History

At first it wasn’t really international, hell it wasn’t even national and the date had nothing to do with the current date Pirate Day is held on but it was a start. To be a festival day they needed a date and choosing June 6th is a big no-no (go to wikipedia to see what happened). Mark came up with September 19th cause well there is nothing on that day anyway, except for his ex-wives birthday but we can all forgive him for that.

7 Years passed and the International Talk Like A Pirate Day, was more of a Friends-of-ours Talk Like A Pirate Day, things would probably have continued indefinitely on that low-key note until John, Mark and Brian were little old pirates in the Home for Retired Sea Dogs. They had a national holiday that almost nobody knew about.

Except for one happy accident. One day in early 2002, John chanced upon Dave Barry’s e-mail address. As the entire universe knows, Dave Barry is a syndicated columnist and the author of somewhere between four and 6,000 books and the second funniest man in the universe.

The first e-mail introduced them, and told him about their great idea — Talk Like a Pirate Day. Then they offered him the only thing we had, the chance to be official national spokesman for the event.

Then within a day they got a reply from Dave himself.

It’s a great idea, he said, (actually “very excellent” were his exact words, in case you’re keeping score.) But then he asked the fatal question.
“Have you guys actually DONE anything about this? Or are you counting on me to carry the ball here?”

Very perceptive of him. The way they answered would be crucial in bringing Barry aboard. So they decided on the truth, with a lot of ass kissing thrown in.

“Well, we’ve talked like pirates every Sept. 19, and we’ve encouraged our several friends to,” John wrote in reply. And Mark put it in perspective when he wrote, “We are dinghy-sized-talk-like-a-pirate kinda guys, but you, Dave … you are like a frigate-huge-sized-talk-like-a-pirate kinda guy.”

In early September, John got a phone call from the feature editor at the local paper, someone he had worked with for several years before leaving the newspaper business. She sounded confused.

“John, I was editing this week’s Dave Barry column and it’s about … Is this you?”

It was. The nationally syndicated columnist and Pulitzer Prize winning writer of “distinguished commentary” (the Pulitzer committee’s description, not his own) became convinced of the great potential of such a holiday. Or maybe he had run out of fresh column ideas and didn’t want to do another one on toilet training his infant daughter. Either way, he had written the column.

And hell broke loose.

Present

At the moment Talk Like A Pirate Day truly is an International festival with people from around the world participating in a tradition where your English skills don’t matter that much as long as you sound like a pirate.

Just use your imagination on the 19th of September

And you can participate too, it’s very simple and the official website for International Talk Like A Pirate Day has a lot of information for you to start with: http://www.talklikeapirate.com/

No one’s perfect, but everyone can be awesome.

What is The International Day of Awesomeness?

The International Day of Awesomeness is a celebration of awesomeness. People are awesome every day, frequently don’t realize it, and their feats of awesomeness are rarely recognized. We aim to fix that, with a special day to both perform and celebrate feats of awesomeness!

How Can I Celebrate The International Day of Awesomeness?

The easiest way to celebrate The International Day of Awesomeness is to be awesome. You could organize a group of your friends to perform feats of awesomness with. You could write a blog entry about someone you think epitomizes the ideals of awesomeness. As we get closer to the day, we’ll have more concrete tips for things you can do to celebrate this very important (but fun, fun, fun – we can’t stress that enough – The International Day of Awesomeness should be fun and not taken too seriously).

History of The International Day of Awesomeness?

This is mostly the fault of Kevin Lawver.On August 6th, 2007, Freddie Maneiro suggested that we have a celebration of Kevins awesomeness (it’s been a running joke on this project). Kevin being amused by this decided to post on his twitter, here. That started a very funny, very un-serious conversation among his friends about just what this holiday would entail. And well, here we are.

The International Day of Awesomness occurs every year on March 10th. Why? Because that’s Chuck Norris’ birthday. No offense to Mr. Norris, but this isn’t really a salute to Chuck Norris, the man. This is a tribute to the awesomeness of the the myth of Chuck Norris (see the Wikipedia entry). The International Day of Awesomeness is also strongly inspired by The Show with Ze Frank. Ze’s year-long internship in the League of Awesomeness is something special, and if you didn’t experience while it was going on, you should go back and watch the shows. Ze and his audience frequently performed feats of awesomeness, which could be used as inspiration for your own feats.

Dan Lurie came up with the original tag line (“Because everyone needs an excuse to be awesome”), and Kevins son, Max, came up with the new one. A bunch of people endorsed the date.

So which pokemon are you??

Flowchart created by Loldwell and Rosscott, cartoonists and illustrators extraordinaire. Be sure to give them high-fives on Twitter (here and here) or check out the shirts and posters that were inspired by their flowchart.

Always fun to meet famous people but never thought that Madame Tussauds would be this awesome. The life like wax-dolls are amazing and it was very fun to see how they are made.

Tomorrow it’s the fifth of november and for those don’t know what it’s about here is a little piece from wiki:

Guy Fawkes Night, also known as Bonfire Night, is an annual celebration, primarily in Great Britain, traditionally and usually held on the evening of 5 November. Festivities are centred on the use of fireworks and the lighting of bonfires.

Historically, the celebrations mark the anniversary of the failed Gunpowder Plot of 5 November 1605. The date was originally made a public holiday in England by the anti-Catholic Thanksgiving Act of 1605, which was repealed in 1859. Some former British colonies a

lso mark the occasion. Guy Fawkes Night was celebrated in Australia until the late 1970s, when the sale and public use of fireworks was made illegal, effectively abolishing the celebration.

So what does this mean for us; well for me personally it means not much to what happened that night (the failed gunpwder plot). But it does hold something to think about: some things should never be forgot, it is not the man that failed but the idea that he had. We should not be oppressed by anyone and if one man fails that doesn’t mean we should forget what he tried to do.

Tomorrow is V for Vendetta night at my home atleast. It’s a great movie showing how oppression can change everyones life and how one man can change it once again.

Photo by Cayusa. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.
Film by palebluefilms. Creative Commons. Share a like.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pfwY2TNehw

The spacecraft was a long way from home.

I thought it would be a good idea, just after Saturn, to have them take one last glance homeward. From Saturn, the Earth would appear too small for Voyager to make out any detail. Our planet would be just a point of light, a lonely pixel hardly distinguishable from the other points of light Voyager would see: nearby planets, far off suns. But precisely because of the obscurity of our world thus revealed, such a picture might be worth having.

It had been well understood by the scientists and philosophers of classical antiquity that the Earth was a mere point in a vast, encompassing cosmos—but no one had ever seen it as such. Here was our first chance, and perhaps also our last for decades to come.

So, here they are: a mosaic of squares laid down on top of the planets in a background smattering of more distant stars. Because of the reflection of sunlight off the spacecraft, the Earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light, as if there were some special significance to this small world; but it’s just an accident of geometry and optics. There is no sign of humans in this picture: not our reworking of the Earth’s surface; not our machines; not ourselves. From this vantage point, our obsession with nationalisms is nowhere in evidence. We are too small. On the scale of worlds, humans are inconsequential: a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal.

Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you’ve ever heard of, every human being who ever was lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings; thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines; every hunter and forager; every hero and coward; every creator and destroyer of civilizations; every king and peasant, every young couple in love; every mother and father; hopeful child; inventor and explorer; every teacher of morals; every corrupt politician; every supreme leader; every superstar; every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings; how eager they are to kill one another; how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity—in all this vastness—there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. It underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the only home we’ve ever known.

The pale blue dot

Well you can always go the local hardware store get some glow in the dark paint and a simple UV led-light or if you’re not going to let any kids play with it a BluRay light (seriously you can tell your kid not to look into the pretty light but it will so don’t use the BluRay near kids permanent eye damage to full blindness is almost a dead certain.)

Here is a simple demonstration of what you could create

www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9YpEaPLKpw

I read on Lifehacker how you can save money by dividing the price of the item by 100 and then rethinking it that many days. Ofcourse in my case I would have to divide it by a much smaller number like 25 or 50 as I have a maximum of about 15 euros a day to spend on bullshit if I want to go to Japan.

Here is the base principal from the original article on the No Credit financial blog.

I like stuff – gadgets, gizmos, and thingamajigs. I also like saving money. So, I’ve created the $100-A-Day-Rule.

For every $100 that I want to spend on the purchase of a new product, I must wait one day before I make the purchase. This creates a self-imposed ‘cooling-off’ period.

If a new gadget costs $100, I have to wait one day until I can purchase the gadget.

If a new gizmo costs $400, I have to wait four days until I can purchase the gizmo.

If a new thingamajig costs $1400, I have to wait two weeks until I can purchase the thingamajig.

I tend to live ‘in-the-moment’, which is just a fancy way to say, I like to impulse buy. In the past, when I wanted something, I just went out and bought it. And, in the past, I’d be stuck with payments, long after the desire for the product had gone away. I once purchased a video game console – because a good buddy had one – and I don’t even like video games. I used my credit card, bought the console, played a few games of Madden, and then never touched it again. A $250 gaming console sat, unused, in my entertainment center, for three years.

Now, when I want something, I use the $100-A-Day-Rule. I spend time researching, looking for cheaper alternatives, and deciding if I really want the item.
No Credit Needed Blog

Well here is an article from Lifehacker.com on how to achive a nice thin crust.

You can get close to the kind of heat a pizza shop uses for their pies with backyard projects , bricks, and even charcoal grills. To get the actual dough right, though, you should plan ahead and let your dough rise.

Oliver Strand at the New York Times digs into the science and taste of dough that’s been left to its own devices for at least a night’s stand. Many recipes call for only a few hours on a counter, or in a fridge, even, but that just won’t cut it, according to a man who’s cooked over 200 pizzas over the last few months:

… Most recipes for the home cook specify a three-hour rise at room temperature. That might be enough to let activated yeast produce carbon dioxide that inflates the dough. But the prolonged fermentation of an overnight rise not only develops the dough’s structure, it also enables starches to transform into flavorful sugars. The dough becomes complex and nuanced. It’s a crust you want to eat.

The proof is in the pictures, and the recipes are provided. If your nona gave you a pizza dough recipe you’ve kept hidden from friends, might we persuade you to offer it up, anonymous-style, in the comments?

Homemade Pizza That Is the Opposite of Fast Food [NYTimes.com]