In the video at left from NVIDIA’s NVISION 2008 (a geekfest promoting video card maker NVIDIA) Jamie & Adam of MythBusters demonstrate how to paint a Mona Lisa in 80 milliseconds. If you plan to try this at home, keep in mind you’ll need an 1100 barrel paintball gun. On a more serious note: in this clip from the convention, Adam Savage explains how the lawyers of American Express and the other major credit cards effectively censored Discovery Channel to prevent them from EVER talking about credit card RFID. This, in spite of the fact that it’s a fairly well known fact that not only are credit cards intrinsically less-than-secure, they’re even less secure when you’re able to hack the new RFID feature. But who cares what these MythBuster guys say anyway. Aren’t these the guys who claim the moon landings actually happened? As an afterthought, I have to wonder (given that these guys live in the Bay Area) just how “green” that Mona Lisa stunt was. Of more interest to others though - also because they live in the Bay Area - appears to be the question Are the MythBusters Gay?

Bush & Rove Laughing Hysterically At Gullibility of American Public

Back in 2001, right after the attacks on the World Trade Center (someone’s going to kill me for that link), a friend of mine and I joked about how Bush would somehow try to link the attacks to Saddam Hussein so he could invade Iraq. At the time, the idea sounded preposterous, and we had a big laugh. That’s why, after joking last year with a friend that “the only way a Republican will be in office in 2009 is if we go to war with Iran”, I’ll go out on a limb and predict an invasion by October. Some headlines this weekend: US prepares military blitz against Iran’s N-sites, Dutch pull spies on Iran attack fears, Israel ready to attack if Iran goes nuclear, US and UK begin war games in Persian Gulf , and the only one in the U.S. media: Iran warns any attack would start ‘world war’. Gentleman, rattle your sabres…

Cicciolina, One Of The Few To Succeed As Both

Oh, make up your own punchline. Do we really care what a bunch of narcissistic Democrats have to say to each other when they get together every four years? If so, here’s a good source. Personally, I’m more interested in things like ABC News making a big fuss about the sex trade spiking in towns when political conventions arrive. They’ve obviously never heard the one about the Senator telling the intern to leave him alone, “…because he had a hundred pages to get through before lunch…”. In any case, although advocacy groups (no, they’re not for it, they’re against it) agree with ABC’s assessment, cops in both cities say not likely. And they should know, because they’re the ones hanging out in parks where all the real tricks are getting turned. Like the former co-chair of John McCain’s presidential campaign in Florida, Bob Allen, who like the cops, is often busy denying things. No, the real fun for politicians at convention time is in skirting ethics laws that might prevent them from having awesome parties, or in whoring THEMSELVES out to special interest lobbies like the RIAA or ATT.

Back in 2003, I became convinced (probably because of my own goldfish-like attention span) that the real future of film and video entertainment would be in any content that lasts less than twenty minutes. Around that time, Fox Searchlabs was launched, offering amazingly well-conceived and produced shorts created by up-and-comers at Fox Searchlight, usually shorts less than 10-15 minutes long. Even that recently, streaming video was a bit of a joke, but especially with the advent of streaming HD, this is becoming a really viable media (especially with services like Joost). Some favorites of mine from that pre-YouTube era include Hang Time, the video at left; Farm Sluts, about a guy who loses his job because of a porn-infected e-mail he receives at work; and The Birthday Suit, about a 50-year-old mom and businesswoman who has a little misunderstanding about her birthday gift. Fox Searchlab is still on line, but for newer high-quality shorts you can check out sites like NiceShorts.com or TheSmalls.com