Cuppacafe

This is an animation of the asteroids discovered over the last three of decades.

Round and round they go. Like Space Junk made of stone

If you click on the YouTube link itself, you can see the uncropped version with the number of asteroids summed since 1980.
I'll spoil it for you. It's over a half million.

We're not alone out there. Oh, wait. We are alone, but there's a half a million rocks out there waiting to sneak up on us and get all stony and stuff.

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This guy has balls. And he has to eat them.

link

Okay, this blog is mainly for pop culture. If you've come for that, you are in for a treat.

Recently, two movies hit the theaters.

One, The Last Airbender was based on a amine series. When I heard that this Japanese styled cartoon was being made into a movie, I felt a bit lost. You see, I don't get cable TV. If I did, not having kids of that age, I doubt if I would have been watching Nickelodeon channel. The show was made similar to many Japanese amine shows, but specifically made for Nick. I went out, and through the wonders of Netflix Streaming, watched the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender in nearly one sitting. It's a show meant for kids, but getting around the cloyingly sweet segments, it had a decent story to follow. The movie made from the show was saddled with child actors that had trouble not tripping over themselves and way too much exposition. The cartoon was cleaner and certainly tolerable. And that's what you'll see next.

What I'm going to show you next will be slices, not from the movie, but from the cartoon that ran on Nick.

Now, with cartoon mashups on the web, most of the time you'll get some cool soundtrack.

Not this time.

This time, it's been mashed up from another recent movie, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Scott Pilgrim, as you all certainly know by now, was a comic book first, and then a movie made to look like it came right out of a comic book. The problem with Scott Pilgrim was it was saddled with a child-like actor who unfortunately grew up to be a larger child with the expressive palette of a potato. The success of the movie revolves around some of the really unlikely (but intentionally funny) dialogue.

Ramona's Seven Evil Exes. Love the old guy in this.

So, what this video does, is take the better bits of dialogue from the Scott Pilgrim movie and matches it with the proper action sequences of the cartoon. You'll see below that this is done to near perfection and it's worth a click.

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Or DOES she?

Just listen.

Just click through.

All will be revealed.

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You all know by now about the woman who petted the cat and then when she thought nobody was looking, tossed the cat into the garbage bin. Perhaps you even heard how the internet chat forum that once tried to take down Scientology quickly turned to finding the culprit and did so in an alarmingly swift fashion...

But not only do cats have nine lives, they also like taking revenge.

Yeah, so you've guessed what's going to happen. Watch anyway.

Here's security camera video taken of what the cat did next...

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And here's the sporadic Cuppabits, news and thoughts from all over, posted whenever the mood and the material strike me.

In celebration of the release of Mockingjay, the third book in the popular Young Adult adventure written by Suzanne Collins, my authorette wife Alison gave me her copy of the first book in the series, The Hunger Games. I read it quickly and enjoyed it. Unfortunately, it reads like a young adult novel. The differences between that and the other young adult series Alison provided and I devoured, the Harry Potter series could fill a novel by itself. While both protagonists are quickly faced with imminent doom by their otherworldly circumstances, I wasn't surprised nor impressed with a single twist in the story. Once the situation was setup, neither the characters nor the twists were surprising or developed uniquely. It's like watching a crime procedural on TV and not only guessing which guest star did the dastardly deed, but which twist they'll use to trip the villain up.

If you don't know the plot, in a distant North America where there is a central and fascist central government that's really well off and advanced, there's a yearly competition where the country's under-privileged various districts have to send two young and mostly untrained teenagers to compete in a contest. The rules are simple. Kill your competitors. Be the last one standing. The general setting isn't a whole lot unlike the Japanese book Battle Royale that was made into a couple of rather gory "splatterfest" movies.

Like most apocalyptic young adult stories, it has a romance. Mad Max (or in this case Mad Maxine) it is not.

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Speaking of books and the lovely and talented author I live with, her book that drops in stores in a couple of weeks keeps getting talked about in Washington D.C. Here's a video of the couple chatting up how they met and the book written by Alison describing their romance.

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The first request from the trapped miners in Chile? They want some Chilean wine to celebrate the Chilean independence day. That, and not being dead and stuff.
Apparently nobody has told them it's going to take four months to drill a relief well, I mean mine shaft, to pull them out of there.

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Here in Texas, it's the first week for school for many children.

Here's a free public service announcement:

When picking up a child from school, particularly when the child is a young kindergartner,

MAKE SURE THE CHILD YOU PICK UP IS YOUR OWN

Thank you.

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In the category of "Neighbors being evil" department, which is worse

this about having various nasty fluids being tossed on others
or
this about tossing the cat in the garbage?

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Make a list of pop music stars way past their prime. To put their name in front of Generation TV, they either appear on American Idol or Glee.

Latest in the long and seemingly endless supply of aged pop stars is Billy Joel.

I think Billy Joel's last three hits were the ones he made with his Volkswagon into a light pole. And a fire hydrant. And a garbage bin.

Let's hope his role on Glee is the Driver's Ed teacher.

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Speaking of reality TV that's not real, Simon Cowell's "X-Factor" has been taking singing talents and making them more talented. They're auto-tuning the vocals of the contestants.

[BBC News]X Factor bosses have admitted using vocal enhancement processes on the ITV talent show.

Fans had claimed after the opening show that "autotuning" had been used to improve some contestants' voices.

It is used in recording studios to improve performances by correcting pitch and disguising off-key mistakes.

An X Factor spokesman said post-production work was necessary on the show due to the number of microphones used during filming.

"The judges make their decisions at the auditions stage based on what they hear on the day, live in the arena," the spokesman added.

"The footage and sound is then edited and dubbed into a finished programme, to deliver the most entertaining experience possible for viewers.

To keep you from having to watch the video/audio, the girl hits a bad streak and the robotic sound cuts in, and it's done terribly. But the fact that Simon KNOWS this is going on and is watching it and knows everyone else knows he's presenting faked vocals... well, this is the guy that wants to bring this crap to America.

I mean, we've seen faked crap on TV before, right?

It's a bit like finding out your Miss [Fill in the location here] beauty contestants had their boob jobs paid for by the contests' organizers.

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My Samsung Galaxy Vibrant phone is doing quite well, and today we find out that it's getting a big brother, a Samsung Galaxy Tablet.

If this keeps up, they'll be no need for traditional laptop computers any more.

Of course, the Galaxy Phone I have has a weak ass GPS system, but it's not like I use that for much [XKCD]

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And finally,

how drunk do you have to be to forget getting shot in the head five years ago?

[...] the man recalled he had received a blow to the head around midnight at a New Year’s party “in 2004 or 2005”, but had forgotten about it because he had been “very drunk”

Talk about a hangover.