Late Night Bed Spins is an occasional feature showcasing talented musicians who have evaded the pop music radar. Bad timing, poor promotion, and difficult to categorize styles can all cause talented acts to not catch fire with the public. Below the fold is a trio of videos by the group "Noisettes". Please give them a listen and feel free to suggest other groups or singers in the comments who you would like to introduce to your fellow morons and moronettes. Enjoy! more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 10:29 PM | Comments (24)
Post contains 89 words, total size 1 kb.

What's The Oldest Internet Meme You Can Remember?

The internet has been around long enough now for people to start playing the I-remember-when game regarding various memes that have spread thru the intertubez STD-like over the years.

For the writer of this article it was the 'All your base are belong to us' meme - a true classic. This video will explain it to you if you're not familiar with it.

For me I think the first true internet meme I can recall was kibo who used to prowl usenet grepping on his name. It would been around 1993-4 or so that I saw my first kibo-response.

And going back even further into the mists of online time to the old dial-up and mainframe BBS days I remember first seeing the smiley, :-), in posts back in 1984. Which was actually when it was still all young and shiny since it was invented in 1982 by Scott Fahlman:

So what's the first internet meme you can remember? more...

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:17 PM | Comments (756)
Post contains 1115 words, total size 10 kb.

Ace is on Ben Howe's Internet radio show along with Adam Baldwin right now.

Listen here.

There's a replay at 11pm Eastern, and the show archive will also be available on Ben's website later on.

Open thread in the comments.

Posted by: andy at 04:16 PM | Comments (255)
Post contains 48 words, total size 1 kb.

Whan, Whan, Hwhan.

You are so, so dumb. You're like a stupid hot chick, except you're not hot, and not a chick, except soft and womanly, but not in a good chick sort of way.

B cups? Sure, B-cups. But only B-cups.

The language of GOP racial politics is heavy on euphemisms that allow the speaker to deny any responsibility for the racial content of his message. The code words in this game are “entitlement society” — as used by Mitt Romney — and “poor work ethic” and “food stamp president” — as used by Newt Gingrich. References to a lack of respect for the “Founding Fathers” and the “Constitution” also make certain ears perk up by demonizing anyone supposedly threatening core “old-fashioned American values.”

By the way, Hwhachn Williams is very butthurt that Gingrich used him like a cheap hooker in South Carolina. He's still whining that Gingrich was talking about "jobs for poor people," which is a dog whistle implying, I guess:

1, poor people are black

2, black people need jobs

3, RACISM!

Or whatever.

In the days since the debate, people have asked if I regretted the way I phrased the question. I do not. I do not know anyone on food stamps who would prefer them to gainful employment.

That's because you're culturally a white liberal, Hwanachem. You know as many people in the ghetto as I do.

And yes, there is a culture there which accepts poverty and hand-outs as the natural order of things.

We can argue about whose fault that is but we can't argue that it exists, and that it should change, unless you want generations forming a permanent underclass of hoplelessness and dependency.

Is that what you want? Hwhymie?

Posted by: Ace at 03:22 PM | Comments (229)
Post contains 317 words, total size 2 kb.

Or Romney.

Lot of caveats there. Big Government claims sources inside someone's camp who says their exit polls, for whatever they count, show a Romney win.

It is what it is. It's data. Sort of.

Romney 47%

Gingrich 34%

Santorum 11%

Paul 8%

(untested: Sweet Meteor of Death)

Via Drudge:

SOURCES, EXIT POLLS 5 PM ET: 46% ROMNEY 32% GINGRICH 12% SANTORUM 7% PAUL...

Given how Drudge has been nailing Romney, I'm going to assume Drudge's numbers come from Romney, and I'm going to assume further that Big Government's come from Gingrich.

But that would be based on the same exit polls, I assume. With some slightly different mathematical models employed to project the entire vote.

That's a pretty fair showing by Gingrich, assuming these numbers are accurate, which in fact I don't.

I'll just call this the Florida Results Thread.

Posted by: Ace at 02:25 PM | Comments (569)
Post contains 183 words, total size 1 kb.

Someone mentioned "Palin threads just don't have the same juice they used to."

It seems that way to me now. I don't listen to her either way anymore.

With the party now turning to a presidential election, is her role as lightning rod/lightning-thrower now more or less over?

Of course she'll never be completely over; I don't mean that. She will still be on FoxNews and still produce books and such.

But she's not really a major player now, is she?

Posted by: Ace at 12:54 PM | Comments (458)
Post contains 91 words, total size 1 kb.

There is some dispute on the right as to whether this was warranted or police brutality.

Although it's fun to laugh at hippies getting tased (oh boy is it), surely we don't want cops getting "taser happy" at protesters, generally.

I think this story ads some context. First, the video again, because someone suggested that would unite us all. And I can't argue with that.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:19 PM | Comments (220)
Post contains 377 words, total size 2 kb.

Wait, now we're voting pragmatically?

Oh and then you get to hear "Judge" Napolitano bloviate for Ron Paul.

Let's listen to "the Judge." He's right on so many things. After all, he was a trial judge and stuff. Only a couple of million people have held that exalted position. And let's ignore the fact he hasn't been a judge, except on tv, since 1995.

Am I the only person who's sick to death of this one-note blowhard?

"The Judge" And Tower Seven. He just doesn't believe that WTC 7 came down they way they say it came down.

ItÂ’s hard for me to believe that it came down by itself. I was gratified to see Geraldo Rivera investigating it. I am gratified to see that people across the board are interested.
I think twenty years from now, people will look at 9-11 the way we look at the assassination of JFK today. It couldnÂ’t possibly have been done the way the government told us.

That's from the Alex Jones show. Of course.

Thanks to JohnE for that tidbit.

Posted by: Ace at 12:06 PM | Comments (141)
Post contains 204 words, total size 1 kb.

Baseball Crank observed, with regard to Romney's changeable politics, that if we ended up with him as a candidate, we'd wind up defending him and nothing else. Because we'd have to contort ourselves so to champion him that there wouldn't much much of conservatism left, apart from Mitt Romney himself.

I cited that as a good observation, and I still do think that's a problem.

However, I'm getting the same feeling about Newt.

First, it was that leftwing attack on equity funds. Which I joined, of course, as I thought it was pretty important we have a genuine, instinctual conservative as a candidate. Even though that candidate was joining in this Hail Mary stuff about "vulture capitalism."

Anyway, now it's that... Mitt Romney attempted to cut the state budget by ending expensive kosher kitchens in state-supported nursing homes, and instead called for kosher meals to get prepared off-site and bused in to the locations where they were needed.

Would have saved the state $600,000 a year. The Democratic legislature put the kibosh on it.

Anyway, that plan to save money has turned into Gingrich's new attack:

“Romney cut off kosher food to elderly Jews on Medicare. Both of them have the same lack of concern for religious liberty.”

And a Newt 2012 radio spot (listen here) goes a step further and declares that Romney...

vetoed a bill paying for kosher food for our seniors in nursing homes -- Holocaust survivors, who for the first time, were forced to eat non-kosher, because Romney thought $5 was too much to pay for our grandparents to eat kosher.

Yeah, it was never the plan they'd eat non-kosher, just that the kosher meals would be prepared in a central kitchen.

Eh, it's politics, I guess. But I suppose that must be the end of all the whining about negative attacks (as Rush Limbaugh terms it) from Newt.

I mean, honestly. Surely we won't be hearing any more about maliciously false claims after that.

Any and all cuts will be attacked by the left in this way-- there is always some inconvenience or change we're supposed to be outraged about, some protected constituency we're supposed to rally behind to keep those budget dollars a-flowin'.

If I thought Newt believed an inch of this crap, I'd be worried about him on that score. But I don't, really. Just any club in the bag.

I think in the end neither Newt nor Mitt is offering much except themselves; there is no Gingrism, like there was a Reaganism, and no Romneyism either. (And there was no McCainism.)

There is no central idea animating either campaign, just the man himself, and since we're really not discussing ideas, but rather men, the negative attack on the opposing man himself is the only game in town.

For both candidates.

Posted by: Ace at 10:22 AM | Comments (472)
Post contains 490 words, total size 3 kb.

Right before the Sweet Meteor of Death, I'm calling this Chinese kid as my tribe's number one draft pick.

According to a news reel from China, a young boy there possesses the ability to see in the dark. Like a Siamese cat's, his sky-blue eyes flash neon green when illuminated by a flashlight, and his night vision is good enough to enable him to fill out questionnaires while sitting in a pitch black room — or so say the reporters who visited Nong Yousui in his hometown of Dahua three years ago.

...

Night vision is made possible by a layer of cells, called the tapetum lucidum, in the eyes of cats and other nocturnal animals. This thin layer is a "retroreflector" — when a beam of light hits it, it reflects the light directly back along its incoming path. The reflected beam constructively interferes with the incoming light beam, amplifying the overall signal that hits the retina and enabling the animal to see in very low-light conditions. Retroreflection also causes cat eyes to flash when they are lit upon at night, and experts say Nong's eyes, if they are truly catlike, should do the same.

And do they? I dunno, the video supposedly shows that glowing. I don't see it myself.

And finally, Gene Simmons' self-guided bullet from the old Michael Crichton/Tom Selleck movie Runaway.

Now, "self-guided" isn't entirely accurate. You have to keep a laser beam shining on the target. But if you manage that, the bullet will seek the laser's reflection.

Each self-guided bullet is around 4 inches in length. At the tip is an optical sensor, that can detect a laser beam being shone on a far-off target. Actuators inside the bullet get intel from the bullet’s sensor, and then “steer tiny fins that guide the bullet to the target.” The bullet can self-correct its navigational path 30 times a second, all while flying more than twice the speed of sound.

Thanks to BrotherBewapitis and CDR M.

Oh, and this was linked as an aside in the cat-eye thing: The "Forbidden Colors" your eyes can't see, Red-Green and Blue-Yellow.

Posted by: Ace at 09:52 AM | Comments (111)
Post contains 369 words, total size 3 kb.