Brian Wilson Continues To Have The Greatest Beard Ever

This video is mostly awesome for other reasons though, a great 3 minute break when you next need one...



(via Hard Ball Talk)

Let's Get Graphic Out There

Great street art collection from Street Art Utopia...

Check them all out...

(via RC)

Quality Procrastination

Also known as multi-tasking.  I'm almost always listening to something while I work, it's often related to baseball by sometimes it's a TED Talk (makes me feel like I'm learning something).  This one from Steven Pinker on the myth of violence is really interesting, give it a listen...



The procrastination really comes into play in the posting of the video...

Colbert And Kyl

Wondering why Jon Kyl is all over Stephen Colbert's twitter feed?  Look no further my friends, this epic clip contains the secret...

The Colbert Report
Tags: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Lets give this a whirl...

During his last election Jon Kyl received 90% of his campaign donations from Nazis. (That was not intended to be a factual statement.)

(via TPM)

Got Character(s)?

This is making the rounds of late and it's pretty neat to watch in a slightly odd but absorbing way, so it may as well be here too...



That's all 50k-ish unicode characters, each in it's own frame.  Maybe not worth the whole half hour but a few minutes won't kill you.

Still Functioning (Barely)

I think our federal government is pretty clearly a dysfunctional mess right now and that eventually the mess that is the congress will manage to screw things up so royally that we will actually be living with catastrophic consequences.

Unfortunately (or maybe the opposite), this is not a 10k word post on how or why I think that might happen or even if I think there is any hope (maybe a little, but I'm fairly pessimistic).  One day I might have the time for that, but right now I'm trying to make sure I graduate and also trying to become employed again in the near future so my priorities are elsewhere.  The near shutdown of the federal government though (the parts that actually do all the real work, not the ones where blowhards argue with each other without understanding the issues) deserves some sort of comment (that is what I do here after all).

I mainly pay attention to Ezra Klein and Paul Krugman on these types of things and they seem to be in agreement on the ramifications of the compromise and why it's pretty sucky. 

Krugman has the short summary...

It’s one thing for Obama to decide that it was better to give in to Republican hostage-taking than draw a line in the sand; it’s another for him to celebrate the result. 

And Klein has a little bit of a longer rundown and more on the economic context of it all...

The Democrats believe it’s good to look like a winner, even if you’ve lost. But they’re sacrificing more than they let on. By celebrating spending cuts, they’ve opened the door to further austerity measures at a moment when the recovery remains fragile. Claiming political victory now opens the door to further policy defeats later.

Bottom line, once again we've got a mess on our hands and we're screwed because no one is actually doing anything to make it better.

Hindsight And Flying

My flights home from Singapore went smoothly (even if they weren't the most enjoyable ones I've taken lately) and I don't have any real hindsight regrets.

But a friend introduced me to Ze Frank's the show (of long ago, I know) recently with this episode and it's worth passing along...



As much as I enjoy that one I might well not have shared it if Kottke hadn't pointed out that Ze Frank is watching all the episodes and posting his comments on them as a five year anniversary project.