Random Thoughts From Marybeth

Dr. Horrible

You only have until midnight tonight to see Acts I, II, and III of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog for free.

If you miss it, you can download it ($1.99 per Act or $3.99 for all three) from iTunes.

Hulu.com

I wrote about Hulu back in January. At that time the site was in beta and membership was by invitation only. It's now open to the public and has even more content than before.

There are full length movies: Weekend at Bernie's, The Usual Suspects, October Sky, Ice Age, The Big Lebowski, and others. There are also clips from movies including Psycho, Raising Arizona, Aliens, Juno, The Sound of Music and more.

Watch full-length episodes of current primetime TV shows such as The Simpsons and The Office the morning after they air, classics like Miami Vice and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and clips from Saturday Night Live, Nip/Tuck, and others. Hulu also offers full-length feature films like The Usual Suspects, Ice Age, Three Amigos!, and The Big Lebowski as well as clips from films such as Napoleon Dynamite, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Devil Wears Prada and many more. Hulu is free and ad-supported — available anytime in the U.S.

What Writers' Strike?

If you thought your only TV viewing choices were reruns, reality TV, and campaign coverage, think again. Hulu.com has popular excerpts and full-length shows available to watch online.

There are shows that are currently on TV: House, Chuck, Monk, The Office, Heroes, and several others. There are also some great shows from years ago: St. Elsewhere, Picket Fences, The Bob Newhart Show, WKRP in Cincinnati, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and many more.

I've been watching WKRP this morning and have been amazed at how it's still funny and relevant after almost 30 years. I wonder if I'll feel that way about any of the shows on now in even 10 years.

If I want to relive the '80s (although, really, who would?) I can watch The A-Team or Fame. And there's plenty of shows from the '70s from The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Kojack (the original one, but they have the one from 2004 too.)

The excerpts from Saturday Night Live are sortable by season so you can watch scenes from back when it was funny (your pick as to when that was...for me it was only the first few seasons - pre-1980.)

The shows do have commercials but they are very limited: not as frequent, as many or as long as on TV.

Who's Counting?

Worldometer - includes (for this year) births, cars produced, movie visitors, carbon dioxide emissions (no subcategory for Gore's house), lightning strikes, people who died of hunger today, dollars spent on dieting in the USA, and deaths from a variety of causes.

OK Go

The treadmill video fascinated me. Even if I hadn't liked the music I would have watched it (with the sound off). This new video is just as creative, maybe more so.

So Wrong In So Many Ways

MST3K short on the film "Catching Trouble" about capturing animals for the Chicago Zoo.

You Can Find Anything Online

An online driver's license search.

Enough With the "Best Of" Lists

The 100 Worst Album Covers - I think some of them are there more for the concept than the cover (Ethel Merman Disco Alburm) but I don't see any that doesn't deserve to be there.

White Christmas

A nice animated Christmas song to get you in the holiday mood.

It's a Wonder That We Bought Anything...

What could be better than commercials from the 1980s?* '80s commercials with snarky comments.

*The real answer is "just about anything that doesn't cause physical pain", but I decided to bend reality a bit for the purpose of this post.

All Cute, All the Time

An antidote to all the "ugly" in the news - Cute Overload.

Another Childhood Myth Busted

I never could have dug a hole to China in my backyard. Not just for the obvious reasons, but because I would have ended up somewhere in the Indian Ocean near Australia.

Where would you have ended up?

From Back When Video Games Didn't Top the Most-Wanted Christmas List

Hasbro Inc. reports that its EASY-BAKE Oven was inducted Thursday into the National Toy Hall of Fame, at the Strong – National Museum of Play.

Lionel trains was also inducted this year.

You can view the Easy-Bake Oven and Lionel train entries along with my favorite, the cardboard box.

Don't Worry, Be Happy

Twenty strategies adapted from the scientific research and applied to New York living. The theory is that too many choices produce stress and we are always comparing what we did with the imagined benefits of the choices we didn't select.

Decide where to go to college by picking two decent schools and flipping a coin.

If someone tells you he’s still pining for his ex, ask the ex out.

Send the kids off to day care, summer camp, and boarding school.

If you go on a shopping spree, throw away the receipts.

Patronize King Cole’s and other establishments that employ a “mixologist”; avoid any bar named after an Irish person.

The last one doesn't seem to fit the "limited choice" theory but it's included because "Spending your alcohol allowance on a few finely crafted cocktails is probably better than guzzling giant troughs of beer, since the ability to limit one’s indulgence is one of the baseline characteristics of happy people. Researchers aren’t sure whether moderation is chicken or egg, but they do know that teetotaling doesn’t confer any particular advantage."

Ooooohhhh! Aaaaahhhh!

How to Photograph Fireworks - what you need to have and what you need to know to get good pictures of fireworks.

Be a Fireworks Nerd - the science behind the colors and the sparkle. More on this from Howstuffworks and About.com.

Learn about types of fireworks from Nova so you don't mislabel your photo of a Peony as a Chrysanthemum.

State laws on fireworks - a clickable map of states linking to pdf pages with what fireworks are permitted and what is not allowed. There's also a Fireworks Safety Test (pdf). (Answers)

A fireworks craft for kids. There are no actual fireworks involved, just paper, glue, and glitter.

More Videos

This time it's 100 Awesome Music Videos. I wonder why I didn't notice at the time (1984), how really creepy Lionel Richie's "Hello" was.

(Previous link to videos here.)

80s Music Videos

Miss the days when MTV played music? There's a large selection of music videos from the 80s here. I don't remember a lot of the ones listed (and am trying hard block out memories of at least a few of them) but I did find some others that I like.

Movie Clapper Board

The Movie Clapper Board Generator

North American Maps

The Atlas of North America has printable maps. You can print one of the premade maps or create your own. You can view all 50 states or zoom in on one. If you click on "People" you can see crime rates by type from 1994 through 2002. Check under "Agriculture" to see where the most family-owned farms are. Want to know about bats or butterflies? Look under "Biology". Click on "Geology" to make a map showing earthquakes from 1569 to 2004.

There are also articles on the same topics used for customizing maps.

DIY

Instructables tells you how to do stuff from the useful (install lights in a cabinet or build a picnic table) to just entertaining (LED Throwies or a Roomba mouse costume).

A Calendar to Share

30boxes.com

You have to register access. When you register you get this message - A confirmation email was sent to marybeth@myway.com. You must open that email and click the link to confirm your address! Remember to check your bulk or spam folder.

The mention of "spam" is not encouraging but the email came to my regular inbox. After you click the link to confirm your email, you may begin adding events to your calendar. You can add buddies to share all or part of your calendar. If you have an event and want to send out email invitations, you can do it from the site and if the other person/people are using 30boxes the event will show up on their calendar.

You can tell it to repeat events weekly, monthly, or yearly; tag events (work, personal, family...); and generate Google maps or hyperlinks for events.

Commercial Bowl XL

You can watch the ads on iflim.com.

My favorites were:

"Budweiser: Clydesdale American Dream" - I don't like all of Anheuser-Busch commercials but I think that their Budweiser ones with the Clydesdales are consistently among the best. (My favorite of all the Clydesdale commercials - "Budweiser: Clydesdale Donkey" - can be seen here.) The "Budweiser Dalmation Reunion" from 1999 was good too.

"Sprint: Locker Room" - I thought the "crime deterrent" was funny. I probably won't feel the same after I've seen it a few hundred more times.

"I'm Going to Disney World Practice" - (I don't see a link to watch this one.) Because I am going to Disney World! If I weren't leaving for Orlando in just over a week I might not have liked it as much.

Most of the commercials were neither good nor bad enough for me to remember well. Considering the cost of these ads, I hope those companies did better with their target demographics than they did with me.

I didn't like the GoDaddy.com commercial. I use them for domain registration because I like their prices and speed of service but if I didn't know what they did, their commercials wouldn't tell me much (or might make me think the "more" they have on their site is completely different from what is really there.) Referring to a two-year-old "wardrobe malfunction" isn't edgy, it's dumb. If you're going to go with stupid over substance then have a scantily-clad man for the female Webmasters this year. I probably wouldn't have liked it any better but would have appreciated the acknowledgment that not all site owners are males stuck in perpetual adolescence.

I applaude Dove for using more "regular-looking" women in their print ads but their commercial about their Self-Esteem Fund just made me go "huh?". I know that they make beauty products but I didn't like the focus of self-esteem being based on physical looks. A campaign to show a "wider definition of beauty" still implies that there are plenty of people with a more rigid definition. On the plus side, their site does suggest donating to the Girl Scouts which, I believe, does a better job of promoting good self-esteem by teaching a variety of skills and values.

None of them convinced me to try a new product (or change brands) but at least they gave me something to blog about this morning.

Handy-Dandy Paper Rulers

Some printable paper rulers because you can never find one when you need one.

Now, if only someone can figure out how to make a printable flashlight*, I'll be all set. (I can never find one of those when I need it either.)

*Other than grabing a sheet of paper and a match.**

**It would be funnier if I spoke British English and called flashlights "torches".***

***It's still not that funny.****

****At least I amuse myself. There are worse ways to do that than my feeble attempts at humor.

Caricature Maker

Digibody's Caricature Maker lets you select among face shapes, noses, eyes, eyebrows, ears, mouths, and hair styles to create a charicature/avatar. You can then save them as .png, .gif, or .jpg files.

I picked the parts that seemed most similar to my own but I don't think the whole picture looks anything like me.

Fly Me to the Asteroid Belt

I'm going into space. Sort of.

Print Your Own Money!

Now it's easier to own it all!

Home Remedies

I haven't fact-checked any of it but "18 Tricks to Teach Your Body" has some interesting suggestions to cure or stop several common problems including: a tickle in your throat, ice cream headache, clearing a stuffed nose, pain from injections, nosebleeds, and the "pins and needles" feeling when a body part "falls asleep".

There's also one tip to impress your friends:

Next time you're at a party, try this trick: Have a person hold one arm straight out to the side, palm down, and instruct him to maintain this position. Then place two fingers on his wrist and push down. He'll resist. Now have him put one foot on a surface that's a half inch higher (a few magazines) and repeat. This time his arm will cave like the French. By misaligning his hips, you've offset his spine, says Rachel Cosgrove, C.S.C.S., co-owner of Results Fitness, in Santa Clarita, California. Your brain senses that the spine is vulnerable, so it shuts down the body's ability to resist.

Keeping Track of Things To-Do

Organization has never been one of my strong points. I do fine with the big things like planning for vacations but not with the day-to-day stuff. Now there's a site that helps people keep track of their to-do lists.

Remember the Milk lets you enter work, study, or personal tasks and sends a reminder by email, IM, or by SMS to your cell phone. You can prioritize your tasks and decide how long in advance you want your reminder. You can share tasks with co-workers, a study group, or friends and family by adding them to your contacts (they also need to have you on their contact list).

And it's free.

Actually my problem is probably more one of procrastination than it is one of not remembering what I need to do. Having an email or a message sent to my phone could provide the nagging I need to get things done.

My Music This Morning

From Google Video:

Dazed and Confused - Led Zeppelin, 1969
Live8 Performance (BBC) - Pink Floyd

Home Library

LibraryThing lets you keep a catalog of your books online. Tags can be added to each entry and users may choose to share their listings so if you're wondering what to read next, you can search for users with similar tastes in books and authors.

It's very easy to use...as long as I'm adding book titles by memory. The problem is that I have so many books (lots of them boxed up in storage) that I don't know if I'll ever get them all listed.

Because I Can't Resist Getting In Line Too

Get your position here

Found at One Happy Dog Speaks.

Paper Crafts

Yamaha has printable (pdf) paper craft designs for creating replicas of some of their motorcycles, rare animals, and seasonal items.

Google Gas

Google map to cheap gas.

Get The Blog Out.

There Ain't No Party Like A Cheese Party.

A Taste For Cats.

The slogans above (and the post title) from the Advertising Slogan Generator. (Gotta Lotta Boredom.) More time-wasters entertainment from The Surrealist. More generators (pages of 'em) on Uzeful.org.

There's a cat name generator (no mention of their tastiness), vampire name generator (I'm Goddess of The Ghastly), wanted poster generator (see extended entry), blog name generator (Frisky Life), and a label maker.

Eye Witness

There is no green.

When the Kids Say, "We're Bored"...

Science Toy Maker will help keep the kids entertained for a half hour or more with materials you can find around the house. (Half an hour is forever in "kid time". It can be even longer in "mom time" if the kids are whining about not having anything to do.)

The project for making a pipe (the playing kind, not the smoking kind) out of a straw sounded interesting to me until I started thinking about having to listen to its "music" for the rest of the day. Fortunately there are several more projects we can try.

More Science Links

"Science.gov is a gateway to authoritative selected science information provided by U.S. Government agencies, including research and development results." Users can search 1700+ web sites and 30 databases and have free access to information that may not be spidered by normal search engines.

You can also register to receive free weekly email alerts when information is added to your topic(s) of interest.

Playing With Science

Fun with High Voltage sounds dangerous but isn't. It's just one of the science experiments/toys that you can find here. You can find most of what you need to build these things at home, a hardware store, or from Radio Shack.

Haven't you always wanted to build a solar marshmallow roaster?

Other fun science links for kids (and those of us who refuse to grow up):
Fun Science Gallery
Home Experiments
Bizarre Stuff You Can Make In Your Kitchen

Finally the Recognition I Deserve

A virtual star on Hollywood Blvd. for having done virtually nothing.

Best Time to Visit

Google Best Time to Visit searches Google description tags for "best time to visit" along with the location you enter.

I searched for my home city, Louisville, Kentucky. The results said the best time to visit here is April and May. Since the Kentucky Derby is the first Saturday in May, this answer isn't a big surprise.

I tried a few other cities/states/countries and then decided to try something a bit different.

"the best time to visit prison, is between october and november"
"the best time to visit mom's home, is between july and december"
"the best time to visit marybeth, is between march and april"...just call ahead, please

Read Before Crossing Bridges

Finally, the answer to a question that has been plaguing mankind for years (since 1975, anyway.)

Buttons for Blogs

80x15 Brilliant Button Maker

Make your own buttons that say what you want to say. No special knowledge or skill required.

The Sound of Pi

I don't know why I find this so fascinating, but I do.

Wikiquote

Wikiquote has quotations sorted by topics: People, Occupations, Literary Works, Proverbs, Films, TV Shows, Themes, and Categories. The Categories section includes mnemonics in English, French, German, and Swedish.

Quotations include links to the Wikipedia for more information.

Cleaning Products and Science

Having three school-aged children means that at some point during the year we're going to be working on science fair projects. I've collected some helpful links on Conor's site (hmmm, need to change this a bit...5th grade was last year).

I thought about this when I saw a site Proctor & Gamble has called Science-in-the-Box. Along with articles about their products and debunking rumors (that the Swiffer WetJet is harmful to pets) they have glossaries of technical terms, chemical functional definitions, and ingredient safety information. The site allows visitors to collect articles/documents in a "file basket" and download them as a zip file before leaving the site.

The site doesn't offer science fair ideas but would be a good resource to use if the student has chosen to do a project relating to a household product. (Keeping in mind that it is a manufactuer site and any claims it makes should be checked through other sources. Even a young scientist should learn to be skeptical.)

Plus, what could be more fun than to find out about the "Sources of Human Soil" where you find out that "(t)he average adult breaks wind roughly 13.6 times/day,(enough gas to inflate a party balloon.)" There is also a history of washing which has enough "ick factor" to interest kids too.

typoGenerator

Type in some text and typoGenerator will create, um, something.

Random Thoughts from Marybeth

After it shows the first image you can keep or change the text type, colors, and background.

Vote or Not

Register to vote, win $100,000. Vote or Not is an idea from the same team who made Hot or Not and is open to all registered voters in the U.S. It doesn't matter to them who you vote for, just that you have registered to vote.

You can only enter once but the person who refers the winner can also win $100,000...so please go to Vote or Not and give us both a chance at the prize money!

Twilight Zone Should Have Been a Clue

Link via Paul.

Looking for Words

Quotations and Proverb Finder

Search by keyword using a wide choice of sources from quote databases to song lyrics. There are also links to the sources if you prefer to browse for quotations.

Where I Went This Morning

A few blogs and some other interesting and useful sites:

pc4media - read about the NASWIT and make sure you read the post about why you should never post your picture online.
Micro Persuasion - first NASWIT blog (see above.)
Virtual Private Library - the main blog lists other blogs that offer links to a wide variety of resources. Some of these include: Astronomy, Directories (JoeAnt is listed!), Finding People, Internet Demographics, References, Statistics, and Theology.
Can't Find on Google - visitors submit search terms they used and a description of what they were looking for but couldn't find through Google.
Free After Rebate - find products that offer rebates equal to their purchase price. Use rebated money to send me chocolate.
Read Print - texts of books and other works that are in the public domain. There are other sites that offer this but I like the clean look of this one.
Waypath - find weblog posts linking to blogs or sites, find related posts, search posts for keywords, and chart the buzz for terms.
The Tile Machine - make background tiles or browse the gallery.
Invade Canada - if for no other reason than it is pronounced "zee" not "zed".
Gas Buddy - high and low gas prices for U.S. states and Canadian provinces (and some cities). Each listing shows the date and time of the post along with the station's name, address, and gas price.

Painting Online

A Paint-like program lets visitors create pictures and save them to share with others. Some of the shared pictures show real talent and some are just scribblings. (I didn't save any of my attempts, they would definitely come under the "scribblings" category.) Caution: some of the images or language in them may be considered offensive. You can use the draw section without viewing the archived images.

Update: Here's another site if you like to color but don't have the imagination or talent to come up with your own designs. SegPlay lets you paint-by-numbers. You can select pictures by category, popularity, theme (there's one for chocolate!), and degree of difficulty.

The paint-by-number page opens in a smaller window. You can enlarge the image but you will have to scroll to see all of it. Once you have filled in all of the areas for a given color, that color disappears from your palette.

Science Links

Chaos seems to aid learning - given the lack of order in our house, my children should all be geniuses.

Material grabs more sun - improved solar cells are more efficient.

My younger son did a science fair project using solar cells. At that time I thought it would be cool to build something useful with them (when we were doing research we found a description of a solar-powered fan that one could take to the beach). The problem with actually building something is that it would take many cells to power anything that approached usefulness. The cells are fragile and not that cheap, so for now, landfills be damned, I'm using battery power.

Hunkin's Experiments - fun experiments and tricks, including one that will make your tongue tingle.

Engine of Our Ingenuity - this program isn't on my local Public Radio station but I wish it were. At least I can read the transcripts and listen online.

Text Analysis

Textalyser will show the total word count, number of different words, complexity, readability, number of characters, average sentence length, frequency for words used, and other statistics.

Copy and paste text or submit a URL for a Web site analysis.

Rock & Roll Hall of Shame

Is there anyone who hasn't, at least briefly, wanted to be a rock star? For most of us (especially those of us who can't sing or play an instrument) the fantasy is fleeting...lasting about as long as it takes to put on a "performance" while singing along to a song on the stereo in the privacy of our bedrooms.

Some, my husband for example, were in bands when they were younger. I'm not really sure why he quit playing. It could have been creative differences or it could have been the desire to have a steady income. The whole starving artist thing is much more appealing when you aren't the one going hungry.

This site shows what happens when people achieve enough celebrity in other areas that they are able to convince someone to let them record a rock song.

Some of these people even made their living from singing. I thought that the oddest thing I would ever hear Bing Crosby sing was "Little Drummer Boy" with David Bowie. (Actually that duet has a strange fascination for me.) His rendition of "Hey Jude", while not technically bad, is, well, it's not good.

You can hear a clip of Joel Grey singing "White Room". If you are either a fan of his or of the song, I would recommend not listening.

Several decided to totally destroy perform some Beatles songs. They include Joe Pesci singing "Got to Get You Into My Life", Mae West singing "Day Tripper", and George Burns singing "With a Little Help From My Friends".

There are two Beatles wives there too. Yoko sings something called "John John". I didn't listen to it. I have to believe that was a good decision. I did listen to Linda McCartney. The recording is from her mic feed while the Beatles were singing "Hey Jude". The woman was bad. Awful. Flatter than plate glass. And there's over 5 minutes of it.

It did make me think a little better of the Bing Crosby version. Also, by comparison, she makes even my singing sound good.

Other outtakes include Marlon Brando calling Burt Reynolds narcissistic (!) and an interview with Tom Brokaw. Warning, do not listen to Tommy Lasorda, Earl Weaver, Casey Kasem or the one with Martin and Lewis if there are children around or you object to profanity.

No Actual Cities Were Harmed in this Test

This morning I destroyed part of Los Angeles by smacking it with an asteroid. I used the diameter, density, velocity, and impact angle of the one that created Ries Crater in Germany.

The worst that would happen to me (a couple thousand miles away) would be a fine dusting of debris and a mild wind. On the other hand, Los Angeles would end up with a crater that was almost 17 miles wide. It could be worse, an asteroid the size of the one that hit Chixulub, Mexico would leave a crater over 112 miles wide. I would see debris just over an inch thick and the air blast would be strong enough to damage my roof and knock down some trees. Someone a bit closer, in Las Vegas for example, would be feel the thermal radiation from the impact in just under 10 seconds. It would be hot enough to ignite clothing and trees. In less than a minute and a half, Las Vegas would feel a 10.2 earthquake. In just over 5 minutes it would be buried under 40 feet of debris. In about 24 minutes an air blast would hit with a velocity of 1327.6 mph. Not that anyone would be left there to notice it.

Go forth and wreak destruction.

Feeling Spacey

It's too cloudy to see any stars tonight but thanks to Your Sky, I can see what I'm missing. Enter your latitude and longitude, check the radio button for the correct hemisphere, and click to see a sky map. You can also select horizon views.

By changing the date, you can see what the sky would have looked like at any time from 4713 B.C. to 8000 A.D. You can also download Home Planet, free software to track the sun, planets, stars, earth satellites, asteroids and comets.

Play Pablo

Mr. Picassohead

Supporting Our Troops

Operation Mom is a group which directly supports our military and their families through care packages for the troops and care groups for their families. There is a media section on the site with newspaper articles and videos about the organization.

They are selling t-shirts and other stuff to help support their efforts.

Ours to Fight For

The Government Publications Department at Northwestern University Library has a comprehensive collection of over 300 posters issued by U.S. Federal agencies from the onset of war through 1945.

More selections are in the "Continue Reading..."