A boy and his dog: Jack Brummet and Slugger

circa about 1955 - click to enlarge

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The Knickerbockers, one hit wonders and shameless Beatles imitators

The Knickerbockers were Jersey Boys, and one hit wonders (and, as such appeared on the Nuggets compilations). They sounded like a British invasion band in their top 20 hit in early 1966 with "Lies."

We mostly remember the tune today because it is so shamelessly derivative of early Beatles, down to the spot-on imitation of John Lennon... on the lead vocal and the Paul McCartney-style whoops ahead of the guitar solo and later in the song. I think we all liked the tune, because back then two Beatles albums a year just weren't enough.


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A Fiddling Robot

Stephen Clarke-Willson pointed this one out. It's not new, but pretty fascinating. The Toyota robot plays violin (Mendelssohn?).


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Nuggets from the British Invasion: Herman's Hermits, The Zombies, and The Kinks

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Eleven foot Bill Clinton

Ooops! Wrong statue!

Last weekend, hordes of Albanians collected in Pristina’s main square to welcome Bill Clinton, the guest of honor at a statue-unveiling ceremony. The Albanians put up the statue to commemorate President Clinton's role in the Yugoslavian war of 1999.

“I never expected that anywhere, someone would make such a big statue of me,” Clinton told the cheering crowd as he removed the cover, revealing a eleven foot bronze likeness of himself.

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All Kramer's entrances on Seinfeld captured in a six minute, seventeen second video

It must have taken forever to capture and then edit this video. In six-some minutes, the video shows every single entrance Kramer made over the course of The Seinfeld Show. This is a fascinating labor of love.



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Jack Brummet - Point: "Why I miss the polling place" Pablo Fanque - Counterpoint: "You're stuck in the 20th century"

Point
By Jack Brummet
All This Is That creative director

It may be a sign of impending or fully-arrived codgerhood, but I already miss the polling place. Washington State has largely replaced the voting booth with mail-in ballots. On "Election Day," you no longer walk around the block to your neighborhood church or elementary school. You lick a stamp and then drop your secure ballot envelope into a mailbox or in the slot at the library. Yesterday didn't even seem like election day, at least until they "closed the polls" and began announcing vote totals after 8 PM.

I don't get to see the poll workers anymore, with their sometimes Parkinson's-trembling hands and shakily applied make-up, or the retired AFL-CIO workers, older party foot-soldiers, and stay at home moms who staffed the voting place on election day. I no longer get to watch as they try four times to find me on the voter list, or have me spell my last name three times.

There are no flags hung on the wall at the mailbox. Our children won't get to see democracy in action as we roll up to the drive-in mailbox. The strange grey steel analog voting machines where you actually pulled down a lever are long gone. Now, the "Austrian ballot" voting booth with the stiff curtain is gone too. Exit polls and political signage lining the street to within 200 feet of the polling place have disappeared. I no longer get to see my neighbors, or meet new ones at our neighborhood polling place at Our Redeemer's Lutheran Church.

The polling place has disappeared like phone booths, writing letters, mail order catalogs, and soon, newspapers and magazines, record stores and bookstores. You rarely find politicians at the retail level anymore, eating sfogliatelle, knishes, and hot dogs, kissing babies, and asking about your wife, as they press the flesh for your vote.

Progress doesn't always feel like progress. I think I liked it a little more when you had to actually do something, like walk to your poll and sign in. Sitting at your kitchen table filling out a ballot will never seem like voting to me. Roll back the stone!



Counterpoint
By Pablo Fanque
All This Is That National Affairs Editor

Really, Jack? You may not be that wrong when you point to your fully arrived codgerhood. America outgrew the polling place years ago. You don't seem to have a problem embracing other areas of technology that have changed our lives.

Mail in ballots dramatically raise the number of people participating in elections, and eliminate the costs of maintaining thousands of polling places staffed with workers. Jack, you're stuck in the 20th century, and after nearly a decade, it's time to leap into Century 21. Get out your stamps and pen.

And. . .if you want to meet your neighbors, well, they have doorbells, don't they?
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A charmingly sweet video: I love xkcd

What a lovely and sweet video. We don't see enough of things like this on the interwebs. Boom de ah dah...

I Love xkcd from NoamR on Vimeo.

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Two new profile picture candidates

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Seattle's Ravenna sinkhole, circa 1957

It was such a gnarly event, that even the New York Times covered the story - click to enlarge


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In Seattle's tree-lined (at least it seems tree-lined to me, a boy from the logged-off Ballard forest) Ravenna neighborhood, a massive sinkhole opened up in November, 1957, and threatened to suck the whole neighborhood down to the 145 foot deep sewer tunnel buried below.

These photographs are courtesy of the Seattle Municipal Archives. At the time, this was the biggest sinkhole, ever in the United States. You can read more about it here.

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America at work

This sweet flowchart is from Projectsidewalk.com




click to enlarge
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Windows Memory Leak At SeaTac Airport

An arrival/departure board at SeaTac International Airport (Microsoft's home airport), today shows a Windows error message that it is running out of virtual memory.

It makes you hope that the air traffic control system does not also run on the Windows operating system. . .

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