Cuppacafe

I didn't think twice about this girl when American Idol started cranked up. Now she's a force. Audibly.

It was Rolling Stones Night, and while Siobhan's semi-goth version of Paint It Black isn't the best vocal, it did emphasize that this girl has power behind her voice that will grow into something we'll all be hearing long after this ninth season of American Idol is over. (Yes, you know it's a goth version because she was wearing a pair of giant black boots someone dug up from ten years ago!!) The scream at the end goes on a measure too long, and is cracked, but that could be her interpretation of the actual song.

This girl has power in her voice.

Let's hope she only uses it for good.

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You'll have to forgive the "hometown story" before the song and the judges wallowing around afterwards, but the song itself here is something to listen to.

It plays out exactly as you'd expect, only without the two faced mayor instead of the policeman at the end.

Very Fun, and Happy St. Patrick's Day!

For a little bit of St. Patrick's Day fun, here's the members of League Of S.T.E.A.M. attempting to use their Ghostbuster like skills in attempting to catch a leprechaun. Slapstick humor ensues.

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Read about surviving in the Arctic. When it goes dark, people get angry. Nobody survives getting wet in the Arctic. If you do, nobody believes you did.

A driver’s semi truck broke through the ice of the Artic Ocean, and he couldn’t get out in time. His truck plummeted past the snowballs of salt that form just below the surface of frozen ocean water, and he was able to draw just enough breath from the air pocket in his truck’s cab before diving out into the viscous, freezing water. The ice was already forming over the hole he’d just broken through, and he would have died if a fuel tank hadn’t broken off from his truck. He rode the fuel tank all the way to the surface, where it broke through the thin ice, and he flung his hand up over the top.

The driver behind him in the convoy had stopped well short of the hole in the ice and had already given up his buddy for dead before he saw that gloved hand rise up with the fuel tank. Negotiating the thin ice around the hole, the other driver pulled the fallen man out. A helicopter — an unusual sight, but not unheard of — just happened to be passing over. The pilot saw the incident, and landed nearby, soon flying the fallen driver to the nearest hospital within two hours. The driver was treated for hypothermia and frostbite, and released that night.

The rescued driver immediately went to the bar, where he wasted no time telling his story. A number of his listeners didn’t believe him and even took umbrage with the tale, at which point, the rescued driver became aggrieved, and a fight broke out. Less than twelve hours after he was submerged beneath the ice of the Arctic Ocean — a situation that no one in recent history had ever survived — the rescued driver was nearly beaten to death in a dingy bar. He was taken back to the same hospital he had just left, and this time, he was there for two months.

Read the whole thing
http://thefastertimes.com

The Robot Skeleton Army has a new leader.

He's being built now.

He will appear on the 5th of April.

He will be your new master.

He's only disguised as a sidekick.

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There's a show on in the UK called "Bang Goes The Theory" (the name of the show a take off on an sports broadcasting meme) that commisioned the building of a car that we here at Cuppacafe can only admire and wish to one day drive -- a car that runs on coffee!

Yes, running on the same substance that fuels this blog, coffee can be used to generate hydrogen, and then that hydrogen can be used to fuel this 1988 Volkswagon Sirocco. (Note the resemblance to the famed DeLorean car from the Back To The Future movies)

The Car-Puccino, the car the runs on coffee beans

Great in theory, but in practice? Well, the car got the jitters.

From the UK's Daily Mail here's the story of how it was supposed to happen:

The car will be driven the 210 miles between Manchester and London powered only by roasted coffee granules. It has been built by a team from the BBC1 science programme Bang Goes The Theory and will go on display at the Big Bang science fair in Manchester to show how fuels other than conventional petrol and diesel can power vehicles.

The team calculates the Carpuccino will do three miles per kilo of ground coffee - the equivalent of about 56 espressos per mile.

The journey will use about 70 kilos of ground coffee which, at supermarket prices of between £13 and £26 a kilo depending on brand and quality, will cost between £910 and £1,820, or between 25 and 50 times the £36 cost of petrol for the journey.
56 espressos per mile: A member of the team Bang Goes The Theory works to convert the car

In total, the trip will use the equivalent of 11,760 espressos, and the team will have to take 'coffee breaks' roughly every 30 to 45 miles to pour in more granules.

They will also have to stop about every 60 miles to clean out the 'coffee filters' to rid them of the soot and tar which is also generated by the process.

So despite a top speed of 60mph, the many stops mean the going will be slow, with the journey taking around ten hours.

But it seems that the planned amount of coffee to be used and the time to change out the coffee filters (Yes, you read that right, they have filters to keep the nasty parts of the coffee out of the engine, but in this case it's tar from the burned coffee beans) was a bit too much to handle while on the British roadways, and so the thing kept breaking down having to wait on the side of the road to clean the coffee crap out of the system:

The 210-mile road trip had trouble from its start in London as it sputtered on its way to Manchester before breaking down outside Birmingham for two hours.

The modified 1988 Volkswagen Sirocco broke down about four times, forcing the driver - Bang Goes the Theory's Jem Stansfield - to wait on the side of the motorway while his team cleaned the engine.

The carpuccino car waits for the foam to settle a bit

Now, this isn't exactly the Mr. Fusion that we were promised by Doc Brown in Back To The Future, but using coffee grounds to power a car is rather fun -- to watch.

If a car that runs on old fryer grease smells like french fries, I would imagine driving behind this Carpuccino Car would be a bit of a slice of heaven...

You have to give Capital One credit for finding/funding this gem.

Here's about five minutes of "You're pulling my leg, aren't you?" that's a silly bit of fun.

I'm sure we'll be hearing more from the Ivan Brothers as the NCAA basketball tournament ("March Madness") develops in the next couple of weeks. (If you don't have the time or inclination to watch this, the piece ends on a bit of a sad and opened ended note, with a bit of a promise for a Part II)

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Here's the big trailer out on Russell Crowe's ROBIN HOOD. While Crowe was originally slated to play the evil Sheriff instead of Robin, and then slated to perhaps play both, we now get to see common sense has ruled the day and Crowe will be playing Robin. And yes, just like previous shots from this movie, Crowe's Robin looks quite a lot like some hero from some Roman era Gladiator movie.

Just to refresh your memory as to what the Robin Hood legacy entails in this retelling of the legacy:

“The [..] adventure chronicles the life of an expert archer, previously interested only in self-preservation, from his service in King Richard’s army against the French. Upon Richard’s death, Robin travels to Nottingham, a town suffering from the corruption of a despotic sheriff and crippling taxation, where he falls for the spirited widow Lady Marian (Blanchett), a woman skeptical of the identity and motivations of this crusader from the forest. Hoping to earn the hand of Maid Marian and salvage the village, Robin assembles a gang whose lethal mercenary skills are matched only by its appetite for life. Together, they begin preying on the indulgent upper class to correct injustices under the sheriff.”

So, pretty much your swords and sandals epic... only replacing arrows for swords and tights for sandals... only there's no tights. Whatever.

And if you just can't wait to revisit the tale of Robin Hood, go instead and revisit Rabbit Hood.

Sorry about any commercials before this little bit about the end of the world -- which as everyone knows, occurs in 2012.

Click for the reason why »

Okay, here's the deal: Either you're old enough to have seen TRON when it first came out or you aren't.

If you're old enough to have seen TRON the first time it came out, you either thought it was cheesy and useless fodder or you thought how cool it would be if they could only make it ... well, more realistic. Yes, I know how silly that sounds. Well, I fall into that latter group. There's a place in my geek heart that has embraced the concept of a digital life or death struggle inside a computer. Hey, it's just as plausible as Smurfs in Space...

If you've been born in the intervening years, I'm sure you're pretty much on the fencepost. You may have seen the movie and thought it was no big deal -- or worse, was bored. While that's your right, whether you loved the original TRON movie or not, you're just too young to appreciate how much hope for the the future of film a lot of us had when the original TRON movie came out.

Don't get me wrong. This movie could still suck large eggs. But the visuals and the concepts, that's what we're looking for. The advancement in the "Holy Crap!" factor that we've been waiting for since the early 1980s. How much of the really cool shit are we going to get to see outside a few well prepared takes that have been making the rounds? Ten minutes of cool, and 90 minutes of talking heads? Or really cool stuff like what's in the official teaser trailer below?

I'm holding out hope that this will be a mind bender. You always hope for a good science fiction movie to jump out of the eye candy that's in the trailers. The plot takes place some 27 years after the first movie left off, with Jeff Bridges' son trying to find his father. It's not much of a spoiler to tell you that

spoiler revealed by a click »

Tell me what you think of the shiny fluff below:

Sound not req'd on this quick advertisement for HP's Slate.

YouTube

Put your ears on and give a listen.

This should put a smile on your face.

The YouTube's latest sensation, Staten Island's PS22's chorus. 70 fifth graders.

The YouTube's latest sensation, Staten Island's PS22's chorus. 70 fifth graders.
YouTube
PS22 Chorus' blog

Yes, you can see that winning movie trailer below.

But first, a few words as to how pointless the film award ceremonies are. The TV ratings for the Oscar Awards has declined quite a bit over the years, and this has led to the network having to cut the advertising rates just to get enough advertisers to air the long drawn out piece of crap that the Oscars have become.

"The academy has a problem here. The show is way too long, and the films this year are not spectacular," he said. "If this year's ratings are down, it could be the tipping point and they will have to make changes."

Seeing as since this quote is from last year, and the ratings were indeed in the crapper again, you'd think the Oscar folks would change something. Well, as you know by now, they did. They added five more spots to the Best Picture, this time including movies that perhaps some of us have actually paid to see at the movie theaters.

This change to the nominating process merely adds to the fact that the whole affair is pretty much a rigged process. The Oscars have been a point to help struggling studios put out movies whose only chance of being seen is the push of the publicity surrounding the Oscar nominating process. Some movies were slated to be huge money losers if they didn't get the publicity for being at least nominated for an Oscar. They'd get nominated, noticed, and in some cases rebooked at the local art cinema to handle demand of those newly introduced to this "potentially important" movie. Now, with the internet being the new way of getting these small films -- and even cooler, mere concepts of small films -- seen, the publicity surrounding the Oscars isn't quite as important. So, in a way, not only is the internet helping to kill off print media such as newspapers, but it's also making less important the mere idea of the Oscars as the way that small films with strong ideas become profitable.

Back when I used to actually pay attention to the Oscars, I couldn't help but weigh the candidates for Best Picture, or Best Actor, and wonder if they won because of their politically correct stance on a topical subject.

Or even better, that nod to the actor who never got nominated but whose work over the decades deserved something.

Remember that when you watch this meta trailer for the Oscar nominated film below.

To make clear what you're about to watch, every line or piece of text or dialogue (including the opening credits) doesn't say anything, but instead says what it's supposed to say. The catch phrase for the "impaired" actor is indeed "Catch Phrase!" These are the tropes that make an Oscar worthy movie.

The Republican voters have really went to school over the governor's race in the Republican primary and edumacated themselves as to the real issues

Where the Head Of The Class sits closer to the fridge

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In our next lesson, we will learn which type of dinosaur Jesus rode...

Your most trusted news source... Just not during the six seconds you can watch below...

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I don't have the heart to tell them that's not Hawaii.