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 ;)