Schwarzenegger Flips Off Lawmakers in Hidden Message

Lifted straight from Wired

• By Kim Zetter  
• October 27, 2009  |  
• 8:11 pm  |  
• Categories: Miscellaneous

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is ticked off.

He’s tired of signing bills that don’t address the pet causes he deems important. So when another unworthy bill crossed his desk recently for signing — addressing funding issues for the Port of San Francisco — the guv vetoed it and sent lawmakers a little note saying why. Only the note said a little more than lawmakers were expecting.

Buried in the text was a hidden message directed at State Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, author of the bill, according to the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Ammiano had strongly criticized the governor in early October and reportedly told Schwarzenegger at the time to “kiss my gay ass.” Schwarzenegger’s veto letter, issued a couple of days later, reads:

Missed the hidden code? The Bay Guardian has helpfully picked it out:

When asked by the Guardian if the message was intentional, Schwarzenegger’s spokesman said only, “what a strange coincidence.” The paper noted that he was “clearly being sarcastic.”

UPDATE 6:15 PST: The governor’s office decided it would make a statement, of sorts, after all. Spokesman Aaron McLear told Threat Level the hidden message was just “a strange coincidence,” repeating the response given to the Bay Guardian. He added that the governor’s office had written other letters that also had hidden words spelled out in them. When asked for examples of what was spelled out in those letters, he replied “soap,” “poet,” “ear.”A spokesman for the governor told Threat Level that he’d been receiving a number of calls about the letter and hadn’t yet decided whether they were going to release a statement about it.

“When you do so many veto messages that’s bound to happen,” he said.

He promised to send examples of those other letters.

Clean Living

New Hubble Images and Notes on Gravitational Lensing

Cheesy videos that otherwise do a good job showing the improvements:


From Wikipedia: A gravitational lens is formed when the light from a very distant, bright source (such as a quasar) is "bent" around a massive object (such as a cluster of galaxies) between the source object and the observer. The process is known as gravitational lensing, and is one of the predictions of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity.


From some podcast I was listening to earlier this week: Einstein thought we would never be able to see gravitational lensing, be cause we are too damn small.


But, remember this image from the videos above? (Here it is embedded in a diagram showing how the image was distorted.)

Wow, we showed him, huh? I think Einstein forgives us for proving him wrong about our ability because by the very observation of this phenomenon, the Hubble helped prove some of his theories correct!

Thunderheist - Jerk It: two music videos

thunderheist - jerk it from thatgo on Vimeo.

Thunderheist "Jerk It" Directed by: Kristin Waterson from dw waterson on Vimeo.

No Subject

Bag Check

Will It Blend?

I WANT THIS MAN'S JOB

Click here to go to the Blendtec "Will it Blend?" website to see all the videos (there's 17 pages!!!)

IPHONE 3GS

HALF DOZEN BIC LIGHTERS

EASY CHEESE

GLOWSTICKS

Brian Jungen

Click here to go to the Brian Jungen: Strange Comfort exhibit page at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian

From Wikipedia: Brian Jungen is a Canadian artist from British Columbia with Swiss and Dunne-za First Nations ancestry; he is based in Vancouver. Jungen was born in Fort St. John, British Columbiaon April 29, 1970. He graduated from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 1992.
From The Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of the American Indian:

Brian Jungen (b. 1970, Dunne-za First Nations/Swiss-Canadian) uses mass-produced goods to make sculptures that are simultaneously fake and authentic, playful and political, common and extraordinary.

In Strange Comfort, a major exhibition organized by the National Museum of the American Indian, Jungen reassembles plastic chairs—hacked apart but still undeniably chairs—into a whale skeleton. Suitcases take the form of a possum, acrocodile, a shark. Expensive sneakers become Northwest Coast-style masks. Golf bags become totems. Jungen charges ordinary, useful objects with layers of meaning, exploring and transgressing the boundaries of what they had been and what they’ve become, riffing on Indian imagery, pop culture, consumerism, and obsession in the process.

BLANKET

TOTEMS

SHAPESHIFTER

CARAPACE

THE PRINCE

The Rutter List

GREG RUTTER'S DEFINITIVE LIST OF THE 99 THINGS YOU SHOULD HAVE ALREADY EXPERIENCED ON THE INTERNET UNLESS YOU'RE A LOSER OR OLD OR SOMETHING

GREG RUTTER'S DEFINITIVE LIST OF THE 99 THINGS YOU SHOULD HAVE ALREADY EXPERIENCED ON THE INTERNET UNLESS YOU'RE A LOSER OR OLD OR SOMETHING

This Guy Is Better At Recycling Than You (and from the looks of it, he's wealthier too).

Dark Days

From Wikipedia: Dark Days is a documentary made by Marc Singer, a British filmmaker. The film follows a group of people living in an abandoned section of the New York City underground railway system, more precisely the area of the so called Freedom Tunnel.

Poppa Neutrino | Random Lunacy

"Poppa Neutrino has all the characteristics of a man who could have built a fortune,"
asserts The New Yorker's Alec Wilkinson, who is featured in RANDOM LUNACY. Yet the radically itinerant Neutrino's belief that "rent is the thing that beats us," caused him instead to choose a homeless existence for himself and his family.

Unencumbered by possessions, save for a video camera kept rolling since the 80's, he led his "tribe" on a quest for pure freedom and adventure.

"Some people are nomadic by nature," claims his wife, Betsy. The self-taught family band called THE FLYING NEUTRINOS was literally singing for its supper as it roamed the world, while Poppa's camera recorded first-hand a life of sleeping in cars, trucks, and on remote beaches, as well as the family's time spent traveling with a Mexican circus. The rafts they built from street scraps, which they then would live aboard, exemplified their consummate ingenuity. Eventually one such vessel was pitted against the Atlantic Ocean.

Captured on tape -- an astonishing portrait of survival outside of conventional society, in a self-created universe with a value system all its own.

RANDOM LUNACY casts a searching gaze on what it means to be marginalized, while at the same time examining what our choices have to do with our ultimate freedom.

The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate

This is lifted straight out of the NEW YORK TIMES

Martial Trezzini/European Pressphoto Agency

SUICIDE MISSION? The core of the superconducting solenoid magnet at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

By DENNIS OVERBYE

Published: October 12, 2009

More than a year after an explosion of sparks, soot and frigid helium shut it down, the world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is poised to start up again. In December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva in a search for forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang.

Multimedia

 Science Times

Related

Times Topics: Large Hadron Collider

Readers' Comments

Readers shared their thoughts on this article.

• Read All Comments (232) »

Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time,dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.
Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like “Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal” and “Search for Future Influence From LHC,” posted on the physics Web sitearXiv.org in the last year and a half.

Sol LeWitt. Minimalism on Acid.

Liu Bolin. Look Closely.

Klieg

Static

Fall Foliage

Unintentionally Sexual Advertisements

from Huffington Post

originally from Break.com:

Rent Is Too Damn High Party

Click here to go to the official website for the Rent Is Too Damn High Party website. (Sound on low)

Addressing Issues That Has Been Totally IGNORED/ AVOIDED and OVER LOOKED.

JIMMY McMILLAN For MAYOR / 2009

 





The NYC Board of Elections Commissioners took the word “DAMN” out of our Party name.

On the ballot you will see: Rent Is Too High
We apologize for the bad grammar.
But... your rent is still too damn high”

(go to the site (volume on low) to see what this guy is dancing about)

Click here to go to the official website for the Rent Is Too Damn High Party website. (Sound on low)

Pug pug

Scary

Politics as Usual | ACORN Scandal Fall-out

Film-makers James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles try set up a sting operation to undermine ACORN and it eventually works:

This recent scam, which was attempted in San Diego, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia to name a few places, had failed for months before the results we’ve all recently seen.

-Bertha Lewis, Chief Organizer, ACORN

Following the exposure:
H.R.3571 - Defund ACORN Act

Official Summary
9/15/2009--Introduced.
Defund ACORN Act - Prohibits any federal contract, grant, cooperative agreement, or other form of agreement from being awarded to, any federal funds in any other form from being provided to, or any federal employee or contractor from promoting any organization that:
(1) has been indicted for a violation under any federal or state law governing the financing of a campaign for election for public office or any law governing the administration of such an election, including a voter registration law;
(2) had its state corporate charter terminated due to its failure to comply with federal or state lobbying disclosure requirements;
(3) has filed a fraudulent form with any federal or state regulatory agency; or
(4) employs, has under contract, or retains to act on its behalf any individual who has been indicted for a violation under federal or state law relating to an election for federal or state office. Identifies, specifically, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and any affiliate as such an organization. Requires the Federal Acquisition Regulation to be revised to carry out provisions of this Act relating to contracts.

From Huffington Post

To his credit, Representative Alan Grayson, a rookie Democrat from Florida, out-thought and out-maneuvered all of his colleagues and quickly went to work with the Project of Government Oversight (POGO) to compile a list of contractors that "might be caught in the ACORN net."

Click here for that list

The congressional legislation intended to defund ACORN, passed with broad bipartisan support, is written so broadly that it applies to "any organization" that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. It also applies to any of the employees, contractors or other folks affiliated with a group charged with any of those things.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/22/whoops-anti-acorn-bill-ro_n_294949.html 

In other words, the bill could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex. Sooo....

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/24/the-unintended-consequenc_n_298540.html

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/24/the-unintended-consequenc_n_298540.html

From politico.com

Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) offered an amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill that would withhold defense contracts to companies who prevent victims from filing lawsuits against sexual assault and harassment.

Franken proposed the amendment after hearing the story of Jamie Leigh Jones, who alleges that she was brutally raped while working a contractor for Halliburton/KBR in Iraq.

But Jones was unable to press charges in court because her defense contract stipulated that any such allegations can only be heard in private arbitration.

Franken’s amendment, which passed 68-30, received the support of 10 Republican senators. However, most Republicans opposed the amendment because it went against the wishes of the Defense Department, and argued it gave Congress too much influence in altering defense contracts.

Republicans point out that the amendment was opposed by a host of business interests, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and applies to a wide range of companies, including IBM and Boeing.

The End

Lunchtime!

Neozoon

 The blurb from Babelgum:

Female street-art crew Neozoon makes striking works using second-hand fur coats. Their artworks are so popular that they usually disappear within a week of installation. In this video, the pair don masks and install a family of bears at the Jannowitzbrücke junction in the heart of Berlin. The artists also invite us to their studio, where they carefully prepare the fur silhouettes, and show us round a local bear pit, where the symbols of Berlin live a more pitiful existence. An exclusive URBANATION production for Babelgum. For more videos from the Art in the City series, visit: babelgum.com/artinthecity

The Babelgum Wild Grafitti Video (To be embedded soon, hopefully)

Related:

The Flicker Bestia Recreata Video (To be embedded soon, hopefully)

Bears for Berlin:

Bulls for España:

Rats for Paris:

SHEEPS!!!!!