So, is Frankie out, at last? Not sure... I think so. If he is, it's about dang time, sez I. Comfortably cool out right now... light rains, high 60s.
Let them sing it for you - type in lyrics, and it pulls clips from songs to play... sort of a cool way to write an audio ransom note. (I did "I want to eat your heart and eyes for dinner," "store the money in a plain brown bag," "Death to those who would dance with no voice" and "Was it a large cat you saw jump through my skin?")
First New Space Ghost C2C since 2001 premieres on December 7 at 11:30pm (ET/PT) on Cartoon Network.
I've been getting a lot of these paypal virus emails lately... fortunately, I deal primarily with a web-mail client that catches this hubbub before it becomes a problem.
Also, Newt says hi from the Futon -
C at work has called me at home numerous times today. I have a procedures manual there that has everything typed out, step by step, written so that a monkey with a head wound could figure it out... but he can't be bothered to look in the book, it seems. So, I get to talk him through it, and hope for the best... but it's a little on the irritating side. I tell them where to find information, and instead, they prefer me to try to rack my brain and recall something I did two months ago.. and wrote down, because I was pretty sure that I wouldn't remember it. Ah well, enough grumping. My own fault for not going in this week. I'll have plenty to do next week, and then I can run with it.
Back on call now once 5pm rolls by, but that's fine. Soft rains and dark skies along with thoughts of my sweetheart will make it float comfortably.
Cool little Flying robot. I'd like one, please. I'd also like to pick up a "Sticky Shocker".
The average cruising airspeed velocity of an unladen European Swallow is roughly 11 meters per second, or 24 miles an hour.
The four capitals of Assyria were Ashur (or Qalat Sherqat), Calah (or Nimrud), the short-lived Dur Sharrukin (or Khorsabad), and Nineveh. The ruins of all four ancient cities fall within the modern state of Iraq
From "Mungo" at RPG.net, about old-school Gamma World:
"It's hard to pick out a single memorable incident, but the campaign was filled with a sense of desperate hilarity. We were always getting in trouble and barely making it out the alive. When people talk about GW being 'Yahoo' this is what I think of – over the top situations and reckless adventure. Unfortunately, I think 'yahoo' has come to mean 'silly' for a lot of people (and perhaps the new GW designers from the sounds of it – though I have yet to read the new edition so I can’t say) which it isn’t. 'Yahoo' was fun, action packed and PC adventure focused - completely antithetical to prolonged angst, introspection, or detailed and often unusable background info, which is what people usually confuse with 'serious.'"Ahh.. yup. That's the good stuff, and sums up a lot of the fun I had in the old gaming days. There's a place for everything, of course, but I certainly preferred "Seat of your pants" scrambling and friendly character roleplay than moody, broody, grumps that many systems seem to favor. (Not like I've really played anything in an age.)
Near Extinct Whistling Language Returns
SAN SEBASTIAN, Canary Islands (AP) -- Juan Cabello takes pride in not using a cell phone or the Internet to communicate. Instead, he puckers up and whistles.
Cabello is a "silbador," until recently a dying breed on tiny, mountainous La Gomera, one of Spain's Canary Islands off West Africa. Like his father and grandfather before him, Cabello, 50, knows "Silbo Gomero," a language that's whistled, not spoken, and can be heard more than two miles away.
This chirpy brand of chatter is thought to have come over with early African settlers 2,500 years ago. Now, educators are working hard to save it from extinction by making schoolchildren study it up to age 14.
Silbo - the word comes from Spanish verb silbar, meaning to whistle - features four "vowels" and four "consonants" that can be strung together to form more than 4,000 words. It sounds just like bird conversation and Cabello says it has plenty of uses.
"I use it for everything: to call to my wife, to tell my kids something, to find a friend if we get lost in a crowd," Cabello said.
In fact, he makes a living off Silbo, performing daily exhibitions at a restaurant on this island of 147 square miles and 19,000 people.
A snatch of dialogue in Silbo is posted at and translates as follows:
http://www.agulo.net/silbo/silbo.mp3
"Hey, Servando!"
"What?"
"Look, go tell Julio to bring the castanets."
"OK. Hey, Julio!"
"What?"
"Lili says you should go get the kids and have them bring the castanets for the party."
"OK, OK, OK."
Silbo was once used throughout the hilly terrain of La Gomera as an ingenious way of communicating over long distances. A strong whistle saved peasants from trekking over hill and dale to send messages or news to neighbors.
Then came the phone, and it's hard to know how many people use Silbo these days.
"A lot of people think they do, but there is a very small group who can truly communicate through Silbo and understand Silbo," said Manuel Carreiras, a psychology professor from the island of Tenerife. He specializes in how the brain processes language and has studied Silbo.
Since 1999, Silbo has been a required language in La Gomera's elementary schools. Some 3,000 students are studying it 25 minutes a week - enough to teach the basics, said Eugenio Darias, a Silbo teacher and director of the island's Silbo program.
"There are few really good silbadores so far, but lots of students are learning to use it and understand it," he said. "We've been very pleased."
But almost as important as speaking - sorry, whistling - Silbo is studying where it came from, and little is known.
"Silbo is the most important pre-Hispanic cultural heritage we have," said Moises Plasencia, the director of the Canary government's historical heritage department.
It might seem appropriate for a language that sounds like birdsong to exist in the Canary Islands, but scholarly theories as to how the archipelago got its name make no mention of whistling.
Little is known about Silbo's origins, but an important step toward recovering the language was the First International Congress of Whistled Languages, held in April in La Gomera. The congress, which will be repeated in 2005, brought together experts on various whistled languages.
Silbo-like whistling has been found in pockets of Greece, Turkey, China and Mexico, but none is as developed as Silbo Gomero, Plasencia said.
One study is looking for vestiges of Silbo in Venezuela, Cuba and Texas, all places to which Gomerans have historically emigrated during hard economic times.
Now, Plasencia is heading an effort to have UNESCO declare it an "intangible cultural heritage" and support efforts to save it. "Silbo is so unique and has many values: historical, linguistic, anthropological and aesthetic. It fits perfectly with UNESCO's requirements," he said.
Besides, says Cabello, it's good for just about anything except for romance: "Everyone on the island would hear what you're saying!"
The Cassini spacecraft, on its way to Saturn, took a gorgeous picture of Jupiter in the gibbous phase. Some kind folks have posted it here for everyone's enjoyment. This is a true-color image; if you were at Jupiter, this is what you would see.Yowza. Far too many jobs run last night. it seemed that as soon as I hung up with one PD, another would crop up. Fortunately, most were recoveries or other forms of good news.
Mike Myers is using his "Linda Richman - Cawfee Tawk" voice as The Cat in the Hat? That's sort of weird. It's not like I'm planning on seeing it in the theater, but I figure it'll be on TV in the next year or two, for at least a month, all over cable. I wonder if it'll be worth watching, or if it'll be really hard to avoid seeing snips and snaps of it when I least desire to?
I have a confession, I think the Coffee Talk skits he did were pretty dang funny, if only because the character reminded me of all the Boca Raton Retirees clucking in their personal circles.
Cow Magnets!
Woohoo! Newt's an Immortal!
Famous Japanese TV Superheroes Of The Seventies (warning, some pages have TV-theme midis)
Nifty and educational sea-predator game.
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