Comics; It's All About the Youth Market

Sweet crackers, Tony Stark as a teen-aged Iron Man? You are going to put a teenager inside of the most destructive piece of weaponry on the Marvel planet? Right. Next you'll be telling me that "Baby Avengers" is in the works. Wha....what!?

Would Someone Please Steal Casey's Lunch Money

Follow me as I spin into the rabbit hole of specious observations. There may be a point at the end.

Over at the world's most popular science blog, Pharyngula, P.Z. Myers (the Cracker King), points out some inadvertent comedy on the part of the Casey Luskin, the co-founder of the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness (IDEA) Center (ideacenter.org). Luskin was upset about this :

1. Shubin et al.: "The intermedium and ulnare of Tiktaalik have homologues to eponymous wrist bones of tetrapods with which they share similar positions and articular relations."

Says Luskin: "OK, then exactly which "wrist bones of tetrapods" are Tiktaalik's bones homologous to? Shubin doesn't say. "

And so I come labouriously to my point.

Has Mr. Luskin ever read an album review in any paper, magazine, or website, in his entire life?

Nit-pickery, it's what blogs are all about.

Stop Tryiing Dumby

John Derbyshire says that nobody can learn a foreign language, it is just too hard.

Or as his spiritual leader said: If something's hard to do, then it's not worth doing!

Not able to leave well enough alone, Derbyshire elaborated:

Obama's idiotic suggestion that all our kids should learn Spanish is, amongst other things (this is multi-dimensional stupidity) an illustration of educational romanticism run amok.The cold fact is that absent exceptional circumstances — the most common of which is, total immersion at a receptive age — not many human beings can learn another language. Oh, you can learn enough to stumble along and get by on a trip abroad, but if you can attain fluency in a language not your own, without those exceptional circumstances, you are an unusually smart and gifted person.

And here I thought the soft bigotry of low-expectations was a liberal trait. Turns out, according to John, it applies to the entirety of the U.S., because:

"education beyond the three R's is a waste of time, and foreign-language instruction a total waste of time."

Thanks Simon Legree. I will make sure to get my kids into the coal-mine for their shift as soon as possible. No fancy book learnin' fer the likes 'o them.

The Rev was right, satire is dead.

Update:

I may rant, but Kevin writes. Check out his take on this over at The Woodshed.

Further Update:

Holy Crap! Turns out that John McCain might be one of the Epsilons as well! So all is forgiven John Derbyshire. One can be illiterate and still aspire to the presidency. Yakoff Smirnov voice/What a country! /Yakoff Smirnov Voice

Those Old Records, Those Old Phonograph Records

Last Friday my mom and I sat around and listened to some records. 45s to be precise. We didn't play them on a turntable though, we watched them on Youtube. There are a number of people who are making Youtube videos of records as they spin on the turntable. Thunderbird1958 has one such channel. At last count he has 1426 videos of records posted. How does he achieve this awesome feat?

I have the turntable output cables plugged into a Radio Shack "Y" cable which is plugged into the sound card on my pc. My webcam (Logitech) records the sound as it records the video.I do it all in one step as I am too lazy to process clips.

Brilliantly simple. And wonderfully fun.

As we huddled around the laptop, enjoying the Jimmie Rodgers tunes, I had a laugh thinking about the transformation this type of pastime has undergone in our lives. Like you, I started with a hand-me-down turntable, one which had a detachable lid that served as a speaker. From there it was on to the family 8-track for car trips, and the RCA cabinet turntable/radio that dominated the living room. For my high school years, my parents blessed me with a full Pioneer rig--turntable, cassette deck, receiver, and big ass speakers. A decision they grew to regret. Just a few more years down the road a swanky new Rotel CD player is added to the mix, and the cassette deck is replaced by various Walkman-style players. Music now sounds better (so we are told) and is becoming more portable. I skipped the portable CD era and jumped into MP3s and mix CDs around the turn of the century. After several format changes (Sony MD, mp3, Apple AAC), I find myself curiously back at the beginning. I am sitting in my house, listening to 45s, and watching them spin on the turntable. My laptop is not a whole lot smaller than my early turntables, and, comically, the speakers are worse.

Does this mean anything? Have I sacrificed quality for expediency? Probably. But at least I was able to spend some time with Mom listening to some old tunes.