Now that John Edwards has bowed out of the race for the President, we are basically down to two choices on the Democratic side of the ticket.  Hillary/Bill and Obama/Oprah.  And to top it off, a co-worker sent me a picture of the first pairing that scared the crap out of me.  So what else am I to do with it but share.  And to be fair, I tried to find a mashup of Obopa, but no luck, so I’ll just post a stock picture of the two of them.

So with that out of the way, the term Hillbilly got me thinking…just what would my hillbilly name be?  Well, the interwebs is a great tool for questions like this, so I went to the Googles and asked and came up with this site.  Turns out my hillbilly name is…drum roll please…

Your Hillbilly Name Is…

Jed Beaver

I added this movie to my Netflix list after seeing the preview on another movie I had rented.  I don’t usually watch the previews and I hate DVD’s that make you sit through them by disabling the “menu” button while they’re playing.  But for some unknown reason I watched this preview and this time it paid off in a pretty good movie experience.  It’s not a movie for everyone, but if you can get past the anti-death penalty message, the human story is an interesting one.

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I saw this video on another site a few days back and it’s been stuck in my head ever since. (I can’t remember where or I’d post a link to it..urgh, getting old I guess)  I finally figured out what was bothering me about it.  Watch the video first, then read on for my issue with the questioner.

The video has embedding disabled, so you’ll have to click on over to YouTube to watch it.

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Go over and look at the picture from the Astronomy Picture of the Day for January 25th.  This has to be one of the most amazing images I’ve ever seen.  Click on the image to get the full resolution picture, save it to your PC and make it your background image.  You will be seriously amazed.  It is frickin’ awesome.

If you don’t want to click on over there, I’ve put a small version of it below to entice you.

Believe me, you won’t be disappointed.

Home Theater Magazine’s February 2008 issue has a couple of really good articles.  One giving a tour of the B&W speaker factory with tons of cool pictures and the second article comparing 7 HDTV’s which included the 5 TV’s I had considered when I was making my purchase back in November last year.  I’ve listed the models below in alphabetical order.

• JVC LT-47X898 – LCD TV
• Mitsubishi 57833 – DLP TV
• Panasonic TH-50PZ750 – Plasma TV
• Pioneer PDP-5080HD – Plasma TV
• Samsung HLT6187S – LED based DLP
• Sharp LC-52D64U – LCD TV
• Sony KDS-60A3000 – SXRD (LCOS) TV

How did my Mitsubishi 57833 fare?  Well, lets just say the title above says it all…but which one won??

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I know, doesn’t sound like it should be posted under the category of “fun stuff”, but really it’s pretty cool.  MIT has put many of their classes online.  You can check out the list of courses here:  MIT Open Courseware

The list covers many topics from the expected Engineering and Physics, to areas such as Economics, Architecture and Music and Theater arts.  There are something like 1800 courses online.  Many contain audio and/or video clips of the lectures.

They even have Professor Lewin giving an introductory physics class with all his crazy demonstrations.  Now that’s the way to teach physics!

Ok, so it’s not everyone’s idea of a way to spend an evening, but it’s quite a resource of information from some of the smartest people around.  So for me personally, if I have the choice between watching some crappy reality show or the latest Jackass movie or sifting through a few of these lectures, I’ll choose the lectures.

I’m definitely late in posting this, but it’s been on my list and I’m just now getting around to it.  Sorry, but better late than never, right.  The 2007 Darwin award winners have been announced and it’s an interesting mix this year.  Everything from alcohol enema’s to dancing with trains.  So go on over and read the final list and be sad for the poor saps who died or feel glad that the gene pool has been cleansed a bit.  I’ll leave that up to you and your conscience.

2007 Darwin Award Winners

Also don’t forget, Darwin Day is nearly here.  Mark your calendar, February 12th is Happy Darwin Day, celebrating Darwins birthday.  I’ll need to run to Hallmark soon to get my cards.

I had heard really good things about this film from friends, all of whom are into science fiction movies.  So the week before this movie came out on DVD, I put it at the top of my Netflix queue and immediately saw it go to “long wait” when it came out.  I had to wait an extra week after its release to get it at the house.  Not bad, I can be patient for a good story and in that I was not disappointed.

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This would actually be funny if it wasn’t so frickin scary.

The first thing that caught my eye happened even before the movie began, it was the MPAA rating information that gets thrown up on the screen showing their rating of PG-13 and the reason given was “Irreverant humor throughout”…gotta love it.  Now, I’m not a regular viewer of the Simpsons, but it’s been around long enough I’ve seen a few episodes over the years and find the humor pretty funny.  I enjoy all the quick one-liners that get thrown in to see if we’re paying attention.  The movie was definitely funny, but as Homer points out at the beginning of the movie, why would I pay to watch something I can see for free.  That’s how I felt about this movie, it seemed like any other Simpsons episode, just longer and with better animation.

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