An alarm clock that wakes you up to the aroma of freshly cooked bacon. Wonderful Brilliant idea.

The Bortle Dark-Sky Scale is a nine-level numeric measure of the night sky brightness in a particular location.  The New Yorker had a nice article about light pollution in which David Owen writes:

For someone standing on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon on a moonless night, the brightest feature of the sky is not the Milky Way but the glow of Las Vegas, a hundred and seventy-five miles away.  To see skies truly comparable to those in which Galileo knew, you would have to travel to such places as the Australian outback and the mountains of Peru.

In other words, it is very likely that I will never see night sky’s like the ones Galileo made his discoveries on.

The American Society of Magazine Editors ranks the top 40 covers of the last 40 years.  One of the covers is my shower curtain.  I’ll let you take a guess at which one. (hint: it’s in the top 5)

He tries to explain how the phone companies defrauded the American public out of $200 billion (with a ‘B’) .  As an example, he said (his emphasis):

As just a small example of the way the phone companies took advantage of ineffectual regulation, they charged an average of $1 per month per customer to run Bellcore, the research organization set up to replace Bell Labs after the 1983 split up of AT&T. But when Bellcore was later sold and the profits from that sale distributed to the telephone companies, not to the customers, ALL BUT ONE RBOC CONTINUED THE $1 CHARGE DESPITE THE FACT THAT IT NO LONGER DIRECTLY SUPPORTED ANYTHING.

Time Warner Cable charges $0.23 for the ads they send you in your bill!  They even go as far as saying that the line item was a mistake and that that cost is usually bundled in with other charges.

Let me get this straight…they charge the customer for the service, pass on every fee to the customer, and now they charge the customer for the advertisements they include in the bill?  What a racket.

Note to self…buy Time Warner stock.

I’ve always felt that if he can wear that “armor” everyone else should because it gave him the ability to not be “afraid” of getting hit by an inside pitch, which is part of every pitchers mental battle with the hitter.

I would have preferred he remain anonymous, but it was nice to see that old-fashioned detective work from old-fashioned media got the job done.

Nicholas Manion makes little skylines of world cities out of paper money.

Earlier this year came news that Clippy, that lovable annoying paper clip that would pop up in MS Office, was being axed.  Now it seems he has moved south and gotten a job at Apple.  He’s included in the return box sent to people who send in their iPhone to be repaired.

Nice to see the little guy moving on with his life.

Apparently soccer is really popular everywhere but the USA.  I guess this kid looks good, but I wouldn’t know.  I consider my morning to be successful if I manage to get from the bed to the bathroom without bumping into the walls.  My mornings are not always successful.

Kenneth Branagh’s version of Hamlet is not only the complete, unabridged, long version that faithfully recreates Will’s vision that doesn’t cut out “unimportant” scenes for time, it’s also visually stunning, and very well acted.  In short, it’s the best movie version of Hamlet.

It’s a shame that it’s taken Warner Brothers so long to bring this beautiful movie out on DVD.  The only downside is that it’s only on DVD.  This movie screams for High Definition.  I don’t have HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, but if this movie were available in HD and with 300 and Planet Earth also in HD, it might be time to take the plunge.  Here’s hoping that it doesn’t take Warner Brothers another 10+ years to get this out on HD.