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Someone's done the math, wikipedia listing...
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Cat-Toast_Device

That Explains It

The other day Listner Jim told me about an interesting study by Scientists and Experts. It seems that you can take someone who is pretty set in their beliefs about something, and show them actual, factual evidence that their beliefs are wrong—and not only will it not matter that they’re wrong, but the factual evidence to the contrary will make their adherence to their incorrect beliefs even stronger. I don’t know exactly which study Listner Jim had in mind, but you can find lots of them if you Google “belief perseverance” or “confirmation bias.” Those Scientists and Experts are a busy bunch.

This helps explain the Troy Davis case, I guess. Troy Davis was arrested in 1989 and charged with shooting off-duty police officer Mark MacPhail during a scuffle in a Burger King parking lot. He was convicted in 1991, based solely on the testimony of witnesses. There was absolutely no physical evidence connecting MacPhail to the crime. (The gun was never found.) Seven of the nine witnesses who testified against Davis have recanted their testimony, and most say they were coerced by police into signing statements—some say they did not even read the statements they signed. (One was even illiterate.) They just wanted the police to let them go and leave them alone. One of the two “witnesses” who has not recanted his testimony is an alternate suspect against whom new evidence does exist. A couple of the original prosecution witnesses now say that this man is the one who killed Officer MacPhail. But in spite of all the facts that point to Troy Davis being innocent, the Supreme Court of Georgia has denied him a new trial, and the Georgia State Board of Pardon and Paroles has refused to commute Troy Davis’ death sentence, and unless the Supreme Court of the United States does something before 7:00 PM tonight (less than two hours from the time I am writing this), the state of Georgia will execute Troy Davis, who says he never killed anybody. The facts also say he probably didn’t, but the facts just seem to make the Georgia authorities more determined to put Troy Davis to death.

I see the same phenomenon every time I mention how John McCain “wet started” the fire on the USS Forrestal, or whenever I say “Keating 5” or “Savings and Loan bail-out” or “disfigured first wife.” My little Republican friends’ eyes glaze over, and they just get more determined to vote for this guy. Or maybe it's Sarah Palin they're voting for. I got about a dozen forwarded emails this morning concerning some PBS poll where people are being asked whether Palin is qualified to be Vice President. The YES vote was winning, and these folks were all agitated and wanted everyone to go vote NO. But I think they’re missing the point: It’s a poll, and most people are voting YES, and that means that most people—or most of the people responding to the poll, anyway—think she is qualified. You fancy liberals better come up with something better than clicking your mouse NO and thinking you’ve accomplished something. Because any facts you can produce to show that Sarah Palin is way out of her league are only going to make those YES folks more convinced that she’s great VP material. And what are you gonna do about that?

Bird Lives!

Happy 63rd anniversary to Mike the Headless Chicken, who on this date in 1945 lost his noggin, but found oh so much more.

Just an unassuming yardbird gamboling about the homestead of Fruita, Colorado, farmer Lloyd Olsen, Mike was, on that fateful day, a 5½-month old Wyandotte rooster slated for the Olsen's evening repast. Fortunately for Mike, Lloyd's axe-wielding skills were lousy and the farmer's attempted execution went awry. Sure, Mike's clucker was lopped clear off, but certain key anatomical features (brain stem, esophageal passage, an ear, don't ask) remained intact, and, bizarrely, our feathered friend survived the encounter. In fact, the lucky duck went to bed that night with his own head tucked under a wing!

Well, in true can-do American spirit, Mike kept on strutting his stuff for the next 18 months, becoming a nationwide celebrity pulling in an absurd $4,500 a month while touring the country and posing for spreads in Life and Time. He even had a personal manager. Sure, the highlife caught up with Mike and he came to a sad end choking to death in an Arizona motel room, but even in death, our headless hero continues to capture the imagination of a nation, what, with a Guinness world record, a website, a MySpace page and even a song (MP3 by Frank Meyer).

And of course there's an inspirational video:

Thank You, Drive Thru!

Today, the second of two recent "drive through" incidents occurred for me, so I must vent, or at least confess, and I'll start with going back to memory a bit. Years and years and years ago, I had friends who worked in a Burger King located on a secondary highway in NJ, that had a drive thru. I remember that the driveway of it was sort of convoluted, as you had to travel around the entire building to get to the window because of a funny curb/lane thing that had been put in to "guide" drivers. Seeing people hop the curb happened often, but even more chuckle inducing would be when a driver intent on getting their Whooper with extra pickles would drive right into these poles that stood about 3 feet high, about 9 inches wide, metal shelled, filled with cement, and surrounded the place for, ah safety - ouch!...chuckle chuckle. While we stood in the back eating from a GIANT barrel of pickles, we would watch corner panel after corner panel fold like accordions against those bright yellow poles.

The Rock-afire Explosion

A few months ago, I picked up Gabby Wood's excellent non-fiction book Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life, a look at the obsessions of turn-of-the-19th-century inventors to create a truly life-like animatronic creation. Delving into this world of clockwork men (and not-so-clockwork scam artists) reminded me a bit of my childhood.

You see, when I was growing up in the 80s I made weekly trips to the nearby ShowBiz Pizza Place, mostly just to flirt with Jr. High School girls and play lots of Dragon's Lair. But for some reason whenever the Rock-afire Band started in on one of their sets, I was suddenly mesmerized by the spellbinding creepiness of the animatronic figures "playing" "music" for "entertainment".

So, I've been thinking all about these about animatronics, and the strange world they inhabit, and then the internet explodes with the word on the documentary film I've been waiting my whole life for... 

For more on the Rock-afire gang, don't miss the website of the original programmer (and voice of Billy Bob the bear) Aaron Fechter, who takes bids to program new songs for the Rock-afire Explosion (currently in progress, "Neighborhood #1" by the Arcade Fire). He also invented Whac-A-Mole, so clearly the man is a genius. Here's a look at the early days of his company, Creative Engineering, and their process for creating the original Rock-afire shows.

But Showbiz Pizza is just the tip of the animatronic iceberg, so I couldn't just leave it at that. Follow the jump for more videos of robot presidents, animals, comedians, and, yes, Marlon Perkins!

Delicate Traces or Erases?

     "First, before we go in, does anyone have any gum in their mouth?"
    "No", we muttered half heartedly.
    "Because if you do, you need to spit it out of your mouth right now and throw it in this trashbin!"
     That is how my visit started on America's oldest residential street.  And this, I tell you sisters and brothers, in the city of brotherly love.  I spent only 36 hours in Philadelphia and I am already sick of that motto.  Imagine how the poor devils feel who have to live with it day in and out, in addition to seeing the fetching mug of Ben Franklin on every local product and print ad!  It's enough to make an over zealous, under talented, former drama student tour guide want to reach her hand into a visiting mouth and rip the gum right out.
     But unlike the Big Apple, I imagine the city of cheese steaks has had nothing lately so embarassing as the dorm-style artist bohemian housing article recently brought to light in the paper of record.  I am not sure what is more awful, that people are so crazy to sink to living in such grim reproductions of 'art community', or that it is outed to the world in a paper as far removed from that scene as the Times.  Ouch.  I wonder how long it will take before reality show scouts come calling at the doors of the dueling McKibbin lofts buildings.
     Which prompts the next question:  how deep does one have to live to not be vacuous?  Not below sea-level deep, but more like, how much does a person have to be of a scholarly nature to not live in the trendy now?  I ask this because I feel that many of the local peeps I encountered in the city of brother and sisterly love had less of an interest in trend for a keeping-up sake, like us Big Apple eaters, and more time to read stories about explorers who risked life and frost bitten limb in the mid 1800's Arctic Ocean.  My analysis is far from scientific and regrettably un-scholarly, but my quick turn of Philadelphia events left me thinking that living away from the too fast motion grid of NYC isn't such a bad thing.
     For instance, my first experimental proof:  I didn't see any couples simultaneously talking on their cell phones.  When two humans in direct proximity to feel-up contact, are instead conversing with intangible, unseen others, that is a sure sign that the world is spinning out of control.  I did not see any examples of that in my highly controlled, scientific assessment (total disclosure: my assessment included many hours of observation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, so perhaps my research data is skewed, because everyone knows talking on cell phones is frowned upon in museums).
     Second experimental proof: we ate at a fabulous Burmese restaurant that had not bothered to change their cuisine category to Myanmar.  Refusing to keep up with rapidly changing military dictatorship governments is a sure sign of inner strength.
     Information that I should NOT include in my survey (if I were soley trying to prove my hypothesis instead of being utterly open with you, the lovely free-form radio listening public): most people I spoke with knew Santogold personally or her life story (born and raised in Philly).  Granted one of them was in a great record store, but this info proves that our brotherly and sisterly lovers know a cool, contempo moment when it has direct and positive effect on them (instead of just knowing the status of R Kelly's child pornography trial).
     And for my last piece of evidence, I offer the  American Philosophical Society Museum.  Housed in a plain building, without so much as a proper sign, this museum offered the largest proof that humans without subscriptions to People magazine can get a lot accomplished in the course of a day.  Granted, much of this accomplishment was made before the invention of even the standard telephone, but I am still in awe of the gorgeous watercolors that Titian Peale brought back from his voyages to Antartica.  I know the horrors of trying to do artwork while traveling, not to mention when the temperature is so low it makes water color highly viscous.  And when was the last time the artifacts you brought back from your travels were the origins of the Smithsonian?
     Am I being too hard on us global warming makers?  Perhaps this New England Patriots spying debacle has stretched me too thin?  I think DJ Icepack being invited to a 7-year-old birthday party with the promise of Ely Manning in attendance did it.  Or maybe the impending steam railroad, and subsequent ramifications of Britain's Industrial Revolution in Masterpiece Theatre's Cranford has me vexed.  I am confident that it has nothing to do with Lily Allen's blonde do, or her mystery man.
     I've got it!  Seven plus years of George W. has left me feeling like a hung over frat boy cramming Cliff notes!  When we dump that obsolescent train wreck I will feel a lot smarter.

Early Musical Robots

One blog reader asked what the the story behind the picture with the walking, talking, and yodeling "radio man" for last week's post was. The article is from a 1939 issue of Popular Mechanics, and "Radio Man" was designed by Swiss engineer August Huber in the 1930's. Like all early robots, he looks way cooler than the modern ones. That's all I know. And instead of wasting my time researching more about Radio Man, here are a few more early robots, all stolen from the "Robot" section of the excellent Modern Mechanix blog. (Click on the images to get a larger version.)

 

Two more robots after the jump.

I Believe That (Stoned) Children Are Our Future

While Dr. Seuss may have quietly but most assuredly extolled the virtues of LSD, some kids' authors are being a little less subtle when it comes to the Sweet Leaf. Follow the pictoral excerpts from the new publication It's Just A Plant and get involved in your kids' choices. Bryce thinks maybe this kid has already made her choice. However, I think what really should be outlawed is taking your kid bike riding wearing Sgt. Pepper garb, but who am I to judge. (Thanks for link, Tom Lax.)

My Night at the Sleep Lab

So I've been having a lot of trouble sleeping.  Fortunately, I have this forum wherein I can compel our global readership to share their related experiences and advice.  The basic problem is this:  I don't usually have difficulty falling asleep, both due to work-related mental exhaustion as well as the fact that I take a prescription medication for anxiety also often prescribed for insomnia.  However, after anywhere from three to five hours, I wake up, and that seems to be that.  My pulse is elevated, though my mind is not particularly troubled or racing; I'm just awake, and can't get back to sleep—no way, no how.

I decided after six weeks or so of this mounting hell to avail myself of a local sleep lab, one affiliated with and on the premises of a reputable local hospital.  I'd read about these places before, and went in aware that they are basically designed to diagnose and treat a condition called sleep apnea, which I didn't really think fit my particular symptoms—but who knows, right?  I needed help and thought that it might even be an interesting experience.

I checked in to the sleep lab at 9 p.m. per their instructions.  The first thing that aroused my skepticism was that no one bothered to take my blood pressure or ask for a list of the prescription medications I take (I take a low-dose antihypertensive that I've been taking for years, plus the aforementioned anxiety pill—possibly relevant?!?!)  The room itself was less like a single hospital room, more like a single room at a really cheap motor hotel, I guess in an attempt to simulate the conditions under which most of us sleep.  (The techs kept saying, "you can watch TV now," as if this was some great gift.)

I was then hooked up to a variety of wired contacts, all connected to my body with surgical tape:  one behind each ear, two or three on various points on my skull, one below my left eye, one above my right eye, two on my chin, two on my chest and one on my back.  Then adjustable elastic strips were applied around my neck, chest and waist.  Now it's time to go to sleep!  Any time I needed to pee, Mohammed (not the Prophet, the sleep lab tech) had to unhook 2 main wires, so that I could carry the central receiver box (about the size of a VHS tape) to the bathroom with me, do my business, then come back and get re-hooked.  I was out for the first 1.5 hours, up for another hour and then basically asleep for another four hours until 6 a.m. when the techs woke me up.  Mohammed said, "Mr. Berger, your sleep was excellent."  If I'd been thinking, I might have asked him to qualify that statement.

Science Geeks are the coolest!

Photobasement posted a slew of Science Fair photos last week, and it got me slipping down the k-hole of my past, thinking about those days as a budding science nerd. And so, after much googling and image searching, I pulled together even more photos. Some are funny, and some are just darn cute!

And so, a slew of Science Fair photos (including some of my faves from the Photobasement post) after the jump!

Carromato de Max Museum of Miniatures

Carromato de Max, i.e. Max's Covered Wagon, is in Mijas, one of the white towns in Spain's Costa del Sol. It's up the kind of switchback road that made me carsick as a kid. The day I went, there were Wizard of Oz-level winds, which made climbing the stairs to the converted train car precarious, and arriving into the museum's spare stillness surprising.

Maybe I was influenced by the winds, but the late Dr. Max appears to have been a traveling mountebank who sold snake oil and collected curiosities. The Max museum was recently renovated, and the random assortment of items is now encapsulated in plastic bubbles as if they came out of giant gumball machines. The display aesthetic is space-age mod, which makes a lovely contrast with the contents, including stuffed and dressed fleas, sculptures made of chewed gum, and just about anything that can be painted on the head of a pin, like Abraham Lincoln (left).

I took some photos on my crapass camera. I also took copious notes, but I can't find them, and it's hard to tell what those damn little things are now. Fleas? Dust? I think it's fine to make up your own captions. Feel free to do so here.

Below: Space Oddities; Seven Wonders of the World on a Toothpick; Pinhead Lincoln; Stuffed and Dressed Fleas.

Massive Subculture Reveal: Bemani

Sometimes you like to pat yourself on the back for having a fun idea like "Guitar Hero?  What about Techno Hero!!!!  That would be so much fun, like haha stupid what would you do, sit there and push play.....haha stupid idea."

Then someone from Japan blows your fucking brain away.

That person (female, I think, because of the spotty nail polish) is playing beatmania IIDX 15 DJ:Troopers.  As you might be able to tell from all the postfixes, it's the latest in a very long run of titles Konami's Bemani series.  It's included games like Guitar Freaks, that featured a guitar controller way before Guitar Hero came out, portable (!) rhythm games called Bemani Pocket, and most famously, Dance Dance Revolution.  The IIDX iteration, which has been around since 1999, features two one-octave keyboard pads and a turntable controller (yes, she's using it in the video - check the pinky).  Instead of a meager 50-someodd songs like Guitar Hero and Rock Band come with, they have...500 songs.  Blam!

In December, there was a gigantic "Bemani 10th anniversary Memorial Event" concert in Tokyo called Gitado Live:

How in the goddamn fucking hell had I not heard of this entire world before this morning?  It got me thinking.  Right now, video gaming - in the United States, at least - is a world of extremes.

Space is the Place

NASA recently made an ill-advised DJing decision: to celebrate the 45th anniversary of their Deep Space Network by broadcasting the Beatles' "Across the Universe" to the North Star tonight.

Clearly, the more appropriate artist to use in this situation is Sun Ra, and we here at WFMU disapprove of NASA's scandalous oversight.

Webisodes worth watching

"Webisode" is one of those 21st century future words that I still have a bit of trouble wrapping my head around. The phrase "video podcast" doesn't serve much better. But they are certainly their own creatures. These videos aren't long enough to be TV shows or even short films, and yet it isn't right to just call them clips, either. Heck, quite often they are professionally made and even have good editing and production values - but still with that backyard homemade feel.

Well, whatever the word, these streaming (and often downloadable) videos usually focus on one of three topics: comedy, music, and science. Well, that is a wild generalization, but I don't have time to explore the infinite amount of video out there. These categories just happen to help define the three web series that have grabbed my attention recently. And so I share them with you.

Comedy: YACHT ROCK   
Music: TAKE-AWAY SHOWS 
Science: THE MANPOLLO PROJECT

Follow the jump for details, links, and video samples.

The Empire State Triangle

Hello, Everybody—Nice seeing you again.

All the NYTimes-readin’ folks probably missed the story yesterday about how cars are mysteriously dying within a 5-block radius of the Empire State Building. Richard Weir wrote in the Daily News that some10 to 15 cars get stuck every day between 7th and Lex, from about 27th to 40th. If you draw a circle around the area where this is happening, the Empire State Building is right in the middle of it. Some cars’ remote entry systems won’t open the doors, and some cars’ engines won’t start even though everything else is working. The cars get towed 4 or 5 blocks, to outside the affected area, and then the doors open and they start right up and everything works fine.

Weir quotes “automotive experts and engineers” who say it’s likely a problem with radio transmissions from all the broadcast towers on top of the Empire State Building jamming the keyless entry systems that operate on specific wavelengths assigned by the FCC. The FCC says they haven’t had any complaints about car problems around the Empire State Building. The Empire State Building people say they don’t believe there’s any problem, and refused to give Reporter Weir a list of all the broadcast antennas there.

It was January 2003 when Sluggo and I tried driving into Manhattan one night—which was already weird, we never do that--and a cop stopped us from going down 5th Ave. at 42nd Street. The street was closed, he said, because of “ice falling from the Empire State Building.” In fact, all the streets for blocks around were closed. They were blocked off for the next couple of nights, too. I’ve never heard of ice falling off the Empire State Building before or since, and certainly not for several nights in a row, and not so that streets 8 blocks away had to be shut down. We naturally figured it was some Homeland Security thing being installed on the Empire State Building, something that would shoot down planes over Brooklyn or Queens before they could hit Manhattan. And how great is it that it turns out to be not a gun at all, but a giant transmitter that’ll make it impossible to open the airplane doors until they’re towed to, like, New Jersey.

Thanks for reading my blog post this time, and may God bless.

Killin' Me Softly With His Song

My favorite new product at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was the iTaser. It's just what it sounds like--an mp3 player combined with a Taser. So the next time I'm on the train, sitting across from some idiot who has his iPod TURNED UP SO LOUD I CAN HEAR IT CLEAR ACROSS THE AISLE EVEN THOUGH HE'S GOT THE EARPHONES IN, I'm for sure gonna think twice before I ask him to turn it down, 'cause I really don't need a 50,000-volt electric charge to spice up my day. If I did, I'd just go walk my dog around the Lower East Side and let Con-Ed electrocute us with some stray voltage.

The spokesman for the iTaser company says their product is aimed at women who want personal protection but usually choose to take a music player instead of a weapon with them when they go out. Now they can have both! "Personal protection can be both fashionable and functionable," he says. I'm not sure whether the leopard-print-design iTaser is supposed to be the functionable one, and I thought "personal protection" was a code word for tampons, but as far as I know they haven't come out with the iTampax yet. No way am I putting an iTaser up there, either.

Anyway, I'm all for combining weapons with traditionally nonviolent pursuits. My favorite Olympic sport is the biathlon, which combines skiing with shooting great big guns. I think it would be fun to combine shooting with other sports, too--like rhythmic gymnastics.
Just imagine some little girl running merrily across an exercise mat with a long ribbon, picking up a hoop and throwing it high over the judges' heads, and then whipping out a semi-automatic assault rifle and firing a few rounds through the center of the hoop as it spins in mid-air. THAT'S a perfect 10, for sure!

We had a guy in Brooklyn just this weekend who tried to add some explosive excitement to a sometimes tedious sport. When police arrested Ivaylo Ivanov in his Brooklyn Heights apartment, they found a pistol, a shotgun, a crossbow, a bullet-proof vest, some drilling equipment, and seven live pipebombs. Ivanov said the pipebombs were for fishing. Okay!  Maybe by this time next year we'll have the Popeil Pocket iBomb. 

Thanks for reading my blog post this time, and may God bless.

What Would It Be Like To Be a WFMU DJ on Another Planet?

What would it be like to be a WFMU DJ on another planet? Let's explore the possibility, using the planets of our own solar system as examples! We'll begin with the farthest-away, newly demoted "dwarf planet." If the four floors (and don't forget the basement) of the WFMU in building in Jersey City was to be planted firmly on the ground somewhere in the middle of Pluto (a solid 70% rock, and 30% ice), and you were broadcasting from that building, you'd find little light, few friends, and would probably be complaining about the building's heating system not working right. It would no doubt be remarkably lonely doing a radio show, literally billions and billions of miles away from the "WFMU 91.1 FM East Orange, WXHD Mount Hope, and wfmu.org on the web" that existed for you on Earth as a station ID only...yet now is oh so very far away (overnight shift anyone?). But whatever you do, make sure you don't step your suicidal outer space self outside onto the deck of Studio A for a cigarette break, or step outside at all, because Pluto's atmosphere is extremely tenuous, consisting mostly of nitrogen, carbon monoxide and methane (plus wear a hat, it's 508 degrees below zero fahrenheit). But, feel free to throw on a long Stockhausen CD and go look out the studio windows pensively—Pluto seems designed for such daydream-y behavior. The glow of Pluto's frozen methane, ethane and carbon monoxide "lakes" will look stunning from the second story atrium window as well, as they reflect sunlight coming from 3,670,050,000 miles away (give an take a million, due to Pluto's notoriously erratic orbit path). As for Neptune...

The Hypersonic Soundbeam

After years of reading puff pieces about the coming of the "Hypersonic Soundbeam," a device designed to send targeted blasts of sound waves that can be heard only be selected recipients in an audio environment, it has apparently made its debut in the public sphere, right here in New York. As part of a billboard marketing campaign for a television show.

A&E has placed a billboard (on Prince St. between Mulberry and Mott) that shoots sound waves designed to resonate against your head, giving the passerby a distinct feeling that the advertisement is arising from within their skull. The television show is is about ghosts, so that means this is a witty kind of progressive marketing stunt and not just totally fucking creepy, right?

IRI Technologies, one of the many companies vending this device to the industry, highlights the invention's utility like so: "The Hypersonic Sound Waves travel silently through space, up to 300 feet away, then convert into an instant sound source whatever surface [including your skull! -ed.] they impact. Amazingly, if you aim this magical device at a person, their head will become a speaker, and they will hear your message "inside" their head."

The patent owner of this little baby is an American Solo Maverick Inventor in the old model - he cooked this idea up and built a prototype without the help of a corporate research team. Woody Norris is, as an interview posted to his website will have you know, "no techno nerd." And he's humble about the source of his inspirations, observing that, "I didn't invent that [medical sonar imaging device]. It happens and I observed it. And so I claimed it. You know what inventing is -- I heard this from somebody else -- 'It's an accident observed."

So once you have "accidentally" invented this mind-sound-beam patent, what do you do with it? The advertising market seems to have been on his mind long before he brought this market. "To Norris's way of thinking, however, a shop with 100 confined spheres of sound is preferable to one where 12 speakers are blaring over each other."

I guess that's the logic of the needle exchange as well: If they're going to be doing it anyway, we might as well keep it neat.

Well, this new mind-wave billboard sure is neat, huh? Fuck, could we work on a way to just beam the whole TV show right into my skull as I'm walking past?

Missionary encounters extremely bizarre skin condition in Eastern Europe (part 3)

Last March, I posted on this blog (here) photos of Ioan, a man in Romania suffering from one of the most unbelievable human skin afflictions ever seen, along with stories and interviews from a missionary working over there to help him. Nine months later, after much attention from the medical field, general global interest, and eventually the press, Ioan's growths have been identified, treated and reduced significantly (click below for more photos).

It's Been Done

This is the prize-winning "Chisai Benjo" ('Small Toilet'), by Takahashi Kaito of SSI Nanotechnology, Inc. The object is magnified ~15,000X, using an SMI2050MS2 (of course). It recently won an award at The 49th International Conference on Electron, Ion and Photo Beam Technology and Nanofabrication Bizarre/Beautiful Micrograph Contest, all of which can be seen here.