Geography of a Recession

A scary trip: a movie clip that shows the growing unemployment over the past 18+ months, here. Below are screenshots I made of the before (March 2007) to after (October 2009). Dark colors are bad (purple = 10% unemployment) ...



h.t. Sullivan

Incredible Online Resource

Free Primary Jewish Sources and Resources On The Internet from this guy.

This is an insane collection of all the online Torah available. I put my own list like this together, but Melech whups my version tenfold. Hooray! (Pic from Melech's site).

Jewish English: Distinctive Lexicon

This was compiled by a friend of mine whose a professor of linguistics and Jewish Sociology: Jewish English: Distinctive Lexicon (Jewish Language Research Wiki, direct link).

The pic is the cover of The Cat in the Hat in Yiddish and has nothing to do with the website.

Fun: Television Tropes & Idioms

This is a very nice resource: Television Tropes & Idioms. An example, some of the tropes in the awesome Evil Dead (e.g. Army of Darkness) movie series (just the 'A's):

• Animate Dead: Subverted when Ash accidentally summons the titular Army of Darkness when he mispronounces a spell.
• Apocalyptic Log
• Arm Cannon
• Arrow Cam
• Artificial Limbs: When his hand is chopped off, Ash replaces it with a chainsaw. Later, he replaces that with a clockwork gauntlet.
  • And in the extended media beyond the films, he'll frequently swap out his gauntlet with the saw.
• Ax Crazy: How Ash copes with the events of the first two movies. By the third, he's turned it into Crazy Awesome.

A further explanation, using the last entry, the difference between Ax Crazy and Crazy Awesome:

[Pic of Jack Nicholson's character in the Shining] An "ax crazy" character is someone who is psychologically unstable and presents a clear danger to others. Ax crazies are capable of extreme violence, whether carried out with a Slasher Smile, a Creepy Monotone, or out and out murderous rage, and they're not too picky about their victims, which makes them extremely frightening to deal with. This mainly differentiates them from other eccentric characters who may themselves be obsessive, weird or seemingly crazy, but use this condition hand in hand with doing good, or at least not being in the way. However, some formerly established heroes can go through an episode of ax-craziness and still retain their heroic mantle.

vs.

Someone who is Crazy Awesome is someone who's nucking futs, in an amusing way, and is effective at what he does because of that craziness. In real life he'd get fired from whatever job he has/would have, or even arrested — at the very least, the things he does just plain wouldn't work. But somehow, he manages to be both effective and a character that the audience likes or even loves.

Like any good internet resource (especially those made by My GenX Brethren), each entry is hyperlinked to a bunch of other concepts. I declare this website, fun.

Pic from the website. Backpost finished 2009-12-02.

Fun - Starship Dimensions

This is a fun link, for you sci-fi geekers: Jeff Russell's Starship Dimensions. Ya gotta see it to understand the coolness.

Purim Ahoy: Infant Costumes

Way too expensive for my horizons, but oh so very very cute.

Here's the whole infant page.

Make Your Own Demotivator

Here's one device to make your own de-motivation poster. This genre of humor is one of my very favorites. It's got the right combination of art, humor, and tar-black cynicism. A few choice examples:

Nice Link: Rodcorp 'How we Work'

Sullivan sends along this very interesting site: Rodcorp: How we work. A description of what it is:

What is "How we work"?

We're interested in the habits, rituals and small (and occasionally big) methods people and teams use to get their work done.

Backpost finished 2009-12-03.

Slifkin blog

As I (hope I've) mentioned before, me and my family are big supporters of Rav Natan Slifkin. He fought the good fight against the forces of intolerance and ignorance. And he now has a blog!

Pic from a website about his book. Backpost finished 2009-12-06.

Sandman Material, Brewers Phrase & Fable

I'm in my (semi) Annual reading of the Sandman, along with a great book I got from my favorite online remainder store (bookcloseouts.com), The Sandman Companion. The book is a set of interviews between the author Hy Bender and Neil Gaiman, the genius behind Sandman. Bender also provides a background/summary of each book and decent background.

Gaiman mentions in the interview that if come across a weird word in the Sandman you'll never go wrong looking it up in Brewer's Phrase & Fable - and, cool enough, the internet provides an online copy!

So, to test it out, here's Morpheus = (2 syl., the Sleeper). Son of Sleep, and god of dreams: so called because he gives these airy nothings their form and fashion.

Here's another online Brewers: From Bartleby.com, and the dream/morpheus entry.

Backpost finished 2009-12-23.

Bond Gadgets in Real Life

Cool article, from the Tech column at New Scientist: Bond gadgets: Never say they will never work.

Their list includes: Fake fingerprints, Phone-controlled car, Micro-aqualung, Invisible car, Voice changer, Ski jacket emergency-pod, and Snooper robot.

h/t Sullivan. Pic of the Q-manual from the Bond RPG. Backpost finished 2009-12-06.

Atari 2600 Catalogs

Yes, yes baby!

Finally tracked these down (following the Gen-X Google Principle, i.e. "I'm sure that's online [applied to anything from my 1970s upbringing/youth]) The collection of Atari 2600 Manuals!

We didn't have that many cartridges (actually, in retrospect, we probably had a bunch - and they were crazy expensive back then, like 20-30$ a pop! - but it wasn't as many as I'd have liked).

The game we had the most fun with was Warlords. Good ol' Dominick, Marcus, Felipe, and Restivo.

But Adventure probably contains the most nostalgia for me. That red dragon was mean; what should I expect from a creature genetically engineered with a gastric compartment the exact size/shape of my protagonist's monad-cube body.

Oh, I could spend all day here!

Backpost finished on 2009-11-25; not sure why it took me this long.

St. Bush

During the Bush Honeymoon Period (from 9/11 until Katrina), when he seemed unstoppable, triumphalist Christers would state proudly that they love the fact that a devout Christian was in the White House. Even back then, I was advising them to not adopt him as their own as he appeared to be a mean and stupid person. We can't always choose who will be successful from our ethnic/cultural subgroup, but we can choose to adopt the person as a hero. As a Jewish-American, I want to adopt Albert Einstein (even though he wasn't very religious) and not Jonathan Pollard (who has found Jehovah in prison, I've been told). So it is with religious Christians and Bush... don't adopt him! - he's a cruel moron! - but I'm not sure they've gotten the message yet.

Here's a list of 50 quotes from Bush about his religious faith from the Aug 8 2007 London Times, compiled by their Religion reporter Libby Purves.

In the list are famous lines (like #17 "I couldn't imagine somebody like Osama bin Laden understanding the joy of Hanukkah" - White House, Dec. 10, 2001), but also just inane statements of his "simple" faith. I say simple because he seems as committed to religious terminology but not religious behavior. He probably likes praying because it's done alone and in direct communication with his chosen, self-defined Deity. As such, it is an act of egotism, not devotion. Minyan forces you to pray with others, to depend on others. Kneeling on your rich carpet to communicate one-on-one with Heaven as if you were a modern-day Moshe Rabbeinu is barely tolerated in halakha.

And outside of prayer, what does Bush do that can be called religious? I doubt he gives much to charity (I'm trying to find the numbers online; download his disclosures here). And let's not forget about the last president who was gloriously touted as a religious man who'd bring Christian principles to bear on White House policy: James Earl Carter.

Songs to Wear Pants To

Andew Sullivan recommended Songs to Wear Pans To - a guy who pledges to make any song, in any form with any lyrics as a way of drumming up his business as a songwriter. There are some great novelties here.

I read about this site (at the original post date of this entry, 4-23-2007, 4:44 pm) but sadly forgot about it until now... which obviated my desire to hire this guy to make a song for my musicologist wife who recently finished her PhD. Lets see if I can get it done in time for her birthday...

{2009 Update: pants picture not of the website. It's just a pair of pants.}

Great Reading: My Year of Flops

In the past three or four years the number of must read websites has exploded (at least for me). Sometimes I'll stumble upon a series that eerily meets my interests with such focus that I need to absorb the whole corpus. The latest in that string of 'must reads' is Nathan Rabin's Onion AV Club column: "My Year of Flops"

Website of the Day: Museum of Hoaxes

Hoaxes. Yum.

The Movie Spoiler

This is not a bad website for those of us who want to know what's going to happen before we waste money and time to see a movie: The Movie Spoiler.

Pic from the website. Backposted from, you guessed it, 4/20/07 and finished on 8/10/07. I had just the link.

Dave Barry Online (Pirated)

I was searching, as a favor to Mrs. Styx, for the resolution of the famous Dave Barry story about the "Lavender Hill Mob." In my search, I found the original story online, because, I swear I am not making this up, some Russian website has pirated his books and placed them online.

Check it out: “Dave Barry” at FictionBook.lib

Friend Alert

An article in the Jewish Week by a friend of my family, Ira Kaminow, the webmaster/creator of Just-Tzedaka.

Judaica Press Tanach Online

I don't know how long this has been up but it is news to me. Chabad has put up the Judaica Press translation of Tanakh, with Rashi, online. Whoo and Hoo!