As the tentacle from a few days ago dried out it actually started looking much better. I may still get something out of it.
The guillotine other the other hand is going just fine. I need to buy another couple of 2x4s to finish it up, but it looks pretty nifty. I still wonder if I will actually have time to get anything finished in time for the party tomorrow though.
Well...the first monster attempt is not going so well. The idea was to make some large tentacles and eyestalks which would be placed around so that they appeared to be burtsing through windows and chimneys.
I think the concept is sound, but the implementation is lacking. The tentacle frame was made of stiff, but bendable wire with three rings of chicken wires along the length of it to give it shape. This was then covered with burlap, which was then to be covered with papermache.
Several problems turned up. The frame was not strong enough, it kept wobbling. The burlap needs to be better fitted to the frame - I was just wrapping it and adhering with duct tape. The last problem was the fiber-duct from the burlap - the papermache didn't want to stick to it.
So, tonight, on to a different project. This time, it's an eightfoot tall guillotine. Since this is a pretty straight forward wood working project, I don't expect any problems. Of course...there will be problems.
I assume that you have gone to places like "Spirit Halloween Store" and seen the outrageous prices they charge for their larger decorations - the mummies, the zombie corpses, stuff like that.
Well, it occured to me just the other day, that all of these things are pretty crappy, and it should be pretty easy to make your own that look better, and cause dimes on the dollar.
So I am going to try making monsters over the next couple of days.
We will see how it turns out. I'll post pictures as things progress.
Excellent.
Good stuff!
Further on down the road.
It's funny. At this point in my life I never thought I would be awake at 2:30 (technically 3:30 - tonight is daylight savings time), listening to records alone.
Seems that you never outgrow that.
And I am not sure how I feel about it.
I am turning forty, which as I have pointed out to several people, is like, as old as my parents. In a lot of ways it feels okay to be forty. After all, I have had a pretty good career (with a few economy related bumps), I am married, own a house, and have kids. I worry about money and stuff all the time.
These are all things you should be doing when you are forty. So that sort of makes it okay. I would feel weird if I was younger than forty and did all those things, just like I would feel wierd if I was forty and had not done them.
At the same time, I don't feel very old. I still like to go out, and I still like the same kinds of book and movies. I don't play videogames as much anymore, but that's related more to not being that interested in what's on the market than anything else. If another good Ultima game came out I would totally take a week of vacation to play it.
I still refuse to take everything very seriously, unless it's something that needs to be taken seriously.
Maybe my problem is that as times have changed, what old has changed. Maybe forty is not really that old anymore. I guess I should start worrying about 50 then, I mean, that's REALLY old. Older than my parents probably are.
It seems like this administration has a real big problem with distortion and with keeping their story straight.
Funny enough that you have Cheney out there telling a conservative think tank that the US will never be fettered by any multinational agreements, and considers itself free to attack anybody for any reason, whenever - at the same time that we are practically begging the UN for help in Iraq, but the next bit kills me.
A little than a month after he admitted that there was no Iraq-9/11 connection he gives a speech on Columbus day praising the troops (who's benefits he is cutting) for their sacrifices (more than they are probably aware of) in Iraq, and for "Not forgetting the lessons of 9/11". So much for that little bit of honesty.
I don't know about you, but for me the lesson of 9/11 was that maybe our history of failed intervention and attempts at power brokering in the middle east (the British are also guilty) was not a good idea, and something that we should maybe think twice about doing again.
Oh, wait, now I am probably going to be accused of siding with the terrorists. I'm not though. I am siding with the democratically elected government of Iran that we replaced with a dictatorship, or with the generally dirt poor populations of the middle east that we have assured will stay that way by propping up dictatorships like Saddam, or the House of Saud. We (and the British and the French) set the stage for what is going on in the middle east now. I am not saying that we deserve it, though I am saying it's largely our fault.
I also think that maybe, just maybe, doing more of the same is not going to be a solution.
Well, it looks like The law suit and prosecution are not going to go forward. While I am glad for the student, I am kind of dissappointed at the same time, it would have been an interesting test case.
Hopfully this will finally make courts realize how stupid the DCMA is. A student wrote a paper explaining how to get around the copy protection on a recently released Anthony Hamilton CD. In it he gives several methods of getting around the protection, everything from a removing a driver that is auto-installed on your PC when you insert the disk, to simply holding down the shift key when you insert the CD. SunComm, the creator of the protection scheme, is now threatening to sue him, and he could face felony charges for simply pointing out these two rather obvious ways of disabling the protection.
If this case goes forward, it basically means that a record company could put a label on a CD that says "This CD is copy protected! It is impossible to copy! Do not try to copy it!". If you published an article saying "If you put the CD into a PC and use any program to copy the audio tracks it will work just fine", well, you will have commited a felony for detailing how to circumvent a copy protection scheme (the label that told you it could not be copied).
Dumb, huh?
Wow! George Bush's campaign has finally got a blog!.
Oh wait. It's called a blog, but really it's just a webpage that regurgitates White House press releases, and amusingly, links to conservative media articles based on those same press releases.
Most interestingly, unlike every other blog in the world there is no facility for comments. Now...why would that be? All the democratic candidate blogs allow comments, and guess what? The get positive comments, nuetral comments, negative comments and occasional downright attack comments. They seem to be letting them all stay up except for posts with profanity.
Why on earth would the Bush Reelection team not want to have comments and input from the electorate - the very people they are supposed to represent.
Draw your own conclusions.
So, the Kay report on the search for WMD in Iraq has come out, showing that basically, they haven't found anything other than plans, rumours with no documentation to back them up (some from paid informants), many more interviews that state there has been no active program since the end of the Gulf War, and a single tiny vial of botulinum which is the same thing used for botox injections (I kid you not, look it up), that has been in a scientist's refrigerator for 12 years.
The response from the Bush administration has been a resounding cry of vindication. In the most bizarre and mind numbing statement from our president he spouted "The fact that we are searching for weapons proves that he had them".
Wow...I thought he was supposed to be off the drugs and booze these days.
