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The site is in a state of crisis. Nothing, of course, compared to the global environmental crisis, the crisis in Iraq (or lots of other countries where things are even worse for the general population on a day-to-day basis), the current American leadership crisis, etc. But insofar as That's Plenty can have a crisis, it is as bad as things can get.
A few years ago, when Ryan was visiting he suggested that we start a blog. I thought it was a great idea, but was unsure that he and I could provide sufficient content to make the site interesting or worthwhile, so I invited a bunch of people that we went to school with to be writers. Dylan and Michelle moved on to another project that requires most of their time, so I invited my sister and Missi St. Pierre to join the staff. Julie Lou and Wythe wanted to be a part of the site, so I asked them on too.
The contributors who make the site run are all some of the most intelligent, funny, interesting people I know. There is a feeling of mutual respect and admiration among everyone who posts here. So why is it that, lately, no one is posting?
How about everyone tries to post every other day, even if its a tiny thing, a link, or a picture, but everyone leaves a comment?
The names are blocked out for privacy reasons. Sort of...it just seemed like a good idea.)
Google doesn't need my help to continue on with their plans of world domination, and yet here I am about to give it to them. Because I have to say, I am really digging their iGoogle homepage thingy. I didn't hear much about it's rollout, google seems to kind of slip these things quietly into the market and let the strong survive. A good tactic if you ask me. Anyway, the google homepage is kind of like what I wanted from widgets, except widgets turned out to be slow, sort of annoying, and I eventually just stopped using them. But now, I have everything right there on my firefox page, which at this point is open pretty much 24/7. It takes a minute to get it the way you want it, and the visual "themes" are awful and seemingly aimed at 10 year old girls, so just stick with classic. But once you have it set up, I have my gmail, my google reader RSS feed, gchat, a dictionary, a wikipedia thingy, a youtube search (offscreen) a translator, all shit I actually use. It's tempting to overload your page with crap, but fight the instict and go with a your top 10 or 15 "gadgets" as the call them. It is pretty swank. (Dear Google, send the check to D-Rock, Budapest Lane.)
If you're anything like me, you hate our president. But you can sympathize with the ol' Dubya on one subject.
It is so hard to tell all them ay-rabs apart! Sunni? Shia? What's the difference!?
The New York Times has come to the rescue through their online edition on this conundrum and many other brain-burning toughies.
If you're not sure about the meaning of a word, or need more information about a topic, just double click on the word in the story! A new window will pop up (so as not to browse you away from the article you're reading) giving you that extra brain boost you need to understand just exactly why all those crazy guys overseas can't stop killing each other long enough to get a functional government in place.
(For the curious, Sunni Arabs believe that succession from Muhammad is not necessarily based on heredity, while the Shia believe that succession of Islamic leaders should descend from Ali, son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad.)
Glad that's cleared up. No wonder they want to kill each other so bad! That's quite an important issue!
(Tested on Firefox 2.0.0.3 and Safari 2.0.4. Works on Firefox, doesn't on Safari.)
My book collection, which I will be adding to LibraryThing book by book as I sorrowfully pack them all away, in preparation for Budapest.
Also video of the Inaugural Kircher Society meeting I cut and thatsplenty founder Steve helped shoot got boingboinged today. So that's fun.
Somewhere, in the north pole Santa and his elves are finally sitting down to some hot chocolate and a well deserved rest after delivering a few billion presents. However not far from them a different kind of ELF is going strong. The HAARP or High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program is only a couple hundred (220 from North Pole, Alaska "Where the Spirit of Christmas Lives Year Round") in Gakona, Alaska. Part of this program is heating the ionosphere, and studying the effects, and researching ELF or extremely low frequency for long distance communication (specifically with submarines).
Santa never really held much sway over me. Sure, he knows if I have been good or bad, and he checks his list twice (although in this day and age I suspect Santa uses Excel or some database program, it's just so much easier.) However, in the end, what was going to happen? Worst case scenario, if I have been bad, I get a lump of coal in my stocking. Ohhhh, not coal. It just seemed like Santa couldn't back up his threats.
Sam - Tell me about some music track, or swear at pitchfuck.
Dylan - Something about a scientist or a compress scheme.
Michelle - What has offended thy eye as of late?
Stephen - Angry recount of dealing with a public service or semi fictional account that is an actual apology/restatement of love for Wifey. Not the Judy Bloom book.
Eric - Why didn't you convince me to download Y the last man earlier? I've been having dreams about it.
Sena - Wow, that's how you spell your name? Huh.
Karen - Tell me something you like'd about LA.
I bought a bunch of raffle tickets at last night's Funde Razor to benefit little kids in hospitals who want video games. I ended up winning twice and received several strange items. The first 8 people who e-mail me their snail mail addresses @ sbruckert@gmail.com will receive something stupid that I won at a raffle.
Who said the Christmas spirit was dead?
If we could add one of those Voight-Kampff comment challenge tests to the site, would that be ok?
Like that but sexier?
I'm getting roughly 45 comment spams a day, in violent waves of 15 at a time. Anyone else?
You know that feeling, the feeling you had as a kid in a science museum, that feeling I still get in the Natural History Museum, where you are compleatly transported to another place, where you feel encompassed by a kind of magical awe. Well, it can be a tough feeling to come by, so I thought I would post about some of the most magical places I know about. Place Number One:
THE HOUSE ON THE ROCK
This might be the most magical place I have ever been. Built originally as a fuck you to Frank Lloyd Wright it is a massive endless sort of lowbrow museum. From Wikipedia "Both of Jordan's biographers relate a story told by Sid Boyum, which places the inspiration for the house in an meeting between Alex Jordan Sr. and Frank Lloyd Wright, at some unspecified time apparently between 1914 and 1923. Jordan Sr. drove with Boyum to Taliesin to show Wright the plans for a building, the Villa Maria in Madison, which Jordan had designed. Jordan worshipped the famous architect and hoped for his approval. Wright looked at the plans and told Jordan "I wouldn't hire you to design a cheese crate or a chicken coop. You're not capable." Fuming, on the drive back on Highway 23, Jordan pointed to a spire of rock and told Boyum "I'm going to put up a Japanese house on one of those pinnacle rocks and advertise it." Nothing is better then revenge building.
To describe the magnificance of the house is near impossible. First off you know that now infamous Squid and Whale fighting in the Natural History Museum? The House on the rock has that but 200 feet long. It also has the world's largest working carousel, in addition to a pricless collection of automated music machines. You can easily spend 8 hours wandering around in the sprawling house and not see everything and not want to stop. Thats why its at the top of my most magical places I have ever been. If for any reason, you are ever anywhere in Wisconsin, it is absolutly worth the trip.
This reminds me - when we got a comment from one of the guys that worked on Guitar Hero II (in response to an apocalyptic comment from me), I was like "Yeah, whatever. It's not Dan @ Harmonix, it's just some dude." But I got all traceroute on his IP address and sure enough we was writing from Harmonix.
And - BONUS - the gentleman that messaged us worked on some of my favorite games, has done some interactive fiction, and kept a book diary of everything that he reads.
After poking around his website, I was actually pretty flattered that he wandered over to our website to give me the business.
Thanks for setting me straight, Dan @ Harmonix!
I really want to have a pumpkin carving contest, so to get you kids excited and ruminating on exactly what kind of Pumpkins you want to carve I suggest you take a look at http://www.extremepumpkins.com/index.html
They put the man back in pumpkin...man.
I typed the name of a play about Muslim women living in Holland, a play called "The Veiled Monologues," into Google's Arabic Translator tool and hit "translate." The result was a tiny string of Arabic characters, followed (or preceded, reading the way we do) by two exclamation points. "Now," I said to myself, "why the hell does it have exclamation points? I didn't put those there... Maybe it's angry?"
I re-translated the Arabic into English and discovered that "The Veiled Monologues" (admittedly not the simplest title, but, still, only three words) had become, simply: "WORDS!!" While I would love to work on a play called "WORDS!!" with two exclamation points, I also think Google should keep coding... You'll get there eventually, guys.
oh, looky, Sam wasn't in T Dex Rex's bday video... whatever shall we do?
Reading Nylon usually makes me want to perform hiri kiri for not being über famous at 24, but you gotta hand it to Rebecca Turbow, her clothes are super cool.
A cross between Judy Jetson, baby-doll bumpkins, 50's housewives and a flower, Turbow makes her Safe Cloting line out of soft, snuggly materials and sothing colors, often with protective features like a tummy pouches and knee pads.
Also check out Shabd Simon Alexander's new line lederhosen 
Artist/Inventor Bruce Shapiro uses his home-made motion machines to manipulate materials making morphing art.
Shapiro, both excited by the possibillites of robotics as a new art form, and disapointed by the expense deterent, has spent the last 15 years building his art machines out of inexpensive or free materials and publishes both the projects and workshops on his website. His works deal with the fluidity of time it takes to make a project and often the final product is the process itelf, putting the art machine creating the work in progress on display. His mediums are also time based and efemeral materials, such as eggs, sand, bubbles and wind.
I admit I subscribe to Merriam-Webster's Word a Day. Today's is fantastic. It's "thank-you-ma'am." Please, before clicking the linky, why not guess what this means.... perhaps via comment below.
When I was on the Grave of the Fireflies page in Wikipedia, I saw that in the See Also section, it linked to the Greatest Movies of All Time list (because Roger Ebert considered it one of the greatest war movies of all time). From there I linked to the worst movies of all time list which includes a list of movies disowned by their makers. That's gotta sting. The list includes such gems as Caligula, where the screenwriters sued to have their names taken off the credits (as the movie originally was to be a morality tale but was completely changed by re-writes, re-shoots and re-edits.) Malcom McDowell (my first movie star crush, incidentally) and his female costar publically apologized for the film.
Rumor on the street is that the subways are going to go down, and possibly even a full scale NY blackout. Probably just a rumor. Just keep an eye/ear out.
New Yorkers are blog crazy. I set out to make a comprehensive list of New York Blogs, i.e. blogs that write specifically about new york things. Turns out, there's a shitload of them! So here are a few, and I suggest you check out the links to the other New York blogs on their sites, because there seems to a blog for every block in New York.
http://www.brooklynrecord.com/
A good Brooklyn oriented blog.
http://www.gothamist.com/
The Boing Boing of New York blogs.
http://www.curbed.com/
A rapier sharp NY real estate blog
http://b61productions.com/
Red Hook blog
http://www.streetsblog.com/
Blog about biking in NY
http://sealevel.typepad.com/sealevelny/
Seems to be about kayaking in NY
http://weblogs.amny.com/news/local/tracker/blog/...and
A blog about the subways.
so on and so forth. Nice job NY, Keep up the blogrock.
8. Karen - 4 Posts
7. Sena - 7 Posts
6. Eric - 8 Posts
5. Wythe - 9 Posts
TIED FOR 4th Place - Dylan and Stephen @ 47 posts
3. Ryan - 68 Posts
2. Sam - 77 Posts
AND THE NUMBER ONE AWARD FOR MOST FREQUENT POSTER GOES TO
1. Michelle - 95 Posts
Congratulations, Michelle! You talk more than any of us. By a lot.
The crafty people of Who's Alive and Who's Dead have taken the guesswork out of knowing which celebrities are alive and which ones are dead with their catalogue of actors, musicians, politicians, athletes, and other well-knowns.
How can you be sure if someone is alive or dead? Simply check under the 'Status' heading next to any celebrity's name to find out. Alternately, the adorable little RIP tombstone icon to the left of a name is a solid indication that the person in question is dead. And if you're wondering if your favorite celeb will be dying anytime soon, the 80+ icon will give you a quick handle on how much remaining life he/she might have left.
Just know that currently there are only 2,275 records. We can only hope that they will expand their database to include more celebrities for even more fun.
