Although other efforts to build an on-demand air-taxi market at low cost have stalled with the current economic downturn, those efforts faced financial and technological problems that Honda expects to avoid, and by the time the HondaJets are rolling off the line at full speed, there’s a good chance that the economy will have recovered. So the air-taxi model—where you got to a website, enter your destination, and have a small jet swoop down to pick you up, possibly at a small business airport rather than a big one where parking and security hassles are greater—may well have a chance.
Filed under:Cool — posted by Anwyn on March 2, 2010 @ 10:07 am
The food pantry at my church, named Casey’s Corner for the autistic boy who every week helps his father unload a truck full of food and supplies into the pantry, is a finalist for a $25,000 grant from Pepsi. If the pantry wins the grant, we will use it to install a walk-in cooler/freezer to store meat and other perishables and open the food pantry one more day per week, thus serving up to 1500 more people each year. Bonus: A walk-in will be significantly more energy-efficient than the consumer refrigerators we have in there now, thus saving the church overhead money that can then go directly to the food pantry or similar service ministries.
You could really help us by voting once a day between now and the end of March. There are at least a couple hundred finalists, so it’s not like we’re down to the top five or something, and we need every vote. Pepsi is doing a good thing–help us make it worth their while so that they will keep on. Please vote!
Update: Pepsi has a registration process attached to the means of voting, but it’s fairly painless and it looks like they won’t force emails on you. Hey, they have to get something out of it or they wouldn’t be doing it, right?
Update: If you don’t want to register with Pepsi and you have a Facebook account, you can vote through the Facebook account. Easy! Also, Casey’s Corner has already jumped from 169th in the running to 91st, which is awesome, but we need sustained voting over the month to put us in the top ten–the top ten will get the grants. Please do vote as often as it occurs to you. Thanks!
Filed under:Cool, Movies — posted by Anwyn on January 27, 2010 @ 1:26 pm
Joel Silver says “the studio” wants him and Guy Ritchie to focus on a new Sherlock Holmes movie instead of something called Lobo, which, judging by the picture at the link, is a comic-book adaptation that I, personally, will not bemoan the lack of. IMDb lists “Untitled Sherlock Holmes Sequel” as in development, in content not available to those of us as yet unwilling to pay for IMDb Pro.
Hooray for more Downey-as-Holmes! Dear Mssrs. Silver & Ritchie: I loved Sherlock Holmes. Please get some wittier screenwriting this time around. Dear Mssrs. Downey & Law: Please carry on full speed ahead. Love, Anwyn
Interviewing Rod Blagojevich and using words unfamiliar to him, such as “accountable.” Apparently it kind of pissed him off.
Blagojevich became so riled by the questioning, Hunt jokingly asked for “a sidebar.”
“You went to law school, I didn’t,” she says. “I’m only a nurse, but I might inject you with something just to get you to quiet down.”
If we can’t have any more movies like Return to Me, at least we can hope she’s going to keep interviewing bigger and bigger politicians in the same way.
Via Hot Air headlines.
It surprises me occasionally what sinks deep into the cultural part of my brain and psyche without me being totally aware of it. I’ve never been a Michael Jackson fan; I acknowledged his talent but disliked watching him grab his crotch and for the most part despised his vocal style. When he died, I thought Sippican had summed it up best, well before his death: Did you know Michael Jackson could sing?
But Quincy’s magnum opus was fixing it so you didn’t notice that the greatest child soul singer, ever, couldn’t sing a lick anymore. Every bit of Quincy’s talents were needed to foist this future circus freak on the public, when the freak had nothing left in the tank but a visually disorienting dance step. And Quincy kept moving the musical cups around so you couldn’t find the little ball under the one marked “He can’t sing.” Because poor old Michael couldn’t sing a lick after his Adams Apple showed up.
… it was over for Michael when his voice changed, and he knew it. And it’s probably what drove him crazy. And if Michael Jackson is anything, it’s crazy.
Perhaps you’d go crazy too, if you were given that gift, and then it was taken away from you like that. And it is a gift. Michael’s father Joe couldn’t beat that sound out of Tito or Jermaine, after all, no matter how hard he tried. Michael had it, and out it came.
So I had a lot of sympathy for Michael Jackson (notably after his death, however), and a certain amount of grief and disgust over an American talent and celebrity descending into a not-quite-psychotic mental twlight, but wasn’t what I would call a fan. So I can’t really explain why I actually got tears in my eyes over this: Nine hundred-plus Dragon*Con participants doing the “Thriller” dance in hopes of breaking the Guinness record. They start out well, some sputter a little in the middle, but they don’t seem to run out of gas.
Is it worth what he went through and what he became to have such a deep and lasting impact on people? I don’t know. What does that impact consist of? Individual resonance, certainly, but also shared cultural watermarks and experience. Sharing that experience over millions of people is no small feat, notwithstanding the fact that of course he never did it alone. How frustrating that the bigger the celebrity, the bigger potential for a harder fall into a nastier trough–harder because even if he/she gets away with whatever he/she pulls, the public knows and never forgets, and nastier because for whatever they do to whomever, it’s played out on national television. RIP, Michael Jackson.
I wondered, as I watched the video, how they taught all those people all those moves in the proper order; it’s not a short song, after all. Check it out:
Filed under:Cool — posted by Anwyn on September 7, 2009 @ 8:31 am
I’ve been meaning to post this for a while. Isn’t it pretty? Matches my writing table, an’ all. I do wonder if Mr. S grumbles as he paints over the grain of tiger maple, though. Still haven’t decided what kind of Sippican I’ll get next. Did you know he has a nifty little branding iron that puts the maker’s mark onto the underside of the wood? So that when your stuff goes up for estate sale, somebody will say, “Hey look, a Sippican, I have to bid on that.” No use looking for it in thrift stores before that; who would part with a Sippican voluntarily?
