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Long ago, when Altavista’s Babelfish service was relatively new, it was fun to pump sentences into it and cause them to be translated back and forth between multiple languages and back into English. This produced many hilarious phrases. I tried making a web form that would accomplish this automatically using some cheesy URL hacks. But it didn’t work consistently. Someone finallly made a much better version of this idea. Some sample results:

“I’m a little tea pot, short and stout.”

translates to

“They are a small POTENTIOMETER, short circuits and a beer of malzes of the tea.”

“a cookie is just a cookie, but fig newtons are fruit and cake.”

translates to

“biskuit has expert of biskuit, but Newton von Fig is fruit and hardens.”

“When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore.”

translates to

“If the moon fixes its eye like a great vector of Fleischpie of the vector of Pizzapie, is the lover.”

Someone figured out a way to merge Terraserver data with Google Maps. The best bit, though, is that you can get a Firefox plugin called Greasemonkey and a DHTML script to make it happen in your own browser:

Someone’s hacked a totally custom map into Google (Chicago Transit Authority maps) and he’s used a Greasemonkey script to integrate it directly into the regular maps.google.com map. If you’ve got Greasemonkey installed (on Mozilla), then right-click on this script: topo_monkey.user.js, and select “Install user script”.

Then, reload Google Maps, and you should see some new options (Terra, Topo, and Urban) appear next to Map and Satellite.

Why does this kick ass? Because Terraserver did not have as cool of interface as Google Maps for scrolling/zooming/browsing the maps. And now it does with this little Greasemonkey script! But I predict that Microsoft will shut this interoperable capability down somehow since all the eyeballs will be looking at Google Maps instead of Terraserver.

Nine Inch Nails: With Teeth: I got a chance to listen to a preview of this album. It makes me miss Trent’s glory days (Pretty Hate Machine and The Downward Spiral seem much more inspired to me, probably because I was much younger when I heard them. Listening to TDS instantly transports me back in time to my more care-free college days). The single The Hand That Feeds, however, is the gem of this new album.

Chingon, Mexicon Spaghetti Western: At the very end of Kill Bill Volume 2, the first part of the credits roll showcasing the actors in a montage of scenes from both movies. The Chingon song Malagueña Salerosa plays during this, and it is one of the best songs from both movies. Chingon is a Robert Rodriguez side project – basically the result of traditional mariachi music slapped around into a rock and roll format. Great stuff! The Chingon version of Malagueña Salerosa is a rock-ified version of an old mariachi song. After hearing it the first hundred times, I was desperate to find more Chingon songs but alas at the time nothing was available. Until now!

Easy Star All Stars, Dub Side Of The Moon: Not a new album, but new to me – before listening to this album I naturally chalked it up as a novelty tribute album (a la Fade To Bluegrass: The Bluegrass Tribute to Metallica). But the mixture of reggae/dub music and the classic Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon goes way beyond the novelty of mere tribute by becoming a damned perfect blend of styles and standing very firmly on its own.

More fun with Google Maps: Apparantly, this is Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch:

(click to see the original)

Click the images to see the originals in Google Maps.

Grand Canyon:

Good Marketing = You Can See It From Space:

Disturbing fandom:

The aliens are among us:

Lots more here:

Google Sightseeing

This pic says it all.

From a photoshopping contest on Worth1000.com:

Someone noticed the word “Dave” on one of Google’s satellite images, which Google now includes in their amazing “Google Maps” service. It was mentioned on Google Blogoscoped, an interesting blog of Google-related news.

Click the image above to show the real thing.

In the last few weeks there have not been very many good movies to choose from, at least not until Sin City opened (which I’m looking forward to seeing). So when Kathryn and I had a date night on Saturday, we chose to see The Upside of Anger. It kind of sneaked into theaters without a lot of fanfare – presumably for not being very marketable blockbuster escapist fare.

imdb | rt

It is a sort of suburban aristrocrat-angst white yuppie dark comedy but with a thoughtful screenplay that contains a lot of humor and interesting dramatic tensions. The performances by the actors are fantastic, especially Joan Allen’s performance. Despite the sort of contrived implausible ending, and the inevitable “character redemption” arcs, the movie was a mesmorizing blend of fine acting and a dramatic, poignant, and humorous story. It definitely satisfies my need for a feel-good family story, at least until I can utterly destroy any remaining warm-fuzzies by basking in the debauchery of a blood-soaked revenge movie such as Sin City.

“Extremism is so easy. You’ve got your position, and that’s it. It doesn’t take much thought. And when you go far enough to the right, you meet the same idiots coming around from the left.”

Admittedly, posting someone else’s thought in this blog did not take me much thought either.

I used to work in Fincastle, VA, so the following comic got my attention: