Boom! Fweee! Oooh! Ahhh!
The image to the left was taken from this page of unusual fireworks from 2009.
Here's some unusual or interesting fireworks-related video stuff for your entertainment. To start with, here's what a smurf tied to a series of bottle rockets would experience. Next, we have a collection of slo-mo videos, starting with fireworks and continuing with condiments and snacks. Next up, we've got some "homemade" fireworks (thanks to a little special effects wizardry). Then, as suggested in last week's comments, the classic scene from "Malcolm in the Middle" featuring the Komodo 3000. Finally, we've got the NYPD teaching all those 4th of July scofflaws a lesson by taking over two tons of confiscated fireworks and destroying them with fire. I know that fireworks are one of those gray-area illegal things that the cops (at least around here in Missouri) generally put up with so long as you're not being obnoxious or burning something down. But let's say they were going to do the NYPD thing and grab all they could. It's my firm belief that if you didn't mention the police were involved and just hung out a sign that said "bring whatever fireworks you have to the 'BIG PILE OF BOOOOOM' event at such-and-such location," you'd have people lining up to see what happens when fifty pounds of sparklers go up along with a hojillion otherwise lesser fireworks. Those organizing the event would be required to set them all off at once; no tricking people out of a show allowed. And I can vouch for the coolness of large amounts of low-end fireworks going off. The wife and I still fondly remember a day years ago when we saw a horse trailer full of the things that had caught fire on the side of the road. It was the best display we'd seen in years. Too bad the highway patrol shooed us away after the bottle rockets started bouncing off the hoods of the surrounding cars.
For those who follow the browser wars, Google's Chrome just hit the 20% user mark, with Internet Explorer still taking the top spot in the high forty percentage, followed by Firefox. I stopped using IE a while ago, not because I had any trouble with viruses/malware as I always ran with Nod32 keeping an eye on me and I always update my computer. I tried FF when it was billed as being "faster," so I gave it a spin and it kind of stuck. However, my biggest problem with FF since version 3-something has been and still (even in version 5.0) remains the dreaded memory leak. FF will just decide that it needs more and more RAM if I leave it open, even on text-only pages with no flash movies on pause or anything. I do tend to treat my browser like a magazine I pick up every so often, in that I like to leave it on the spot where I was reading while I go do something else (like feed the kid, mow the lawn, make sure the seals on the Snoozing One's prison are still intact, etc.). It royally stinks that I have to "lose my place" and shut the browser down (often having to kill the process) because it's eating up too many resources to be allowed to live. I've seen a few "solutions" to this, but they really just trade one problem for another, the most common one creating a swap file that eats up hard drive space instead of RAM. So I decided to give Chrome a try. It's not importing my bookmarks from FF for some reason, but I haven't tried all of the exporting tricks I know yet. And while it seems softer on the ol' RAM usage, it appears that the amount of memory used goes up for each tab opened. Assuming I don't get any runaway leaks, I'll have to see how that usage stacks up to the 1.8 gigs FF has grabbed on occasion.
And not a knock on FF per se, but there seems to be a hard-core group on their help forums that's convinced, in spite of years of user evidence to the contrary, that memory leaks are the fault of the user, some going so far as to suggest a total re-installation of their operating system. :)
Speaking of another FF, one that may or may not contain the Human Torch, the writer who gave us the script for "The Rise of the Silver Surfer" is going to be responsible for "Thor 2." He's one of the writers on the first Thor film, and I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, seeing that he was saddled with quite a few immovable problems when writing the second Fantastic Four movie:
- The less-than-capable cast, especially Jessica Alba, who seemed to only be present for the hourly underwear/nekkid joke.
- No access to the rest of the Marvel Universe (this wasn't a Marvel/Disney production), without which the Fantastic Four look pretty silly.
- Trying to present a cosmic threat like Galactus to a possibly non-comic book reading audience without it coming off as incredibly silly or confusing.
That's about as much credit as I'm going to extend for that mess, and Don Payne's credits mostly include comedies (even one of the superhero offerings, "My Super Ex-Girlfriend"). Then again, comics are fairly tongue-in-cheek when you think about it, so maybe he'll help Thor to (if you'll pardon the expression) capture some lightning in a bottle again, or at least, a decent amount of static electricity.
If having Data, or one of his genius-scientist progenitors, appear in the next Star Trek film or two, Brent Spiner would like your help getting the word out. I liked Data in TNG, for the most part, though the flirtation with Asimov's laws was kind of hit or miss. He seemed to need a lot of persuasion to even consider shooting Kivas Fajo in the episode, "The Most Toys." Alternately, he never seemed to have a problem firing the Enterprise's weapons at other ships, so... maybe he was never told there were people on them or they didn't count because they weren't human? And perhaps I'm getting a little darker in my dotage, but I'd love a revival of Data that parallels the evolution of Marvel Comics' Machine Man. Having Data refer to his crewmates as "fleshy ones" and perhaps threatening to construct a bride would be something I'd gladly buy a ticket to see, just for the novelty of it.
I've got to go slather sunscreen on the boy and dunk him in a swimming pool before we burn some hotdogs and go watch exploding things in the sky. Not that he couldn't go outside and see that right now; as I mentioned above, the police don't seem too concerned with the booms and the flashes so long as the fire department isn't involved or a plane gets downed. If you want to seem like a pro at the pyro profession, you can point out the specific names to the effects you're viewing, though how your lesson on the deployment of burning chemicals might not be well-received; it's all in the delivery.
And since I mentioned deliveries, here's an extensive one:
- We can accuse Michael Bay of many things, but refusing to recycle isn't one of them, and he's been at it a while.
- It turns out that the Doctor once met the Dark Knight, and prints of the event are available.
- Speaking of Batman, this has got to be the best Bat-Lego set ever created (via target="_blank">SuperPunch).
- And not wanting to leave the Doctor out of a follow-up, here's a handy, if large, infographic guide to his companions.
- Though it's possible we may have trouble remembering them all.
- Behold the luckiest squirrel caught on camera.
- Hate the Future is a tumblr collection of odd sci-fi imagery, usually accompanied by amusing captions.
- Defend your hero as he valiantly tries to save the world in Mittens! Written in 48 hours as a game challenge, this pixel-game has you, a cat, doing what cats have always done behind the scenes: protecting the person who gets all the credit.
- If you truly want to write like they did in the good ol' days when typewriters were still works of mechanical sorcery, try to get a hold of a writing ball.
- Now if someone would just make it so those 3D printers rolled the dice as they made them...
- And lest those one-roll dice go to waste, here's a gallery of works from an artist who sculpts using dice. Gencon needs to have a live demonstration by next year's convention, or there is no justice in the world.
- There are hints that Blizzard's next big online game will be a 'casual' MMO, so t-shirts and jeans allowed, right?
- It looks like the worst power-hog in your house might be your cable box/DVR.
- How many licks does it take for a cat to get to the center of a child's head? More than nine minutes, at least.
- It's a "one-button" game (jump), but Iron Terror is a well-animated game where you're running for your life from a giant robot. Guest-starring the Wilhelm Scream.
- And we end with a little classic arcade-inspired gaming, Xonix 3D, which reminds me of the old "Qix" game from days of yore.