Drunk and happy

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.

           -- George Bernard Shaw

It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled sea of thought.

           -- John Kenneth Galbraith

I'm actually not sure if Galbraith was being sarcastic. But it's interesting to see it in counterpoint with the Shaw quote. 

The funny thing is that many people in this world would in earnestness argue that being happier when drunk is actually the whole point, and that alcohol is a great thing. If one has markedly less intelligence and control while drunk, gets hangovers and ruins the liver, that's a minor price to pay. 

Well, it's all just beliefs in a subjective world. Uhm, which actually is closer to the points of the two quotes... 

I wonder, can you have a "firm anchor" in nonsense, if you are aware that it is nonsense? 

Rate on 30-year mortgage falls to record 3.94 pct.

Rate on 30-year mortgage falls to record 3.94 pct, article.
Good lawd, that may be less than the current inflation!

Ooooh, these are very strange times indeed. From some observers it sounds like what we may experience is not so much a "double dip" as it's a stumble and then a fall like Wile E. Coyte off a cliff. British magazine Money Week has a new ad which strongly warns against any investment positions in: 1: most stocks, 2: The Euro, 3: real estate, 4: government bonds. That's practically everything normally considered safe as houses! (Ooops, houses, not safe now! Not as investment anyway.)

Steve Jobs RIP

Steve Jobs has uploaded to that big server in the Cloud. He will be missed.

Contigo Autoseal Travel Mug (updated)

I've been using the Thermos travel mug for a couple of years, but I was never happy with its insulation. The metal surface gets burning hot to hold, which is a sad indication of how it holds on the heat of the liquid, or rather not. Also, it's not tight (and not meant to be), if you tip it over, it'll spill somewhat.

So I got the Contigo Autoseal Travel Mug instead (on the left here). So far, way better, It's completely tight, and when you drink from it, you press a spring button on the back, which opens the smallish opening (right-sized) to drink from.

And it holds the heat much better. The Thermos mug uses "foam" insulation (don't know what the foam is made of, but I'm not impressed), the Contigo uses vacuum. And the outside of the Contigo mug hardly gets warm at all. And of course, at the end of a (really) leisurely drunk mug full of tea, it is still hot at the end, which I couldn't say about the Thermos mug.

Indeed the foam insulation takes up more space inside the mug, but it's still much less efficient. 

I wonder how they seal the vacuum so tight that it will last for years, not air seeping in at all? 

Update:

 Ray said...
Strange that Thermos would let itself be outdone by a competitor when it was Thermos that originally
made it big with glass vacuum bottles held in place inside a metal casing decades ago. They were fragile in the sense that dropping it could break the glass, which was relatively thin, but if cared for, they worked like a charm for years.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...
Yes, exactly! I thought Thermos was king.

But the Thermos one eats *so* much heat. Even after pre-heating it with boiled water for three minutes, no less, I still had to heat the milk when making tea. If I did that with the Contigo, the tea would scald me for at least an hour. Very remarkable.

Olympus E-PL3 Pen Lite

Olympus E-PL3 Pen Lite with Franier grip and the brand new 45mm F:1.8 portrait lens. Beautiful.
It's the littlest portrait lens I've ever seen. The lens cap is barely larger than a 2-£ coin.

Bokeh test at full opening. Very promising, though I have yet to test it in daylight.
Top image with noise reduction in software, lower one without. ISO 1600. Good result for a M4/3 sensor, the first full frame Canon 5D didn't do it all that much better. And nice soft bokeh (background blur).

Update: 

By request, a comparison between Olympus 45mm F:1.8 and the great little Pentax 70mm F2.4. (For different formats, so the use is roughly the same.) Similar in bulk, the Pentax is shorter, but fatter. Slightly heavier (all metal), but in this class it hardly matters. The Pentax sits on a bigger camera (a DSLR), but also a more capable one, ultimately. 

Ala-tin-gala

Cover version of an old Gasolin' fav fave.
Ala-tin-gala is a nonsense word so far as I know.
Unfortunately it does not seem there's a video version of Gasolin's own famous extended version from their excellent double album Live Sådan. (Rough translation: "Live; that how you do it".) One couldn't have imagined a better Live collection, they were in absolute top form all the way through.
(iTunes UK has many Gasolin collections, but I only found this one on CD. For big fans I recommend the Black Box.)

Tyve meter henne af en rendesten 

åh ja, Alla-Tin-Gala. 

Der sad en lille dreng og så på dameben 

åh ja, Alla-Tin-Gala. 

Så kom en abbedisse med portvinstud 

og skældte ham ud. 

En millionær og en minister gik en aftentur 

åh ja, Alla-Tin-Gala. 

De kyssed' hinanden i et cykelskur 

åh ja, Alla-Tin-Gala. 

De sagde hej hej jeg elsker dig 

hvis du stemmer på mig. 

En luder og en lommetyv, på Jammers Plads 

åh ja, Alla-Tin-Gala. 

De spilled' boogie woogie på en Fender bas 

åh ja, Alla-Tin-Gala. 

Så kom der en guru med det 11. Bud 

men ham smed de ud. 

En gammel mand med tømmermænd og stjerneskud 

åh ja, Alla-Tin-Gala. 

Han sad på en trappesten og spotted' mig ud 

åh ja, Alla-Tin-Gala. 

Han sa' der' sikkert mange ting du meget bedre forstår 

om mange år. 

Ok, gamle dreng sagde jeg, og hva' så det? 

SF city

Thanks to Norm  for sending me this wallpaper art.
Andreas found the artist via TinEye: Staszek Marek. It has different sizes (I got one for my Cinema Display, perhaps the size reads the screen size of the visitor.)

I have always been fond of SF imagery, especially urban. As an example, my favorite part of the fourth Star Wars movie (Phantom Menace) was the great city scenes, like the street view with the café.

Achievement poster

(From despair.com. Warning: the promotion of their merchandise is so huge and in-your-face that it almost removes any interest in seeing their actual content. Big flunk for that.) 

Heart of Glass

Lord, what a stunning woman. I remember watching this video at 15 on prime time TV with the family when it was new, and I couldn't believe it. I grunted something to the effect, and my mother said: "actually I'd be curious as to what your ideal girl would be". And I said: "Well, her!" 



Of course this song and album Parallel Lines were outstanding too, and I became an instant Blondie fan.

Pelpina and batmanning

I love Dutch web shot hostess Pelpina. One guess why. That's right, it's because she likes technology like I do.

A two-faced cat

Rebecca sent this story (incl. video) of cat with two faces, surviving so far to twelve years. I dunno what we can learn from this, but golly, it's not something you expect to see. It's virtually unique for such a creature to survive.
I like that his name is "Frank and Louie", very funny.
"You can look on this cat at as sort of a bad omen, or as sort of a miracle."

LoveFilm "does a Netflix"

[Note: can you guys tell me which other European countries presently have movie disk rental service by post? And if it includes streaming yet?]

I've just found out that the UK DVD rental service LoveFilm, which I'm already using and have for over ten years (since 2000, when they were called DVDsOnTap), now lets you stream lots of films to your iPad, included free in your subscription, like NetFlix. I honestly didn't really believe this kind of thing would come to Europe. (Update: it works on my Mac too, I didn't really think it would since last I checked they could not deliver pay-per-view to Macs.)

The little bastiches are using it in promotion, but they had not informed us subscribers about it!       :-)

The picture and sound quality is really good, better than DVDs I have ripped. And the selection seems good too, not just b-movies from before 1980. Almost 6,000 titles at the moment.
(I think this will make me forgive that they have animated ads on their site. If I didn't have ad-blocking on my browser, this would test my patience a lot.)

It's really remarkable value for money. Especially since you don't have to be so durn careful and read five reviews before ordering a movie for rental, 'cuz if you don't like it, it'll only take you 20-40 seconds to find and start watching a new one, as opposed to several days with the disk delivery. I'm honestly not sure how big the percentage of the movies are which I am really interested in, it might be pretty small. But this system also allows you to experiment more, for example The Interview is a (in)famous movie which I previously had not bothered with, but now I know what it's like (nasty, but not a bad movie).

This was at the last minute I found out about it too. Between rental as well as purchased DVDs and blu-rays, web videos, and cable subscription, I never have anything to watch!!
But honestly, my purchased-disk shelf is moving rather slowly, I'm beginning to think I'll never get down to the fourth season of the Cosby Show, which I bought... at least two years ago (gawd, it might be three).  Today, entertainment is an embarrassment of riches. I remember the nineties, where one might go to Blockbusters (oops, dead too now, another victim of digital delivery) and stare at the shelves until blood spurted out of the eyes.

And before you had video... one evening the only half interesting movie within range in the cinema was Indiana Jones 4, and it was so bad that even a group of teen girls were making fun of it as we left the cinema after a late-nigh showing one fine summer's eve: "seriously, that was a ridiculous movie, wasn't it?" (Come on, it it had chases on any vehicle which can move, and at one point IJ was walking in a underground passage with gasoline to over his ankles, carrying a torch which was dripping little flaming bits down into the gasoline without effect! Until the plot demanded exploding gasoline, of course.)