I didn't watch the show last night, but saw these on line this morning. Joseph Gordon Levitt hosted Saturday Night Live last night and there were two parody ads that they did for Dos Equis Beer's Most Interesting Man of the World. Part One and Part Two, enjoy!
So today was my birthday; I turned the Big 5-0. Not Hawaii Five-O, the other one.....
I'm actually okay with it. Of course I'm still reflecting on my life to date, and what I wanted to have accomplished by now; and my hopes - and reality sure don't match up. It's the more recent setbacks that are influencing my overall picture right now...
But on the positive side, it has been kind of freeing for me. I still want to try and put my best foot forward, but I don't sweat the small stuff as much as I used to. I've gotten more comfortable in my own skin. It didn't happen overnight, it's been a gradual process. A journey, not a destination point.
I had wanted to make a trip down to Seattle and the Space Needle to celebrate my birthday, but that unfortunately did not end up happening. At some point after my last birthday I apparently looked at the calendar wrong, and thought my birthday was on Saturday (I don't know what I was thinking, or what year I was looking at). But also, financially I was not in a good position to make it a reality, so I had to let that idea go.
My team-mate at work, Amber, asked me why the Space Needle; and aside from the fact that I think it is about the coolest thing in Seattle, we both had our debuts in 1962.
I have been up to the observation deck once, and really enjoyed it. This picture is one that my dad took on a visit out here before he married Susan, but I can't remember if that was the same time that we went up with my brother Mark or not.
I think losing both dad and Mark two years ago has also added to the bittersweet feelings I've had for the last week. Not having married and had a family of my own has made it harder to lose the family I grew up with. I truly value my friendships, but there are times when they can't fill the void.
Lake Michigan
But I did have a good day. The sun was shining and it was warm and beautiful, and I was thankful for that. And Amber and Terry treated me to lunch and espresso at work, and I received well wishes from friends. So just like the rest of my life, everything did not go as planned, but I still had a good time...
This article is from yesterday's The Bellingham Herald, and it is about a guy from work. Ivan is very creative, and he and his family have been featured in the paper several times in the last year; enjoy!
Bellingham man's goal: Open-source guide to making prosthetic fingers
Ivan Owen has been working on the design of Rich Van As' prothestetic finger for about 8 months. It works via a system of cables, pulleys, lever arm and a spring/bungee. The black plastic hand in the picture is an exact copy of Van As's injured hand that he cast from a polyurethane resin and shipped overseas to Bellingham.
JEN OWEN — COURTESY TO THE BELLINGHAM HERALD
Read more here: http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2012/09/10/2680098/bellingham-mans-goal-open-source.html#storylink=cpy
Published: September 10, 2012
By MICHELLE NOLAN— FOR THE BELLINGHAM HERALD
When South African woodworker Richard Van As lost four fingers in an accident, Ivan Owen soon realized his mechanical skills were not just a hobby; they could improve thousands of lives.
The result: A partnership the inventive pair will use to create an open-source Internet site with directions for creating relatively inexpensive prosthetic fingers.
Owen, 27, a lifelong Whatcom County resident, is a businessman by day and a mechanical special effects artist in his spare time. He and his wife, Jen, live in Bellingham with their three children.
Question: Ivan, why did you produce your YouTube demonstration of playing the piano with a prosthetic finger?
Answer: I want people to see what Richard and I are doing to create affordable, practical prosthetic fingers.
Q: How did you meet Richard?
A: After he lost four fingers last year, he realized it would cost him $20,000 for two prosthetic fingers for the fingers he lost at the first knuckle (the other two fingers were entirely lost). So he sought solutions on the Internet, and he came across a large artificial hand I had created (not for use). Richard sent me a picture of his hand and asked if I could help.
Q: What did he see in your work?
A: He felt that together, perhaps we could create artificial fingers for much less money. Soon we both realized this was more than about us, but rather a way to help people worldwide.
Q: How much progress have you made?
A: Just working together on the Internet we have created both longer and shorter prosthetic fingers that work well, though we have a ways to go to create special hinges and to fine-tune the fingers. We're about 75 percent there.
But to really finish our project we need to spend some time working together. Richard's close friend, Mark Cowley, generously donated his frequent flyer miles and I am now booked for a flight to South Africa on Nov. 17, returning on Nov. 23. We are still fundraising for the cost of various tools and materials that we'll need.
Q: Why are you publishing everything open source on the Internet?
A: We aren't interested in trying to make money off people's miseries. We want everyone in the world who needs prosthetic fingers to have a way to see them created by others for very little money. Our real dream is a nonprofit fueled by donations and devoted to open-source information about prosthetics. What I'm really interested in doing is perfecting artificial fingers.
Q: Why fingers?
A: I've been a musician for 18 years, and I especially know how important the use of fingers can be. I've been inspired by people like my former music teacher Robert Lundquist and his wife, Pat, who showed me how unselfish and caring people can be in helping others.
Q: Have you always had such an exceptional mechanical aptitude?
A: When I attended Sehome High School I was mostly interested in music, but I also developed a fascination for creating replicas of medieval armor. I belonged to the Society for Creative Anachronism for a while.
Later, on assignment, I created a spider mask with movable mandibles. That, in turn, led me to build an artificial hand a foot-and-a-half long. While I attended Whatcom Community College I continued working with mechanical special effects art, and now I do creative work for small filmmakers.
Q: Richard seems to have quite a sense of humor.
A: He has an incredible mind and he's very mechanically oriented. The website comingupshorthanded.com shows what a great sense of humor he has. I really can't take much of the credit for all this, because Richard has been the catalyst.
WATCH THE VIDEO
LEARN MORE, HELP OUT
• The fundraising page to help Richard Van As and Ivan Owen is fundly.com/JLSFOAEU.
I love the Greek Fest, and went twice this year, with Jo on Thursday and Jo, Denise and Debra on Saturday. As always the food was fantastic, and the weather was sunny and beautiful. I was hoping that more of the Around the Corner gang would have joined us, but hopefully we will have a nice crowd at Christmas for the Cookie Party.
I have gotten a lot done on the desk in the last month. I finished sanding, and as of this morning, put the third coat of oil on the last two sections. I will put on one to two more coats, and then the real fun will begin of putting it all back together. The weather is supposed to be nice again this week, after some rain tomorrow, so I should be able to be to get most of that done by the weekend.
Sadly, this Saturday may bring an end to the "Davemobile". The transmission went out on the 1983 Buick Skylark I got from my late neighbor Dave in mid-June, and I cannot afford to fix it. I will be getting the car towed away and sold for scrap, I was hoping it was going to make it 30 years, but that was not to be.
I had fun catching up on the past week of The Daily Show from the conventions. There were too many funny sections for me to embed all of them here. But of course in between the humor were some pretty wry observations as well, I recommend checking them out.
Will Braden holds Henri, the cat who stars in Braden's video
He is Henri the Existential Cat, certainly the most famous feline in Seattle, and now among the most famous in the country.
He lives a pampered life in a North End home, oblivious to his notoriety and a national award that was bestowed upon him last week.
Henri doesn't care that the three YouTube videos in which he stars have been viewed 5.3 million times. In them, he tells — much in the style of a 1950s avant-garde film, in French with English subtitles — of his tortured cat soul.
Better to just take a nap.
On Thursday, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, a video about Henri, "Henri 2: Paw de Deux," by local filmmaker Will Braden, won the first Internet Cat Video Film Festival.
The event drew 10,136 entries, with more than 10,000 cat lovers showing up to watch as the videos were projected for free in a large open field outside the center.
It's no secret that cat videos generate clicks on the Web, but even the Walker Art Center people were shocked at the response.
"When we thought of this idea six weeks ago, we thought that maybe 100 people would show up," said spokeswoman Rachel Joyce. "Then we started getting a little attention, and we thought a couple of thousand people will be here. But we were absolutely overwhelmed."
The contest included a number of categories — documentary and foreign, among others — but only one winner, chosen by public vote on the Web.
It was Braden and Henri who won the "People's Choice" Golden Kitty award "by a landslide," says Joyce. They even beat the world-famous Japanese cat, Maru, whose videos have been viewed 174 million times.
The award was for the second of the three videos by Braden starring Henri.
But it was his first video, "Henri," that introduced the angst-ridden cat to the world: "I am a black cat ... ," the subtitles began. "I live a life of luxury ... But I feel empty ... ."
The award cost about $30 and is a piggy bank, shaped like a fat cat and sprayed in a gold color to make it look more like a real award.
Braden, 32, is a graduate of Garfield High School and Western Washington University who also studied at the Seattle Film Institute.
It was for a project at the film institute that Braden made the first video of Henri.
It was in 2006, and the students had been watching a number of black-and-white French movies from the 1940s and '50s. Braden began thinking about how Americans viewed these films — "the French films were very pretentious and self-involved."
He decided to do a parody. "And what could be more self-absorbed and pampered than a house cat?" he said.
Henri, who used to be just plain Henry, is a "tuxedo" cat, so named because of his black-and-white coloring. Now 8, he was adopted from the Seattle Animal Shelter.
He does not live with Braden, and, because of his fame, his actual ownership is a private matter.
It was to make him more French that Henry became "Henri" in the video.
Braden wrote the scripts, and his mother, who speaks fluent French, helped him with the pronunciations and proper usage.
The 2-½-minute video got good reaction from the instructors and fellow students, and eventually Braden decided to start a Facebook page for the cat, "Henri, le Chat Noir," for "Henri, the Black Cat."
At the end of 2011 he made the second video, which made Henri an online star. All those Facebook friends helped make Henri the People's Choice winner in the recent contest.
Braden had been making a living doing videos at weddings and corporate events. Now, Braden has a website dedicated to Henri that sells everything from T-shirts to mugs, and generates $800 to $1,000 a week in sales.
Braden also says he has a book contract with Ten Speed Press, a subsidiary of Random House, for a book of Henri photos and musings.
On his Facebook page, which has nearly 40,000 followers, Braden also posts regular Henri existential quotes:
"Am I supposed to be excited that the world has made one more rotation? We are hurtling through space, yet going nowhere."
"Once, after an abundance of catnip, I hallucinated that I was ascending to the heavens and touching the whiskers of God. I woke up on top of the refrigerator."
To get into an existential mood, Braden says he buys used books and goes online to get e-books by existential authors, such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Albert Camus.
"It's a little disheartening that you can get a book on existentialism for 99 cents, and Kim Kardashian's memoirs sell for like $17," he says.
Braden says that one reason he chose Henri to star in the videos — besides the fact that his black-and-white fur would show up better — is that the cat is so easygoing.
Henri lives with three other cats, including a white one that has made appearances in the videos, with Henri referring to him as "the white imbecile."
If Braden wants a shot of Henri looking out the window for some moody pondering, "I just put him there."
And if he needs to have the cat at a certain angle by the cat dish, "I just slide him one way or the other. As long as I give him treats, he's happy."
Finally, courtesy of Braden, this from Henri, on winning the contest:
"That I have received this golden, smiling idol for a film documenting my metaphysical torment speaks volumes about the spiritual void of humanity. Shiny and meaningless, life marches on."
When comedian Stephen Colbert launched his show,The Colbert Report (2005), he introduced the word "truthiness" to the U.S. public. Speaking in character as a bloviating right-wing pundit, Colbert explained that truthiness was thinking from the gut, ignoring facts, and holding beliefs with no basis in reality.
At the time, his main target was George W. Bush, who had repeatedly told the U.S. public during his presidency that things he felt were necessarily true. The word also emerged in response to claims by the administration that the War in Iraq was about finding Weapons of Mass Destruction. You can watch the segment where he calls the WMD justification a flat out lie here:
It didn't take long for "truthiness" to enter widespread use and it was named the Word of the Year by Webster's in 2006. In those early days, the word held the punch of satire and it encouraged critical thinking about the ways that truth was increasingly absent from policy decisions, media coverage, and public perceptions.
But whatever the context for the word's role in 2005, we have clearly hit a new era in political discourse where truthiness trumps truth all the time with little, if any, repercussions. The proof is in last week's Republican National Convention where truthiness was alarmingly on display at a rate we have never seen in U.S. history.
Each day as the speeches wound down, media outlets dedicated stories to fact-checking the speeches. After Paul Ryan's speech, Joan Walsh of Salon.comwrote that "Paul Ryan gave a feisty anti-Obama speech that will have fact-checkers working for days." CBS Newsreported that most of the major claims made by Ryan about Obama's record were misleading and untrue. Ryan then kept up his pattern of truthiness after the RNC when he lied about his best time in a marathon, shaving off more than an hour from his finish time. Seriously?
The master of truthiness-checking himself, Stephen Colbert also gave his audience his own version of the truth. Watch the clip where he fact-check's Ryan speech here:
Ryan's lying was followed by Romney's. Perhaps even more disturbingly, some media reporting found comfort in the fact that Romney's speech was not as lie-ridden as Ryan's. According toUSAToday the good news is that Romney's speech mostly included "puffery and exaggeration" in comparison to Ryan's flat-out lying:
In a speech heavy on anecdotal history but short on policy details, Mitt Romney avoided major falsehoods in making his case to the American public while accepting the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention. Even a key Democratic strategist, Bill Burton, a former press secretary for President Obama, tweeted shortly after the speech ended: "Romney actually avoided almost all of the lies from Ryan's speech."
While he may have avoided the same lies as Ryan, Romney's speech had its own fair share offalsehoods too.
And lest it seem like the fact-checking was simply a partisan matter, Sally Kohn of Fox News wrotethat "to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to facts, Ryan's speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech."
So given the fact that we have learned that the RNC was full of falsehoods, why aren't the liars suffering from backlash? Why aren't their supporters enraged that the candidates they support were incapable of stating their positions and describing their differences with Obama without lying? Has the Republican Party simply given up on truth and embraced truthiness?
According to the Romney campaign's pollster Neil Newhouse it has. After the media questioned the accuracy of speeches at the RNC, he explained that "we're not going let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers."
The politicians lied. The media proved the lies. But does anyone care? Nope.
Or at least they don't care enough. Polls showed that the RNC gave the Romney ticket a bump that now puts them in the lead. While post-convention bumps are considered common, it is worth asking why the lying and the public knowledge of it didn't make any difference. Shouldn't their numbers have gone down? Is our knowledge of political truthiness now just a joke with no punch line?
When Colbert first described truthiness his hope was that he could encourage the U.S. public to expect the truth from the nation's leaders. Colbert's truthiness was a joke -- but it was a joke that was meant to be taken seriously. In the world of satire the idea is to mock in a way that makes a difference. First we spot the truthiness and then we do something about it.
The worrying trend today is that even when there is abundant evidence of lying, there are no repercussions. It's a case of lying and loving it. And it needs to be stopped. If on Election Day we no longer care about the difference between truth and truthiness, then the joke will be on us.
I wanted to share this, because while I don't think any candidate is perfect, and even though I follow politics, I am constantly disgusted with what political races have become. The presenting of opinions as truths, and all the money being thrown around by the same people that claim they are being gouged by government. Yet those folks always seem to have copious amounts of money to throw behind a candidate that is close to their heart. If even half the time and money that goes in to politics these days was spent on truly worth causes, most of the issues that every one is complaining about would be resolved...
