Morning: t-shirt, sweater, heavy jacket. Lunchtime: just the t-shirt. Slight difference in temp…
Category: Strange World
Zune Fail, Comment Win & Holiday Creep
- Weird: Zunes all over the world froze up at the same time overnight.
- Comment win: “like she was going to rip his arm off and beat his spleen to death with it. Not him; just his spleen”
- Just a quick store run – yeah along with everyone else in town.
- More holiday creep! I still need to mail Xmas gifts to people I missed! It’s still 2008!
Christmas Shopping
- Need to sleep. Found myself typing “Satan Claus” by mistake.
- Symptom of car culture: I almost feel like I have to justify crossing the street on foot to go to another store instead of moving the car.
- Sun Halo. All you have to do is look up once in a while.
- Linens & Things: Nothing left to sell but the shelves…
- Almost. Walked around a corner and they do have SOME stuff left
- Virgin Megastore is closing too, but they’ve still got lots of stuff. Including 5000 copies of Serial Mom.
- Replica toys: I get the nostalgia factor, but at the same time it’s a weird idea.
- Going out of business sales seen today: 4. Mervyns, Linens & Things,Virgin, Steve & Barry’s.
- And the more stores I look at, the more “What You Own” competes in my head for the ubiquitous Christmas music.
- Amazon’s wishlist needs a generic option. Like “I want an 8GB Micro-SD card” rather than “I want THIS Micro-SD card specifically!”
Shopping Observations
- Can we get a moratorium on covers of “Last Christmas?” Actually, can we get one on the original too?
- Funny how easy it is to spot a cover by Darryl K. Sweet. It makes me want to mash up Xanth, WOT, and every other fantasy series he’s covered
- I can’t see giving someone Countdown to Final Crisis as a gift. Maybe a gag gift?
- Someone EXPANDED The Red Balloon into a full-length film????
- Nothing says Christmas like 50s xmas song played on a mall stage by a guy with a ukulele. Now he’s singing Over the Rainbow. ????
Santa Hats, Translation, Expelled
- Saw a bunch of Santa hats lying alongside the entire length of the 55 South to 405 South ramp – and it’s a long bridge. Maybe a box came open?
- Got tech support question in Spanish for wrong company. Replied in bad Spanish with link. Checked against Google Translate. Google has a better vocabulary than I do. 🙁
- Roger Ebert dismantles Expelled (via @mikesterling).
Fall in SoCal
Fall in Southern California = checking the weather report daily to decide between shorts or a heavy jacket.
Lightning Symphony
I was looking up the proper term for a plasma lamp and stumbled upon the Wikipedia entry for the Zeusaphone.
It’s a Tesla Coil that’s set up to modulate its discharges so that they produce specific notes. In other words, it’s a Tesla Coil that plays music using lightning!
Seriously… how can you turn down a description like that?
It’s also been called a “thoremin,” — another lightning-god-based pun, this one on the theramin,
The company that makes them has a couple of video clips on their website, but sadly they’re a little underwhelming on a 200-pixel window with computer speakers. I imagine they’d be seriously impressive in person.
Photo by Dracoswinsauer. Used per Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
