Note to self: Look out the window to see if there are any really little kids waiting for treats before putting on the mask and opening the door :)

Since 1994, A Word A Day (AWAD) has done one thing and done it well - bring a new word into your active vocabulary (complete with audible pronunciations). Truthfully, I often skim or gloss entries arriving in the daily inbox, but every now and then one really catches my attention. Today’s word: Skeuomorph:

noun: A design feature copied from a similar artifact in another material, even when not functionally necessary. For example, the click sound of a shutter in an analog camera that is now reproduced in a digital camera by playing a sound clip.

The word captures the fake authenticity meme so well. Think wood-grained vinyl on the side of a 70s station wagon. Think “distressed” jeans. Think hockey mom.

Stranger than fiction: Tiny, virtually indestructible animals called tardigrades, aka “water bears.” They don’t do much, but they don’t seem to know how to die, either. From The Very Short List - What can’t water bears bear?

Tardigrades — barely visible invertebrates that cling to mosses and lichens — are an exception to this rule. They are virtually indestructible. In recent years, scientists have subjected tardigrades (which are also known as water bears) to extreme temperatures, ranging from 155ºC to –200ºC. They’ve deprived the creatures of food and water for years at a time and zapped them with incredibly toxic levels of radiation. But, just like a Timex watch, water bears keep on ticking. Earlier this month, scientists reported that a colony of tardigrades had even managed to withstand the vacuum of outer space.

There is no outer boundary to the mind-blowing properties of raw nature.

See also: the Tardigrades in Space blog.

Y’all dream. Dream of all the things you could be doing if you weren’t glued to the job, glued to the family, glued to the tube. Watch Discovery and wonder if you should take up hang gliding / hitch-hiking / kayaking / gator wrestling / any activity that gets you off your seat and helps you milk life to the fullest. You know, that “50 things to do before I die” list? How many of those items do you really think you’ll cross off?

Brett [Something] decided the only way to make sure he crossed all 50 items off his list would be to leave the house and get started. And not come back until everything on the list was done.

• Go through a hedge maze
• Create a crop circle
• Tour the Crayola Factory
• Geocache in all 48 contiguous states
• Drive a race car
• Make Moonshine
• Learn survival skills
• Etc.

Calls himself Amtrekker. Travels with four T-shirts, one pair of pants, one pair of shorts, and a backpack full of technology he uses to blog about his adventures and produce a weekly podcast from wherever he is at the time. And he’s doing it. Living the adventure dream you and I only dream about really doing. Only a few more items left on his list, then he can go back home.

Great interviews with Brett in the Podcacher podcast, episodes 178 and 189.

Go Brett!

File under Art Imitates Life Imitates Art:

Me want…

Imagine traipsing down the trail with 200 lbs. of extra weight… and not feeling it. Better: Imagine being paralyzed, and suddenly able to walk. Human exoskeletons are a reality.

Berkeley Bionics has spent the last several years developing and working to perfect their exoskeletons, which augment both a person’s lifting strength and endurance. With the HULC device, a person can carry up to 200 pounds without seriously impeding their mobility while using up to 15 percent less oxygen to bear the weight, increasing the length of time a person would be able to haul such a load.

File under Truth Is Stranger: A couple of months ago Miles’ viking helmet got busted — right around the time we had to replace the video inverter in Amy’s monitor. Naturally, the broke inverter ended up attached to the broke helmet, along with a few lights and some pipe cleaner. Miles called it “The Brain Great-iator,” because it allegedly makes your brain greater (unconfirmed).

Separated at birth? Miles and Steve Carrell

Then last month’s Wired mag hit the stands, with cover story 12 Hacks That Will Amp Up Your Brainpower, featuring Steve Carrell sporting a grown-up version of Miles’ own invention.

Michael Scott is going to get so sued.

Wow. Live-action Spanish version of The Simpsons. No one seems to have more info. Can someone translate please?

Birdman coda: Yves Rossy dropped out of an airplane at 8,000 feet with this thing strapped to his back last week, becoming a human fuselage. 200 lbs of thrust kicked him out to 186 mph during his five-minute flight - first successful one of its kind. Awe-inspiring.

One of the excellent things about being a parent is the endless opportunity to re-live your childhood. In high school, Gumby was mostly the subject of satire… we had grown up watching 1950s/60s Gumby shorts in the 1970s. In the 80s, mocking Gumby was fun because it had been a staple of our own childhoods, even though that staple had already been retro when we were tykes. But while we made lots of Gumby jokes and loved to quote from Eddie Murphy’s 1982 SNL Gumby reprisal, and while I even made a foam Gumby costume for halloween ‘82, I hadn’t seen any of the actual episodes since early childhood.

Rented a volume of early episodes recently to show Miles, and was taken by surprise — they’re so completely different from my early memories. I remember “Gumby” as innocent and simple, and it is. But it’s also incredibly surreal, and charmingly/badly produced. The stiffest voice acting you can imagine. Ridiculous plot and prop inconsistencies. The clay in Gumby’s body tearing between the legs and Clokey not even bothering to edit it out. Strange animations scattered throughout the stories for no particular reason… you can almost visualize the animators making it up as they went along: “Hey, what if a musical note jumped out of this red vinyl LP and down Gumby’s throat?” Sure, why not. Spontaneously bizarre.

Everything in the Gumby universe starts with “Gumb___.” Gumby and his family live in Gumbasia. Gumby’s mother and father are called Gumba and Gumbo. Gumba reminds Gumby every time he leaves the house, “Don’t forget to take your Gumbopiture!” — a bizarre reference to a recurring prop — a sort of circular thermometer that measures Gumby’s health relative to his temperature (clay is stiff when cold, runny when warm; Art Clokey seems to have been obsessed with the plot possibilities presented by clay’s thermal properties).

Another recurrent effect I had no memory of: Every time Clokey needed to show fire or smoke (dragon’s breath, burning wheat, steaming pools…), he created the effect by scratching at or burning the physical film (and by the looks of it, dousing it with chemicals from time to time). At one point, Gumby steals a hot rod and starts spinning donuts (I kid you not). The smoke reeling from his tires looks like Clokey just scribbled on the film with Magic Marker. It’s brilliant.

I had completely forgotten the excellent way Gumby gets around. Rather than animating him walking, Clokey just propped him up on one leg and slid him across the floor - an inexplicable one-foot slide/skate move that makes you wonder whether Gumby actually has some kind of undulating foot pad, like a super-fast mollusk. It’s just weird, totally cheap, and totally wonderful.

Nothing about watching Gumby episodes from the 60s while in your 40s matches your early childhood memories. Everything is cheaper, more hokey, more cliche’d, more technicolor. A TV show (even a kids show) being made this badly today would never get signed. These classic episodes would hardly even pass for rough cuts in today’s big-budget TV universe. But the constraints of small budgets allowed Clokey and the animators to think off-the-cuff and improvise like crazy. There were only three channels at the time, and no one cared that it was hokey - maybe that’s what we all loved about it (ultimately, Gumby became a 223-episode series stretching over 35 years).

After a few evenings of watching Gumby re-runs with Miles, I asked him what he thought:

“Well, it doesn’t amount to much, but it’s sure interensting!”

Right on.

Amazing what a man can do with a can of spray paint and a saucepan lid (and an uncanny gift for seeing possibilities).

My attempt to sell off boxes of 30-year-old+ comics was an abject failure. The market is flooded, the internet is taking over the comic space, etc. etc. Especially disheartening was that I couldn’t find a good home for all my old Mad magazines. Thumbing through the boxes a few months ago, had to take time out to do a bunch of Mad Fold-Ins — the back page was always a treat, and every issue has vertical creases at the 1/3 points. Creator Al Jaffe (now 86) has been creating the fold-ins by hand almost non-stop since 1964.

The New York Times is featuring an excellent collection of fold-ins, with interactivity expertly re-created in Flash.

Gizmodo: “Boston Dynamics keeps working on their BigDog quadruped robot, which will probably grow to be the future AT-AT of the Pentagon.” Video:

Something about the way the bot moves elicits sympathy in the viewer - its motions are so animal-like they throw you. When the researcher kicks BigDog to demonstrate how it can regain its balance, my first reaction was one of sympathy for “the animal” - internally, I had already started to identify it as a living creature (and thus as sentient). But the whine of the two-stroke Briggs & Stratton lawn mower engine keeps you reminded. Wonder why it isn’t electric?

More here.

For those about to adopt Dali’s paranoicritical method, we salute you.

Carmina Burana (Alternate Lyrics)

I’m almost convinced the original Latin is somehow an encrypted version of something much more surreal. The brain is a strange and wonderful place.

Thanks mnep

A bit post-facto, but when am I not late to the party? For n+1 mag, old friend A.S. Hamrah offers his typically surly, dryly hilarious Oscar preview. Excerpt:

I can’t say anything about Juno because I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it because I hated Little Miss Sunshine so much. After I saw Little Miss Sunshine I really wished I hadn’t. I refuse to make that mistake again. If that’s what a feel good movie is, I can’t stand to feel that good. It’s physically painful for me to feel that good.

Righteous CD cover meme image pool happening on Flickr these-a-days.

1. First, you’ll need a name for your band. This will be the first article title on WikiPedia’s random page selector.

2. Now for the all-important album title. Grab the last four words of the very last quote on the quotationspage’s random quote selector.

3. And of course, the album art. Yours will be the third picture, no matter what it is, on Flickr’s most interesting page.

Run your elements through the Photoshop sausage grinder, emulating the style of an album you already own (if you like), and out comes an album cover that looks like it could be at home in the Indie or Alt.Whatever section of your local record store.

To get yours into the pool, you’ll need to join the pool, then go to your uploaded image and click the “Add to pool” link right above it (I’ve always thought Flickr made the process of playing in photo pools unnecessarily complicated).

I made one.

Think you can tell a fine artist from a fake? Or an artist from an ape, for that matter? Actual Faulkner from a machine translation from German text? Reverent quizzes let you try your hand. Kinda funny, kinda pointed. (n.b. I only got 100% on Pollock or Birds, though Amy did get close on Fine Art or Fake). The bell curve shows the bulk of the population batting around 70-80%.

I’ve never used one, but Amazon recommends I give it a shot. Were it not for the “Six Feet Under” marathon Amy and I undertook around this time last year, digesting the entire series in a couple of months, I’d have absolutely no idea what this ad was referring to. What I’m trying to figure out is why this ad came up while purchasing Robyn Hitchcock back-catalog from the Amazon MP3 store. There’s got to be a connection there somewhere… “Heavenly nightshade. It’s where you came from.”

Science time, boys and girls.

Now, all we need is a worldwide power source strong enough to cool road surfaces to negative bajillion degrees and we’ve got free transportation!

Far out — BBC: A giant Pacific octopus living in a Cornish aquarium has formed an unlikely bond with a child’s plastic toy. Louis regularly plays with the Mr Potato Head figure which was given to him as part of an enrichment project at Newquay’s Blue Reef Aquarium.