We live in a time of obsessive safety. Every item for sale in this great land is scrutinized from front to back, top to bottom, for any possible injury causing attribute. Designers rework their products endlessly attempting to prevent even the most advanced ignoramus from successfully modifying their product into an efficient eye removal tool. [...]
August 25, 2009
Les Paul died recently. While most currently known for his eponymous guitar models from Gibson and Epiphone, he was quite a popular musician in his time as well as the originator of technology that birthed modern music. Just watch this: Hear all of those vocal parts? Before Paul’s use of multi-tracking the only layered vocalizations were [...]
August 22, 2009
The Times relayed to us this week the tale of new findings from space nonsense. NASA scientists, apparently having nothing better to do with their barrels of taxpayer money, decided to run a spectacularly expensive flying object into the debris of a comet. This sort of tomfoolery, most resembling a horde of teenagers driving too [...]
August 18, 2009
As you are probably well aware this marks the fortieth anniversary of the Woodstock music festival. Half a million petulant children, schedules clear of any worthwhile engagements, stormed a quiet, upstate New York farm, senses of entitlement expanding wildly until the sun was concealed from view, bringing a storm. Before the four days were through, [...]
August 13, 2009
A bit of a difference from today’s spend, spend, spend or we DIE!
August 12, 2009
A terrible scourge has infected our mechanical design culture. Its name is tool-less fastening. One will find the droppings of this is the craze emblazoned in advertisements promoting electronic componentry. It has even more recently spread its emasculating tentacles to the manly mechanical fields. Its idea is simple, even seductive upon shallow inspection. It is [...]
July 31, 2009
Overblown story of the week. So, an old lady beat a fawn to death with a shovel. She did this either because she was frightened (her story) or it was eating her flowers (her nosy neighbor’s story). She is in trouble because, for some reason, it is illegal to kill animals in your yard. Another great [...]
July 25, 2009
While the Gaia-über-alles set screams for a carbon tax, they miss the largest cost to society. Simply put the cost of photographic technology is too low. Now any derelict finding himself in the odd situation of not having spent all his ready cash on corn-syruped food items and methamphetamine, runs to the local emporium for [...]
August 29, 2009