Angela Benedetti

This is a great video, showing what it’d be like if you could use Adobe Photoshop in your kitchen to bake cookies.

Check it out!

St. Stephen of Jobs introduces the iCodex.

Angie

So I’m flying back up to Reno to spend a little over a week with my mom for Christmas, yay.

A funny thing — about ten or twelve years ago, we were at Mom’s for Christmas and a family friend named Linda was supposed to come over. So I got her a couple of glass candle holders as a gift; they were popular at the time, with a narrow well in the middle you filled with water and then floated a taper in, the idea being that as it burned down, it’d get lighter and float higher in the water, keeping the flame at about the same level. I thought they were pretty, so anyway.

Well, Linda didn’t come after all, so I had these two candles in boxes like twenty inches long by six square, which I took home. I figured I’d use them or something, so when I got home I unwrapped them and stuck them on top of a bookcase. We’re not really into decorative stuff, though, so I never did use them, and they’ve been sitting there ever since, collecting dust on their boxes. We’ve been trying to figure out what to do with them recently, with the move coming up and all.

Then we got a note from Mom a couple of days ago, saying that her friend Linda’s going to be coming up for Christmas. Hey, I’ve got a present for her already! LOL! Too bad I unwrapped them back then….

Angie

Gacked from a few places around the net.

A couple of homophobic thugs in Swansea, Wales, attacked two men who were walking down the street in short skirts and high heels. The two cross-dressers turned around and wiped the sidewalk with the jerks. It turns out the cross-dressers were a couple of cage fighters — talk about picking a fight with the wrong guys! LOL!

Someone named CJ in comments to the above linked article suggested “Give these 2 badges and cuffs and get them out on the streets everynight dressed that way to attract idiots who only attack people (seemingly) weaker than themselves.” I’d chip in for that, seriously. [evil snicker]

Angie

I have to share this just because it made me snicker.

In the current issue of Smithsonian, July 2009, there’s an article called “Nikita in Hollywood” about Nikita Kruschev’s visit to the US in 1959. I wasn’t born then so I’d heard only vague mentions of the event, and found the article interesting and entertaining both. Very historical as well as readable, good photos, etc.

There’s one bit, though, describing a conversation at the banquet held in Hollywood for Kruschev and his party, along with as many Hollywood notables as could be shoehorned into the banquet room. The visitors were scattered among the tables, spreading the wealth, so everyone got a chance to talk to a couple of famous actors or directors or whatever. One conversational snippet:

As the waiters delivered lunch — squab, wild rice, Parisian potatoes and peas with pearl onions — Charlton Heston, who’d once played Moses, attempted to make small talk with Mikhail Sholokhov, the Soviet novelist who would win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1965. “I have read excerpts from your works,” Heston said.

“Thank you,” Sholokhov replied. “When we get some of your films, I shall not fail to watch some excerpts from them.”

I had to laugh, and give Sholokhov a fist-pump for that. I mean, it’s clear Heston was trying to make polite conversation, so he gets a brownie point for good intentions, but seriously, would he have been flattered if someone said they’d watched his movies’ trailers but not the movies themselves?

The primary reason for excerpts to be circulated, and certainly the only reason I can think of why they’d be put in the way of someone who’s a reader but not in the business nor an academic, is as promo. You read the excerpt and then if you like it you read the entire work it was taken from. Telling a writer you’ve read excerpts is essentially saying that you weren’t interested enough or impressed enough with said excerpts to actually read the books. That’s not any kind of a compliment, and as someone who works in an analogous business, one might’ve expected Heston to twig to that.

Great come-back from Sholokhov, though.

Angie

Check out this comic to see the true power of The Author.

Angie

This is an absolutely awesome video of some seriously cracked shepherds with way too much time on their hands and some brilliant sheepdogs, plus a lot of sheep which I’m sure were really confused before they were done. [grin]

Watch it!

Thanks to One_Undone on LJ for the link. Hee!

Just to be at least a tiny bit on topic, I’m trying to figure out how to incorporate this into a story. A character who’s into sheep-art with LED lights would be great fun…. [grin/ponder]

Angie

One of the comics I read regularly is Penny Arcade, and this comic spoofing all the “OOoo! Ahhhh! Whoooaa!” about e-book readers lately made me snicker. Thought I’d share.

Angie

[EDIT: Comments closed because of spam. [sigh]]