Okay...so the blog's dead. Till further notice, anyway.

ARRRRGGGHHH!!!!

Hi folks, the blog's not dead, I'm not dead, just in stasis till I find a place to host my image files or my isp gets off their ass and hooks me back up with some webspace. Hopefully this will take place in the very near future, until then just go on over to MeFi or something, nothing to see here. My sincerest apologies to everyone.

Grrr....

Hi folks, just thought I'd check in and say hi...apparently my isp decided to change my username and the number I dial-in to and apparently they've also totally screwed up all the pictures on my blog I've uploaded over the past freaking year and a half. This sucks. I guess I'll have to call them tomorrow and figure out what gives, if my ftp account is still there, if they dumped all the pics, whatever. I'm not too happy right now.

Trivia Time

     Howa bout a game of Trivial Pursuit? It's a Flash preview of the 20th Anniversary Edition of the popular quiz game.

Speak & Spell

     Someone made a Flash version of the popular Texas Instruments toy you can play with here, either for nostalgia's sake or because you're still a crappy speller and could just use the practice.

Superman's Contract Extended

     I just thought it was worth mentioning that Jerry Rice was given a six-year extension on his contract to play with the Raiders, that would make him 46 at the end of the contract. What's this guy made of? He's still seventh in receptions at 40 years of age, by the way.

Say What?

"I get to go to lots of overseas places, like Canada."
- Britney Spears, Pop Singer

     This and other pearls of wisdom can be found at GoodQuotes.com.

Was it Lionel Richie? Argh....

     Well, I could write a description of this Flash game, but I may as well save my breath, the title's pretty much self-explanatory - Name That Tune!

Topher's Breakfast Cereal Character Guide

     A detailed look at cereal spokestoons like the venerable Sugar Crisp Sugar Bear (above).

Flash Flash Revolution

     A knockoff of Dance Dance Revolution, in which you use your arrow keys to keep time with the beat of various mixes. This one's pretty darn big so if you're not on cable you'd best have some patience.

The Batcycle

     One man's endless quest for perfection continues as he attempts to realize his dream of having a reproduction of the TV Batman's "Batcycle", complete with sidecar.

Make-a-Flake

     Make your own snowflake, by cutting out a paper one in Flash. There were fifty-thousand made, last I checked, in their gallery of user-created flakes and some of them were pretty good, too.

     If you're feeling more industrious, however, and you'd like to make a real snowflake from good old water and cold air, you can go here and do just that.

An Ad Man, I Am

     The advertising work of Dr. Seuss. Link via Boingboing, by the way, as was the arcade cabinet project, it's about the only page I've had the time to browse tonight. I'm about to fall asleep over here, as you can tell by the really lame article title.

So...You Want to Play Donkey Kong?

     Two guys are building an ultra-sweet M.A.M.E cabinet, with all the extras. You can see pics of their arcade dream machine and read the logs they're making of their project's progress here.

Your Name in Chinese

     Calligraphic Chinese representations of many common names for wallpaper or screensavers.

Mirror Sytes

I Say Ketchup, You Say Catsup

     In yet another example of the fact that for every oddball obsession there is in this world, there's a website devoted to it, in this case, that obsession would be ketchup. I'm guessing that whoever made this site is probably one of those nuts who'll douse a perfectly good steak in the stuff, something that always makes me cringe when I see it.

Hurt

     In case you haven't seen it, Johnny Cash, who's been in very poor health recently, did a video of his cover of Nine Inch Nail's song, Hurt. You can see it here, on Mark Romanek's website, along with several other award-winning videos he's directed. Although the pairing of musical sensibilities sounded a little odd to me at first- NIN and Johnny Cash- it's a perfect fit and a really moving piece of work I highly recommend seeing.

Should We Be Happy or Worried?

     Well, big news in blogging land: Pyra Labs, the company behind this whole Blogger show, have been bought by Google, the internet search behometh. Maybe this will be a good thing, I'm not sure, but I'm thankful, at least, that they didn't sell it to AOL or Microsoft or something, that would have been really scary.

For All you Valentine's Day Lovers Out There...

     I'd just like to say this: the chocolate industry is driven by child slave labor and diamond's are over-valued rocks ....enjoy.
     As for myself, I plan on spending the holiday as always, curled up under my covers in the fetal position, lights off and curtains drawn, The Doors' song The End playing in an endless loop on my Winamp. Now that's a good, old-fashioned V-Day, if you ask me.

Exotic Sodas

     Outlaw Hemp Butterscotch? White Tail Birch? These are a couple of the out-there sodas profiled here. Only one of the bunch I've ever tried is Vernor's Ginger Ale, which I grew up on. Great stuff and I hadn't thought about it in years, but the stuff does tend to make you sneeze, like they mentioned in their review. Good, good stuff, wish I had a bottle of it. Incidentally, it's the oldest soda in the United States, first produced in 1858.
     It's funny, with all the choices out there as far as soft drinks go, it seems that 9 times out of ten I'll just grab a Mountain Dew. I like a lot of different sodas- the occasional root beer, the cherry-flavored stuff, cream soda- I guess my brain's just so hard-wired by advertising that, when faced with a myriad of choices in the convenience store cooler, I'll always unthinkingly grab whatever the media wants me to drink at the time and go along with the rest of the herd.
     Next time I'm faced with the prospect of buying a drink, I'm going to make it a point to take a moment, look around and go for something different.

Happy Valentine's Day...Do You Feel Lucky?

     Smith and Wesson unveiled their largest handgun ever this week, the .50 caliber Magnum. You have to wonder if this merely a coincidence or a case of shrewd marketing?

Mind Reader

     A neat little mind-reading trick.

More Pencil Carving Craziness

     I put up a link to this type of thing a few months back, but here's another page of carved pencils I saw on MeFi awhile ago that's even more impressive. Someone's got a whole lot of patience. I wonder how many of these carvings get broken and tossed out before a finished one is completed?

Just In Case Anyone Out There Ever Wondered What I Looked Like...

     The person above is me. Never talked much about myself on here or felt the need to put up pictures, but I photoshopped this pic the other night and since it sort of fit in with the scheme I figured "what the heck?".
     In case anyone's into that sort of thing and is curious about the filters I used for the spacey-stuff, the background was done with Glitterato and the Earth was made with Lunar Cell, same thing I made the one on the top of the page with, two filters by Flaming Pear. I've been playing with PS a lot lately and maybe I'll start putting up a few pics here and there.

Knowing Poe

     A look at the literary genius that was Edgar Allen Poe, his life and times, his letters and more.

Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman

     It's a rare artist that kicked the kind of ass Leonardo kicked and his work as an illustrator is showcased nicely on this site.

Hat Tricks

     No, we're not talking about hockey, we're talking about tricks you can do...with hats. Yeah, I know, who cares about doing tricks with hats. For some reason, though, I can see my friend Bill getting a charge out of this one as some of the tricks might fall under the category of juggling, although indirectly, at best.

Time Passages

     Playing With Time takes a look at the world around us in an unusual way, slowing down events too fast for us to perceive- like the blink of an eye or an exploding firecracker- and speeding up gradual processes, like the change of seasons, so we can appreciate what's really going on. The site, which is an offshoot of a travelling museum exhibit, has a lot of amazing Quicktime footage that puts time in a unique perspective.

Web Zen

     Lots of really great stuff here. This current page focuses on retro-goodies like Pong and other early videogames, old computers, 80's nostalgia items like the Cube and more. Tons of good pics of early machines and some humorous stuff as well. There's more fun to be found in the site's archives, though, so poke around awhile, you can waste some serious time here, great site. (via Boingboing...where I also picked up the previous Grover is Bitter link)

Grover is Bitter

     Event though this sort of thing has been done before on the web (I'm thinking of the now-defunct Bert is Evil), this VH1 Behind the Music-type profile of Sesame Street's Grover is still a pretty funny read.

Yikes! Celebs Without Makeup

     Some downright frightening shots of various Hollywood pretty-persons without their makeup on.

The Digital Needle

     This is one of those things where you wonder to yourself, "what got into the guy that he'd even come up with something like this?". A fellow has apparently compiled software that can allow you to transfer audio from old records by scanning the disks' grooves. I doubt there's a huge market for this and there are obviously much better ways to go about tackling the problem, but it's a pretty nifty concept anyway.

The Doors of the 21st Century...

     Well, from the sound of this merciless review, The Doors reunion sounds like a horrible spectacle. With only two members of the original group performing, Robby Krieger and Ray Manzarak, and backed by drummers which seem to be changing from day to day (John Densmore, who's suffering from tinnitus, has been kicked to the curb and is suing) and the former front-man for The Cult in the lead-singer position, it sounds pretty scary.
     Dancing shamans and pictures of Nixon are part of the show and I think that we should all be very, very grateful to Jim Morrison for making the responsible and savvy decision to die young, while he was still cool, in that grandest of rock star traditions.
     Thanks to his sacrifice, we've mercifully been spared the vision of a fat and balding Lizard King in too-tight leather pants, dancing around and singing Love Me Two Times behind a giant Pespi-Cola billboard. For that, we are all eternally in his debt.

Valentine's Gifts You Don't Want to Recieve

     Yet another Photoshop contest from the folks at Worth1000.com.

Kevin Mitnick, You've Been Hax0red!

     Kevin Mitnick, the famous hacker who was recently released from his court-imposed restrictions barring him from using computers or the internet, was apparently amused to find that his own website, a showcase for his new security company, Defensive Thinking, was itself hacked twice in the last few weeks. Look alive, Kevin ;)

And the Beat Goes On...and On....and On...and On....and On...

     In what has to be the most ridiculous waste of time ever, avante garde composter...ahem, I mean composer John Cage's 639-year-long musical composition was begun on a German church organ Wednesday. Yes, you heard that right. The piece lasts 639 years. Currently, the first three notes of the late author's piece, called As Slow As Possible are being played and will go on for a year and a half.
     I have to confess here, I don't know much about John Cage's music, other than the fact that his estate/record company sued a guy awhile back for stealing his brilliant idea for an album track of just minutes of silence, entitled 4'33", which he released in 1952. Look, I dig the whole "avant garde" thing and maybe this is just some sort of Warhol-ish prank Cage played on the world. If so, hats off to the guy, it's gotta be the greatest practical joke in history, 'cause hundreds of years after the guy's dead some moron's liable to be sitting in a church in Germany waiting for the last note of this song to finish so he can clap and stomp his feet and that's pretty funny, but It's hard for me to believe that even he could have taken this seriously enough to expect someone would ever play the thing in it's entirety. There's a huge difference, to me, at least, between something being art and being novel and I think this is merely a cute idea taken to ridiculous extreme and I have to question the sanity of the folks behind this.
     Have to admit, though, I'm curious as to whether the whole song will ever be played out, a lot can happen in 639 years.

Paint it Black

     Scientists have created the "blackest" black ever, by dipping a shiny surface momentarily in nitric acid. They plan to use this super-black surface, which reflects 10 to 20 times less light than the black paint currently used to reduce unwanted reflections in telescopes, to improve the way we see the universe and allow intruments here on earth, as well as the Hubble, to see farther and better.

One Word

     This site simply presents you with one word, each day, and asks you to write about said word for sixty seconds, after which, you can see what kind of things others were inspired to say and the results can be interesting.

The Days of Wine and Spandex

     Denim and Leather celebrates the era of the eighties hair band, when bands like Accept and Motley Crue threatened a worldwide shortage of hairspray and studded belts were a staple fashion accessory. There's an extensive list of the players of the era, along with games, a thesaurous and numerous links to the subject.
     Jeff, Phil...I don't know if you guys ever read this thing or not, but this one's for you, you headbanging freaks.

Neurotic Poets

     A site that takes a look into the minds of several poets, such as Edgar Allen Poe (above), whose briliant legacies seem to point out a link between their artistic genius and their troubled mental states and asks the question of whether the two might be linked. Along with Poe, tragic luminaries of prose such as Dickenson, Plath and Shelley are profiled and I noticed, in a blurb at the bottom of the homepage, there's a profile of Jim Morrison in the works, as well, which is only fitting. I think The Lizard King would have fit right in at a cocktail party with this crew.

A Journey Into the Mind of a Parrot

     I don't know what to make of this site, really...it's about the late budgie parrot, Victor, whose owner claims that not only could his bird talk, but that he understood language and could carry on conversations with a human-like grasp of the ideas conveyed by speech. He's compiled tons of sound files and research data about the bird and seems absolutely serious about it. I'm not sure if the guy's parrot was a genius or if it's some elaborate hoax but it was an interesting site, nonetheless and you can make your own conclusions.

Do We Really Need This Stuff?

     The Museum of Weird Consumer Culture, a tribute to the most perplexing, unnecessary and downright idiot consumer items around, such as the dog diapers pictured above. I don't know, though...I really think the solar-powered milk frother sounds like something everyone should have. I don't know how I've managed to live without it this long, frankly.

Public Domain Photos

     A rather large collection of public domain photographs as well as other resources for raw image material for projects you may have in mind. Mostly gathered from N.A.S.A., the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other govt. sources, these images are available for fair-use application with some restrictions applying.
     The main site, Grokking the Gimp, is full-to-bursting with tutorials and info on the freeware graphics application, which many prefer or put on par with Adobe's Photoshop product. I must admit I've never used the Gimp but I hear it's a great program.

In Memory of the Columbia

     With the loss of the Columbia shuttle and it's crew today, I felt it would be a slight to them not to say something here. It's hard to think of anything to do but express my utmost sympathy for their families and my absolute respect for the people who were onboard.
     While watching the reports on the news yesterday morning, I was reminded of something Tom Wolfe said, regarding the Apollo program, in his book, The Right Stuff:

     What is it that makes a man willing to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas, Titan or Saturn rocket, and wait for someone to light the fuse?

     There are people out there, unbelievably, who actually tried to profit off this tragedy. I was amazed to read that within hours, perhaps minutes after this catastrophe, auctions for bogus "debris" from the craft were on Ebay.
     There are those who'd rejoice in it, as well. Many Iraqi's reportedly have, calling it "God's vengeance" for encroaching on their land.
     I can't begin to describe how these reports sickened me. As far as vultures of the Ebay auctions are concerned, there's probably nothing anyone could say to show them how misguided and base their actions are, I imagine their hearts are so jaded that nothing could elicit pangs of concience from them.
     To the people of Iraq, though, I would ask that they to take no joy in this event, as it was not a tragedy to be mourned by only Americans, but by everyone. The seven astronauts on board, I believe, weren't in space for the benefit of one nation or for Western culture's advancement, but for all of humankind. I truly believe that although they were patriots, one and all, their grandest goals in life weren't merely the advancement of the United States of America, but the the advancement of the entire world and it's people.
     Russell 'Rusty' Schweikart, upon returning from his mission on Apollo 9, remarked:

     "As you pass from sunlight into darkness and back again every hour and a half, you become startlingly aware how artificial are thousands of boundaries we've created to separate and define. And for the first time in your life you feel in your gut the precious unity of the Earth and all the living things it supports."

     Reading that, it makes you think that if everyone could see the Earth from that viewpoint, it might go a long way towards achieving some sort of brotherhood among all the world's people. Even if we had the resources to achieve such a thing, though, it would still be impossible, perhaps, as not everyone has the courage of the seven people that died yesterday, nor the vision to look beyond their earth's war-torn borders towards a better world for us all.
     Their bravery and their willingness to sacrifice their lives in the name of furthering the scope of man's knowledge should be commended and their heroism remembered always.

     Man must rise above the Earth - to the top of the atmosphere and beyond - for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives.

- Socrates

Barry's Blog

     This is old news by now, I realize, but Dave Barry has a blog. I know a lot of folks dig his humor, so if you happen to be one of them and weren't aware of this fact, you might want to swing by and check it out.

Consoles that Sucked

     A look at game consoles that didn't make it. Either their price tags were outrageous, their concepts were flawed or they just never really had a good reason to exist in the first place.

When You Just Can't Handle the Thrill-a-Minute Action of Solitaire

     For the terminally bored or enthusiasts of the popular time-killer, Jigzone has lots of online jigsaw puzzles of varying degrees of difficulty for you to while away the hours with.

A Letter from the Editor

Re: The proposed "new look" of The Ends of the Earth, mentioned in a previous post.

     Well, I really did intend to put up a new template, in fact, I worked on the thing, off and on for probably six or seven hours over the past few days. However, when it came time to put it into action, I looked at it, looked at the template I have now and just really liked this one better, so why fix what ain't broke, huh? I'm sure at some point I will be changing the look of my page, but until I come up with something that's markedly better, I'm just going to hang with the current look and perhaps give it a few tweaks here and there. In better news, I've fixed the archives, so there's no longer a Santa Claus on the older pages, nor that gimmicky snow-flake effect, which I only meant to leave up here for a week or so, back during the holidays. Also, having gotten all that crap out of the way, as well as some pressing personal problems I won't go into here, I'm now free to return you to you regularly-scheduled diet of neato links and semi-lucid rants. That is all, thank you for reading.

Beware of Xupiter, the Browser Tool from Hell

     Some evil programmers whose website resides on Hungary have created a particularly nasty little download that installs itself without your permission and hijacks your browser, periodically changing your start page to the Xupiter.com homepage. Surfers who've been unfortunate enough to have downloaded Xupiter say it's incredibly hard to get rid of. Though it does have an "uninstall" program, it either doesn't work or makes things even worse. If you happen to find yourself at it's mercy, you may have to resort to using something like Spybot Search and Destroy or, for more advanced users, editing your registry.
     Having personally dealt with a couple similiar programs that took over my browser settings, I can assure you that nothing will make you madder than connecting to the net and finding that not only has your start page changed (which would be aggravating enough in and of itself) but you can't change it back, no matter how hard you try.
     I had one awhile back - EzyCyberSearch - if I recall correctly, that was nearly as frustrating as this and my friend, Phillip, is currently dealing with another, which offers no uninstall or information on it's homepage and even changes your address bar search settings so your browser is directed to their own, utterly useless search. A search for, say, National Geographic won't turn up their website in the results, only links to speciously-related items you can buy on various e-stores. This is the internet at it's worst. I say track these scum down and hang them alongside the spammers, the bot-makers and all the rest of the slimy, sneaky opportunists on the internet and let's be quick about it, okay?

Acno's Energizer

     A neat little Flash game of the cutesy-character-who-has-to-solve-puzzles-to-get-to-the-next-level variety.

Update Regarding My Lack of Updates:

     Okay, here's the thing, I hate having this screwed up travesty of a webpage on here, all scrambled up like it was put in a blender, so there's a whole new look on the way, may keep it awhile, may change it back to something resembling this, not sure yet. At any rate, I have some things I need to burn to disk so I can just reformat this stupid computer of mine first, it's in as big a mess as this page, currently and it's time to get my ducks in a row. Meanwhile, visit the archives and poke around there, sure you can find something entertaining, or just go visit some of my links, lot of good things there to keep you busy. Give me a few days and I should have the new, possibly improved Ends finished. Thanks again for stopping by.

Welcome to the (HTML) Jungle

     Well, as many of you have probably noticed, my site's all weirded out. I'm not exactly sure what I've done to wreak such havoc on my page, but I'll try and get things sorted out soon. I may well just end up starting over and redesigning the whole thing or at least try and put things together like they were, I sort of let things get out of hand here and it's hard to tell what's giving me the problems, thus far. I know it looks like a real mess here, though and I'm not the only one seeing it that way, so I guess it's time to roll up my sleeves, get under the hood and get dirty. Thank you for your patience.

Stop the Presses!

     Virtual Journalist...do you have what it takes to make it in the reporting biz?

Celebrities Eating!

     A site devoted to one thing and one thing only: pictures of celebrities eating. I haven't seen all the celebs included yet, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the gallery of munching superstars, like J-LO (above, enjoying what appears to be a tasty burger), is woefully lacking in snapshots of Calista Flockheart or Kate Moss.

Holy Cow, Dig What's in Store for Playstation 3!

     The next incarnation of the popular gaming console, slated for 2005, will supposedly incorporate new chip technology nicknamed "The Cell", a supercomputer-on-a-chip that IBM and other companies shelling out 400 million dollar's worth of money to the project predict will be able to perform a whopping one trillion+ calculations in a second, making it roughly 100 times as powerful as a 2.5 Ghz Pentium 4 CPU.
     Kind of makes you wonder what Tekken 5 or 6 or whatever will be like, huh? Actually, if the thing's going to be that powerful, maybe they should roll out a few games with a different slant: Cure Cancer Extreme 2005, EA DNA Splicer, Quantum Mechanics Man, etc. Just so long as you can play Pac-man on it, though, I'll be happy.

Busted!

     A great big pile of celebrity mugshots, such as this glamorous shot of ZsaZsa Gabor.
     Needless to say, such luminaries as Robert Downey Jr. and Nicki Sixx of Motley Crue fame, have more than one.

Fly Guy

     This is just the coolest little Flash cartoon I've seen in awhile. Be sure and explore all the areas and interact with the things you find on your as you fly around - especially the little UFO - personally, I thought that was the best bit.
     A very original and entertaining flight of fancy.

Taking Criminal Stupidity to Breathtaking New Heights

     A man robbing a bank, upon finding out the bank was closed and there was no money to be had, steals a clock radio and a bunch of candy. The police track him down by following the empty wrappers left behind. What was the candy? Dum-Dums, of course.

     Another criminal mastermind steals a snake-handler's bag from his car at a traffic light. What do you suppose was in the bag?