Silenced Majority Portal

Pakistan: 4 Inch Alien Accidentally Stoned by Children

This is a nice relief from Madonnas on burnt toast and screen doors. Or angels.  

Jackson-Inspired Artwork & Flash Mob / Is Michael in Heaven? Did He Really Have 10,000 Books?

See Best, Worst and Weirdest Art Inspired by MJ here. Here is a composite:

 

July 8 Flashmob

Is Michael in Heaven goes into the Top Five MJ stories I found worth reading.

Michael Jackson was raised by Jehovah’s Witnesses and flirted with Scientology and Islam. Now many Christian groups wonder if the King of Pop is residing with the King of Kings.

Seattle PI Blog reports that Michael had 10,000 books. They reported that a judge who knew him said in an interview:

"He loved to read. He had over 10,000 books at his house. And I know that because - and I hate to keep referring to the case, because I don't want the case - the case should not define him. But one of the things that we learned - the DA went through his entire library and found, for instance, a German art book from 1930-something. And it turned out that the guy who was the artist behind the book had been prosecuted by the Nazis. Nobody knew that, but then the cops get up there and say, 'We found this book with pictures of nude people in it.' But it was art, with a lot of text. It was art. And they found some other things, a briefcase that didn't belong to him that had some Playboys in it or something. But they went through the guy's entire house, 10,000 books. And it caused us to do the same thing, and look at it."

"And there were places that he liked to sit, and you could see the books with his bookmarks in it, with notes and everything in it where he liked to sit and read. And I can tell you from talking to him that he had a very - especially for someone who was self-taught, as it were, and had his own reading list - he was very well-read. And I don't want to say that I'm well-read, but I've certainly read a lot, let's put it that way, and I enjoy philosophy and history and everything myself, and it was very nice to talk to him, because he was very intellectual, and he liked to talk about those things. But he didn't flaunt it, and it was very seldom that he would initiate the conversation like that, but if you got into a conversation like that with him, he was there."

Apparently MJ was a frequenter of several bookstores and a Johny Appleseed of reading, spreading books to all children.  He would bring in vanloads of kids and buy them whatever books they wanted.  He would often wear a surgical mask and have an assistant hold an umbrealla to shield him from the glare of florescent lighting.  They contrasted him with Kanye West who doesn't like to read and discussed the disconnect between pop and intellect in America.  

"Bruno" - Starring Ron Paul (Wallingford Landmark Theater Marquee)

PeeWee's Big Adventure at Fremont Outdoor Cinema, Seattle

Perfect night (spooky), perfect weather (ominous clouds, minimal drops), perfect neighborhood (still interesting pockets), perfect film (classic)

Skies over the deck of the Rainier place where we had beers, the sculptural condo with PCC below which used to be where the old outdoor theater was before Fremont became all gentrified, the bar down the street, some other big mural next to the theater that reminds me of Brussels, one of the best neons around, the garage sale signs by Circus Contraption building, finally the theater, then the darkening theater, and finally PeeWee!  Time to cheer for PeeWee and his bike and boo Frances!!

Royale Mit Cheese, A Prototype Of The Future

UPDATE: Douglas Rushkoff, writing at The Daily Beast sees this move by Google and reaches the same conclusions that I did.

Oh, and DiAnne, insomnia?

Good Lord, you've got about a back up of like 20 drafts up in here.

This is a first draft and as such I'm leaving off any editorial comment on the long term implications in The Unites States and the world over of such electronic food ordering devices on Surplus Employee Issues, since I want to do a couple more takes of this, and being barred from such eateries for life is not the way to go about it.

One thing I will talk about is how I see the process of making the above video applies to yesterday's announcement by Google that they are planning to roll out a proprietary Operating System to go up against MSFT, because I believe that they also have Apple in their sights as well.

The raw footage of the above 8.5 minute file started out life yesterday as a 2.5 GIGABYTE 1080p HD video file in the .MOV format.

Because home bandwidth sucks here in Germany, (it would take a full day to U/L the original file to YouTube), fiddling with a variety of video compression schemes in Quicktime Pro I managed to shrink it down to a more reasonable 88 megabytes, without completely destroying the quality of it.

Took minutes instead of hours to upload, and then YouTube went ahead and cut that 88 meg file in half, actually a little bit more, and further compressed it down to a 40 meg file.

This means that the entire 8.5 minute clip is about 1.5% the size of the original.

40 megs of the original file wouldn't even be a full 10 seconds of film.

Remarkable.

What I think Google is going to do with their new Chrome OS, to have the General Public switch en masse is to offer a complete package to the consumer via their Netbooks.

Remember about 5 odd years ago when they first rolled out GMail with a base amount of 2 gigabytes of free storage with each account?

That was their response to their competitors in the the Web Based Email environment that were offering free email accounts with all of a 10 to 25 megabyte limit.

People made the switch to droves to GMail, and their competitors at Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL had their hands forced, and they too began offering accounts in the multi-gigabyte range.

Today the two biggest issues facing end users who are doing photography and HD video is the exponential growth in file sizes that the new generation of high resolution cameras have come to market with, and the inability of the most common desktop configurations that people have to process those files efficiently.

This is not to mention the insanely high costs associated with the software, such as Photoshop and Final Cut Pro.

Sales of 1 TB external drives have been driven by this phenomena, but as any end user will tell you they are susceptible to failure.

With high speed bandwidth becoming ubiquitous what I see happening is that Google will offer with these Chrome OS netbooks of theirs terrabytes of storage in The Cloud, which, people fed up with losing years of work from HD crashes, will gladly embrace, privacy issues be damned.

Better Google's servers go down, and take the planet's data down with it, and have somebody to blame, rather than it all being on my shoulders, thank you.

Add to that Google doing all the high CPU back end processing on their equipment, using their apps, which are also in The Cloud, which means that no one ever has to ever update a piece of software, ever again, and all of a sudden Apple and Microsoft are looking at a real threat to their business model.

Especially if these Chrome OS Netbooks of theirs come out with a Price Point in the $300 to $500 range.

If they can pull that sort of thing off, and given their resources, the probably can, then who in their right mind would pay the thousands of dollars needed to do the same thing that Google's machine can?

It's called making the General Pubalick an Offer they can't possibly refuse.

This is not a new idea, in fact it's a return to the era of the 'Dumb Terminal' model that existed at the Dawn of the Computer Age, and again reared its head about 10 years ago when Larry Ellison of Oracle broached the idea of 'Thin Client' 'Network Computer' about 10 years ago.

In other words. everything old is new again.

On a personal note, if I'm right about this; I'm feeling a little irked right now, since I made a not insignificant capital investment this year, and if I had waited a year and a half, I coulda had all that, and had plenty left over for my hookers and coke habit.

There's no Justice in this world, I tell ya.

What Ever Happened to Bo Derek? (Who?)

Derek is a conservative Republican who supported George H.W. Bush in 1988 and 1992 and campaigned for his son, George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, and she appeared at both Republican conventions. Derek has also appeared at public events with Republican Congressman David Dreier of Southern California. When White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten was asked about the nature of his relationship with Bo Derek on the April 30, 2006 edition of Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, Bolten identified Derek as a "friend" and as a "strong supporter of the President."   (Wikipedia - Bo Derek)

Bo's website

Bad movies: 10, Tarzan the Ape Man, Orca the Killer Whale.  Lost out on Golden Globe to Bette Midler.

Dance Your Ass Off, Literally / Skating Babies (Evian)

This little beauty comes from Sebastien in Strasburg France. The French marvel at our obesity but are starting to catch up with us with globalization, increased productivity demands and fast food. I have a feeling we will be the champs for awhile though. 

This came from Ginger in San Bruno, CA 

How Bruno Interviewed a Real Terrorist

Poodle Samizdat - See Reagan Pop Up From the Grave

http://www.mediafire.com/?5tognxxfpm5

These are from a ten minute animated short made using the first playing of the Poodle Game.  You take one photo of the Poodle, and take turns animating, communicating only by email.  This took two years and encompassed some of the most menacing political events in human memory.  Highlights: Reagan popping up, Don Byron music.  Download the full video at the link.

RIP Robert McNamara - What Makes It Immoral To Lose & Not To Win?

Proportionality. "LeMay said if we lost the war we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals and I think he's right."