Extreme Sheep Herding

I know this has already made the rounds, been on Olbermann, etc. But I'd never seen the whole thing, and maybe you haven't either:

Spectroscopy Joke

Dr. Maddow on 1950s Cocktails

and a quote from my mum on the subject:

That's interesting. I visited the Media Lab at MIT a couple of times... and this is a very typical project for them. A lot of their stuff is cool, but the sold their souls to the devil a long time ago. A lot of their projects will sell to companies like Gillette for marketing purposes before they go anywhere else. Case in point: RFID tagging of goods in the supermarket so that they can check exactly what their customers do with it.

Kinetic Sculpture

Check this shit out:





Wood that Works Archive







http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDnrFgd7yfo&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVS9J4qxnmY&feature=related

My hero

I put bird seed out my window for, well, not the birds. Here in Kingston Ontario, there is an army of well fed, fat, black, grey, and red squirrels. Most people here hate them, call them vermin, and want to get rid of them. My view is: I hate cities. I hate that we knock down wilderness and pave it and then get angry when one, ONE, species of animals survives and adapts to our new, sanitised, version of their world. Just because the knocking down didn't happen in your time, doesn't mean it's ok. So, really for my own pleasure, I feed these squirrels. I have become the Crazy Squirrel Lady of Aberdeen Street. Cameron sent me this:

Squirrel Girl

also, from Cameron, see this:
Animal Farm rankles the West Bank

Audio about Animal Farm

Classical Facebook

Yet again, Taibbi proves why he is King

The Big Takeover - a full rundown of the credit crisis, its causes, and the actions that followed

and a response to a NYTimes op-ed by a now former AIG employee complaining that we're all making him feel bad.

Saw this quote on a sign today

“Spring is when you feel like whistling even with a shoe full of slush.” Doug Larson


Amen

If Gloria Allred thinks you're a self serving media whore, you've really got a problem.


I first became an Allred fan when she represented Scott Peterson's girlfriend Amber Frey in that whole fiasco. She wears the most insane outfits, never the same one twice.

Evo Morales

Muezza the Muse

Hell for cat abusers? I'm there.

The Prophet forbade payment for cat.

Geographic Tongue

Yep, it's real, and it's actually called "geographic tongue"...

wow

holy crap, she's gay, you do know this?

Marc Black sings his 'Love Song for Rachel Maddow'

Rachel Maddow Song

how is this legal?

http://www.aolcdn.com/tmz_documents/0320_mia_birth_cert_wm.swf

I am a single mother with a 9-year-old boy. To stay warm at night my son and I would pull off all the pillows from the couch and pile them on the kitchen floor. I'd hang a blanket from the kitchen doorway and we'd sleep right there on the floor. By February we ran out of wood and I burned my mother's dining room furniture. I have no oil for hot water. We boil our water on the stove and pour it in the tub. I'd like to order one of your flags and hang it upside down at the capital building... we are certainly a country in distress.

— Letter from a single mother in a Vermont city, to Senator Bernie Sanders

from

Shaded Electoral Maps

So, after the 2000 election, a lot of people felt robbed, or divided or somesuch. To make themselves feel better, they made lots of different electoral maps by county and population and electoral vote count. Everyone felt so good this time round after the election that no one bothered.

I miss them.

So here's my first effort. Maps shaded from blue to red by how much they voted for McCain or Obama. I took the base map from Wikipedia and the full blue and red from the NY Times. Percentages in both are taken from just Obama and McCain's votes, ie: no third party or write in votes counted for the purposes of this map. The first one is done by increments of 5 percent on an interval from 90% to Obama to 90% to McCain. The second map is done on an interval of 60 to 60 with divs at ten, two, five, and seven.




The first one was mostly purple and didn't make it very far into the red zone, so I ended up making these two. The first covers all the range of democratic territories (DC went 93% for Obama) and the second one only covers the range covered by republican territories (Wyoming went 67% to McCain)

Mulled Wine

I've been experimenting with mulled wine recipes and here's the current result:

1 750 mL bottle of red wine (something with body like a cab sav or a burgundy. something drinkable but not really expensive; you're going to cover up all those subtle notes with spices)

6 cinnamon sticks, broken up
12 whole cloves, crushed
12 whole allspice, crushed
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/8 tsp ginger
1/4 - 1/2 cup sugar

Mix the wine and spices in a pot and heat very slowly for 15-25 minutes. Do not let it boil, or the alcohol will boil off. The best way to heat the wine is to put it in the clean pot of an autodrip coffee maker and heat it on the hot plate. This hot plate is made to keep coffee hot without boiling it and it will do the same for your wine. Once this is done, add the sugar a little at a time, tasting. Depending on the wine you use, you will need more or less. Next strain and serve it hot in mugs. It's even better after sitting overnight with the spices.


I compiled these instructions from these two recipes:

BellaOnline - Mulled Wine Recipe

http://www.janespice.com/recipes/mulled-wine

Thanks to Jim Fortune of Bella Online for the tip about the coffee maker.

For more on mulled wine, check out this page with historical recipes:

WineIntro Mulled Wine, Eggnog, Glogg Recipes

work in progress

right now I'm getting way too involved in the physical look of the blog. I'm working on new wallpaper and such. i hate using a default template from google.

hopefully it will come out well

Marionette Video

This is my friend Cameron's second wire marionette ever. check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEMc023vIHU

Statement of Purpose

I'm gonna use this space to post things I find that I like in the hopes that even if it doesn't help anyone else, it will help me when I want to remember something I liked in the past