badhatharry

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badhatharry used to do surgery for girls in the eighties but gravity always wins. He can be reached at [email protected]

Start Me Up: Formula 1 Roundup

By badhatharry and Daisy Walker

Another F1 season is upon us. If you are one of like three people here who watch it, then you already know this stuff.  If you want to learn a bit about the pinnacle in racing, then come on in. I was hoping to get this up before this weekend, but I’m a lazy bastard, so suck it.

The Formula 1 track contains 24 driver, the most of which you don’t really need to know about.  The ones who you do, are listed below.

Lewis Hamilton (McLaren)

The first multiracial F1 driver, Hamilton was signed to the McLaren youth development program at the age of 13. He made his debut in 2007, finishing second in the World Championship by one point. The following year, he won the title by the same margin in what many claim as the most exciting season finish ever. Has a major rivalry with Alonso, who accused McLaren of favoritism towards then-teammate Hamilton during the 2007 season.

 

 

Jenson Button (McLaren)

The 2009 World Champion, Button has been a bit of a F1 journeyman until partnering with Ross Brawn at the old Honda team and caught lightning in a bottle. An expert at conserving his tires, Button’s smooth style is a sharp contrast to Hamilton’s aggressive approach, but new teammates’ appear to have a good relationship. Button was the victim of an attempted carjacking/kidnapping/robbery at last season’s Brazilian GP weekend.

 

 

Fernando Alonso (Ferrari)

Two-time World Champion, Alonso’s aggressive driving style has won him plenty of fans and also many detractors. Controversy has followed him throughout his F1 career, including conflicts with Hamilton, Schumacher and his current teammate Massa. He is often referred to as “the most complete driver on the grid,” but also a driver who will win by any means necessary.

 

Felipe Massa (Ferrari)

Rebounding strongly from a life-threatening injury at the 2009 Hungarian GP, Massa has finished as high as second in the World Championship (2008). At the 2010 German GP, Massa was involved in the “team orders” controversy at Ferrari when he received instructions from a team engineer that implied he should allow Alonso (ranked higher in points) to pass him. Ferrari were subsequently fined for not following sporting regulations.

 

Sebastian Vettel (Red Bull)

Defending World Champion, and at 23, the youngest ever to win the title. Hailed as the “Next Schumacher,” Vettel is now firmly established as the lead driver for his team after some mid-season tension with Webber in 2010.

 

 

 

Mark Webber (Red Bull)

After 6 years with uncompetitive teams, Webber won his first F1 race in 2009 after joining Red Bull Racing. After leading the Championship for a long period in 2010, he eventually finished the season in third place. Webber crashed spectacularly at the 2010 European GP, flipping his car end over end. He also revealed after the season that he had competed in the final four races with a small fracture in his right shoulder.

 

 


Michael Schumacher (Mercedes)

Seven time world champion (five of those with Ferrari), the German returned to F1 last year after a three year retirement to join former Ferrari team manager Ross Brawn at the new Mercedes team. Results have been less than stellar, and he’s frequently been outclassed by his younger and less experienced teammate, Nico Rosberg.

 

Robert Kubica (Renault)

In February 2011, Kubica was severely injured in a rally race event, almost losing part of his right arm and hand and requiring four surgeries. His F1 future is uncertain, and Nick Heidfeld will replace him  at Renault during Kubica’s recovery.

 

 

(everyone give a shout-out to Daisy Walker for writing those driver bios)

The season opener this year is in Australia.  It was going to be held in Bahrain, but pick up a paper, and you’ll find out why that didn’t happen.  Bernie Ecclestone, the rich Englishman with the mop haircut who owns the commercial rights to the sport, is trying to figure out a way to shove that race in later in the schedule.  Bernie is also toying with the ridiculous idea of installing sprinklers on the tracks so if the race is boring, they can turn it into a wet one.  The drivers, and everyone else with an IQ above 80, are against this.  The tire supplier for this year, Pirelli, supports this idea, because I think they feel it will take focus away from the fact that their tires don’t last very long.

There are two drivers to a team.  The drivers race and accumulate points based on what place they take.  The points are tallied at the end of the season, and the driver with the most wins the driver’s championship.  The points of each driver on a team are tallied, and whichever team has the most between their two drivers wins the constructor’s championship.  Last season was Sebastian Vettel and Red Bull, respectively.

That’s it for the overview.  We don’t want to hit you with too many facts all at once.  This column will either continue throughout the season, or until they stop posting it due to lack of interest.  In the next installment, we will discuss the outcome of the Australian GP, and what KERS is and what moveable wings are.

Gawker Editor Invents Dying Person As A Joke UPDATED – No, he didn’t.

EDIT:  Chen just posted a piece on Gawker stating that he is not the person behind Lucidending, and that his statement on Twitter was a joke.  It looks like I was wrong, and I apologize for that.  I’m not going to link to the Gawker piece because I still feel this is a pretty pathetic way to garner pageviews, but it appears that the only thing Mr. Chen is guilty of is being careless in a public forum.  Once again, my apologies.  Honestly, I’m glad it’s not true.  The thought that Mr. Chen could steep so low was disheartening.  I’m glad I was wrong.

On March 6th, a person on Reddit with the username “Lucidending” posted that he was going to die on Tuesday, the 8th.  He had cancer, and was exercising Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act to die.  The thread, referred to as an “AMA” (Ask Me Anything), became one of the most popular posts in the history of the site.  As of this writing, there were 9,823 comments, most showing an abundance of support or compassion for Lucidending.  People took the time to share stories of loved ones who had lost their lives to cancer, and others composed songs for the OP.  People from as far away as India wrote in to lend their support.  The story was carried by various news outlets, including USA Today.

The kicker?  It was fake.  Some people were suspicious when Lucidending said that he had been given the cocktail to end his life, and already had the I.V., so administering it would be easy.  The Death With Dignity Act doesn’t allow for the drug to be taken intravenously.  It has to be ingested either by mouth or feeding tube.

On March 8th, Gawker’s Adrian Chen wrote in his twitter feed, “I have a confession to make: I was lucidending.”

On February 4th, Mr. Chen posted a story about a woman who was soliciting donations for cancer research, and was accused of fraud by a fellow Redditor.  She turned out to be legit.  From his Twitter account, it seems that Lucidending was a prank to turn the tables on Reddit’s “hardheaded skepticism.”

 

 

 

Yup.  Point made.  The woman who was asking for donations used a personal PayPal account.  I wouldn’t send money to her, either.  Making up a story about someone with cancer who is going to kill themselves is a completely logical reaction to that.  If you ever watched someone you love waste away in front of you, Mr. Chen, then you might have some idea how heartbreaking it is to read a post like Lucidending’s.  I hope you never have the experience that makes you understand how heinous your prank was.

Meet Your New Favorite Solar Flare – TODAY.

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Are you experiencing a slowdown in the speed at which you download kittens that look like Hitler?  It might be the Sun’s fault.  (Not really, but I can’t think of a way to open this.)  On Monday, the Sun shot off an X 2 flare aimed at Earth.  Solar flares are large eruptions in the atmosphere of the Sun.  The white spot in the center of the above photo supplied by NASA shows this particular flare.  They follow an 11 year cycle between activity, and dormancy, and are currently ramping up to a peak in May of 2013.  The cycle is a result of the Sun’s magnetic field reversing itself.  Every 11 years, its north pole becomes its south pole, and vice versa.

Solar flares are measured according to a scale that starts with A, B, C, M, or X.  A is the small end of the scale, while X is the large end.  The largest flare ever recorded was an X 28, or the equivalent to a magnitude 25 earthquake back in 2003. X flares, if they are aimed at Earth, are the ones we need to worry about.  While the smaller ones may either bounce harmlessly off our magnetic field, or cause aurorae, the larger M and X class flares could disrupt communications here on Earth.  Satellites don’t like excess energy, and solar flares are a massive stream of protons that can destroy these things.  Already, there are interruptions with radio communication being reported in southern China.

The flare kicked off on Monday, and took eight minutes to hit Earth, because it travels at the speed of light, However, with the larger flares comes something called a Coronal Mass Ejection, which takes several days to reach Earth.  This is where the nasty stuff is.  A CME back in 1989 knocked out power to 6 million people in Quebec for more than 9 hours.

The CME from this flare is expected to hit sometime today.  While nobody is telling people to run to Arken’s fall-out shelter, they do expect some hiccups in communications systems over the next few days.

This video will show you what the solar flare looks like, and help you to understand that the Sun is one giant disco.  The juicy stuff hits about 20 seconds in.

Meet Your New Favorite Planet: Tyche

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Astrophysicists John Matese and Daniel Whitmire of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette believe they may have discovered a new planet in our solar system.  Nicknamed Tyche, the object is believed to be the size of four Jupiters, comprised of helium and hydrogen, and orbits our sun at a distance of 15,000AU (one AU, or Astronomical Unit, is the distance from the Earth to the Sun, 15,000AU is roughly 1/4th of a light year).  This orbit puts it well within the boundaries of the Oort Cloud — a cloud of debris orbiting our sun with a radius of one light year — where long-term comets (those with an orbit greater than 200 years) originate.

Matese and Whitmire first proposed the existence of Tyche in 1999 as a result of studying the origins of long-term comets.  It was discovered that their orbits originated in a cluster that was roughly the same angle from the ecliptic, or the path of the Sun through space.  An object at least the size of Jupiter in the Oort cloud could explain the disruption of debris along this plane, which could in turn account for the pattern of mass extinctions on Earth.

In 1984, paleontologists David Raup and Jack Sepkoski found a pattern of mass extinctions in the fossil record dating back 250 million years.  They discovered that every 26 million years, a mass extinction occurred.  The lack of any Earth-based evidence of any sort of change led the team to believe that the cause was extra-terrestrial.  The existence of Tyche could explain this pattern due to the orbit of Tyche disrupting Oort Cloud objects and send them towards the inner Solar System, thereby increasing Earth’s chances of an impact like the one that is believed to have killed the dinosaurs.

NASA’s WISE Telescope (Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer) may have already discovered Tyche.  In April, the first batch of data from the telescope is set to be released.  Matese and Whitmire think that it will reveal the existence of Tyche within two years.  The object they are looking for is believed to have cloud bands much like Jupiter, and have a temperature of -73C, or five times warmer than Pluto.  The heat would be left over from its formation, and would take longer to cool off due to its size.

If Tyche is found to exist, though, it would not add to the number of planets in our Solar System, as it most likely formed around another star and then captured by the Sun’s gravitational field.  The International Astronomical Union would most likely create a new category for this planet.

Tips To Enjoy Disneyland

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Yesterday, as part of Operation Get Some On Valentine’s Day, I took the girlfriend to Disneyland. Below is a list of tips to make your time there more enjoyable, and some general observations of the day.

  • If a friend or family member works there, they can get you in for free.  I strongly recommend this.  It is a mathematical certainty that “Free” beats “$74 A Person.”  Also, with this free ticket, you get the ability to go into Disneyland’s bastard stepbrother, the California Adventure Park.  I don’t understand this thing.  They have a scale model of the Golden Gate.  Sure, you could drop the money to see that, or just drive north for six hours and see the real one.  This was like putting a Planet Hollywood in Beverly Hills next to the old CAA building.  Sure, I could see the white T-Shirt Bruce Willis wore in Die Hard, or I could just walk outside, and see Bruce Willis for realsies.
  • Get some sort of ailment.  I’m not proposing breaking something or contracting lupus, but if you have an old ankle brace, dust that sucker off, put it on, get in a wheelchair, and get on all the rides from the exit, thereby avoiding the line. (WARNING: Not all of these tips are particularly honest, and anything between you and your God is your business)
  • Fast Passes:  These are basically vouchers that you can get to hold a place in line.  If a ride offers a Fast Pass, you insert your ticket to Disneyland in a machine, and get a ticket that allows you to get on a much shorter line between two certain times.  When you’ve hit your time window, you go back to the ride, show the guy at the beginning of the line your Fast Pass, and he puts you in a shorter line.  It’s worth it if the wait time for the ride is 20 minutes or more, but don’t bother if it is less. Also, if you go at the very beginning of the time window, you get to the front or near the front of the Fast Pass line.  The longer you wait, the more people who got Fast Passes when you did will be in front of you.  Get a Fast Pass, go back to the ride right when the time window opens, and you’re looking at a five minute wait for the ride.
  • Fast Passes are offered, but provide no advantage on the Autopia.  That ride is a steaming pile of shit anyway, so just skip it all together.
  • This is my first time back since 2002, which is crazy, because I love it there, and live two hours away. In fact, until 2005, I lived 45 minutes away. Since then, Disney has hit on this idea that if a movie makes money, and there’s a ride that somehow fits in with that movie, they should redo the ride to fit that movie. Johnny Depp is now in Pirates Of The Caribbean.  This isn’t so bad, except for moments when it’s glaring that they just shoehorned references in.  Davy Jones now talks to riders via a projection on a curtain of dry ice.  This happens right before you go into the huge naval battle, and now Geoffrey Rush is demanding that the Conquistadors who are manning the fort hand over Captain Jack Sparrow. Granted, I never saw Pirate 3, and stopped paying attention halfway through 2, but Captain Jack hanging out with Conquistadors seems to violate quite a bit of history. The Submarine Voyage is now “Finding Nemo While We Get Rid Of Everything That Made This Ride Fun, And Now It Makes Absolutely No Sense.” You start out with a speech similar to the original saying you’re going on a submarine voyage, only now the accents are Australian, and you get to watch a lot of underwater animatronics.  That shit I love.  Then, the people stop talking, and you watch video out of your portholes while the dad fish and the stupid fish swim around and talk. They can’t even get the mix on this ride correct. At one point, the crew of the sub breaks in and says something, but you can’t understand it because there’s still dialogue going on from the two fish. They finally find Nemo, I guess, because there’s a fish that looks exactly like the dad fish, but with a different voice, and something about an underwater volcano.  See, in the original ride, you see the eruption of an underwater volcano, and the narrator discusses how dangerous it is.  Now, there are fish swimming around on the volcano set, and nobody says a word about it. All of a sudden everything is just red.  Then the narrators come back in to remind you that they were once there in the first place, and mention the mermaids and sea monster from the original ride.  But you don’t get to see them.  This ride now sucks out loud.
  • Strangely enough, they didn’t add Eddie Murphy to the Haunted Mansion ride.
  • If you’re on a ride that breaks down, you get a pass to avoid the line of any ride.  It’s a one-use thing, and works for parties up to 6. The girlfriend and I were on Thunder Mountain when it broke.  We used our pass to get on the Matterhorn.  Here’s a tip: If you’re in this situation, when they walk you back to the beginning of the ride, they ask how many people are in your party.  Have each person in your party say “One.”  You get as many passes as you have people with you, and can use them all over the place.
  • Space Mountain has the same moving lights we do at my work. They seem to not work for them either.  If anyone is in the theatrical entertainment business, DO NOT BUY STUDIO SPOTS.  Space Mountain redid the ride so now you get music and a much darker room. The darker room is amazing.  The music is terrible. It’s some soundtracky adult contemporary music with an epileptic drummer playing behind it. They also do the thing where they take your picture, but it’s when the ride slows down to return to the beginning.  The photos have shots of a lot of people pitched forward as the brakes kick in.
  • Captain Eo is fucking terrible. I mean absolutely fucking terrible. George Lucas, I can believe you put your name on this because of every movie you were involved with post 1989.  Coppola, you fucking made The Godfather.  Granted, this is mid-80s broke Coppola before he started making money on wine, but still. You are much better than this.  You wrote Patton. You go from George C Scott’s monologue in front of the flag to the dialogue in this piece of shit?  The inventor of the written language is rolling over in his grave.
  • It’s somewhat depressing to watch a friend be the Jungle Cruise Skipper. Watching your friend repeat the same jokes they have for the last three years, and hearing the “(kill me)” riding on the carrier frequency of the terrible jokes makes you kind of sad. I was wearing a Yankee hat, and my friend introduced me to the rest of the boat as Short Round, despite the fact that I’m 6′, and white. I took a second to tell of the time Ponies! and I tried to start a twitter rumor that Short Round had died.  The rumor didn’t take.
  • Skip Fantasmic and any parades or the fireworks. Fantasmic is some flashlights shining on water. The fireworks are controlled explosions in the sky that, frankly, you can see from anywhere in the park.  The parade is a parade, and like all parades, sucks.  Here’s what those events are good for: GO ON ALL THE BIG RIDES. Everyone is watching those things happen, and you can get on with little or no wait.
  • Last thing:  Went on Pirates at like 9:30 AM, and saw a couple riding alone in a boat. They were both texting. It broke my heart to see that two people let such a prime opportunity for some ride head slip past them.

A Horrible Confession

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I like The New Radicals and Fall Out Boy.

I have a degree in sound design from CalArts (technically, I have a BFA in theater, but CalArts has a sound design program that I studied). I spent a lot of time in college hanging out with the music school students. Were I more talented, my days would be spent creating masterpieces on the guitar and synth (the big analogue ones with the patch cables and such. My work has an original Moog Modular that I restored and constantly play with). My music collection runs from Phoenix to Aphex Twin to Brian Eno to Penderecki to Mozart. I consider myself a music snob. I don’t listen to terrestrial radio because I can’t stand the repetitive playlist. I get my music from the underground station on Sirius, and blogs, and the What.CD staff picks, and Becomes Eclectic on KCRW (everyone who doesn’t know about this show, it’s run on Los Angeles’ NPR station every weekday morning, and is amazing. They stream it online.). I am the insufferable prick who points out that the Beatles’ “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” is a ripoff of “You Never Can Tell” by Chuck Berry.
Back in the nineties, when I was in college (class of 2000), I was watching MTV. The video for “You Get What You Give” came on. The video was fairly innocuous: a bunch of kids take over a mall and let the pets out and something and I think Robin Sparkles is there. I don’t know. I’ve had a lot to drink since then. The point is, the song was pretty good. I went out and bought the CD. There were songs about ODing, I think some stuff about suicide, altogether some pretty subversive material coated in catchy pop hooks. I love this album. I am the only one of my friends that does. Well, except for one, but he loves it in the way I love the Breakin’ movies and Snakes On A Plane – because they’re shit.
Fall Out Boy is a band with a great name. They also have some really fun songs. “Sugar, We’re Going Down” is on my playlist for when I shower in the morning. Altogether, these guys write solid songs, and divorce the Simpson girl without the boobs. The second part would usually make me not even want to try their music, but I didn’t know about that when I first heard them. I am the only one of my friends that likes this band as well.
I don’t want you to think that all of my friends are a bunch of hipster music snobs like me. My best friends, who I have known since I started high school, love Matchbox 20 and Blessid Union Of Souls. If that name isn’t enough to drive you away, they’re the guys responsible for that “Hey Leonardo (She Likes Me For Me)” piece of shit that was mildly popular back around 2000. These guys have horrible taste in music, and they don’t like either of these bands.
In college, a buddy of mine who was getting his Master’s in sound design went out and bought Blink 182’s big album. This guy was a music major at Oberlin, and a huge fan of Wendy Carlos’ work in “A Clockwork Orange.” Wendy Carlos is the one who made “Switched On Bach,” which, as a big analogue synth fan, I listen to pretty regularly. Anyway, this guy who had a degree in music from a pretty serious school, and could wax philosophical about classical music reworked on a Moog, loved Blink 182. He sat in the sound studio at school and listened to that album for three hours with headphones on. He heard a band that was tailor-made for that day’s youth. I heard a band that couldn’t play their instruments, and whose mastery of the English language paled in comparison to a third grader. I opened up to him about my love for The New Radicals, and he laughed at me.
These are my guilty pleasures. Now I only listen to them in my house, or through earphones so no one will laugh at me.
These are my guilty pleasures. I know I shouldn’t like them, but I do

A Crasstalk Group Has Been Started

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So far, I’ve included the people with commenting accounts here who I am friends with on FB. Ponies! and EBone. Right now it’s an open group so I don’t have to approve everyone who wants to join, but once it gets big enough, maybe we should close it down? Booboo, when you join, I’ll make you the admin so you can run the FB front of Crasstalk, if you want. However, if nobody wants this, let me know and I’ll shut it down.

Here’s the link to the Facebook Group.

The group is just called Crasstalk. Come join and send me pictures of boobs.

The difference between Christianity and Judiasm

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My girlfriend has a couple who is her best friend.  They’s good people, with two great kids.  They’re going skiing with us next weekend up in the Sierra Nevadas.  The kids are coming as a matter of circumstance, not by choice.  Neither of their parents can watch them because the dad’s parents are taking care of his grandfather who just entered hospice.  The mother’s parents can’t take them because her mother’s sister just died.  She had some disorder where the body produces too much blood.  She bled out of all of her orifices because her stomach ruptured due to the excessive blood production.  That’s a horrible fucking way to die.

My girlfriend’s friend is getting her Master’s.  There’s some screwup with her enrollment, and last week, she wasn’t able to attend class.  The friend calls this a blessing, because she was able to go to her mother’s house for her birthday instead of class.  This is when her mother found out that her sister was being taken to the hospital.  We live in Bakersfield, CA.  The mother and the aunt live in Tehachapi, which is 45 minutes east.  The hospital they were taking her to is in Bakersfield.  It’s a blessing because this woman was able to drive 45 minutes east, just to turn around and drive back to go to the hospital.  It’s a blessing that she was able to run laps.

Here’s where the difference hits.  If you’re familiar with the Old Testament, it’s a rough book.  The Jewish outlook on life seem to be, “It’s all shit, but when you die it gets better.  But make no mistake about it, it’s all shit.  And God is a prick.”  The Christian outlook is, “It’s shit, but when you die, provided you adhere to these rules, it gets better.  But make no mistake about it, it’s all shit.  And God loves us, so any modicum of happiness you’re able to get out of this is thanks to Him.”  Anything good, He gets the credit.  Anything bad, well that’s how it goes.  Judiasm is “My parents got shot right in front of me, and now I’m alone.”  Christianity is “My parents got shot right in front of me, but I was given this candy bar, so I got that going for me.”

This is one of the main reasons I don’t believe in God.

The Competing Open Thread Sites

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With the demise of the open threads over at Gawker, some of the more industrious geeks have decided to create their own boards.  In the few days following Gawker’s Meg Ryan-like reconstruction, Twitter was ablaze with people pimping their own sites, and recruiting the better commenters to join them.  It was like a commenter free agency.  When the dust settled, most people frequented two sites, yippayap ( http://yippayap.com/ ), and ATGAR ( http://atgar.dailyentity.com/ ).  Both now have a de facto #whitenoise in them, with yippayap even going so far as to call its corresponding page whitenoise, and yippayap also has the relocated #groupthink.  I haven’t ventured into groupthink, because it’s not really my demographic (straight male who blogs while he poops), but the whitenoise pages are pretty interesting.  They’re like some sort of anthropologic study in how something like 4chan came to be.  There’s no censorship, no threat of banning or destarring, and as a result, they have become a center for ridiculous memes, and fake commenting accounts.  Also, those who I Could.  Not.  Fucking.  Stand.  are there.  I ain’t going to either of those sites, which is a shame because #whitenoise was where I began my open thread career.  Now that’s gone.  Looks like I’m with you guys until BMC decides to revamp this site.

P.S. I have no idea how to use wordpress, so I’m just guessing on the shit below where I type this stuff.  If I fuck it all up, my apologies.