This van ad presents a weird intersection of events and circumstance.

Someone had the inventor’s spark. They built a better mousetrap (valve). That person was paired up with someone with some marketing spunk. That person was paired up with a budding copy writer with an advertising writing style from the 50s. Next, add someone who can print a reasonably good (yet pixelated) image on the side of a van. Lastly, find a van owner willing to brandish the ad on the side of their vehicle. Possibly even someone who would install said mousetrap (valve).

I have a sneaking suspicion that all of these roles were satisfied by one person. That mixture of ingenuity, action, and unintended kitsch make this world a beautiful place. Here’s a vote against specialization.

From Bot Junkie comes a (long) series of videos of a REAL man. If the zombie apocolaypse happens (oh, and it will happen), I’m going to this guy’s house. He’s basicly building a giant hexapod robot that he can drive around in. Here’s a picture of his plans:
Check out his website. I havent’ gotten through all of the videos, but in order to build his robot, he first has to build a workshop. So he starts there. Did I mention that’s he’s completely off the grid? Yeah. Dude is making this robot from scratch, with very little resources. 
 

 
[via BotJunkie]

From the Full Gisburg.

There’s plenty more where that came from too.  Glorious.

Here are some pretty nifty long exposure photographs. Recently on a rock climbing trip to Joshua Tree some buddies and me took some of our own long exposure photographs, just goofin’ around really. Here’s two:

Pictures were taken by my buddy Val.

Politifact.com has a nice list of campaign promises made by Barack Obama and the current status of those promises. You can check it out here. It would have been nice to have a list like this for the last administration handy, and also a list of all of the scandals the GOP was dealing with. It seemed like for a few years, there was a new scandal every week. There were simply too many to keep track of. With this list we can at least keep track of this administration’s promises. Here’s a link to the only (so far) promise that has been broken.

If you’re a member of the white liberal yuppie elite, you probably listen to This American Life [wikipedia][podcast]. If so, you should go and donate at least $1. It costs them $150,000 a year to host the podcast.

Think about it. For the cost of $1, you can support something less inane than “Two and a Half Men” or “Everybody loves Raymond.”