A drop of golden sun

If this flashmob-dance “Do Re Mi” in Belgium doesn’t make you at least smile, you have no soul (and I don’t mean in the James Brown sense).

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My Lottery Garage: Spartan V

The Spartan V has 170hp (from a Ducati bike engine) and weighs 660 pounds. That’s just insane — a Lotus Elise, pretty much the lightest car you could otherwise buy, weighs about 3 times as much and only has a couple dozen more horsepower. The car’s Aussie makers say it does 0-60 in under 3 seconds. It’s a track-only car, but I can hold out hope that they’ll get around to making a street-legal version sometime.

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Talk Like A Pirate Day!

Argh! Or should I say, arrrrrrrgh! Here I be, almost forgettin’ what be the most glorious Internet holiday o’ the whole bleedin’ year, International Talk Like A Pirate Day!

So here be a video for all ya scallywags, with a Formula 1 race driver taking his lovely wench out for a wee drive on a track, in a Honda Civic (it’ll be startin’ to get good around the 2:00 mark). They both be Italians, but you’ll be needin’ no translation. Why be this a pirate video, you lubbers might ask? Because the Civic be a Type-R, o’ course!  (via Miss C, pic via Costumzee)

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Lifestyles of the rich and Facebooked

Unless you’re utterly indifferent to Facebook, you pretty much have to read the recent magazine profiles of founder Mark Zuckerberg and accomplice Sean Parker (the guy played by Justin Timberlake in the upcoming movie “The Social Network”).

Whether you’re a fan or foe, you’ll find grist for your mill in the stories of their respective rises to fame and fortune. The latter is especially interesting, since Parker was also involved in Napster, founded Plaxo and basically lives like a rock star geek (or should that be like a geek rock star?).

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Fundy-mentalism

The New York Times does a profile on religious parody site ChristWire, and doesn’t mention Poe’s Law even once? Really, NYT?

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Wishing you the bluest sky …

I wish I could have found the video of Fountains of Wayne doing their version of The Kinks’ “Better Things” on Conan O’Brien’s show in September 2001, but I guess life’s full of disappointments, and what better day to be reminded of that?

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Bragging rites

The erratic but sometimes useful HuffPost has a semi-interesting list of 13 Books Nobody’s Read But Say They Have. Here’s the list if you don’t want to view the slideshow:
1. The Canterbury Tales
2. Democracy in America
3. Ulysses
4. A Christmas Carol
5. The Satanic verses
6. Moby-Dick
7. A Brief History of Time
8. Infinite Jest
9. The Name of the Rose
10. Remembrance Of Things Past
11. Don Quixote
12. As I Lay Dying
13. War and Peace

I’ve actually read 3 of them, and started but given up on another 3. Maybe I’ll give a prize or something to anyone who guesses them all correctly. Hint: The one pictured isn’t in either category, really. I did read the exact Classics Illustrated version pictured, but never even tried to read the real “Moby-Dick.”

(via Miss C, who gave me the idea to list them all and spare you the slideshow if you hate them like I do)

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Overthinking restrooms

This ridiculously detailed look at bathroom signs has a lot of food for thought, as well as a good deal of Women’s Studies-inspired speculation. Sometimes the purpose of a sign is just to tell people which door they’re looking for, not to reinforce conformity to society’s expectations of gender roles and definitions. Then again, sometimes people who claim something is being overblown are just uncomfortable with any challenges to the status quo from which they benefit. (via The Awl)

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The 21-month point

It’s been a long time since I stopped posting weekly or monthly milestones on my unemployment situation, but this calls for an announcement, and I’ve spent the past few days feeling like I peed on a stick, watched it turn blue, and now I want to tell everybody the news except I’m aware that there’s a slight chance it could turn out to be a false alarm (or that it could all fall through in a couple weeks or so): A short while ago, I had no job, and now I have two!

A few weeks back, I got a call from a company that was working with another company that was working for another company that needed some miscellaneous IT work done, and I was told that I’d been accepted, and I sent in papers for a background check, and took a “whizz quiz” and all that, but I never got called to do any actual work. Meanwhile, the nice lady who runs the tech school where I got my training went and sent my resume to another company, and they e-mailed me, then called me, then brought me in for some assessment tests, then interviewed me, then offered me a job.

So starting in mid-September, I’ll be in training for my brand-new job. So I sent an e-mail to the other company telling them that I’d gotten this other job, and where should I send in the corporate ID card I’d gotten and all that. And the guy replied and said I shouldn’t be so hasty to cut my ties with them, since they might have some one-day jobs here and there that they could use me on.

Which is actually really cool, since my main job is going to be strictly a phone job (but working with VOIP and networking, which is pretty cool), and I’ll be able to supplement that with some hands-on tech work in a (presumably) wide variety of areas. So right now things are looking up for me, and in a year or so I might have a really broad set of skills that I can use to parlay into a better job, while still having two employers willing to give me work. It’s not like I’ll be making boatloads of money (or even as much as I made at my old job), but it’s a hell of a lot better than being unemployed and sending out resume after resume into a big black hole.

And the best part is, my wife Louise finally gets a break from looking after me and all the mental and emotional stuff I’ve been going through all this time being unemployed. If it weren’t for her, I’d never have made it through the darkness and into the light.

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