"Restore(s) a little sanity into current political debate" - Kenneth Minogue, TLS "Projects a more expansive and optimistic future for Americans than (the analysis of) Huntington" - James R. Kurth, National Interest "One of (the) most important books I have read in recent years" - Lexington Green
Chicago Boyz is a registered trademark of Chicago Boyz Media, LLC. All original content on the Chicago Boyz web site is copyright 2001-2012 by Chicago Boyz Media, LLC or the Chicago Boyz contributor who posted it. All rights reserved. Please send inquiries to .
Tonight will be the occasion of a “super Moon”, which seems to be a term used by people who know a lot about the Moon to denote a full Moon that coincides with the Moon’s closest passage to Earth in its elliptical orbit. Cosmophobia aside, there is no reason to be alarmed. However, some Chicagoboyz are finding it necessary to shave more frequently than usual, and if you have a hot date tonight it might be a good idea to pack a disposable razor with your breath mints. Don’t let that stubble become any trouble. (I’m not sure if this advice applies to the ladies as well.)
-To see a truly interactive magazine at play, check out RC Pilot (there’s a free demo at the link). I find the content extremely interesting overall despite my low level of interest in radio-controlled models per se. There is a lot of good aviation content inside, and RC technology is increasingly relevant WRT drones and other hot topics. You will probably like RCP if you are any kind of technophile.
(I’m going to permalink these sites for future reference.)
I reviewed your site and it seems we could complement your current content. XXXXX XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX has a team of house writers that can provide you with unique custom written content covering the following topics: applying for food stamps, who qualifies for food stamps, Medicaid, and more. I’m certain we could provide some valuable unique articles that would engage your users and expand your site. This is provided completely and entirely free of charge to our partners.
We also have some small food assistance program finder widgets that publishers are running. This widget allows users to search for government assistance for free. For placing these we would be able compensate you for placing the widgets on your site.
It has happened to us again; we came home from morning walkies on Thursday with an extra dog, to the bafflement and apparent disgust of the Lesser Weevil and Connor … who seem to be getting over it, even as I write. The current canine find is small, attractive, and relatively well-behaved and seems to be agreeable to cats. Which a dog in our house had damn-well better be … the cats outnumber the dogs, and are Superior Beings – at least, as the cats see it, and woe betide the canine which doesn’t acknowledge this superiority immediately. Read the rest of this entry »
“In due time we rattled up to a stage-station, and sat down to breakfast with a half-savage, half-civilized company of armed and bearded mountaineers, ranchmen and station employees. The most gentlemanly- appearing, quiet and affable officer we had yet found along the road in the Overland Company’s service was the person who sat at the head of the table, at my elbow. Never youth stared and shivered as I did when I heard them call him SLADE! … Here, right by my side, was the actual ogre who, in fights and brawls and various ways, had taken the lives of twenty-six human beings, or all men lied about him! … He was so friendly and so gentle-spoken that I warmed to him in spite of his awful history. It was hardly possible to realize that this pleasant person was the pitiless scourge of the outlaws, the raw-head-and-bloody- bones the nursing mothers of the mountains terrified their children with.” That was what Mark Twain wrote, years afterwards in an account of a stagecoach journey to California, in 1861, upon encountering Joseph ‘Jack’ Alfred Slade, a divisional superintendent for the Central Overland, and a man who combined a horrific reputation with a perfectly soft-spoken and gentlemanly demeanor … and who in the space of four years, went from being a hard-working, responsible and respected corporate man (as these things were counted in the 19th century wild west) to being hanged by the Virginia City, Montana, Committee of Vigilance.
Back on November 21 of last year we played our first game of Name That Breed. There were a lot of good guesses in the comments. Below is the subject, our dog Jameson.
And here comes the next spectacular ruckus regarding indy-writers and the (relatively) non-elected, totally bureaucratic and ham-fisted powers of our universe. This one, for a marvel, does not involve Amazon.com, at whose door can be laid the last couple or three of these shindigs. This one involves Paypal, that pearl of great price … and fairly substantial fees on transactions although not too onerous as these things go, certainly better than pawn shops and payday check cashing establishments without a particle of the stigma and it usually makes up for the convenience of the transaction and who am I to object, actually?
A few weeks ago I took a whole hog butchering class in Milwaukee. Photos and info are posted at my “home” blog, Life in the Great Midwest. The photos may be disturbing to some, however the dispatching and evisceration of the animal are not part of the class. More importantly, if you go to part one you get to see a picture of Dan from Madison with a hair and beard net on. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4.
The 2012 Chicago Zine Fest is fast approaching. March 9-10 is the weekend for small press, self-published, and independent publishers to show us their stuff. Quimby’s Bookstore, Silver Tongue, 826CHI, Renegade Handmade, and DIYCHI are sponsoring this year’s festival of readings, exhibitions, and workshops.
Small press and self-publishing have become increasingly popular amongst authors of all kinds. Let’s face it: getting published by a large company isn’t exactly the easiest feat to achieve. Perhaps it’s rightfully so that writers and artists take matters into their own hands without the scary middle man. While large chains like Border’s and Barnes & Noble have been disappearing rapidly, the independent publishers and their creative authors have done a great service to our local bookstores who are very proud to carry their unique items on their shelves.
I always have plans to do “arty” things around the city and then flake out at the last minute. Maybe I’ll make this one. Or maybe not. Or maybe I will. I swear, sometimes I’m like Polly in Along Came Polly. Truth be told, I am one-half Reuben Feffer, one-half Polly Prince.
I haven’t been blogging much lately because it’s been a strange few weeks. Last week really took the cake. I had a credit card number lifted, a minor fender bender, and then got called in for a follow-up mammogram which turned out, thankfully, to be nothing. Awaiting the results while rain blurred the great glass panes of one wall of the waiting room, I thought, “maybe I should do more arty things around the city.” Enough with Reuben, it’s time to be a little Polly.
After following all the directions given for making cheeses last fall, to include covering the various wheels with wax – we stashed the results on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator to age. Read the rest of this entry »
A while back I read a book called “Ravens in Winter” and found the lives of crows and ravens to be very interesting. The book describes how they communicate food sources to one another through some type of unknown mechanism and their general high intelligence level.
When I was in Norway I came across a Carrion Crow (or at least I think it is; I looked it up on wikipedia) that found a clam-shell container that usually contains take out food. The crow obviously knew that it was correlated with food and poked it with its beak and shook it about deliberately before throwing it to the ground in disgust. I took a video and uploaded it and you can see it in HD here which I find very humorous.
Before 9/11 I traveled to Tasmania and had an encounter with what I believe was a Forest Raven, although once again I am not an ornithologist. The bird was AMAZINGLY persistent – when our car pulled up to a clearing it jumped on the side mirror (the window was open) and looked me right in the face (with big yellow eyes) and started cawing for food. I rolled up the window and it sat right on the hood of the car staring at me through the dashboard. I have never seen an (ostensibly wild) bird so unafraid of humans.
For as much as a role-playing game Human Revolution is, it’s difficult to truly play it as a role-playing game. Every bit of dialogue that grates with my ideal is jarring, and snaps me back out of the magical game-world where player and character are the same. I found myself dreading dialogue options: Would choosing this option make Jensen look like some faceless arm of a crime syndicate instead of a person who merely weighs options to find the most logical one? Should I find a bag of puppies for him to oppress?
The problem is that Jensen is not me. He can’t be the character I envision in my head, no matter how much I try. He is his own character, an entity wholly separate from me. I am just the invisible hand telling him which baddies to shoot and what to say in conversation.
Following a couple of posts (here and here) about time-lapse videos I did some experimenting. It turns out to be simple to create a passable time-lapse sequence using an inexpensive digicam and some freeware.
You need an interval timer. I don’t know how many cameras have this feature. However, if you have a Canon PowerShot camera you can download a quite sophisticated bit of freeware called CHDK that, among other capabilities, functions as a user configurable interval timer. CHDK is well documented but the online wiki is a bit intimidating. Don’t worry. Go to this page and work your way down. It gives the essentials.
I used my Canon S95 with CHDK, configured to take photos continuously at five-second intervals. Put the camera on a tripod or other support, use JPEG rather than RAW if this is an option and deactivate your camera’s stabilizer if it has one. Focus manually if you can. Then point the camera at something interesting and start the interval timer. The video below represents about an hour and a quarter in real time, 924 exposures. (Your camera battery will run down pretty quickly doing this, so you may want to turn off the camera’s LCD if possible. The CHDK documentation mentions a way to trick the camera into turning off its LCD by plugging something into the “video out” socket, but I haven’t tried this yet.)
There are probably many ways to stitch the photos into a video sequence. I used Microsoft Windows Live Movie Maker, which is part of Windows Live Essentials, which may have come with your computer if you use Windows 7. (It’s also available as a free download here.) Simple to use: Start a new project, import your photos (batch edit them first if you want), select all of the imported photos, click the Edit tab, set Duration to .03 seconds (the minimum), hit the enter key to apply this duration to all of your photos, then save your movie using the quality setting of your choice.
Misawa AB, late fall, 1977. If it were later in the year, the field would have been under about four feet of snow. I think I took this picture because some of the FEN-Misawa staff were playing. They would have been for one of the larger unit teams – FEN wasn’t large enough to field a team of our own.
So while I was doodling out a thoughtful post on British identity in the Emerald Isle, this whole pajama business in Dublin blew open, meriting mention not only in the London Times editorial section on Friday(sorry-behind a paywall), but Althouse as well! So what’s up with dressing down?
The debate that took place was fascinating – in part because there really was no debate. The Dept of Social Welfare hung up a bunch of signs asking people to show up in street clothes, and Irish punditry applauded. I read this as part of a continuing meme in Irish thought and culture – that Irish manners, once the finest to behold, are crumbling due to American/British media, the Celtic Tiger, the end of the Celtic Tiger, the Church, the lack of the Church, Leinster Rugby losing to Connacht, so on and so forth. Mind you, this is a nation where people still thank the bus driver as they exit the bus. Where thank you notes are sent with profusion. It’s not a political thing one way – or the other. It’s more like a nationwide “Mind yer manners” moment.
Inspired, in equal measures, by Hurricane Katrina, Buster Keaton, The Wizard of Oz, and a love for books, “Morris Lessmore” is a story of people who devote their lives to books and books who return the favor. Morris Lessmore is a poignant, humorous allegory about the curative powers of story. Using a variety of techniques (miniatures, computer animation, 2D animation) award winning author/ illustrator William Joyce and Co-director Brandon Oldenburg present a new narrative experience that harkens back to silent films and M-G-M Technicolor musicals. “Morris Lessmore” is old fashioned and cutting edge at the same time.
“The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore” is one of five animated short films that will be considered for outstanding film achievements of 2011 in the 84th Academy Awards ®.
Film Awards Won by “The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore”
To date, “The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore” film has drummed up fans all over the world taking home the following awards:
· Cinequest Film Fest: Best Animated Short
· Palm Springs International ShortFest: Audience Favorite Award
· SIGGRAPH: Best in Show
I still can’t seem to center images or videos in WordPress, at least not easily. When I save a post, WordPress simply removes the ‘center’ tags. With images I can work around the problem by putting the HTML code for a table into the post. Inside the cells of a table, WordPress will leave the ‘center’ tags alone. I don’t want to do this with a video like this, for I’m not sure if I won’t mess up the look of the blog if I make it too wide.
” and found the lives of crows and ravens to be very interesting. The book describes how they communicate food sources to one another through some type of unknown mechanism and their general high intelligence level.
