My old buddy Seth Faske has been working on a new Xbox360, Playstation3, PC, video game called Stranglehold and they just released some trailers for it. Seth is a liquid effects guy. He worked on the various splashes and splatters of blood, booze, and other liquids. It looks pretty awesome. Of course the trailers are super violent and bloody, but hey the game’s called “Stranglehold” not “Fuzzy Kitty’s Fun with Numbers”.

O.K. let’s face it. You probably have never read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Despite the the fact that many people credit this book as the foundation for the entire field of modern economics, but at 900+ pages it’s just too damn long! Since I’ve got a blog-oriented attention span, a new copy of Wealth of Nations would probably just wind up unfinished on my shelf next copies of Ulysses, The Brothers Karamazov, and Altas Shrugged (at least I got 700 pages in before giving up on the last one). So if you’re like me you should check out a new book called simply “On Wealth of Nations” by author, humorist, and all-around libertarian hell-raiser, P.J. O’Rourke. Hmm, O.K. maybe even that’s too much of a commitment. How about listening to O’Rourke’s hour-long talk about Wealth of Nations at the Common Wealth Club. Come on even I made it through that, it was hilarious. If all else fails at least read O’Rourke’s recent article in Forbes about how Adam Smith (not Al Gore) invented the internet.

Just when I thought a video couldn’t be any more awesome than “I Wanna Love You Tender” by Armi & Danny, I found this 1977 video of The Carpenters doing their version of Klaatu’s “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft“. It’s so incredible that I made Claudia watch it twice.

(thanks to Boing Boing)

I’ve started a new Willard Park Blog for “news and minutia” from my neighborhood in south-east Berkeley (Willard, Elmwood, and Telegraph). I’ve already posted some upcoming events and a few photos. The plan is to get as many of my neighbors as possible to post and comment on things. We’ve got some interesting and wild folks around so I’m hoping for some cool dialogues. Here’s my informal manifesto. Let me know if you want to get involved.

The tourism board for Cumbria has put together an awesome music video to commemorate the 200th anniversary of William Wordsworth’s I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud. The poem is rapped by a giant, red squirrel named MC Nuts. Wordsworth and the (now endangered) red squirrel are both natives of Cumbria. I imagine some Wordsworth buffs might scoff at the comical video but it was intended to reach the “YouTube Generation” and I seriously doubt that I’d be blogging about the 200th anniversary of the poem if I couldn’t include this goofy video.

Wow! I just came across UbuWeb, a gigantic, internet archive of movies, audio, and writings from “all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts“. The site has wild stuff by people ranging from Marcel Duchamp to William S. Burroughs and Philip Glass to William Wegman. UbuWeb is definitely Mecca for avant-geeks and all fans of 20th century weirdness.

My beloved, two year old, Treo 650, cell phone died today. Actually it still works fine as a camera, camcorder, pda, sms, ssh, ftp, calendar, e-mail, Commodore 64 emulator, web browsing device, it’s just that the archaic “phone” feature stopped working. I started hearing some static while I was using headphones with it a few weeks back, so I decided to order some snazy, new ones. When they showed up this afternoon I hooked them up and still heard the static. (Being the technical wizard that I am) I decided to wiggle the adapter around to improve sound quality. This of course made the sound stop all together. I unplugged the headphones and FOOM… no sound at all! After a trip to three hardware stores I was finally able to find an elusive, microscopically small, T4, star head screwdriver to open up the phone, only to discover that the internal headphone connector had shattered into eight slivers of plastic and metal. This makes the headset not work and seems to make the phone think it is in headset mode, so no sound goes to the normal phone parts either.

Sigh… I suppose I’ll throw myself on the mercy of the Sprint store to see if the can fix it or set me up with something new. Hopefully I won’t be lured into impulse buying the most expensive one in the store (again). In the mean time, call our home phone if you need to talk.

Alas, fair Treo, I knew ye well.

Check out this incredible video of extreme, wheelchair rider Aaron Fotherinham doing a bunch of crazy skateboard style tricks on street and at skate parks including a totally insane backflip off a ramp. Awesome stuff. There is a part at the end where he takes a younger kid out in a bowl that actually got me a little choked up.

I’m (mysteriously) a sucker for cute baby stuff recently. I had to share this picture of a new born baby tapir from Stranger Fruit. It was born at the Edinburgh Zoo, so Brian needs to go check it out for me in person.

Come on… I know you want to drop $149,995 for that awesome, 1982, black Trans Am. Unfortunately KITT doesn’t actually talk or throw oil slicks, but the cool red light thing in the front still works. SFGate has a more info and a picture.