{"id":378,"date":"2010-10-22T11:47:33","date_gmt":"2010-10-22T16:47:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2010\/10\/22\/101022_randomthursday\/"},"modified":"2022-03-18T15:16:16","modified_gmt":"2022-03-18T20:16:16","slug":"101022_randomthursday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2010\/10\/22\/101022_randomthursday\/","title":{"rendered":"Random Thursday &#8211; The Friday Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Because I spent all day yesterday in a hospital waiting room without reliable WiFi and was too cheap to spring for a 30-day 3G data plan on my iPad just to write a blog post, and because vacuuming and dusting the house and doing the laundry are not tasks to be done without interruption, here&#8217;s a day-late Random Thursday article.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>This is the kind of interviewer I&#8217;d want to be if I was an interviewer. In this clip, Billy Ray Cyrus interviews Richard Dreyfuss, with droll and amusing (if that&#8217;s not too too redundant) consequences.\n<div style=\"text-align: center; margin-top: 1em;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/CPJowXgH3YU\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1.25em;\">Well, this is embarrassing. I&#8217;ve just been informed that in the preceding video, the interviewer is actually Gordon Keith and the interviewee is Zach Galifianakis (who in a more sane Hollywood era would have changed his name to something more typeable, like &#8220;Prad Bitt&#8221; or something similar). [Credit and back story goes to <a href=\"http:\/\/stuffchristianslike.net\/2010\/10\/zach-galifianakis-gets-two-ferned-awkward-awesome-video\/\">Stuff Christians Like<\/a>]<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1.25em;\">I&#8217;ve noticed an interesting cultural trend that I&#8217;m all in favor of and that&#8217;s using raptor references to make otherwise mundane things seem edgy, if not downright dangerous. For example, here&#8217;s a cool front-drive recumbent cycle made by a Dutch company called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.raptobike.nl\/bikes\/low-racer-1.html\">RaptoBike<\/a>. (Although it just occurred to me that perhaps &#8220;Rapto&#8221; means something else in Dutch, like &#8220;recumbent&#8221; or &#8220;peachy keen.&#8221; I should really research these things before writing about them. *thoughtful pause* Yeah, right. hahahahahahahahahah)\n<div style=\"text-align: center; margin-top: 1em;\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/images\/misc\/raptobike.jpg\"><\/div>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 1em;\">Then there&#8217;s the wisdom of Philosoraptor, <a href=\"http:\/\/knowyourmeme.com\/memes\/philosoraptor\">a visual meme<\/a> that&#8217;s taken the interwebz by storm. Here&#8217;s a recent musing by the venerable Saurian Sage (Tip of the RaptoCap to <a href=\"http:\/\/twistedsifter.com\/2010\/10\/the-friday-shirk-report-october-22-2010-volume-80\/\">Twisted Sifter<\/a>):<\/p>\n<div style=\"text-align: center; margin-top: 1em;\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/images\/misc\/philosoraptor.jpg\"><\/div>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 1em;\">I&#8217;m all in favor of this approach and am seriously considering changing the name of this website to &#8220;The Fire Raptor Ant Gazette&#8221; or something similarly edgy and\/or dangerous.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1.25em;\">And speaking of things I probably won&#8217;t actually do, buying <a href=\"http:\/\/www.neatorama.com\/2010\/10\/19\/5000-yo-yo\/\">a $5,000 yo-yo<\/a> falls squarely into that category. (At the same time, an MTV show entitled &#8220;Pimp My Yo-Yo&#8221; would seem to be fertile ground for imaginative use of street slang.)<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1.25em;\">I don&#8217;t drink beer, but I still feel that it&#8217;s important that this list of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ratebeer.com\/Ratings\/TheWorstBeers.asp\">The World&#8217;s Worst Beers<\/a> gets widespread attention. Don&#8217;t thank me; it&#8217;s just part of the public service to which the Gazette has and always will give lip service. (Side note: There&#8217;s actually a class of beer called &#8220;Spice\/Herb\/Vegetable&#8221;? Wonder what the Philosoraptor would say about that?)<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1.25em;\">I apologize to Seth Godin for including <a href=\"http:\/\/sethgodin.typepad.com\/seths_blog\/2010\/10\/deliberately-uninformed-relentlessly-so.html\">his article<\/a> amongst these other things, and I also realize the irony of using a time-wasting useless distraction to refer you to an article warning about the dangers of wasting time on useless distractions. Nevertheless, go read it and salvage <i>something<\/i> from this post.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1.25em;\">Finally, we&#8217;ll close with something that will restore your faith in technology: <a href=\"http:\/\/behindthecurtain.us\/2010\/06\/12\/my-first-week-with-the-iphone\/\">a blind man&#8217;s account<\/a> of how he&#8217;s using an iPhone to &#8220;see.&#8221; Just amazing. (Link via <a href=\"http:\/\/www.neatorama.com\/2010\/09\/19\/seeing-with-an-iphone\/\">Neatorama<\/a>)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Because I spent all day yesterday in a hospital waiting room without reliable WiFi and was too cheap to spring for a 30-day 3G data plan on my iPad just to write a blog post, and because vacuuming and dusting the house and doing the laundry are not tasks to be done without interruption, here&#8217;s&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2010\/10\/22\/101022_randomthursday\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Random Thursday &#8211; The Friday Edition<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-thursday","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9082,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions\/9082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}