A samurai sword wielding vigilante has come to the rescue of two Police officers when they were attacked by an armed gang in South Shields, England.
A group of men had forced their way into a house and were ransacking the place when passing plain-clothes officers were alerted by a woman inside screaming.
The criminals outnumbered them and were armed with a hammer, knives and chains and attacked the Police officers.
As one of them stabbed at a Policeman with his knife, a mysterious do-gooder appeared from nowhere and attacked him with a samurai sword.
One of the burglars began running away but was stopped by the stranger who struck him on the arm with the sword.
Two of the criminals were arrested, but in true hero style the samurai disappeared before police could speak to him.
Banzai!
New Library Toy
LibraryThing is a site that claims to catalogue your personal book collection. In practice, it's not very comprehensive, partly because it's hoping users will provide cataloguing information (like a wiki). Still, it works if you want a place to list all the books you own but don't have the time or skills to do it in Excel or Access. Also lets you share your collection with others as a way of social networking ("You've read jPod? So have I!").
Monday, January 15, 2007
Everyone loves toys...
...but what happens When Toys Attack?!
Too late for Christmas, but this article lists some of the most dangerous toys of all time (or at least the last 50 years). Some highlights:
Lawn Darts (duh)
Home atomic energy lab--with actual radioactive materials!
Finger-munching Snack Time Cabbage Patch doll
Castration anxiety courtesy of a belt-buckle cap gun
The South will Rise Again!--with the Johnny Reb Cannon
Battlestar Galactica toys take out the evil Cylons--or little Jimmy's right eye
Fisher-Price motorcycle: "Jane, stop this crazy thing!"
Whoever said childhood was innocent?
It is the physical weakness of a baby that makes it seem "innocent", not the quality of its inner life. I have myself seen a small baby jealous; it was too young to speak, but it was livid with anger as it watched another infant at the breast.
-Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions
Friday, January 12, 2007
Look me up!
Remember the card catalogue? Now you too can be part of those good old days again, with the Catalog Card Generator!
...wiping out all 4500 songs and 15 videos on your iPod.
I'm not sure exactly what happened--maybe it had to do with "Syncing", but all the mp3s and videos were wiped off (to the turn of 27 GB of files). The photos were untouched.
So I just got back from the Evanescence concert in Toronto. I had a great time. We had pretty good seats considering we were in the bleachers at the Air Canada Centre.
There was some indie band as the first opener--Black Mary or something like that. I didn't really hear much of them. The other opener was Stone Sour, also known as "the guy from Slipknot's other band". They rocked pretty hard. I'm glad that it's okay for guitarists to play fast solos again, and for drummers to use double-bass drums. Corey Taylor is a pretty vulgar but friendly frontman, eliciting many laughs and screams of support from the audience.
Then Evanescence took the stage. Amy Lee and the boys rocked as usual, though we noticed her voice was sounding strained near the end of the set. Well, I think this was a longer set than when my sister and I saw them at Koolhaus back in October. Other than a few more songs and much cooler lighting effects, the sets were pretty close in content. But Amy, darling, if you're going to play 90-minute sets for the whole tour, you have to start writing songs with longer instrumental sections. I know you have a powerful and versatile voice, but if you don't take care of it, you'll lose it.
Here's a pastiche of several clips of Evanescence live, backed by their breakthrough hit, "Bring Me to Life" (I'm fairly certain it's the studio recording of the song):
Sunday, January 07, 2007
Time to let our hair down again, fellow bibliophiles!
In all the rush of the holiday season, I almost forgot that Naughty Librarian Month has rolled around again. And I don't have a thing to wear!
Friday, January 05, 2007
Aural Kombat
Via Penny Arcade, I've learned of a new documentary on video games called Moral Kombat. Here's the trailer:
This is utter bullshit on so many levels, I can't name them all. But I highly recommend Harold Schechter's book, Savage Pastimes, for a revealing look at just how violent our culture and society is compared to ages past. A bit of a spoiler--are first-person shooter games really worse than the bear-baiting of the Renaissance era? There's a big stink about the video of Saddam Hussein's lynching execution making the rounds on YouTube and the like, but up until about a hundred years ago hangings were public events that families went to for weekend picnics. In the carnival-like atmosphere of a public hanging, all the townspeople would gather round, with their young children, to watch these criminals drop a short length, and twitch for a bit at the end of the gibbet, and being cut down. Meanwhile, buskers, entertainers, food vendors and prostitutes would be making brisk business. Death has always been associated with entertainment, food and sex--probably because proximity to it makes the living value pleasures of the flesh that much more.
This issue hits my hot button because I'm a roleplayer, and my hobby went through this same bullshit over 20 years ago. (I'm also a video-gamer, though I'm not on top of every latest development in that industry.) The line from the trailer that really set me off was "we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be."What?! Are they saying there is no boundary between imagination and reality? Puh-lease. Over the last two decades, I've "pretended" to be an evil knight in service to a dark god (in Dungeons & Dragons), a drug-dealing black market surgeon (in the Cyberpunk 2020 game), a Terminator-like killer cyborg (in the Mage: the Ascension game), a backstabbing, treacherous vampire (in live-action Vampire games), and a raging werewolf warrior (in a live-action Werewolf game). In real life, I've never been in a fight, never committed an act of violence on someone, never been charged with any crime (except exceeding the speed limit by 30 km/h), never drank anyone's blood, and never barked at the moon (OK, the last one I did, but in my defense I was singing along with Ozzy Osbourne).
If we were what we pretended to be, George W. Bush would be an effective president and warleader, Canada would be respected and envied the world over (newsflash: we're not), and Paris Hilton would be a paragon of moral virtue.
