Wednesday, July 31, 2019
Website Wednesday 19.31
Website Wednesday
a subsidiary ofSkip's House of Chaos
(The 234,453rd Most Interesting Man in the World)
"From the Large Intestine of the Internets,
through the Sphincter of Electronic Mail,
peeing like a baby on a changing tableinto the brisk digital wind..."
a subsidiary ofSkip's House of Chaos
(The 234,453rd Most Interesting Man in the World)
"From the Large Intestine of the Internets,
through the Sphincter of Electronic Mail,
peeing like a baby on a changing tableinto the brisk digital wind..."
Anyone who doesn’t like musicals because
“people don’t just start randomly singing
and dancing all of a sudden in real life”
have obviously never been to my house.
Top of the heap: The Coolest Astronomical Photo, EVER
Why We're Moving Forward With Impeachment
Top CBP Officer Testifies He's Unsure if 3-Year-Old is "a Criminal or a National Security Threat"
The Influence of Coffee Around the World
The In-N-Out Burger MysteryHas Been Solved (Thanks, Spider Monkey!)
Poland is About to Openthe World's Deepest Pool (Thanks, Susan!)
93 weird facts you may not believe are true (Thanks, Melody!)
11 Highly Unnecessary Expenses
Wanna win a bunch of classic Corvettes?
What constitutional rights do undocumented immigrants have?
How to stroke a cat, according to science
Good for you, Corona Beer!
I Took a Dump the Same Way the Apollo Astronauts Did - And Dear God Was It Awful
The man who tried to conquer his fear of heights... and failed spectacularly
Scientists share Hilarious Titles of Real Studies
The Great Saudi Beauty Pageant Scandal of 2018
Here's your chance to vote for the 2019 Shed of the Year
5 Everyday Foods That Are Disgusting Behind the Scenes
World War II Photos You Didn't See in History Class
Love you, mean it. Let's do lunch. Have your people call my people. Ciao, bella.
- Skip ಠ_ಠ
Website Wednesday archives
(If you'd like to subscribe to the Website Wednesday mailing list,
shoot me an email and let me know)
The Crowpocalypse
Between 4 and 5 AM
(that's in the MORNING, mind you)
hundreds of these suckers
are screaming at each other
right outside my bedroom window.
was a murder, or anything...
Tuesday, July 30, 2019
GUEST EDITORIAL
Aumsville is a very quiet town.
Living on Decker Road in the past, there were log trucks downshifting through the curves marking the quarter hours; cross country bicycle teams shouting for joy as they made the descent; every kid riding a new motorcycle pumping as much gasoline into the engine as their body was pumping adrenaline into their heart; and every summer the MG sport car clubs took on the hill, sounding for all the world like a swarm of mosquitoes.
But Aumsville is quiet.
Then one hot afternoon I heard the sound.
The music had changed. More digital. Not as loud.
But it still triggered the same love/hate response as it did back during those hot Iowa summers.
It was a truck.
Not just any truck.
The ice cream truck!
My hand automatically searched for coins in my pockets. Gone were the days of the fifty-cent-a-week-a-allowances... plus all of the pennies on the nightstand.
I was flush.
I could buy a whole box-full if I wanted….did they take DiscoverCard?
I was ready to dash and splurge.
But then the memories came back…Barefoot kid doing the hot-foot hop on the molten August asphalt. Shouting back at the house “MOM, HE’S ALMOST HERE!” My mother, head completely armored in metal hair-curlers, clad in slippers and a house coat, doing a perfect Groucho Marx run down to the street. Her eyes dart left and right—are the neighbors watching? When she arrives, we both inspect the contents of her red clam-shell coin purse.
The truck stops. The chimes play on.
The inventory never changed. It was a truck-full of disappointment and unmet expectations. If I sound bitter, I still am.
Nutty Buddies—cost too much.
Little sundaes in a plastic cup—taste wasn’t too bad, but the feeling of that dry wooden paddle on my tongue still haunts me.
Snow cones—These things had refrozen so many times that they were solid ice. You had to eat them gopher-style. And the paper cone that held them might have been an early Charmin prototype. Your best bet was to bite off the bottom of the cone and suck out the liquid as it melted.
Popsicles—Yeah, they were splitable, you could share them—such a high cost for friendship. It did teach me some valuable math skills—-I knew exactly how many times I had been the splitter and how many times I had been the splitee with every kid in the neighborhood. The one thing that popsicles had going for them is their high sugar/flavor ratio. Get some melted orange popsicle on your hand and you were guaranteed a hand covered in dirt and ants by the end of the day.
Fudgesicles—In no world, under no conditions, did this taste like fudge! My mother made fudge! I knew fudge! This was not fudge! It was always grainy. And tasteless. In your mouth it had all the texture of frozen gravy on a stick.
Vanilla ice cream on a stick covered in chocolate—This came the closest to living up to its potential. The chocolate was good. The ice cream was usually flavorful and smooth. But the whole thing was a time-bomb. Once the chocolate shell was broken, it was a race as everything began to slide off the stick. The chocolate sloughed off in great sheets. Catch it! If it landed on your t-shirt, you spent the rest of the day sucking chocolate out of the fabric. This was a perfect example of winning the battle, but loosing the war. If you were lucky enough to consume every bit of chocolate and ice cream—-even that stubborn bit where the chocolate came in contact with the stick—it went by so fast, that you were only left with memories.
And speaking of memories, back in Aumsville, The coins stayed on the nightstand. The truck passed by. Fool me once—-more like fool me from ages 4-7, but never again.
I was immune. I had move on. I was an adult.
Now if Starbucks rolled trucks through the neighborhoods…
(Thanks, Craig!)
Living on Decker Road in the past, there were log trucks downshifting through the curves marking the quarter hours; cross country bicycle teams shouting for joy as they made the descent; every kid riding a new motorcycle pumping as much gasoline into the engine as their body was pumping adrenaline into their heart; and every summer the MG sport car clubs took on the hill, sounding for all the world like a swarm of mosquitoes.
But Aumsville is quiet.
Then one hot afternoon I heard the sound.
The music had changed. More digital. Not as loud.
But it still triggered the same love/hate response as it did back during those hot Iowa summers.
It was a truck.
Not just any truck.
The ice cream truck!
I was flush.
I could buy a whole box-full if I wanted….did they take DiscoverCard?
I was ready to dash and splurge.
But then the memories came back…Barefoot kid doing the hot-foot hop on the molten August asphalt. Shouting back at the house “MOM, HE’S ALMOST HERE!” My mother, head completely armored in metal hair-curlers, clad in slippers and a house coat, doing a perfect Groucho Marx run down to the street. Her eyes dart left and right—are the neighbors watching? When she arrives, we both inspect the contents of her red clam-shell coin purse.
The truck stops. The chimes play on.
The inventory never changed. It was a truck-full of disappointment and unmet expectations. If I sound bitter, I still am.
Nutty Buddies—cost too much.
Little sundaes in a plastic cup—taste wasn’t too bad, but the feeling of that dry wooden paddle on my tongue still haunts me.
Snow cones—These things had refrozen so many times that they were solid ice. You had to eat them gopher-style. And the paper cone that held them might have been an early Charmin prototype. Your best bet was to bite off the bottom of the cone and suck out the liquid as it melted.
Popsicles—Yeah, they were splitable, you could share them—such a high cost for friendship. It did teach me some valuable math skills—-I knew exactly how many times I had been the splitter and how many times I had been the splitee with every kid in the neighborhood. The one thing that popsicles had going for them is their high sugar/flavor ratio. Get some melted orange popsicle on your hand and you were guaranteed a hand covered in dirt and ants by the end of the day.
Fudgesicles—In no world, under no conditions, did this taste like fudge! My mother made fudge! I knew fudge! This was not fudge! It was always grainy. And tasteless. In your mouth it had all the texture of frozen gravy on a stick.
Vanilla ice cream on a stick covered in chocolate—This came the closest to living up to its potential. The chocolate was good. The ice cream was usually flavorful and smooth. But the whole thing was a time-bomb. Once the chocolate shell was broken, it was a race as everything began to slide off the stick. The chocolate sloughed off in great sheets. Catch it! If it landed on your t-shirt, you spent the rest of the day sucking chocolate out of the fabric. This was a perfect example of winning the battle, but loosing the war. If you were lucky enough to consume every bit of chocolate and ice cream—-even that stubborn bit where the chocolate came in contact with the stick—it went by so fast, that you were only left with memories.
And speaking of memories, back in Aumsville, The coins stayed on the nightstand. The truck passed by. Fool me once—-more like fool me from ages 4-7, but never again.
I was immune. I had move on. I was an adult.
Now if Starbucks rolled trucks through the neighborhoods…
(Thanks, Craig!)
TUNESMITH TUESDAY - Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra
Welcome Home Elvis was a 1960 television special on the ABC Television Network starring Frank Sinatra and featuring Elvis Presley in his first televised appearance following his military service in West Germany. This was Elvis' first TV appearance in three years.
Monday, July 29, 2019
The Coolest Astronomical Photo, EVER
It's called the Hubble Legacy Field
Hubble's Wide View of the Evolving Universe
This Hubble Space Telescope image represents the largest, most comprehensive "history book" of galaxies in the universe.
The image, a combination of nearly 7,500 separate Hubble exposures, represents 16 years' worth of observations.
The ambitious endeavor, called the Hubble Legacy Field, includes several Hubble deep-field surveys, including the eXtreme Deep Field (XDF), the deepest view of the universe. The wavelength range stretches from ultraviolet to near-infrared light, capturing all the features of galaxy assembly over time.
The image mosaic presents a wide portrait of the distant universe and contains roughly 265,000 galaxies. They stretch back through 13.3 billion years of time to just 500 million years after the universe's birth in the big bang. The tiny, faint, most distant galaxies in the image are similar to the seedling villages from which today's great galaxy star-cities grew. The faintest and farthest galaxies are just one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see.
The wider view contains about 30 times as many galaxies as in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, taken in 2004. The new portrait, a mosaic of multiple snapshots, covers almost the width of the full Moon. Lying in this region is the XDF, which penetrated deeper into space than this legacy field view. However, the XDF field covers less than one-tenth of the full Moon's diameter.
You can download the full, 1.19 GB image here
MONDAY MIND GAME - Droodles 2
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
Give up?
Drag your cursor between the asterisks for the answers:
*
1. A ship arriving too late to save a drowning witch
2. A giraffe passing by a second story window
3. A pig emerging from a fog bank
4. The early bird catching an extremely strong worm
5. Footprints of a pirate chicken with a peg leg
6. An egg, sunnyside down
7. A fat man on a soft bed smoking a pipe
8. An extremely determined worm crossing a razor blade
9. An aerial view of an elephant floating on its back
10. A rabbit reading a newspaper
*
