tumbledry

Electric Boogaloo

Always useful for trivia and popular culture, here comes Wikipedia, about Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo:

Since the release of the film, the unusual title suffix “Electric Boogaloo,” a reference to a funk-oriented dance style from the 1970s, has become a running joke concerning movie sequels.

It has also been used to lampoon the actual name of a sequel when it is found to be ridiculous or disappointing.

You see, simply put “electric boogaloo” after anything that is ridiculous, misfounded, or silly overall, and you’ve suddenly done the work of many adjective-heavy sentences.

Volskwagen Garage

Here I am cleaning out my email inbox (responses from two different job applications today!), and I ran across an email I left in my inbox since February, from Nils. It depicts this fantastic circular parking garage, with an open air car elevator at the center, used to hoist cars up to little carports. It is 20 stories high.

Now, I thought, perhaps this has been covered by Snopes, an urban myth debunking site. The pictures looked real, and it turns out that they are - however, this is not a public parking garage, no, it’s the storage area for Volkswagen’s Autostadt factory in Wolfsburg, Germany. Still amazing; thanks, Nils!

Crazy Name

I was listening to NPR’s program called Midday this past Monday, and the topic was the final Harry Potter book. One of the speakers on the show was from the Red Balloon Bookshop, and her name was Maureen Sackmaster-Carpenter. Sackmaster. What an awesome last name.

Sea Wolf & The Notwist

“Now it’s only work
Each day bleeding into the next
Barely scraping by I tire myself out just so I can rest
But rest it rightly comes
And when it does I come out and go home
Because it’s much too quiet
Seems that I’m not suited to being in love
And everyone around me’s changed
But the garden that you planted remains.”

But, you know… I think even better than Sea Wolf’s “The Garden You Planted” above is The Notwist, who says this in their song Consequence:

Fail with consequence,
lose with eloquence
and smile.

Seriously, if you want to change your life, listen to that song on myspace. It’s only 99¢ on iTunes, if you prefer.

Cookie Issues

There are currently a few difficulties with the “what’s new since you last visited” script. Should be fixed soon. In the meantime, everything is new, all the time!
UPDATE: If new things are not updating, delete your cookies, and everything should work fine again.

Sad Song

This is the most stunning thing I’ve seen online in over a year. A certain Mr. Fredo Viola created something he calls the Sad Song Video, which was made only using 15 second clips from his digital camera. Incredible production, haunting melodies — today, I’m happy for the internet.

(via dooce, via hicksdesign)

Relationship Struggles

Mykala and I are currently riding a frighteningly violent relationship rollercoaster full of hairpin turns and terrifying drops. Three years: the stakes are high, very high.

Today, Things Happened

There are frequently crickets in the basement of my parent’s home, which nobody likes to kill. So, after accidentally amputating the legs off one too many crickets in attempts to remove them from the premises, my mother devised a system whereby a check box (remember checks?) is used to scoop up the crickets. Recently, my dad was trying to save a cricket, so he asked after the whereabouts of this box. He found it. It’s labeled in permanent marker: “Box for catching/releasing crickets.”

Speaking of crickets (and by that, I mean I have no transition at all), a personal trainer at Lifetime had two women standing on squishy half sphere exercise platforms. They were hitting each other repeatedly with long foam sticks.

And speaking of war, I drove by protesters today on University Avenue. One of the signs stuck out: “Let’s be friends with the world again.”

The French Connections

Behind the pay-wall at the New York Times, Paul Krugman writes about the sad state of United States broadband internet.

Even more striking is the fact that our “high speed” connections are painfully slow by other countries’ standards. According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, French broadband connections are, on average, more than three times as fast as ours. Japanese connections are a dozen times faster. Oh, and access is much cheaper in both countries than it is here.

The main idea of the article is that the ideals of a market driven economy are just that: ideals — sometimes federal regulations are the only way to guarantee a situation where competition drives prices down. He goes one (emphasis mine):

Meanwhile, as a recent article in Business Week explains, the real French bureaucrats used judicious regulation to promote competition. As a result, French consumers get to choose from a variety of service providers who offer reasonably priced Internet access that’s much faster than anything I can get, and comes with free voice calls, TV and Wi-Fi.

I left those long quotes in, as I know that most of you won’t get to read the article. Silly newspapers: subscriptions are for paper newspapers!

Myspace and Business

I really enjoyed this comment about the changing place of email in today’s digital communication landscape.

“A ‘social network’ is next to useless for building professional contacts if it’s just full of other dumbass teenagers texting OMG WTF BBQ at each other all day.”

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