Clear Blue Dei

Sean Robinson, Head of IT at the Allen County Public Library and defender of Truth, Justice and the American Way, obliterates the bad guys (and a few innocent victims) in his pursuit of… something.

Brought to you by JibJab (Starring You!), I present: Unnecessary Force, starring Sean Robinson. Supporting roles by Nat Robinson as the Chief, Susan Mellott as Victim #1, Julian Casserley as Victim #2 and Dorothy Lubbes (my mom) as Victim #3. With a guest appearance by Rush Limbaugh.

Note: This requires an extremely high-speed connection. Watching it on my wireless connection at home, I lose rather large pieces of it. Just so you know.

Wordpress Note: When I embedded this in my post, I had to turn off the Visual Editor in WordPress (self-hosted) in order for it to display correctly. You can do that by going to Users, editing your user and unchecking the “Use Visual Editor” checkbox at the top left. You can re-check it after you have published your post, but be careful about re-editing your post with the Visual Editor on. This is the same issue that you run into when you try to embed a YouTube video in a self-hosted WordPress blog post.

JibJab Note: And in case you were wondering how to embed a JibJab Movie in your post, after you have created the movie in JibJab, click on the word “Embed” to the right of the movie, under Publish. It will create the code for you which you then copy in its entirety and paste into your post where you want it to appear. (Turning off the Visual Editor first if you are using a self-hosted Wordpress blog, i.e. one that isn’t through wordpress.com)

Enjoy!

~Susan Mellott

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My husband Sean Robinson and Kay Gregg from the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana, created a video for the Librareo “Why I Love My Library” video contest.

Out of over 175 public, school and academic libraries that submitted videos for the “I Love My Library!” video contest, Sean and Kay’s video was selected as one of the 5 finalists.

The winner was revealed at the annual ALA (American Library Association) conference. Unfortunately, the ACPL video did not win (though it was certainly the funniest, although the others were also good). However, it did get many, many more views than any of the other finalists!

And who doesn’t love a zombie video? Especially one set in a Library! So just in time for Halloween, I present to you: Reference Zombies!

~Susan Mellott

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Well, I had originally planned to write about a cool set of posts I found on Dark Roasted Blend about weird and wacky cars. But as I started looking at their blog, I found myself reading more and more posts of theirs and being totally amazed and amused.

So while this post is mainly about the amazing cars they have written about, it is also a huge recommendation to go surf round on their blog. But only if you have plenty of time! And don’t forget to bookmark it because you’ll want to go back again and again.

So without further ado, here are some of the wild and wonderful cars and similar forms of transportation that I found on their site.

This is the picture that I originally viewed that led me to their blog. How could you not go look to see where it came from.

And if you’ve read my prior posts, you will know how much I love the new fortwo Smart car. Check this smart car out!

This is from their World’s Smallest Cars. It is a 1954 Mivalino small car (truly rare find) - Italian Mi-Val motorcycle company’s own version of the Messerschmitt KR-175:

Smallest ever car to go into mass production was the fascinating “Peel” P50 car (you could almost carry it as a suitcase) - more info here.

Despite having only one light (of any kind) and 5-inch wheels, the car was nevertheless deemed street legal.

Here’s some seriously lit up trucks:

From their Future Tech Review, the Moovie concept car built by Peugeot has a length of just 2,3 metres (7.6 ft) and width and height of 1,5 metres (4.9 ft). Access is created by two large sliding doors placed in the centre of the hub-less side-wheels.:

And what about these Super Recreational Vehicles?

Too fancy for you? Try these:

Not really cars, but mechanized mobility suits “i-foot” and “i-unit”. The units can climb the stairs and are part of “The Wonders of Living and Moving Freely” and “The New Relationship Between People and Vehicles” exhibits.

These are just a very small preview of the cool cars and transportation (and related) things they have written about.

And then when you’ve spent hours looking through these, check out another of their categories, like Architecture or just plain Weird and start all over again!

~Susan Mellott

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Thanks to twitter (@bbluesman aka Mark Foreman, creator of many outstanding audio podcasts), I found this great mini-movie video created by Galacticast. GALACTICAST is a weekly comedy show parodying all the worlds of geek-dom. From their apartment studio, Casey McKinnon and Rudy Jahchan (along with the other Galacticast players) mash-up their love of sci-fi, fantasy, horror, comics, and video-games to bring you hilarious sketches every Monday morning.

Their latest release is “Star Fleet Academy - To Boldly Go Where No One Wants to Go“, a spoof of the Star Trek shows. Mark twittered (tweeted?) about it so I followed link and was entranced. It is really, really well done and very funny. And it is only one of their many great podcasts. (Sorry for the too large size, I can’t control the size of the video).

Galacticast was nominated for 3 Parsec Awards (A Celebration of Speculative Fiction Podcasting) this year,: Best Fan Podcast, Best Video Podcast and Best Video Production. Here is the list of all the finalists and you can view/listen to all the amazing podcasts that were nominated this year here and you view by category by using the selections listed in the left sidebar. And here is the list of the Parsec Award Winners.

If you have some time to kill, go look through the Parsec Award nominations and the Galacticast videos. You’ll be glad you did!

~Susan Mellott

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Here is the Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational which once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.

The winners are:

1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.
2. Ignoranus: A person who’s both stupid and an asshole.
3. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.
4. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.
5. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign breaking down in the near future.
6. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.
7. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
8. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.
9. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
10. Hipatitis: Terminal coolness.
11. Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)
12. Karmageddon: It’s when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, and then the Earth explodes, and it’s a serious bummer.
13. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you
14. Glibido: All talk and no action.
15. Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
16. Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.
17. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
18. Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you’re eating.

The Washington Post has also published the winning submissions to its yearly contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words.

And the winners are:
1. coffee, n. the person upon whom one coughs.
2. flabbergasted, adj. appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained.
3. abdicate, v. to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
4. esplanade, v. to attempt an explanation while drunk.
5. willy-nilly, adj. impotent.
6. negligent, adj. absentmindedly answering the door when wearing only a nightgown.
7. lymph, v. to walk with a lisp.
8. gargoyle, n. olive-flavored mouthwash.
9. flatulence, n. emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over by a steamroller.
10. balderdash, n. a rapidly receding hairline.
11. testicle, n. a humorous question on an exam.
12. rectitude, n. the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.
13. pokemon, n. a Rastafarian proctologist.
14. oyster, n. a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.
15. Frisbeetarianism, n. the belief that, after death, the soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.
16. circumvent, n. an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.

Enjoy!

~Susan Mellott

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While browsing some of my favorite blogs, I found an entry on JustGiblets pointing to some silly and fun tests to pass time when it is a rainy day, or OK, I confess, I’d rather play around on the computer than clean. And after you’ve taken them, you can easily add them to your facebook if you so choose (and who doesn’t, that has a facebook account

The Brainfall tests are definitely geared to younger people (in school) though. I had a hard time answering some of the questions since they referred to school and it really doesn’t make any sense now. But with a little fudging, I had a great time.

They have tests you can take to determine things like “What Kind of Guy Will You Fall For?” (no surprise there - Geek

What Kind of Guy Will You Fall For?
	You would fall for the geek. If you’re looking for love, consider spending a little more time studying up in the library. To you, there’s nothing more attractive than intelligence, shyness, and kindness; your future love may have four eyes and zero social skills, but he’ll make up for it in brains and heart.
Find Your Character @ BrainFall.com

and “What Kind of Drink are You?” I see I am part Cosmopolitan and part Whiskey on the Rocks. Weird combo, but I guess the bottom line is that I REALLY don’t care what people think of me I think I’m a lot more Whiskey Sour. Because I can be an almost obsessive perfectionist and don’t call me ‘girly’ !

What Kind of Drink Are You?
	You are a part Cosmopolitan. You are quiet and content. You don’t stand out too much, but you don’t mind and don’t care what people think of you. You don’t need everything to be perfect, as long as you get what matters. Sure, you may be ‘girly’ and you may not be the smartest, craziest or most refined, but you really like yourself, and that’s fine by you.
	You are a part Whiskey on the Rocks. You are tough and you know it. It takes a long time for people to get to know you but you wouldn’t have it any other way. You don’t care what people think, but sometimes that turns people off of you.
Find Your Character @ BrainFall.com

And another site with a ton of fun quizzes and tests is Tickle.com. I’ve taken tickle quizzes several times over the years just for fun. I think it is a little better than Brainfall, although the quizzes are longer and you have to deal with advertising. Just look for the ’skip offers’ or ‘go to results’ to get past the ads.

The first Tickle test I took was an IQ test. It was really involved, but was interesting. It is under the PHD-certified ‘premium’ tests and I seem to remember having to pay money if I wanted the full report. But it did give me results and an IQ score I think (it’s been a long time ago). But it is an interesting challenge to try to solve each question. Don’t start it unless you have some time and energy to spend!

On a lighter note, I took the “Which ’80s TV Show are You?” and I’d be The Dukes of Hazzard

“Yee-haw! So maybe you get into a scrape or two, but what’s wrong with that? You never mean no harm. You believe in standing up for what’s right — and don’t mind having a good time while you’re at it. We wouldn’t change you if we could!”

Just for fun,

~Susan Mellott

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JibJab lets you upload a picture of your face and insert it in a video. It is limited in its choices but it is an interesting concept.Is this cool or what? It’s a bit of a waste of time, but a lot of fun. It will be better when they add more movies and things.

And unfortunately I can’t seem to add the video I created to WordPress.com. I managed to trick it into inserting into this blog, which is my self-hosted WordPress.org blog by creating the Blogger post through JibJab to my Blogger post and then copying the html to this post. A pretty jury-rigged solution though.

UPDATE: It *almost* worked. I could see the video but it caused my template to get a little flakey after it. I imagine someone better with HTML then I am could fix it.

UPDATE AGAIN: OK, I’m an idiot… I realized I could click ‘embed’ on my video and didn’t have to click any of the predefined items (like blogger or facebook) and it would create the html code and I could cut and paste. Duh.

Also, this link should take you to our video on JibJab.

BTW, you can create a post/link directly from JibJab to Blogger, MySpace, Facebook, Typepad and several other Web 2.0 tools.

Thanks to Libraryman, from whom I shamelessly stole, even down to starring in the same movie. What can I say, it was the best one

~Susan Mellott

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What can I say? Enjoy!

Thanks to just giblets for posting about this gem.

~Susan Mellott

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I was looking for episodes on the internet of some TV shows for my sister and was having a hard time finding “So You Think You Can Dance” (which apparently Fox does not put on their website). But I looked for anything on YouTube and found Snape teaches Slytherins to dance. It is excellent and was created using the game Sims 2.

And fourth-rose has also written a story that goes with the video, in which Professor Snape, in order to make sure Slytherin doesn’t make fools of themselves at the upcoming Yule Ball, teaches them to dance. It is absolutely hilarious and well worth the read.

Looking around, I found that people were writing additional Harry Potter stories using Sims to illustrate them. Here is a page of Sims outtakes from a chapter of one of those stories by CloudlessNights. You can find her work by checking out her tags and links, like Harry Potter starring The Sims: Book 1 - The Philosophers Stone and Book 2 - Chamber of Secrets.

She also has a great series called the Timeturner Incident written by the Sims. As she says in episode 1: “Please bear in mind that visiting sims can’t be controlled, so whatever they did, they did it all on their own accord. I was only watching in shock, awe and amusement, and taking a lot of pictures ;-)”

And check out the Harry Potter Sim Videos on YouTube. The assortment of creative ideas is outstanding. And there is an outstanding series of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix with voice actors and everything. Here is chapter 1 (he has disabled embedding the video). These were created starting in October of 2005. It is interesting to compare to the movie.

And of course, if you just search on Sims2, you end up with a ton of fun videos. Who would have thought people could be so creative with this new medium?

Enjoy.

~Susan Mellott

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Today in the era of text messages, too often a clever put-down is about as classy as “OMFG U SUX”. But Angry 365 Days a Year (if I was Australian, I would be too) has put together a list (actually mostly copied it from somewhere else, but that is the mark of a good blogger) called When Insults Had Class. These are some of the true classics in the sarcastic retort genre. Here are a few that I especially liked:

“Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I’ll waste no time in reading it.” Moses Hadas

“He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.”
Billy Wilder

“I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play. Bring a friend… if you have one.” –
George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill

“Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second… if there is one.” –
Winston Churchill, in response

“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever…” –
Oscar Wilde

And let me just add:

“I’m for New Zealand, or any team that is playing against Australia”
Sean’s favorite T-Shirt

And for clever “yo mama” jokes if philosophers had said them, see Jamie VanEaton’s post Smart Talking with the Philosophers. Here are a few of my favorites:

Rousseau: In man’s natural state, man is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. But then he saw your mama and decided inherently ugly.

Camus: Sisyphus said, “I thought I was going to have to push this rock up a hill forever. And then I found out it was your mama.”

Kierkegaard: To have faith is to have doubt. So to have faith in God means you have to have some doubt that God exists. And that may be so, because I’ve seen your mama.

Nietzsche: Your mama is dead.

~Susan Mellott

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