We played “Stupidest People” for the preliminary round of the Songslam. There’s no video available just yet from Friday, but here’s the song from Zille:

The Stupidest People

But wait there’s more! Remember that time we got “inspired” and came up with the idea for she was? That was also the day of conception for 4 or 5 more proto-songs, amongst them, this one. And at least for this example, the first run improv worked out for the whole song, save a few revisions.

Proto-Stupidest People

This never gets old. Correction: this is getting old. Video footage and interviews of a recent Teaparty anti-healthcare rally. Of course we don’t know that the entire crowd was as ignorant as these folks interviewed here, but it’s pretty clear that it wasn’t too hard to find enough people at the rally who literally didn’t know what they were talking about.

What really baffles me is why anyone would be willing to travel across the country to join in the rally and yet have absolutely no desire to inform oneself.

There’s no such thing as identical cousins.

I almost fell for this one, and I wasn’t born yesterday. Thanks to ole Thunderbird for watching my back. What’s the word?
Phishing is particularly dangerous because 1) it is possible to fake a return email address and 2)it is possible to use misleading links.

I haven’t a clue how it’s done, but steps can be taken to make a maligned email appear to come from a legit sender, like pictured here.

Secondly, you can make a link go to a false address by changing the href tag .  Like this:  http://www.yahoo.com if you click on that link you’ll see it does not go where it would appear that it should.   Or just look down below in the status bar when rolling over said link.

If you look at the status bar before clicking, be sure to take a good look, too.  Domain names are always the last thing before the first single slash:
For example:  a url says:  http://www.google.com  — that’s google.  http://maps.google.com — still google, pointing to the subdomain maps.  Subdomains go to the left.  But http://www.google.com.seezen.net is not google, it’s seezen.net, with a subdomain called “com” and a sub-subdomain “google”.  So the ruse is to use a legit sounding subdomain in your evil webaddress to throw off the scent.  You wouldn’t click on http://www.iamavirus.com, but you might fall for http://www.google.com.iamavirus.com, which is basically what the one I got today does.

The final ingredient for a phish scam is to cause some false alarm, for example, a fake message from ebay saying that your account has been hacked.  However, that kind of thing has already been widely written about to the point that it would raise an automatic red flag.  This message is particularly insidious because it lacks that kind of drama and goes instead for a nagging “gotta get that done” kind of message.

And a nightmare for others.  Everyone is making fun of Damien Jean, the self-produced up-and-coming anti-pop phenom.   Beady-eyed, somber, white besocked and limber, and generally dorky looking, Damien does a little number in a half-full club with a lovely undersea wall mural.  This video is truly a …video.

From the learn something every day files:

I did not know this. Cheese is not vegetarian.  Cheese requires a rennet, to speed the coagulating process along.  And for most cheeses out there, rennet is made from the contents of the fourth stomach of a newborn calf.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rennet

http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mrennet.html

While this doesn’t directly affect my diet — I eat beef — my girlfriend is an ethical vegitarian, and I’m the cook.  So as of yesterday, she swore off cheese cold turkey.   Yay.

The thing is, there are so-called vegetarian cheeses, using plant material, microbes, or DNA for rennet.  However, I read this one here: http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/12/is-cheese-vegetarian.html

which makes an interesting point:  You can’t have milk without bearing calves, and at best only some will be kept for milking; the rest will be slaughtered eventually.

On the home stretch of her PHD, Julie has completed writing and is now revising and doing the finishing touches. It is a race against the clock, and tensions are high. Sleep cycles are stretched and completely out of sync with the rotation of the earth. Tempers flair, and dishes are washed on a less than daily basis. It’s like living with meth addicts.
Finding time to be good to oneself is very important in days like these. Yesterday, I took her to lunch at the Sushi place on the corner — there are at least four in the neighborhood. Going for a daily walk is also nice, although unlike Frank, we never bring any furniture we find on the street home with us.

And this weekend is the famous Fete de la Musique, which is a veritable orgy of busking and free concerts.

Meanwhile, Julie has enlisted her little mom to help with the proofreading, which has been an ordeal of itself. Although a very literate woman, things like copy and paste, or the fine difference between “save” and “save as” are a complete mystery to her. This is compounded by the fact that she is dealing with a computer with a German language operating system.

Fortunately, there is logmein. Although I had thought about doing it before, I could absolutely kick myself for not finding a solution like it earlier on. You install it on your mother-in-law’s computer with a password, and then you can access and control it remotely via a web browser. Amazing. Totally cool. Logmein.com

Our young birdies don’t come to the flowerbox anymore, although we see them around still. We’ve populated all the pots and boxes with shishkebab skewers to discourage anymore flower box romance taking place, cause Brother, we don’t need the hassle. However, with the warm weather and the windows open all day, we’ve had a damn pigeon fly into the flat three times in the last four days. Not cool. We are getting a cat.

Spec work, simply put, is speculative work, work for maybe-profits down the road, or just for creds. For example, someone has an idea for a T-shirt. It is expensive to print T-shirts, so we can’t pay you now to make the design. But if well sell lots of shirts we’ll pay you later, plus you will get lots of publicity. How about that?

Trying to make a living doing something creative will have you facing it almost every day, especially if you are just getting started and are just about ready to take any job you can find.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve encountered lots of good reads on the subject, so here are links.

This first one was actually from a discussion thread from a forum for Flash animators.

The funniest / saddest job posting you will see

This next one is a site that is aaaall about it.

NO!SPEC

Dani of DaniDraws has a thing or two to say about those guys on Pixish. A good little read.

Spec Work and Pixish

Tom gets all spec worked up.

Tom’s MAD Blog

Brad is pissed.
Brad Fitzpatrick

I had been meaning to post this last fall, but then things got busy. Nonetheless, with Clinton still in the race til the bitter end, I thought I might as well get it in anyway.

Last Fall, I received a chain letter from someone and it read like this:

(more…)

The award goes to… YAHOO! Answers.

How does it work?  You post a question, and anyone, regardless of their actual background, can chime in.  Then, everyone can vote on which answer they think is right.

The result is predictable: every question is hastily answered by multiple users who have know idea what they are talking about.  And nobody can be bothered to vote either.

Q: What color is Yak’s milk?

Answer 1: It’s pink.  Everyone knows that.

Answer 2: It’s white, stupid.  What else should it be?

That would make for a good gameshow on NPR (it’s called Whatdya Know), but for amassing and distributing useful knowledge, you really can’t get any more Schildburgermässig than this.