The Dower Power Hour

This week’s heroes are two high school seniors: David Shepherd and Travis Price. After a male Freshman was taunted for wearing pink on the first day of school this year, these cool kids decided to do something about it. The pair organized a mass effort to get everyone to wear pink on the same day to display a community solidarity against mean-spirited teasing. Apparently, using a mix of word-of-mouth and the Internet, they were able to get approximately half the school to display their intolerance for intolerance. You can read more about it here.  Anyway, good job guys! 

Next week’s hero will be William Seward, but I’ve been trying to finish the book which has inspired my Seward salute before I explain who he is and why he is one of the great, under-recognized American heroes.  

Thanks to Anjie for showing me this one. The concept is pretty straight forward. This French company helps spouses cheat on their significant others by allowing them to purchase alibis and the necessary follow-up documents, phone calls, whatever is necessary for them to pull it off. It’s legal, because they only make up documents from fake companies, not by doctoring real ones.

The company’s creator is a former private eye that got tired of being the anti-fun police, apparently, and wanted to help people get away with mischief for a change. If you can read French, I encourage you to check out their website. Despite myself, I can’t help but think that this is actually a really intriguing idea.  I’m surprised I haven’t heard about something like this before.  What do you think, is this the epitome of denigration or simply another service to society?

Before I forget, today is the official Day of Conception in Ulyanovsk Oblast, a federal subject of Russia.  In honor of its low birthrates, September 12th has been designated a day for couples to get off of work and then… get off in bed, if you’re willing to excuse the horrible sexual pun.  Couples that give birth nine months later, June 12th, will receive “money, cars, refrigerators, and other prizes.”  For those that participate and give birth on that day, a committee of judges evaluates the mother and family based on criteria including respectability and parenting.   More than 600 women signed up for the contest last year, and the birth rate on that day was three times the usual average.

Ulyanovsk Oblast:

This is really cool. If any of you have 10 minutes to set aside everything and just try to grasp a somewhat difficult concept, I highly recommend you watch this video. It starts with an explanation of the three dimensions that we are most familiar with and then slowly proceeds to ten possible dimensions. The style in which the video is constructed is aesthetically pleasing and easy to follow so please take a look.

No, really. I’m not kidding. You can read the full story here.  The basic logic goes like this:

Since plants are “sensitive to light,” they make the perfect audience for cinema.  Since it’s hard to determine what would entertain a daffodil, naturally reproduction is the safest bet.  The artist filmed the pollination of several plants, edited the footage to make it the grainy black and white that we associate with old fashioned, low quality smut, and then projected the scene directly on the plant audience.  This is the same artist “known for trying to genetically engineer God in a petri dish in collaboration with scientists at the University of California.”

If you don’t know what to do with this information, you’re not alone.

This clip was extremely well done.

OK, I have held out long enough. Let’s talk about Ron Paul.

If you haven’t heard the name before, than you are part of a large but rapidly shrinking group of voters. Ron Paul is difficult to describe. He’s a Republican but, as a libertarian, his beliefs are increasingly out-of-line with current Republican thought. His platform is a strange mix-max of positions, many of which are quite out there. Having paid close attention to the election campaign so far and watched all four of the Republican debates, I can say with some certainty that Ron Paul is simultaneously the most extreme candidate and, on many issues, the most logical and fact-driven.

Because there is so much to talk about both in terms of platform, this post will be solely devoted to analysis of Ron Paul’s foreign policy, which for me is his most appealing aspect.

[Read more →]

Disclaimer: This work was the creation of Daniel Shiu and Andrew Lipson.  You can read about how it was done on their website. 

Today’s unsung hero(es) of the week are Stanley Murphy and Zhamar Young. Here’s the full story, courtesy of WIBW.  (OK, so it’s a little bit silly to quote a newspaper article about a supposedly unsung hero, but I think these kids deserve some recognition.)

“A babysitter in Missouri is charged with child endangerment after police say she dangled a baby out of a second story window, then dropped him.Rebecca Woods, 18, has been charged with first degree endangering the welfare of a child.

The incident happened Saturday at the John B. Hughes Apartment Complex in Springfield.

Stanley Murphy and Zhamar Young were playing football and dashed to catch the toddler just before he hit the ground. They say if they weren’t there, the baby could have been seriously hurt.

Neighborhood mothers are now urging parents to screen their caretakers more carefully.

The toddler is okay. Woods is being held on a $25,000 bond.”

If you are in a good mood and want to stay that way, than I suggest you don’t watch this video. For the rest of us grumpy cynics, prepare to be blown away by the ignorance of today’s youth. No, it’s not “who was America’s first President?” or “what century was the Civil War?” or “Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?” or “what war featured the attack at Pearl Harbor?” or even “point to Iraq on this unlabeled globe.” Oh no. The question which causes these college students so much trouble: “What year was the attack on September 11th?” Watch.