Wednesday Rantlings

Phil Foglio's Good Omens Artwork is on eBay. All the money will go to the Alzheimer's Research Trust in honor of Terry Pratchett. I tried to put in a bid, but it was already well beyond my limit (and growing) when I submitted.

This story about a track star reinstated as champion got to me, especially the bit about the second-place winner, when given the gold medal, went to the disqualified runner and gave her the medal.

Cryptomundo is reporting on Bushnell's One Million Dollar Trail Cam Contest to get a picture of bigfoot that is declared as genuine by a panel of experts.

The RIAA's thugs, MediaDefender, illegally attack a legit torrent site and take down the company's entire website as a result. Again, illegally. Through a Denial of Service attack. Which is illegal. The RIAA sucks. Any company that sues its customers, especially without evidence in most cases, sucks. I hope Revision 3 sues MediaDefender into oblivion, where thugs like them belong.

More on Stonehenge. In fact, it may have been a Royal Cemetary. Thanks to Maggie for the first tip on this one.

German Twit looted Machu Picchu 40 years before its official discovery.

Top Ten British Top Ten Sports Lists according to the Observer Sport Monthly.

An explanation of why TV sets don't have a channel one. This may not mean anything at all to the current generation, but it was a minor question in mine.

Loss of rights: while am Amtrak spokesman is telling a news crew that it's fine to take pictures in DC's Union Station, a security guard shows up and tells them to stop filming. Then refuses to explain the policy that makes guards harass photographers.

A gamer makes a comment on a new trend in video games of leaving dead bodies as part of the landscape, and what that means to gamers and how they see the game.

Boy abducted by Ircenrraat (the Alaskan equivalent of leprechauns). This is from the Museum of Hoaxes, but I wonder if Cryptomundo would be interested in it as well.

Wait... California allows amendments to their constitution through a simple majority of the popular vote? That can't be right.

A blogger at the NY Times explains why he hates traffic cameras. Yeah, I think they are the wrong way to enforce laws as well. Especially since the companies that run the red light cameras tinker with light timing and make intersections more dangerous.

Pug Puppy for the in-laws.

Catching Up Linkages

Happy Solstice.

You must watch the video Mark Evanier linked to, which has the BEST Christmas song ever.

I admit, I'm laughing at the poor dogs. Thanks for pointing this out, Gordondym.

LucasFilm Christmas Cards.

Cute Overload revisits Nora the Piano-Playing Cat.

Harry Potter and the Bickering Geneticists.

Captain Kirk mistletoe training video.

Nerd Trailers.

Oooh, hydrokinetic energy!

I have a strong desire to try this recipe, and freeze them as suggested by Aaron Williams.

And 400 years later, 2009 will be the Internation Year of Astronomy.

Medical Myths.

The Hajj has Free WiFi for the pilgrims. Awesome.

Can a virgin human give birth? Well, not a GUY human.

Starbucks' most expensive drink. I don't drink coffee, so this sounds truly disgusting to me.

Harry Potter plus South Park equals...

Bloggity reader Jack Pendarvis makes the NYTimes.

I'd like to point out some eBay auctions for ROM Spaceknight Paintings, the proceeds of which will be going to Bill Mantlo's medical care.

Paying it forward by paying for the car behind yours.

Pocky Marketing Ploy. Y'mean they have to actually MARKET Pocky? It doesn't just sell itself? No, I don't want the painting packages. I'll settle for the dark chocolate pocky, personally.

Comic Book Urban Legends Revealed #134. Cypher, Kryptonians, and The Champions.

Torchwood Season Two Trailer. Not for the kiddies.

Blogging Is My Favorite Pastime on Thursdays

The Library Problem. How to organize a home library of thousands of books?

The Bad Astronomy Blog's Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2007.

Star Wars Toys that Never Made It.

The Beat asks if Free on the web equals sales?

Writer's interrupt taping of a talentless twit's show.

My friend David Maxine is blogging! Cool!

Wow. Our eBay auctions are a fascinating look into the consumer mind. Dr Fate is the only one that had bids on him as of this writing.

New Jersey abolishes the death penalty.

As if I needed another reason to avoid McDonalds "food", they are actually fining people in England who stay too long in their parking lots! It's the Lincoln Park Pirates all over again.

Making Lights asks what is the first major news event you personally remember. The first big one, after the Bicentennial celebrations when I was four, was the Mt St Helens eruption when I was eight. The first time I realized that history was still happening.

More Links

It's Human Rights Day.

Florida Doomed, says Phil Plait.

An Illustrated History of Trepanation. Just in case you weren't feeling queasy today.

American Elf Archives are now free, which means I'm willing to use RSS to follow them, since it means I probably won't keep getting errors when I try to look at previous day's strips.

Why Chinese signs with English translations often feature the F-word. Short answer: faulty translation software.

Tell the producers of your favorite show what you think about their refusal to give writers their due.

WSDOT photos, lots of flood pictures in this flickr set.

An author has been chosen to finish the Wheel of Time series.

Nokia bizarrely claims the Ogg format is proprietary, which it isn't, because it's open source. Very odd.

If I go down to Olympia, I wanna stop and get some BBQ.

We're ebaying to try to pay the bills, check out our listings.

For Family and Friends only:
My Christmas wishlist: The only thing I really want is gift certificates for Kiva.org. Any gift I get is invested in a small business in the developing world. When that business pays me back, I relend the money to someone else, thus supporting a bunch of people with a very small gift. As a bonus, you can follow along at my Kiva page to see what I do with your gift. I, personally, don't need a lot. I have plenty of junk. Helping other folks up is the greatest gift anyone can give. So that's my Christmas wishlist. Note: Kiva also accepts donations to keep running their service. That's a good gift, too.

Pledge Drive

So I mentioned that I did a PBS pledge drive on Saturday? I was acting more as the security person for the "break room" than doing anything useful. But I was there, and I recorded the breaks to share with you. In addition to Paul, William and Ryan, my hubby-Eric and the famous Monty the Penguin acted as talent in these two clips. Paul and William start each one off, then Eric, Monty and Ryan comment on them.

First up: The Pledge Heads.

And now that you've seen that bit of insanity, check out the all-time classic, and still considered one of the funniest bits ever done for this station, The PBS Police.

And hey, if you feel like giving the station money to contribute to the continuation of Doctor Who on KBTC, the number or the website are still active. Just select a Doctor Who thank you gift, as listed in the pull-down on the website. Along the same lines, I've got more items for KBTC up on eBay.

Continuing to Get Unscrewed

I thought I'd just mention the auctions for Unscrewed Comics going on right now, since my current auctions are over for the moment (whew).

You can read about Unscrewed Comics here, and learn what caused a bunch of freelancers to come together.

The short story: Rick Olney cheated a whole bunch of people, promising them pay for various work, only he never paid most of them. Being something of a common occurrence in the comic book business (to be paid late), these people didn't realize until they started comparing notes that they'd all been cheated by the same guy. So they decided to prevent other people from being cheated by publicizing the guy's methods and dishonesty, and furthermore, they decided to turn the negative energy into something positive.

Thus the auctions, and soon there will be an anthology of works by various creators who support the cause. The cause being preventing "publishers" from getting away with not paying their workforce.

Randoms for the Day

Linda Medley discusses WonderCon and Fantagraphics.

While I'm very happy with our current eBay auction results, I'm kind of surprised that no one is giving the Alan Scott Green Lantern soft toy any love. C'mon, eBayers, where's the Golden Age love?

Mike Sterling on Captain America and Marvel, and ordering comics.

Leonard Kirk amuses me yet again, this time with the instructions for Kraft Dinner.

Beware the Ides of March.

Mark Evanier asks an obvious question. Having something like that in cars would be really handy.

Roombonkers! via Garrett.

R2-D2 Mailboxes.

Ask An Applied Mathematician.

Stopping Stock Spammers by stopping transactions on spammed stocks. Could it work? I sure hope so.

Saying vagina will get you suspended?

I generally don't care at all about American Idol, but I've been checking in on this one because Blake Lewis is from Bothell, where I live. I still haven't bothered to actually WATCH the show, so I don't know if our local rep is any good. But I'm keeping an eye on the news to see how far he goes.

Random Thoughts

Couldn't get through all the links I wanted to post, so I'll finish tomorrow if I have the time...

Self-Link #1: Grassroots promotion of Aquaman.

Self-Link #2: It is time once again to remind you of our eBay auctions. If it has "KBTC" in the description, all proceeds are going to the local PBS station. If it doesn't, all proceeds are going to pay our bills.

Colleen Doran Sees Wicked then flaunts her stuff at the DC offices.

Heidi Meeley applies "The Customer Is Always Right" to the comic book industry.

Ten in Green. Remember the Alamo.

Pictures from Wondercon.

I got my monster, thanks to Adventures in Applied Math. Apparently, Tegan eats townsfolk and abducts geeks. Hrm.

Speaking of monsters... mmmmmmm Chocolate Dalek. It looks REALLY messy. Yum.

With March came a tiny bit of spare money, some of which went to Conlan Press to buy The Last Unicorn DVD.

FilkerTom on naked actors and stupid commentators.

If you haven't checked out Strange Maps yet, you really ought to. All kinds of neat stuff there, from Oz to the DCU and back again.

I don't really care much about this news item, except I do hope the press gets to ask the perp one single question: WHY?

After several days of not moving, the Leif Erikson statue finally was successfully removed to be renovated and moved to a slightly different location.

Hmmm, I think I'd actually watch this.

I Park Like An Idiot dot com, where you can get bumper stickers to put on the cars of people who can't park in between the lines. I don't think I'd have the nerve to actually apply one of these, but I am amused by the thought.

Reading Scriptures leads to Violence.

Don't use the words winter, games, or gold in Vancouver BC for the next few years. More from Boing Boing.

Oz and Ends tells us what a "baramin" is.

Junk science from the RIAA.

Duct Tape comes in handy.

We still don't understand ball lightning.

9-year-old Canadian Terrorist detained by the US.

Diebold may dump e-voting unit because it's tarnished their reputation. Well, duh. Creating easily hackable voting machines with no paper trail would tarnish any company's reputation.

Garrett wants us to remember what a jury REALLY is. As a juror, you have the right to judge both the criminal AND the law. It's called Jury Nullification, and judges don't want you to know about it.

You must know your rights! Because, once selected for jury duty, nobody will inform you of your power to judge both law and fact. In fact, the judge's instructions to the jury may be to the contrary. Another quote from US vs Dougherty (cited earlier): "The fact that there is widespread existence of the jury's prerogative, and approval of its existence as a necessary counter to case-hardened judges and arbitrary prosecutors, does not establish as an imperative that the jury must be informed by the judge of that power".

For St Patrick's Day: Oh Danny Boy, as performed by three of the best evah Muppet singers. Don't get yer hopes up.

eBay Adventures

Hubby-Eric and I are really short on cash this month, AND we want to clear out some of the mess in our house. Hubby-Eric has decided to sell off his Green Lantern collection, and I'm going to prune my own collections a bit. The result is that we've been readying ourselves to put stuff up on eBay. And finally, now, we have posted our first three non-KBTC auctions. All for PVC sets that feature Green Lantern.

If you want to look at my auctions, I'm the user tegan. There should be three KBTC auctions (all the money we get from those goes to a local PBS station) and three PVC sets.

Heh. The original goal was to just get the stuff out of the house and find a good home for it. Now that I've seen our monthly bills, I'm really hoping to see a bidding war and some nice prices, though I suspect we aren't going to. *sigh*

Coughing, Hacking, Sneezing...

I made a quick run to the comic shop, but half the shipment was misshipped or something, and there wasn't much to pick up. I did get the latest "52", which is good as it features Aquaman in a very tiny cameo.

My throat goes from mildly irritated to massively painful in just a couple of minutes now. I'm gulping down bucketloads of lemon ginger tea, but when I'm not drinking hot tea I'm in pain. I'm tired of being miserable.

I apologize to anyone who reads this blog via RSS. I want to take full advantage of the tag/label function, and so I've been going back and adding tags to old posts. I originally thought it wouldn't send those posts to the RSS feed... but I was wrong. So I turned off the feed, updating the tags, then turned the feed back on... but it still flooded the feed. ARGH!!!

My kitchen light is out. It's a florescent light, and it turns on but has a lovely headache-inducing flickering effect and gives out almost no actual light. This makes it incredibly difficult to cook anything. Worse is trying to wash dishes, since the dishwasher is in a corner with no light at all. So I called some local electricians and finally managed to get ahold of a live one instead of an answering machine. He could send someone out, sure... 6:30 am tomorrow. Yikes. Still, I like the idea of it possibly being fixed in time for making breakfast, and I'm not going to be able to tolerate it much longer broken anyway. Ok, what the heck. I've already set my alarm for 6 am.

Unfortunately, this means hubby-Eric and I are headed for a very financially tight month. I'm looking at putting up his Green Lantern stuff on eBay a little earlier than originally planned in the hopes that it'll keep us afloat. This puts our summer plans in jeopardy as well... I really want to go down to the Winkie convention with Eric this year, but it may not happen.

Speaking of conventions, tickets are now on sale for the Emerald City Comicon. At the moment, I plan to attend both days. I'll probably be with my "twin" sister for the first day and hubby-Eric the second. I hope to see other Seattle area folk there...

Linkages For A Monday Afternoon

I just put up another round of eBay auctions to support KBTC. We haven't started selling hubby-Eric's Green Lantern stuff yet, but that'll come soon, I think. I know at least one reader of this blog bought an item off me in the last round of auctions, and I thank you kindly for supporting PBS through us!

I laughed aloud at this one: Poorly Positioned Firing Squads.

The Dorothy folks have announced the shipping date of the much-delayed chapter seven. If you ordered it, look for it on February 28th. If you didn't order it, why not?

Those same folks also alert us that The Baum Bugle is out, a fact which I can confirm as hubby-Eric's copy arrived in the mail today.

Ha! Check out the poster on the wall in this comic. I'm surprised I didn't notice it in previous strips (I checked, it did appear, along with some other interesting posters).

The Templar Arizona Preorder Project worked! $3227 was raised to get the story onto paper. You can still preorder and keep up with the news on the project. Congrats to Spike for the success!

If you have access to the NY Times page (free registration, I think), check out Unhappy Meals, which is about what you need to eat. It's all pretty obvious, until you start to compare it to what you are eating in general. Then you realize that most of this country has a long way to go to get to healthy eating habits.

Linkdump

Hubby-Eric and I are starting to sell stuff on eBay. The first round is stuff we're selling to raise money for KBTC. At some point, we'll also start selling off Eric's Green Lantern collection (mostly action figures). If you want to see what we're selling, it's under the user tegan. Anything that says "Androgums KBTC" is for the station.

Coyote V. Acme.

Oscar Nominees. I have not seen any of the films.

The Golden Raspberry Nominees. I have not seen any of the films.

Crowd Control during the Hajj may have saved lives, as no one was trampled to death in this year's event.

The State of the Union Drinking Game 2007. The only way I'd watch it is if I was already drunk. Which is saying something, as I don't drink alcohol.

I kind of wonder if the guy attacking Esther Grable in the last Ripples Through Time was just an overenthusiastic Gorilla Suit'er?