullying tactics. President Bill Clinton was scheduled to speak on Friday night and he did, but not without the U.S. threatening the United Nations. From NYMetro:

Bush-administration officials privately threatened organizers of the U.N. Climate Change Conference, telling them that any chance there might’ve been for the United States to sign on to the Kyoto global-warming protocol would be scuttled if they allowed Bill Clinton to speak at the gathering today in Montreal, according to a source involved with the negotiations who spoke to New York Magazine on condition of anonymity.

Clinton did end up speaking and called the Bush administration “flat wrong”.

This morning, more than 150 nations agreed to launch formal talks on mandatory greenhouse gas reductions after the Kyoto 2012 deadline passes. The United States was not among them.

On a lighter note, the National Environmental Trust distributed whoopee cushions with Bush’s face printed on the front by the words “Emissions Accomplished.”

Jennifer Morgan of the World Wildlife Fund: “This shows just how willing the U.S. administration is to walk away from a healthy planet and its responsibilities to its own people.”

President Clinton: “I think it’s crazy for us to play games with our children’s future. We know what’s happening to the climate, we have a highly predictable set of consequences if we continue to pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and we know we have an alternative that will lead us to greater prosperity.”

Rubios Family16-year-old Zach Rubio was suspended from his Kansas high school for speaking Spanish. When one student asked him in Spanish to borrow a dollar, Zach responded with ‘No problema.’ For that response, he was ordered to leave school.

From the WaPo:

Most of the time, 16-year-old Zach Rubio converses in clear, unaccented American teen-speak, a form of English in which the three most common words are “like,” “whatever” and “totally.” But Zach is also fluent in his dad’s native language, Spanish — and that’s what got him suspended from school.

“It was, like, totally not in the classroom,” the high school junior said, recalling the infraction. “We were in the, like, hall or whatever, on restroom break. This kid I know, he’s like, ‘Me prestas un dolar?’ [‘Will you lend me a dollar?’] Well, he asked in Spanish; it just seemed natural to answer that way. So I’m like, ‘No problema.’ ”

But that conversation turned out to be a big problem for the staff at the Endeavor Alternative School, a small public high school in an ethnically mixed blue-collar neighborhood. A teacher who overheard the two boys sent Zach to the office, where Principal Jennifer Watts ordered him to call his father and leave the school.

The suspension was later overturned by the school district which stated speaking a foreign language is not grounds for dismissal, but it frightens me to think that we as Americans are so afraid of what we do not know that we will even kick a teenager out of school for speaking in a language that we might not understand.

This is ridiculous! Completely ridiculous!

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