I just watched this 60 Minutes video on a blind kid who uses echolocation, like a dolphin or a bat, to get around. He can identify objects in his environment and even play video games! You really have to see it to believe it:

Here’s some great audio of an 8-year old girl from Dublin, Ireland making prank phone calls. Becky is featured on an Irish morning radio show. Get started with a clip (below) where she contacts a demolition company to blow up her school. Fill yer boots, man!

Becky’s Demolition Company

Becky’s Driving Test

Becky Rings the Zoo

Becky and the Spare Tyre

Update 1:

Due to the incredible response this article has drawn (over 90,000 page views this week!), I decided to put up some more great Becky prank calls. Want to hear them? Click Here!

Update 2:

Want even more Becky? Of course you do! Check out Becky Barry’s first TV appearance in the U.K. on a Christmas special from this past holiday. Click Here for more Irish charm.

Beck’s Sea Change is one of my favorite albums. It is a masterpiece of melancholy and I find very myself very much in that mood today. There have been further setbacks in my various ventures and it is a grey, miserable day in eastern Pennsylvania.

It is on such overcast and dreary days I turn to this album. It doesn’t necessarily cheer me up, but is so beautifully written I can’t help but be soothed.

My favorite song on the record is “Guess I’m Doing Fine”. The composition is elegant and haunting. Once it gets in your head, it is hard to forget.

As always, my policy is that if anyone would like a download link for this song, just make a Comment below - I’ll hook you up with a link in a comment-reply of my own. Download links are automatically embedded in my RSS feeds.

Most Columbus Days are marked by rabid condemnations of the Italian explorer as a genocidal maniac bent on destroying the peaceful and innocent native peoples who populated the Caribbean islands that he discovered. These condemnations are not only unwarranted, but are also indicative of the hatred those delivering them have for all that Columbus stood for and brought to the primitive New World.

Two myths regarding Columbus to dispel quickly are:

1. That everyone thought the world was flat while he thought it was round.
2. That the legacy of Columbus was one of death and destruction.

Columbus and everyone else who was educated in Europe knew the Earth was round, a fact that had been proved by the Ancient Greeks. What Columbus got wrong was the circumference of the Earth, causing him to think he could sail from Europe to Asia going west — which, of course, you can. Luckily for him, though, the Americas were in his way or he would have ended up starving.

The legacy of Columbus was not death and destruction. Most Indian deaths were caused by the introduction of diseases that the Europeans brought with them unwittingly. It must also be remembered that the Indians living in the Americas were largely primitive Stone Age-level savages who advanced very little in the thousands of years they inhabited North and South America. The two built-up “civilizations” of the Americas, those of the Incas and the Aztecs, were hardly much better, being built upon irrationality, human sacrifice and brutal primitivism.

Contrary to the myth that Europe unleashed war upon peaceful natives, warfare existed in plenty before Columbus arrived. And it continued, as the Indians clashed with the European explorers and each other. In fact, many tribes lined up to fight with the Europeans to get rid of the Incas and Aztecs.

It is always asserted that Americans, like Columbus, stole the land of the Indians. Could Columbus be responsible for stealing anyone’s land, let alone that of the Indians? This seems dubious considering the nomadic nature of many of the peoples he encountered and their lack of any private property or organized settlements. What was there to steal? The land was not in use, evidenced by the pathetic level of any kind of progress — intellectual or material — on the part of nearly every Indian tribe. This, despite thousands of years inhabiting lands of great plenty and separated from the other people of the world who could have potentially meddled with them.

So what is the true legacy of Columbus? We are. The discovery of the New World allowed people to start anew, away from the growingly absolutist and mercantilist kingdoms of Europe. As a result, the ideas that could not be put into action easily in Europe — those of individual rights, capitalism and limited republican government, all the ideas upon which our country was predicated — were allowed to flourish in an environment far away from the kings and aristocrats of the Old World.

Finally, why are the condemnations of Columbus so visceral and continual year after year? We’re told in college that all cultures are equal and that to prefer our culture to any other is ethnocentrism. Of course this is absolutely absurd. If all cultures are equal, why do people move? Or why do people move, predominantly, to prospering societies as opposed to tribal, primitive Indian-type societies? The answer is simply that not all societies are equal. Some are, indeed, better than others.

But the goal of such bromides as “all cultures are equal,” is to tear down cultures such as ours that are, by every objective standard, far better than those of the primitives out in the middle of forests and oceans who eat other people or sacrifice them to the sun or volcanoes or practice any other such absurdity.

Humans, having the ability to reason, are in a unique position to prosper far more successfully than any other animal. Columbus was the harbinger of reason for a New World that was shockingly devoid of it. Similarly, any defense of the pre-Columbus condition is the glorification of perpetual irrational primitivism and death, while condemning the introduction of reason and the ideas that flowed from it.

Columbus is thus cursed when in fact he should be thanked — not only by us, but also by the descendents of the Indians who escaped conditions barely better than death that their ancestors experienced millennia after millennia.

Thank you, Christopher Columbus.

(from the Las Vegas Review-Journal)

There has been a lot of Knight Rider talk around the web lately.

First, Hasselhoff has been trotting the globe promoting his remake of the role that made him famous. Then we hear news that Orlando Bloom politely declined Hasselhoff’s offer to have him play his son in the movie. THEN we find out that Hasselhoff isn’t even involved in the movie!

But one of the hotly debated talks among those who dare to still call themselves Knight Rider fans has revolved more around K.I.T.T. The car that made the entire series possible. I don’t know how we missed this 4 days ago, but there was a poster revealed that answers a few questions people had about K.I.T.T.

Quite a few images have ben circulating in recent weeks and been disclaimed as fakes. Is this another? Click the thumbnail below for this purported movie poster:

No word on whether its genuine or not, but either way, its very well done, and I would believe it if it turns out to be real. Still no news as to who will play Michael Knight, or if William Daniels will return as the voice of the indestructable car.

Thanks to: themovieblog.com

Another image surfaced previously of just the car. Some industry insiders claimed it was a fake, just a fan’s dream version:

The car in both images is the Koenigsegg CCX.

I mentioned putting this up a couple of weeks ago. It’s Joan Jett & the Blackhearts’ hot new video about a girl who likes to play both sides of the fence. AC/DC is another great Joan Jett cover, this one form the seminal 70s band, Sweet.

The video features Carmen Electra and showcases Jett still kicking it pretty hard for someone pushing 50! You can also still hear a high-quality audio version of the song in my archives here.

I’m still dealing with the fallout of the legislation passed by Congress in the middle of the night on Saturday, effectively banning US banks from doing business with online casinos. This morality-legislating garbage was tacked onto the ports bill at the last second, so no members would notice or be able to debate it. Although it has yet to be signed (but certainly will be by the Monkey-in-Chief) or had any regulatory statutes laid out, many of the major international casinos are closing their doors to Americans, effective today.

Typical of the Republican Party, the party of pedophiles and religious zealotry, once again individual citizens in America can only dimly recall there was once something somewhere in a Bill of Something that used to insure they had free will as adults. Funny, can’t really remember now if that ever meant anything…

Anyway, I had a brand new account - with bonus funds - at Bet365 that I now have to withdraw. I’ll still have the funds in Neteller, but am looking for another great casino to play at.

It’s fun being the only free nation in the world that treats its adult citizens like children.

Tom Rothman, Chairman at 20th Century Fox, recently talked at length to The IESB about various upcoming Fox projects including “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer”, “Wolverine”, “AVP 2″, future “X-Men” films and “Live Free or Die Hard” amongst others.

The villain hasn’t been signed yet for “Live Free or Die Hard” but they’ve almost got an American actor locked in, someone described as “very cool and contemporary” and will be announced within the next fortnight.

Fanboys will love that after the all too tame PG-13 “Alien vs. Predator”, the approach with AVP2 will be “very hardcore, very R rated”. The script is very violent with little resemblance to the first film.

Talk of stand alone “Predator” films still continues but nothing is happening as such on that front. As for more “Alien” films, if Ridley Scott wanted to do another would Fox be up for it? “If Ridley would ever do it, we would do it in a second”.

Despite the script leakage, they are no where near a finished script on “Wolverine”. No script has been received yet for “Magneto” either.

Rothman won’t confirm or deny what new characters appear in “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer” aside from the previously announced Silver Surfer and the cosmically powerful Galactus. The Surfer, which will be “very, very faithful” design wise to the comic, will be state of the art CGI and a lot of money is being spent on the effect in the hope that it could lead to a spin-off series. Our first glimpse will come with the teaser trailer very early in the new year.

courtesy of Dark Horizons

I’m famous for getting into obscure songs years after they’ve already been out. Such pinpoint pop-culture sensitivity allows me to know when something is cool only after everyone else has already enjoyed/ignored it. I’m just hip that way.

“Adrenaline” was originally on the XXX soundtrack and, despite Vin Diesel’s starmaking turn as a hip-hop James Bond in a fur coat, this song never really climbed very far into the Top 40.

Nevertheless, whenever I need to feel kickass doing something decidedly un-kickass at the laptop, I usually get wound up with something like this song. Enjoy!

P.S. Bonus to Gavin for having such great taste in women.

As always, my policy is that if anyone would like a download link for this song, just make a Comment below and ask - I’ll hook you up with a link in a comment-reply of my own (check back with this article). Download links are automatically embedded in my RSS feeds.

I have finally finished getting all the videos from Pensacola together and have uploaded the articles to my Home Videos section. The streaming videos are collected into three articles:

Videos of my Pensacola Sailboat Project

Dolphins at Patti’s Shipyard

Memorial Daysail 2006

Now if I can just get my act together on the photo galleries, I could start getting them up as well!