I finished up reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road recently, which ended up being very good. If everything he writes is as good as this and No Country For Old Men, he may just find himself on my list of favorite writers – a list of which I’m sure he has been eyeing for some time now.

I also started reading a few other books, one being Terry Pratchett’s The Color of Magic, which is the first of the Discworld series. I’m not all that far into it, but so far it’s a pretty great read if you’re into that kind of sci-fi fantasy type stuff. Pratchett’s wit is one most writers would kill to have, I think. The last book I’ve been eyeing through as of late is Jean-Paul Sartre’s Essays in Existentialism. Existentialism is a fascinating philosophy to me, and Sartre really hits the nail on the head with what it’s all about. Some existentialists get pretty out there and silly, but Sartre is always right where it should be. If it’s a subject that interests you, I might suggest looking to his writings first.

Oh and in paroozing the interwebs I came across an article Warren Ellis linked to and found it rather amusing. I wont even tell you what it’s all about so you can go and see the headline in big font for yourself.

This is a pretty great blog that drags up articles in old science and mechanics magazines and republishes them for all the world to laugh at. This article in particular is rather amusing, as it predicts what life will be like forty years from now in the distant year of 2008.

Some correct predictions from the article

• TVs will be flat
• Computers are important in everyday life
• Much of commerce is done with credit cards
• Electronic shopping is a common reality

Some incorrect predictions from the article

• What’s an air-cushion car?
• 200 passenger rocket ships don’t fly around to other continents
• There are no hypersonic passenger planes that fly at 4,000 mph
• Houses aren’t pre built and easily added onto via “modules” and “modules” aren’t given out as common wedding gifts
• Everything isn’t made out of plastic. Seriously whoever wrote this article really thought plastic was the ultimate wave of the future.
• The average work day is not four hours
• The “pace of technological advance” is not so intense that two hours a day are used to study it by every common jobholder
• TV screens do not cover an entire wall in most homes
• A typical vacation is not a stay at an undersea resort or on a hotel satellite
• There is no “intelligence pill” that makes everyone smart
• Heart disease has not been “virtually eliminated”

All in all the article is pretty hilarious, but I think this is my favorite part.

Other conveniences ease kitchenwork. The housewife simply determines in advance her menus for the week, then slips prepackaged meals into the freezer and lets the automatic food utility do the rest. At preset times, each meal slides into the microwave oven and is cooked or thawed. The meal then is served on disposable plastic plates.

With all these amazing technological advances one thing is sure to stay the same – the kitchen is still the woman’s proper place in the home!

More of a reason than his war heavy foreign policy, his support for No Child Left Behind, his proposed corporate tax cuts, or his support of NAFTA in its current form. Consider yourself warned of the horrific events that unfold in this video.

So this week is spring break for me, which means that I will inevitably waste my extra days off without realizing that they had even come and gone. Then I’ll be back in school next Monday and will have done none of the homework I’d promised myself I’d do over the break. Frankly, I’m already off to a great start!

I’ve been wasting some time lately reading about the Large Hadron Collider being built in Switzerland that’s supposed to be turned on in May. I know people probably always have an inflated idea of the importance of the time in which they live, but man. What a time to be alive. I wont pretend to understand everything going on with the thing, but from what I gather experiments carried out with the particle accelerator may close big gaps in our understanding of physics, like how some types of particles acquire mass. Even more interesting is the (very small) possibility that it may end up producing Strangelets and Micro Black Holes, in which case no one is really sure what would happen. Will the earth be devoured by Micro Black Holes of our own creation in May? Probably not, but it’s hard to deny that the possibility is engrossing. Am I in favor of turning on a machine that could possibly induce such an outcome? Hell yes I am! We’ve all got to go sometime, and I can’t think of a more epic way to die than via a man made black hole. Well, maybe if cloned dinosaurs were somehow also involved.

I didn’t sleep last night. Not because I was playing the new Smash Bros, but because I made this video.

All the footage is from Bill Nye’s show "The Eyes of Nye." And it’s all innuendo.

Has to be one of these custom keyboards, available for sale at a modest price. And by modest I mean starting at $800. People always talk about what kind of cars they would buy if they won the lottery or somehow otherwise stumbled on a large sum of money. Screw the cars, this is the type of stuff I would indulge in. There are a few other designs at the site, all of which are amazing for various reasons. In defense of the high price, the builder had this to say.

Due to the broad range of customizations and configurations, it is difficult to simply put a price tag on each keyboard, but they usually range from about $800 to $1000 or more depending on the complexity and intricacy of the design, the choice of metals, options, finish, etc. This may sound like a lot, but when you consider that each keyboard can cost up to $300 in parts alone, then factor in the time it takes to find authentic antique keys, disassemble them, design the custom key inserts, cut and align them all, cut the original keys down to round stalks, paint each key and keystalk by hand, crimp 105 keys together, cut the metal frames, drill the holes, file, sand, prep and polish the metal, assemble everything, solder the leds, fit the jewel lights, test the keyboards, etc,etc,etc….I really don’t make much money on them.

I don’t know if I buy into the idea that it really costs him $800 to make one of these, but who am I to argue?

I was never a huge fan of Nine Inch Nails – even when I tried to get into them a few years ago it only took a couple weeks for my interest to wane almost completely.

Then Ghosts I-IV came out, much to everyone’s surprise, in a very high quality, successful, impressive example of digital distribution done right a few days ago. I heard it was all electronic and instrumental, which sounded pretty good to me for a few reasons, the main one being that I like the idea of music that’s strong enough to stand on it’s own without a singing “front man.” It forces the music itself to be more interesting instead of relying so heavily on a familiar voice. Also, like Derrick and I were talking about earlier, Trent Reznor’s lyrics are historically embarrassingly angsty. Never the less, even with the nice release of an entirely electornic instramental album I was somewhat apprehensive about caring.

Then people started talking to me about the release, most of them talking about how they wish Reznor was singing, and almost everyone mentioning mixed feelings about it all. Finally I decide that I want to hear it for myself. I download Ghosts I, basically the first disc of the four disc set, which was released absolutely free via a torrent. Much to my surprise I liked it quite a bit and paid the OUTRAGOUS sum of five dollars to download all four discs.

While it’s far to early to tell if the release will stand the Adam Test of Time, which is perhaps the most rigorous test any piece of music can be put through, I can say that for now I’m really loving it. If nothing else I love the idea of so many people downloading and listening to it simply because it’s Nine Inch Nails, regardless of the fact that much of it sounds more like Brian Eno or Boards of Canada than Nine Inch Nails.

Is actually pretty funny. I just got done listening to the audiobook version of David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day and I enjoyed it. It was read by the author too, which is always a godsend. One thing that did get on my nerves was that at the end of each essay (and occasionally at the end of each chapter of an essay) some goofy piano roll or musical cue plays. It seems silly and out of place and often feels like it’s supposed to be the *badum tish* drum-and-cymbal part at the end of a joke. It almost ruined some of the stories, but all in all it was an easy to listen to, amusing, fluffy piece of work. Definitely a nice break after listening to 10 CDs of Noam Chomsky. Next on my list will probably be Life of Pi, because a friend of mine keeps hounding me to read it and I’m starting to feel bad that I haven’t.

I also read Scott McCloud’s follow up to Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics. Published well before broadband was a universal reality, RC was way ahead of its time. Parts of it sound silly now, other parts have turned out to be dead on, and other parts still have a good chance of becoming reality. The book was essentially a state of the industry address with a clarion call for a shift to digital distribution of comics because of the many advantages a theoretical system like that would have. The book has been attacked on nearly all fronts, but made some really valid points. While I think the mainstream digital distribution of comics (and other printed media) is still a bit of a ways away, we’re starting to see the beginnings of it now with things like the Amazon Kindle. Comics will probably be some of the most resistant things to a switch to this kind of format because of the collection aspect of the physical books, but eventually it well be, at least, an option.

While not as universally appealing as Understanding Comics was, Reinventing Comics was a good read, albeit a bit wordy at parts. In the end Understanding Comics is a history that’s potentially of interest to anyone who cares about art while Reinventing is strictly for those who have an interest in the future of the comics industry and where digital distribution might be able to take it.