Shiny Things

I’m a sucker for shiny things and mechanical contraptions. So I spent quite a while poring over Roger Woods wonderful creations at klockwerks.

Greg Brotherton is another sculptor who recycles junk into cool. His forté is turning retro-futuristic vacuum cleaners and other industrial detritus into breathtakingly cool, highly polished rayguns and robots. The movie advertising Brotron products is a masterpiece.

Flash Games: Care Bears

Remember the fad for Care Bears? Adorable little teddy bears that came in a multitude of colours, a clever marketing gimmick that manipulated children into bullying their parents into buying them the whole set.

Here’s a chance to go back to your childhood and kill the little bastards: Liquid Generations’ Evil Care Bears.

After you’ve finished happily slaughtering Care Bears with guns, you can have a shot at the quiz: Which Dysfunctional Care Bear Are You?

I seem to be Gay Bear — comfortable with myself, although the regular Care Bears think I’m a deviant. And I have a crush on Grumpy.

Space Elevator Going Up

Scientists’ efforts to realise the space elevator, as first described by Arthur C Clarke in his 1979 novel The Fountains of Paradise. Advances in materials science mean that a cable reaching up as far as 100,000km from the surface of the Earth is no longer an impossibility and 70 scientists and engineers are discussing the idea at a conference in Santa Fe

Beer-Coated CDs

Cameron Jones, a DJ and scientist in Melbourne whose research is in the area of communication through biological cells, serendipitously created an ‘optical biocomputer’ when he spilled beer on his CDs and left them over night. The resulting fungus that formed distorted the sound of the CDs in interesting and meaningful ways

Encounters with the Mad

Had a brief encounter with the state of mental health this week. Or, more appropriately, it had an encounter with me.

I’d dropped in to pick up my comics for the week and was the only customer in the store, when the escapee from the mad house arrived. Complete with little plastic hospital bracelet and a white gown that laced up the bag, the new arrival muttered something neither of us could understand. Jase just said; Nah, mate. Can’t help you. And he happily toddled off again.

You’d think that someone somewhere would be missing this guy, but as we didn’t see anyone with large butterfly nuts, perhaps it was just an exercise in integrating the patients back into the community.

Just one more bloke doomed to wander the public transport system, eternally pestering passengers who are trying to read in peace.

Adventures Whilst Dog Walking

Had a not uneventful trip walking the beasties yesterday.

Just around the corner from home I spotted a black cat sitting in the gutter. It’s an odd place for a cat, but I’ve seen weirder and didn’t think much of it. There was a sudden flurry of activity and I assumed the cat has just spotted the dogs approaching and done a runner. Nope. It was laying in wait for a bird and proudly swaggered off home with its prize, a Noisy Miner by the feathers, in its jaws.

Up near the local shops a flock of nearly twenty Yellow Tail Black Cockatoos screeched into the pines, scaring even the nesting Magpies away, before heading off back into bushland. I’ve only ever seen one before in the distance, so a whole flock was impressive.

Malamute was disappointed that her fan club of small girls wasn’t around in their usual spot to worship her, but she cheered up when she scared a pair of Red Rumped Parrots. Cute little guys, they blend into the grass really well and are getting cockier around the dogs. If they don’t get some smarts soon, Husky has offered to give them some.

The Police are always saying that it’s dog walkers who find bodies, but it was just birds this time. I live in hope.

What RIAA Gets Out of File Sharing

A company called BigChampagne sells regional P2P download statistics to most of the major record labels. When the labels know what people are downloading, they know what to put on the radio, and sales in the area increase. The record industry’s lawsuits against file sharing companies hang on their assertion that the programs have no use other than to help infringe copyrights. If the labels acknowledge a legitimate use for P2P programs, it would undercut their case as well as their zero-tolerance stance

Cheaper Than Economy: Fly Cargo

After hours of travelling, Charles McKinley, 25, of New York City, pried open the crate with a crowbar Saturday morning. He popped up outside his parents’ doorstep in the south Dallas suburb of DeSoto, shook the hand of a shocked deliveryman and walked away